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.