NaNoWriMo Time Again: Pick a Winner

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a non-profit organization, so any donations made are fully tax deductible. C’mon! You can afford a few bucks and get a tax break, too!

I did NaNoWriMo last November for a personal challenge. I wrote a paranormal romance, a genre I hadn’t tried before. I met the goal, so that means I was a winner, and I have the t-shirts to prove it. This year-WHEN I win-I want the cool tote bag. And the t-shirt!

The rules are simple: you pledge to write 50K words during the month of November and upload at the end for a word count to verify. 50K uploaded? You’re a “winner”. Has to be done from scratch, but it’s on the honor system. You can plan in advance, write character sketches, and do research--just no composition of scenes or chapters.

That’s pretty clear.

Like last year, I have many options. What shall I do? I have tickler files with dozens of story ideas. I really should work on book three of my culinary mystery series (Potluck) or book three (Sex for Sale) of my erotic romance “Sex Sells” series, but I am always attracted to bright and shiny new things. I know I have to write those, so I don’t have the same sense of “new beginnings”, that urgency to write that I get with an unfamiliar project.

I dug into my tickler files to find three plots that really, really interest me. (Who am I kidding? They wouldn’t be in a tickler file if they didn’t really, really interest me!) So help me pick one of these three! Vote with your comments. As a side note, I have never written a novel in two of these genres, so I am stretching myself that way, too.

1) Blake Crouch is writing a series of paranormal/sci fi/fantasy books that will be a TV series in 2014 (“Wayward Pines” starring Matt Dillon). Kindle Worlds has the rights to sell fan fiction for the books/TV series through their new initiative. I’d like to take some story threads from the series and do past events and future ones to submit to Kindle Worlds for publication. The town of Wayward Pines isn’t what it seems. You may arrive in the town, but you’ll never leave. At least not in the expected way of travelers. I plan to explore the “heartbeat” of Wayward Pines, the main character’s wife and child, and one of the watchers guarding the town. Untitled at this time.

2) One Heart (tentative title), historical fiction, goes back to the first novel I attempted in high school. This story explores the relationship of Virginia Dare (first white child in the Colonies) and Pocohantas, supposed savior of Captain John Smith and wife of a Virginia planter. My story premise is that Virginia Dare survived and was reared by Indians, eventually being sold to Powhatan, father of Pocohantas. She lived with and took care of baby Pocohantas thus engendering her regard for the invading British. This can explain how Pocohantas knew the English language.

3) It’s a Dog’s Life (working title) is a paranormal comedy. A woman walking her dog has an accident. Both she and the dog are seriously hurt. The woman dies, and her spirit becomes a “walk-in” [walk-ins are a realm of the paranormal] replacing the dog’s spirit in its body. She boots the dog’s spirit out, in effect, so she can inhabit a body and not be totally, absolutely dead. Her family is unaware of the switch, of course, and hilarity ensues as she tries to let them know Mom is still with them. She monitors their food choices and other activities she used to be in charge of. They notice the dog is more proactive and start to call her Mom. Things get really “hairy”, so to speak, when Dad begins to date again.

Vote--Pick this year's "winner" so I can write it and tell you how it goes in November. Voting closes October 8, 2013 at midnight. I'll announce the winner on Facebook, here, and on Twitter.

Recap: 30 days; 11, 669 words per week; 50,000 total words. On average, 1667 words per day or less than 7 pages. Pshaw! Nothing to it!  Find out more, and sign-up yourself, at www.nanowrimo.org