More NaNo thoughts

I have an idea of what I might right for the National Novel Writing Month challenge… but maybe it will change on November 1st, the day the challenge begins… to write 50,000 words in the month of November!

I was looking back at this time last year,and these are some thoughts I had then… maybe there’s an idea among them? As you will see, I took up the first of these ideas, writing the Radwinter story, and I published the results last February.

National Novel Writing Month… November… I have signed up to the challenge of writing 50,00 words in a month… my novels are usually longer than that so I have no expectation to actually write a whole novel… but can I even write a decent chunk of a novel? 50,000 whole words…

• I need to get to grips with my story about the Radwinter family and what happens when they try to find out where their family comes from – combining my interest in genealogy, my love of mysteries, and plenty of characters.
• There is the mysterious beginning of a story I found which I have no memory of writing, or even any idea of where it might be going… a lonely man is wandering around a river estuary then goes to the pub… that’s it.
• There is a recent idea I have of two friends driving along a motorway when suddenly the driver sees something, swings over to the hard shoulder and jumps out and runs back along the carriageway and vanishes…
• I’m wondering whether to use this as an opportunity to write in a different genre… dare I try something historical, would I get bogged down with  panic about being accurate or anachronistic? Could I wrote a fictional account of the mysterious love affair of my great-grandparents, Louis and Lois?
• … or a more recent historical novel could be set in the seventies based on my own life but made much more exciting!
• … a truly different genre would be steam punk which I have only discovered about two weeks ago but have never read (it’s a type of science fiction featuring steam-driven machines…)
• Fantasy seems to be fashionable, and I have read some I enjoyed, but there is such a lot of it out there, and some of it, sub-Tolkien is really rather awful and very clichéed
• …or should I just wait until November 1st and see what happens?

I will keep you up to date… success, or failure, I’ll let you know!