Still standing. Some small Newton has absconded with the ruler, and the blue tape measure refuses to stand up, but I assure you that this sock is measuring up at 10 inches. I guess that I’ll need six more inches before doing the heel and foot.
In other news….
NaNoWriMo begins in a week. I am proud to say that I’ve finished a NaNo all three years that I’ve participated in it.
2005 Something Knitty, about a knitter who’s yarn starts talking to her
2006 I can’t remember the title, about a normal-seeming couple who come to a very bad end
2007 Amy vs. The Mud Vampires (my personal favorite), about a social studies teacher who realizes she is a witch when mud-vampires start knocking on her door
I’ve taken several approaches to writing each year. The first year was totally seat of my pants. I had no outline and no early plan. Each day I just made it up. This was hard, and energy-consuming, and led to a NaNo novel that, while it holds some really lovely, weird, and hilarious scenes, is sort of a meandery mish-mash of funny and poignant that is less than coherent. No, you can’t read that one.
The second year, I used the ever-loving sticky note. I put 20 of them on the inside of a cupboard door. The cupboard was near my computer, and I could open it to see my sticky note “outline” or close it when I wasn’t writing. Each sticky started as a chapter idea. In this chapter I will…. “kill the protagonist,” “talk about the speeding ticket,” “detail the marriage proposal,” etc. I started sometime in October to put details onto each sticky note as they occurred to me. A new idea was scribbled on what seemed to be the appropriate sticky note as it occurred to me, with no thought for order at first. If a new chapter idea popped into my head, I added it to a blank sticky, until all 20 were filled. Then I rearranged them into what seemed to be a reasonable order. When nano began, I’d take down a sticky note, whichever one moved me, and try to write about whatever was on that note and only that note until I hit 2000 words. Then I’d stop and take up another note. The writing on this one went a lot easier in some ways, which I ascribe to the plan (and the familiar subject matter). The novel was still terrible, mainly due to the familiarity of the subject matter. That novel was all about exorcising demons though, getting those somewhat “too real” characters out of my head to make way for the fictional characters that I really wanted to write about. No, no one can read that one either. Ever.
Last year, I scribbled in my journal during October. I wrote down dreams. I wrote down song titles that I liked. I would free-write about whatever character or setting or whatever popped into my head. And from one of those scribbled dreams emerged the mud vampires. A bit of research and sculpting turned them into golems. Which led me to witches. Which inspired the creation of Amy. A favorite archetypal character of mine who has popped up in short scribblings as a knitting sex-shop owner, a witch, a down-on-her-luck business executive, a high school teacher, and a few combinations of each. Yes, you could argue that each of those is a different character, sure. But somehow, in my mind, each of them was Amy. I did not have a sticky note outline for the mud vampires. Or a more conventional outline. I did do some work ahead of time to flesh out characters in a different way than I’d done before, trying to make them fuller and more complex. Writing this NaNo was super fun. (I just cracked my gum to go along with that, and you can imagine me bobbing a pony tail if you’d like, since I know that sounded like a weirdly ditzy thing to say). The words just poured out of me. I don’t know where they came from, but each day that I wrote, they were there. Lots of them. Gushing out of me faster than I could type (and I type pretty fast). That one will be shared, eventually. For sure.
This year, with a week left to go until NaNo 2008, I have no idea what I’m going to write about. My journal is really rather empty of anything useful. Though the Soap Stealers keep popping up. Dreams have been uninspiring lately. I did take a look back through the Mud Vampire NaNo the other day, though, and I’m sorely tempted to do a sequel. Amy and her weird family could totally be serialized.
Maybe.
In an effort to jump-start the inspirational process, I have started using my favorite idea-maker. Some people roll dice, or use tarot cards, some people might go use the
Plot Machine over at ScriptFrenzy. I use music. This idea-maker would work with a favorite radio station, Rhapsody on shuffle, an iPod with an extensive play-list, or, as I tend to use, a big CD player. I put the music on random, and write down the first ten songs that get played. If I know the songs well, I don’t even listen to them all the way through, I just write down the titles and skip to the next track. This is a great tool for developing a character. Each song might illustrate a nuance or experience or mood of that character. But when I’m stuck for big ideas, like I am now, I try to make the songs fit together into a pattern or narrative or mood, or something.
Here’s one list I came up with yesterday.
“Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” by Gorillaz (this one might inspire a novel all by itself)
“Allison” by Elvis Costello
“Wishin’ for You” by The Flatlanders
“Searchin’” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Hey There, Fancypants” by Ween
“Long Long While” by The Rolling Stones
“Samba Pa Ti” by Santana
“Oh L’Amour (Live in Nashville)” by Erasure
“Baby Can Dance” by the Hoodoo Gurus
“Beautiful” by Smashing Pumpkins
I don’t know what to do with these. There is some irony to the juxtaposition of artists here. I’m not sure I would ever every put Erasure and Lynyrd Skynyrd in the same list, but I guess there is some sort of Southern connection in there since the Erasure is live in (of all places) Nashville, Tennessee. I’ll work on it, but I’m thinking “Hey there, fancypants” might be by new working title.
;)
Friday, October 31, 2008 at 8:16PM 
