Well, it’s been awhile since my last post, all thanks to Twitter for keeping me from posting 140-character-max drivel on individual blog postings.
Does anybody know what tomorrow is? Yes, tomorrow is the day after Halloween, which makes me quite sad that the holiday is over and the “big” holidays are upon us. If you said Dia de los Muertos, you’d also be correct, but as I am not Hispanic or Catholic, this means little to me. No, tomorrow marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month.
Last year was the first year I discovered and partook in the movement, the final product being my first ever completed novel at ~8:36 a.m. on November 30, 2010. The feeling of holding a finished tome at 136,000+ words is exhilarating, and my interest in maintaining this high is bloated and piqued…so we’re going to do it again!
I believe some of you are familiar and involved—ahem…some of you intimately—with a fantasy erotica romance quinary I have been developing for quite some time. In the last 12 months specifically the stories have developed in and around themselves, and every day I’m tending to the stories with new plot points, characters and what I hope is scintillating dialogue. These stories have occupied my thoughts day and night for several years; it is these stories that have curbed my appetite from any other stories I have in the works, including the very one I (barely) finished last November, the one I’m struggling through (for the same reasons) to draft #2. It is this keen interest that will hopefully propel me into finishing at least one of the five books…maybe even two.
The difficult thing about this is that it’s not one solitary story that has only itself to rely on for a conclusive story. My quinary, which has yet to have a title, is much like any serial out there; each book has the same set of characters, the end of each book encompassing a climax that together build into a larger one at the end of the series. Consider Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Because each separate tale relies on each other to make a complete story, consistency is key… It weighs heavily on my mind and worries me incessantly.
Also, much like the aforementioned titles, this is a fantasy series. So while I do not have to worry so much about researching actual events or places to avoid anachronisms, I have to make a ton of shit up. I look forward to this with relish (really, that’s a lot of the appeal of being a wordsmith), but it’s a lot of pressure to take on to make the stories both interesting and believable.
Not to mention the fact that this is a romance series, which means the principle plot points revolve around the budding relationship of a different couple in each story. Writing about sex and love is my passion (no pun…), but I don’t want these stories to be all sex and emotion; I want action, fighting and anger; I want intellect, deception and espionage; I want death, destruction and war.
This is a HELLUVA project to take on, and it will take an EXORBITANT amount of organization, patience and research to complete. If publication is the final goal (and it is), then I must wait for the full five-book story to be complete, consistent and whole before even contemplating contests, agents and publishers (and consequential directors, actors and Oscar acceptance speeches…I dream big).
One month; one novel. I can do it—I’ve done it before.
The writing community on Twitter is aflutter at the starting gates, and I’m psyched to start another typing marathon. I am also excited to say that my enthusiasm has bubbled over, and some of my friends, coworkers and loved ones have also decided to take on the challenge of finishing a novel this month as well. Huzzah!
So wish me a hearty good luck as I embark on another writing journey!
JLH
