This November, It's December's Problem

It's been a while, I know.

Off and on over the past several months, I've thought, "Oh, I should write a blog post." And then I didn't. I could say that I've been busy, that work and life got in the way. But really, I just haven't felt motivated. But now, on the eve of another NaNoWriMo, I think it's time for a comeback.

So what have I been up to?

In April, I rewrote part one of a "book" I wrote in 2017. It was a road trip through, essentially, the Twilight Zone. One day I'd like to make it work, but I was never really happy with the plot beyond that first part. Still don’t know where it's going.

In July, I tried my hand at an epistolary novel. That is, a story told via letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, etc. Turns out, I'm not very good at writing journal entries. I knew that. I've never been able to consistently keep a journal. Or, you know, a blog. I even thought about writing a blog post about it, but, well, I'm bad at that. I might try to work on that more eventually, because it was a fun idea. It was basically two people in a post-apocalyptic world, they get separated, and we follow the journal of one as they are following messages and clues left by the other.

But that is not what we are working on now.

Because now, or rather, in the very near future, it's NaNoWriMo.

So that means I'll be throwing all my eggs into one literary basket in my quest for 50,000 words. And I have a great idea. By which I may mean a terrible idea. It may be completely unreadable to any normal person. Don't care, gonna do it anyway.

It's a novel… about a novel. About a terribly written NaNo novel, even. Which means it contains all the tropes and desperation that come with a NaNo novel.

I'm going to give you a little backstory. In the course of trying to reach 50,000 words, one runs into all sorts of issues. Plot holes, missing research, just… bad, frantic writing. And while some choose to edit and fix during November, many, myself included, live by the mantra, "That's December's problem."

And so, on November 29th, 2015, I made a note in my list of random plot ideas: "December's Problem, a NaNo novel, with a MC named December. It's a tragic romance."

And so, here we are, eight years later, and that's the book we're writing. The idea has obviously evolved since that initial note, and it's become a genre-hopping, Alice in Wonderland meets Sliders portal fantasy wherein December must prevent Mr. Ian Woon (an acronym of NaNoWriMo) from using the Macguffin to rewrite his own story (and in the process destroy all of the others, including December's).

It's going to be fun. Common tools during NaNo (especially in my local region) are random generators,  prompts drawn out of a crumpled paper bag, and the misadventures of a guy named Steve. All of this is going in there. As December travels through different stories, I will be rolling a 20-sided die to determine the genre. As she encounters different version of her friend Steve, I'll be drawing a Steve out of the bag to see what misfortune he's dealing with. It's going to partly structured, but within that structure, somewhat random.

Honestly, my hope it that the fact that's it's largely pure nonsense will lend itself to a lot of words. Because I need words, all the words I can get. It's probably not going to be a good book. But I think it's going to be a good NaNo.

I'll see you next time.