Lead Up to NaNo: 12 days to go

ignore the timestamp. I wrote it yesterday, but just now posted

Well, it's 12 days before my 5th NaNo. It's 11 in the morning & tho' I know I should, I'm not sleeping. I can't. My mind just keeps running over things & over things. Who am I using for the rest of the cast, what're they all doing, what're they like, what's the point of this whole story, I wonder if i got any NaNomail yet, I'm kinda hungry, no, food just means I'll have to go downstairs & mess around a while, maybe I should throw in a movie, or watch some of the stuff off the DVR, maybe i should start a new book, no can't start a new book lest, on the off chance, I'm not done before Nov, I should go to sleep, I don't feel like going to sleep, I'm kinda tired, no, I'm hungry, ugh.... this sucks!

Ya see my problem?

I've been trolling the boards lately & open this one up just a bit to a few people wanting to read. I'm still debating, providing they actually do read & comment, if I should save reading commentary till after. Might be better, but we'll see. If noone reads it it won't be an issue anyway. So this year I'm gonna take another whack at something I'd thought of a couple years ago. But, as I'm starting entirely from the ground up (haven't even opened the old vesion since last i added to it) I don't think it really counts as an ongoing project. It's the old gods in the modern era thing. So far the cast list is still up in the air for the most part & though I know the basic structure I'm using, the particulars of where & how the story will go are still a total mystery.

Ya know, there are times when this endeavor seems really crazy to me, lol. When I was a kid I remember thinking how it'd be really cool to write things, but whenever I tried I could never do it. There wasn't any big reason was so enamored of the idea, not that I recall anyway, I just thought it sounded so interesting, so fun...plus I really liked to read And this continued for YEARS. In high school I thought the idea of keeping a journal sounded awesome, but whenever i tried I'd write a blah couple of entries about nothing, then taper off & forget it. 'Writing classes!' I thought, would totally do the trick. If I took a writing class, I'd suddenly know how & what to write, right? No, not really. And if you don't believe me, ask the teachers that gave me Fs in their class when all I managed to do was stare helplessly at the blank page practically every time.

I didn't really start writing until my early twenties. My gaming group broke up & I missed it, so I started looking for a game online. In my 'oh it's just gaming' mindset, I completely blew past the realization I was writing a few nights a week for....lol, well for longer than my intellect likes admitting in public. I moved on to another game & in this one a small, but dedicated group & I wrote nightly. Wrote LOTS in fact. it was a girl from there that pointed me towards NaNo originally. She IMed me on Halloween '03 at....oh, like 9:30-10pm.

'Omg, you HAVE to do this thing with me!!' she tells me.

'What??' (cut right to the point, don't I?)

'A friend of mine talked me in to doing this thing & I know I can't by myself, you have to do this with me!!' She sends me to www.nanowrimo.com for the first time.

I go & read the particulars. 'You're kidding, right?'

'Please! There's no way i can do this!'

'Yeah, me either'. I read on. 'This thing starts in like an hour & a half! What'm I supposed to write about in that amount of time!?!'

'I dunno! i don't even know what I'm writing about! Please do this with me anyway'. I grumble & go to sign up. And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, strictly speaking, the rest is virtual literary flotsam & jetsam I keep squirreled away on a web board somewhere, but that doesn't really have the same ring to it.

My first NaNo, ironically, has been my longest. It was nowhere near the 50k goal, but it was soooo much more than I EVER thought i could write on a single piece. It was about a girl that was working on an archeological dig
where, little by little, she started just knowing things about the site she shouldn't, weird dreams plagued her & certain objects would trigger visions she couldn't explain. Eventually, it was going to be deduced that she'd lived there in a past life. There was to be some parallel between then & now; a similar problem she'd been having or a figure in her life that echoed someone from before, etc. I think occasionally of opening it back up sometime, reading through it & finishing. I'm not sure where i would have ended, but I do like the basic premise.

My second ended up being something completely different than I'd planned. I'd thought to do a WWII era anti-love story. But, as I sat down to type at midnight of Day One, something totally different poured out. I did several thousand words on a CSI fan fic. The premise, I think, came to me from something I saw on the Travel Channel, lol. They were showing a thing on Vegas & visited an indoor skydiving place & I remember thinking that'd be a tricky place to process for a crime scene, lol.

Writing is funny like that sometimes. You wouldn't think it as it's your words coming from your mind, but it really can surprise you. I love when that happens, when a char does or says something you never saw coming until you were reading it off the page. You can't sleep because all your imaginary people are chattering away in your head & WON'T SHUT UP! Lol, that one's both exhilarating & infuriating, lol.