It’s November 1. And you know what that means.
NaNoWriMo starts today. NaBloPoMo does, too. So, what did I spend much of the afternoon doing? Writing a short story that’s been nagging me for some time and trying to decide which of my unfinished (and, let’s be honest, barely-begun) projects gets the NaNo treatment this year.
I’ve been thinking all week I’d dive into the WWII horror I’ve been researching for more than two years, but decided this morning that there’s still too much I don’t know. I imagined this manuscript, full of holes where historical details ought to be, and shuddered. Same for the Crimean War steampunk/alt historical romance novel. I’ve still got that piece I started for NaNo 2007, which ties in somehow with my VPXIII submission story and stares at me accusingly from time to time. The vaguely-Venetian project was a possibility, but this afternoon, as I was wrestling with the relationships around which my ghost story is coalescing, I made my decision.
The story’s loosely based on one I read in my Evidence class at UC Hastings. It’s a classic “What If” exercise – the original case, which was decided in England in the 18th or 19th century, involved a man whose child disappeared. He was accused of murder. He talked the court into letting him go out and find the child, and returned with a girl about the right age, who was clearly not his daughter. He was found guilty, and hanged. Soon after, his daughter reappeared. She’d simply run away from home, as he’d said all along. “What if,” I thought all those years ago, “he’d succeeded in the switch?”
Hopefully, in about a month, I’ll know.
Cool premise. I definitely learned my lesson last year: best to pick an open-ended idea that encourages brainstorming rather than bogging down in technical or historical details. Can’t wait to see what you come up with.
CoreKnell´s last blog ..FYI: VP at the WFC, FWIW
That’s why I went with the novel I’m writing now. I knew most of the material and could fake a lot of the rest (through the premise). It’s turning out I’m doing more research than I originally thought, but less than for my other novel ideas. It certainly has helped move things along.
Of course, if the event or historical fact is background to the action in the story, you could insert placeholders (like, something involving this happens around now, do more research) and continue with the writing. Research it when your rewrite.
Steve Buchheit´s last blog ..The gales of November coming early
[...] and ain’t I a woman? And then I pondered whether I could use his POV tricks in the novel I started (and no, didn’t finish) during NaNoWriMo, which has three POV characters and tripped me up [...]