Art of the Odd

Another 1,600 words on the NaNoWriMo project tonight, give or take 96, and I believe I’ve discovered my inner romance novelist. She says things like, “As he stepped into the brighter light of the room, he got his first good look at the girl upon whom all of his childhood dreams had rested – and found her a perfect stranger.” I’m letting her work, for now – she has some good ideas, and I can always kill her in the morning.

I feel a bit like I’m front-loading the story; if I keep on at this pace, I’m not sure I’ll make it to 50,000 words, even allowing for my current overuse of modifiers. But I’ll describe every dress in excruciating detail if I must. For now, the three main characters have been introduced, and hints dropped about their pasts. If I can just keep anyone from announcing his or her sudden, undying affection for anyone else, at least until the end of the week, I’ll be happy.

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.

According to my calendar, it is. And that means NaNoWriMo‘s coming, and so is NaBloPoMo, and yes, I’m intending to do both.

To kick it off a few days early (and try to get myself back in the habit with this blogging thing), I’m taking a cue from Sarah Morgan’s post “10 Years Ago Today,” which was brought to my attention by Be the Boy. NovySan went into his IMDB record to find out what he was doing, but since mine doesn’t go back that far, I had to do some math.

2008-10=1998, give or take a few days, and we end up with Halloween 1998. (We’ll call it Halloweek, just to cover our bases.) That was my first year in law school, and the year my first marriage fell apart. Or, at least, it was the year the cracks really started to show. Sometime after Thanksgiving 1998, I was sitting in front of my computer sobbing, looking up California divorce info on a dial-up connection – but I didn’t file the paperwork until 2001. Halloweek 1998, though, I was coming up on my 6th anniversary (yes, we got married on Halloween), and I really can’t remember what we did for it.

I’m also not sure where I thought I’d be in 2008, but this is where I’ve ended up – I’ve just reactivated my legal license (and it’s no easier to find a job now than it was when I passed the Bar in 2001), I’m very happily remarried, and the only thing I know about 2018 is that it’s 10 years away, and that’s plenty of time to get wherever I’m going.