We’re coming down to crunch time. Friday is the first day of November (!), which means the start of NaNoWriMo. As I’ve mentioned before, I have done it every year for over a decade. I never had a problem meeting the 50,000 words limit because I am verbose by nature. At that point, I was writing 2,000 words a day as a personal goal.
That dropped off about the same time as a personal tragedy befell me. I still don’t want to talk about that, but I’ll just say it shook up my life. I lost a lot of the passion I had for life, including my writing passion. To be fair, I hadn’t really recovered the latter since my medical crisis. Or rather, my ability to write fiction. I still don’t know if it’s brain damage from the stroke or what, but I’m struggling with it in a way that I have never struggled before.
I don’t want to get into that becuase this post is about brainstorming for what I want to do for NaNoWriMo. I do want to do something. I have three options. Well, three options with sub-options.
1. A mystery trilogy. I write mysteries. Or at least I did back before my medical crisis. I have an outline of a trilogy lurking in the back of my brain. The problem is that I want to start with book two. I can start with book two, yes, but would that make it book one? Or would it still be book two when I go back to book one? I can ask those questions here because I’m trying to decide what to do in NaNoWriMo so there are no stupid questions. Or something.
I like to do things my way even if it’s not the best way to do things. Being weird/different sparks joy in me. And, again, it’s not that I do it on purpose, but that my brain works that way. I am better then I don’t try to restrain the oddity and just let the creativity flow. The problem is that the masking I do is hard to shed. I can feel this very thin veil surrounding me when I write, admonishing me not to step outside the box too far.
The issue with the mystery trilogy is that I know the general shape of what I want to do with it, but I lose steam after twenty-five to thirty pages. I can’t make it sing the way it used to do. When something I’ve written is good, the words shimmer and lift off the page. I know that sounds like nonsense, but it’s true.
The first book of the trilogy will be set in the hospital. It will include what happened to me. And there will be a mystery happening as well, but in a way that plays with the reader’s perceptions. Becuase, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I was high out of my mind on drugs while I was in the hospital. Nothing was real, but it felt like the realest thing ever.
Side note: …never mind. I will get to that when I get to that.
I want to set a murder in the hopsital, but the protag being bombed out of, argh. I’m just going to use their for now as a placeholder. The protag who is me will be agender, of course, but given that I default to ‘her’ in the real world, I’ll go with that for now. Maybe. We’ll see. I’m not comfortable with calling myself or my protag that, even if I don’t mind when others do. It makes writing hard, I’ll tell you that much. In the hospital, though, I was a ‘she’, and I was fine with it.
I get stuck with how to portray the delusions, though. Of course, I know they are delusions now, but I did not know at the time. I thought they were actually happening to me, and it wasn’t until the drugs left me completely that I realized, oh, no. It’s not realistic that a young woman died of COVID on my floor and the nurses did not change a thing. It’s not realistic that a mafia don who was on the run from the FBI would be in the hospital to get a face exchange in order to keep evading the police. Those are two of my favorite delusions. Well, not favorite, but the most astounding.
Then there were things that conceivably might have happened, but I’m not sure they did. Such as talking to the chaplain. Which was a really nice chat, by the way, so I don’t care if it’s real or not. I got something meaningful out of it, which is enough fo me.
Then there were things that happened that I knew actually happened such as the testing. They tested my motor skills, my memory, my ability to do basic chores, my speech, and my ability to walk. I passed all with flying colors. My memory, which used to be really good, was the lowest rated at ‘fair’. The rest were all above average to great. It’s funny that memory was that low, but my memory isn’t as good as it used to be. Plus, the woman wanted me to name items in a drawer or something like that starting with A, then B, then C, then D. And my brain was going for the most difficult words I could think of because that’s how my brain works.
The mystery that happens in the hopsital will be shrouded in…well, mystery. Because did it actually happen or didn’t it? If so, did it happen the way the protag saw it happen? Spoiler: no and no. But in the case of the story, yes and no. It was the wildest week of my life. The fact that it was just two weeks in the hospital and one week awake is surreal. And that the week awake was mostly me lying in bed and sleeping, but also the delusions.
I want to convey that in my writing, which is why I want to set the first book of the trilogy in the hospital. The second book will be a year or so later, and it’s the one that I tried something different during NaNoWriMo last year (or the year before). I was trying to marry two different genres together–one that I love and one that I hate. Did it work? No. Do I think it could actually work? I don’t know, but I may try it again. I have more to say, but I’m tired so I’ll leave it for tomorrow.