nanowrimo_lj | The Dark and Stormy Brain (Reply)

So, I started outlining plot and characters for this year's effort, in the hopes that solid organization would let me breeze through a zero draft pretty quickly. With the remaining time, I would challenge myself to finish Nano 2002; and, in the extremely unlikely possibility that I would manage to finish Nano 2002, I'd use the last few days/hours to start a second round of editing on Nano 2003.

There are people out there who do manage to get 10k+ work on several projects plus complete their 50k novel. How they manage this, I do not know.

Anyway, I found out that all that lovely preplanning puts me in touch with an unpalatable fact: I don't give a rat's ass about this story, nor do I care if I cross the 50k line this year. The point is to produce as much as I can to deadline, as far as the 50k goes, and having already pumped out a novella of speed, I don't feel the need to prove to myself that I can do it. After all, I already did. On top of that, the book I am planning to write is something I am not so happy about that my fingers will fly across the keyboard.

I suppose it's best to find out that I can't committ to this story before 1 November. There is still time to get some planning done. Not much, though; only a few hours. There are a plethora of things that I have to get done before 1 November, so that I will have free evenings and enough done to neglect all my other projects with a clear conscience.

Now, however, I find myself in that state of flux that heralded last year's decesion to just go with whatever came out of my fingertips. On the whole, I like last year's story, but it does have one problem. There is a central plot point that is pretty... ah... socially unacceptable, so much so that I don't see a mainstream publisher ever touching the book, even if were edited to a point of being otherwise perfect. The story pretty much hinges on this particular plot element, so eliminating it is not possible.

And that's sort of what I am worried about here. The point of participating in this, for me, is the joy of writng. My, how cliche that sounds, but it remains true. I have no burning need to be published. Nonetheless, I do not want to find myself in the position of having a novel in my hands that is permanently destined for the locked drawer, either.

Argh.