Nanowrimo 2010

November was National Novel Writing Month, and I won for the second year in a row. I reached the word goal on Saturday. Yay! To make things more fun, three of my work friends were also doing it, so we had fun sort of competing with, sort of supporting each other through it. 50,000 sounds like a pretty daunting task for just thirty days, but it works out to less than 2,000 words a day, so it's only somewhat difficult, not impossible. As far as I know all four of us succeeded, so that's really nice too.

This year I wrote a sequel to the story I wrote last year. Well, not "wrote" since that implies it's finished, but I've been working on it since then. You need to keep in mind that the word goal for nanowrimo is set at 50,000 words, but the vast majority of published novels are twice that long. Anyway, I'm 3/4ths finished the story from last year, and knew how it would end, so it was easy to work on a sequel without knowing what happens in that middle bit.

In the first story, Pull, Caitlin makes her living pulling people who died young out of the afterlife, and the Manchester police ask her for her help: there's a serial killer on the lose, and they hope she can talk to the victims to get a lead on the elusive criminal. Oh, and she's in love with a guy in the afterlife who has no interest in being alive again. In the end the bad guy is caught...and Caitlin realizes that she's pregnant, which is something she and Kyler thought couldn't happen because the dead don't reproduce in the afterlife.

Push picks up six months later, with Kyler having crossed over to be with Caitlin and their upcoming baby (and Danny, her foster kid who has her gift). Learning to live after having been in the afterlife since dying at birth causes Kyler more than a little stress, and Caitlin and Danny are also learning to cope because of it. Caitlin herself gets an education in something she's never thought about before: what it's like for the people she's rescued to start their lives over.

Before long the police officer from the first story comes to ask Caitlin for help again: someone has been forcing people who were happily dead back into life. Caitlin agrees to return them to where they belong, but finds out that she can't. Things explode into new tragedy for one of the dead she couldn't help, and Caitlin finds herself sleuthing again, this time trying to figure out why someone like her would be "helping" people against their will.

Ultimately, I'd like to write this out as a trilogy (the next story, Hold, is going to be about the dead not being able to get into the afterlife...for some reason. I haven't thought it out too far yet. It'll upset Caitlin's belief that there are no ghosts, anyway!) and of course get them published. I learned recently that the average age of a novelist being published for the first time is 36, so that let's me angst a little less that I haven't finished a (publishable) novel quite yet. Apparently 12-year-old me deciding I should be published by age 30 was overly ambitious, lol.

"must keep writing if I'm to be better than everyone else" - Jets to Brazil, I Typed For Miles