It Begins . . .

November 1st is FINALLY here!

This year's NaNo has been a strange one so far (and by "so far" I don't mean the past eight hours, I mean the weeks leading up to it) just because I had so much up in the air, and I didn't know when things were going to happen, and I sort of wanted to do NaNo, but I had no idea how certain events in my life were going to interfere with that. Now that it's here, it turns out there's nothing about this NaNo that will be all that different than previous years.

So, that novel I was planning on writing this year . . . I originally chose the idea because it was something vague. I wasn't really attached to it. I didn't have any elaborate thoughts on it. I figured that way, if all that up-in-the-air stuff DID end up falling in November, I could work around it, and write anything, and just sort of have fun with the novel instead of worrying about "getting it right" while dealing with all this other stuff. I envisioned a much more whimsical NaNo, more along the lines of my first year, when I didn't know what I was doing (but more fun than frantic this time).

But then, once it became clear that nothing major was going to get in the way of writing, I started thinking about my idea. And getting other ideas. Elaborate ones. And pretty soon I had this whole vision of how the story SHOULD go, only it was going to be complicated and required actual planning ahead, and by then I didn't have TIME to plan ahead. I mean, yeah, I could still write my idea and just see where it took me, since that's what I was going to do anyway, but the whole point of it was to choose something that I didn't CARE where it took me, and now suddenly I DID care, and . . .

GAH!!!

So, I ditched it. Three days ago, I decided this was not the right time for that particular story. That blog post I wrote a couple weeks ago? Yeah, you can forget about that.

So, what am I writing? Well, yesterday afternoon I decided on another very vague idea that I'm not particularly attached to. And I'm just going to go with it. We'll see where I end up a month from now.

(You may be thinking, "Why are you wasting time writing a BLOG POST? You should be writing your NOVEL!" Actually, I'm writing this from the past. I know, it's kind of trippy. So earlier when I said "yesterday afternoon," that actually was about an hour ago. And when I started by saying "the past eight hours" since NaNo has started, those are hours that don't even exist yet! Or maybe they do. I don't really get relativity and space-time and all that. Even though I'm basically using time travel to talk to you right now. Sort of. I think this parenthetical got off track somewhere . . .)