Hmmmm

So, NaNo started. And I started. And all I can say about my progress so far is "hmmmm." My posted word count is 718 so far. But first, I wrote 186 words on my slushie novel idea--a 115-word false start followed by a 71-word false start. I hated both, and realized the narrator had no voice yet & I didn't care what she had to say. Not that I think it's a bad idea. I still want to write it, & I have some fun ideas for it. But it doesn't seem likely to get me off to a quick start now.

So I switched to idea #2, the sister story. The problem with this one is, I wrote a few pages on it several years ago. I was going to toss out the old pages and start from scratch for NaNo, but unfortunately I still like them. While I know I could fit them back in somehow in December, once NaNo is over, I had a hard time figuring out how to start without them. Or rather, I had trouble getting back into the narrator's voice without using any of those words. I decided to try my other idea before bothering to start that one over.

Finally, I tried idea #3, my suicide novel. This is the one I originally had in mind for NaNo anyway. I also have some old notes for that one, but they were random anyway and I started over. I wrote 718 words before stopping for the night. They aren't 718 good words. Some are good, but most seem like they're just placeholders for whatever I might want to say there later. Some probably need to go later in the book, not at the very beginning. I don't have a good sense of how the timeline of the book should work, and what should go where. But still, something seemed to be clicking, just a little, so for now I'm going with that one. Though I've already run into plot problems! I even had to do some online research, which just made the plot problems worse. And, I'm again going to have to figure out how or where to incorporate my old notes without using any old text. Not that I had that much.

One observation: I must really like to write little poems. Because both my attempts at writing included rhymes. I expected to incorporate some previously written poems into my suicide book sometime (after NaNo is over), but didn't expect to write many new ones along the way. I didn't exactly write a poem, but did write an excerpt from a song the narrator supposedly wrote, and in my attempt to write the slushie book, I wrote part of a jingle from the slushie ad!

And one sign of my NaNo insanity: I still think that before I continue, I'll try to start a fresh version of idea #2. I want to make sure it doesn't flow out better before I commit to idea #3. Though one very crazy part of me is still whispering in my head, "Maybe I can write two novel drafts this month!" Yeah...that's about as likely as my not eating any leftover Halloween candy tomorrow. Ha!