What I'm not writing for NaNoWriMo

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What I'm not writing for NaNoWriMo

I realize I never talked about what I was going write for NaNoWriMo on this blog. Pretty funny, when you consider how much talking about NaNoWriMo I've been doing.

First let's talk about the projects I'm in the middle of:

Editing: one nonfiction book, three plays, and Mistress Novel
Works in progress: Wife Novel, Mistress Novel 2 (over 50% completed), five e-books, and the four blogs I write for weekly

Now, of course, this doesn't include the other secret projects I have in the pipeline. But I think everything above is the stuff I'm really working on a daily basis. You already know how I feel about the fact that I didn't get a chance to finish editing Mistress Novel before NaNoWriMo and just about everything on the list above was something I thought I'd have done by this point in the year which makes me shake my fist at the sky and curse my stupid hands. You may question the wisdom of me starting a new project at all, but I swear I have a good reason for it that will cover in a future post.

Every time NaNoWriMo rolls around, I like to use it to write one of those ideas that's been kicking around in my head for a while. I see no reason to wait to write the ideas in my head and NaNoWriMo seems to be the best way to bang out first draft. So, every year, I usually just pick out one of the ideas in the "I've been meaning to write that" file and write that for NaNoWriMo.

So, in this post I wanted to highlight a few of the novels I thought about writing for NaNoWriMo this year until I came upon the idea that I'm actually going to use.

Mind you, these will all get better nicknames once they become an official work in progress.

The Post-Apocalyptic Romance Book. I don't read romance. I don't like romance. But my mother is absolutely obsessed with romance and has read hundreds of romance books. She loves to recap the books to me after she's read them and listening to plot after plot inadvertently gave me an idea for a story that I fear is romance. Of course, it's Hillary Romance, which means it's mostly science fiction and weird stuff, but it's still Romance. I took the trouble of actually writing up an outline for this book and thought about writing it for NaNoWriMo, but it's a much newer idea than some of my others and so I decided it had to wait
The Library Book. This book started out as sort of a dystopian future commentary on paper books versus e-books and I have a horrible feeling it is also becoming a romance. I should probably stop talking to my mother. I outlined about half of this book, but I really don't have the whole thing planned out yet so this one was never really a serious contender for NaNoWriMo.
The Based on Shakespeare Book. Two years ago I told everyone I was going to cheat at NaNoWriMo by basing my novel off of a Shakespeare play. I never actually got to do that. But I have a very good idea for a novel that is a modern retelling of a Shakespeare play. I keep putting off writing it though because it seems like the sort of idea that would be easy so I started saving it for a year when I really have no plan for NaNoWriMo. Up until a few weeks ago, it was almost this year's project.
The Family Storytelling Project. I've talked about this project on the blog before and I really was tempted to do it for NaNoWriMo this year. In the end, however, I decided that it just wasn't in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month to do something that was mostly nonfiction. But man, it would've been nice to get this project done, but I have a feeling it's something I really can't rush if it's going to come out the way I want it to.
I have to really exciting short stories that I am dying to write. I was tempted to back to back them and write them both for NaNoWriMo but, again, I feel it isn't in the spirit of the contest.
M5. When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a short story for class. It was terrible. It was so terrible, in fact that it has been haunting me since then because I am 100% convinced I could do it better now as an adult this time as a novel instead of a short story. If you were in my sixth grade class, the code name M5 probably makes perfect sense to you but, if not, that's probably for the best as I've really overhauled the entire thing so that it's almost unrecognizable. But this is a middle grade novel that is sort of a total re-imagining of the short story that I wrote when I was in sixth grade. I keep putting off writing this story even though it's one of my oldest ideas, because I really need to do a bunch of research on animal behavior, and I keep hoping I can pick my friend Katie's brain to get that information without actually having to go to a library. I understand this is a new form of laziness.

As of a few weeks ago, I was all set to proceed with the Shakespeare book, when I got a shiny new idea. I normally don't let new ideas seduce me away from my master plan. But this idea came with a very convincing argument why it should be the next one I work on. So, even though all of the books listed above were things I've been planning to work on for a really long time, the brand-new idea is the one I'm writing for NaNoWriMo this year.

But, you ask, what are you actually writing for NaNoWriMo? Well, you'll just have to stay tuned… ;-)