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.
