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Happy December everyone! I am very proud to announce that I not only won NaNoWriMo by writing 50,000 words in November, but I finished Apollo and Daphne at just over 65,000 words on November 30th! I also managed to be the Municipal Liaison for the Charleston Region, so not only did I write a novel, but I made sure other people wrote their novels as well. And many of them were able to finish their 50k as well! I’m very proud of my Wrimos.
Today’s sticky comes straight out of my purse, where it was hanging out all month, waiting for inspiration. Anytime I had any little idea I wrote it down on the sticky. This isn’t the only one, but it is the one that has a few different things on it instead of one whole scene. As it turns out, you can write 166.5 words on a sticky if you write very small. I’ll have to upload that one next. This one has ideas from all through the book, and at the bottom is the word count from one day’s writing (that’s a pretty good word count, no?).
And while we are still talking about NaNo, let me take a minute to point you in the direction of Doyce Testerman. I followed his blog all November long, and it seemed that every time I was having a problem with one thing or another, that was the day that Doyce decided to write about it! I highly recommend the blog – his latest posts are about NaNo, but you can use them for your writing any time of the year. So go, read that! You’ll learn more about writing there then you will reading my little stickies (they are much more about the idea process then the actual writing).
I am happy to say that I did not come up with anymore NaNo ideas this past week, so I will still be working on Apollo and Daphne in November (as of right this moment, which may change). I’m trying to work different parts of the myths in, including the part about Daphne turning into a Bay Laurel. Unfortunately, in this day and age people don’t just turn into trees. Instead I think I’ll have her smell like the tree in question (a bay laurel tree is rather potent) and at the end she will either die (major angst for Apollo, since his last girlfriend, Hyacinth, died in a freak discus accident) or he’ll stalk her until she’s forced to change her name to Laurel and move out of the city. While the stalking and name changing would follow the plot of the myth more closely, I’m just not sure I want to make Apollo into that much of a bad guy. He’s not a bad guy at all, he just obsesses. Of course, making her car crash into a tree (thus, melding the human with the tree!) doesn’t make him much of a good guy either.
Either way, I think he’s just going to have to look like an obsessive jerk near the end of the story.
And Flight 1082 was my husband’s flight number the day I wrote this sticky. I didn’t want to waste an entire sticky just to write down a flight number, so I tacked it on the bottom of this one (you’ve probably seen it before).
So, remember last weekend when I said I had found my next NaNo Novel idea? I found two more this week. One is an idea I’ve been cultivating since my first NaNo back in 2005. The main character is a pretty quiet guy, so I ended up writing Lane’s Girl instead, just because I couldn’t get Mio to say enough (Lane, however, never stops talking and we finished NaNo that year in 19 days). This week while watching the History Channel I found a setting that would work perfectly for Mio’s story. I still don’t trust him to talk enough to do a NaNo though, so that will be something I write outside of November (plus, I have to do a lot of research for that novel, since it will be historical fiction and I’m not yet an expert on Roman Britain).
So that left me with last week’s book idea about the world-hopper, or the third idea I had this week: Apollo and Daphne. If you’ve never read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, you are missing out on a plethora of ancient mythology. These have been some of my favorite stories since I was a child and first read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Unfortunately, a lot of people are turned off by the style of writing in Metamorphoses (just ask my husband what he thinks of it!) so I thought I would re-tell the story in the context of today’s world. It sounds like bad fanfiction on the surface - take the Greek gods and throw them into high school – but I think the story of Apollo and Daphne can really speak to young readers. It’s about first love, about losing your first love, about never even getting your first love although you try and try. And in my version it will take place in Olympia, WA instead of Olympia, Greece.
As you can probably tell, it didn’t take me long to change my mind and decide to write my NaNo Novel about Apollo and Daphne instead of the world-hopper. And you are sure to see more stickies about it in the near future, since I have already filled one page of my writing notebook with stickies I brought home from work.
