My thoughts turn to November. An annual project is in the planning stage.
It’s that time of the year again. The nights are getting longer and the days of barefoot walks are coming to an end. For no other reason than that, after a few days of rain and heavy morning dews, it gets slippery up on the cliffs. The sad truth is that I don’t bounce as well as I used to.
Which means I have to find other places to walk, or put my shoes on when I venture off-road.
There is also another rhythm to this time of year: the quest for a writing project to fill my November. After the demise of the official NaNoWriMo challenge, I kept the habit up, because I liked the idea of having to write a 50,000-word draft in 30 days.
The pressure of a deadline, even if it was self-imposed, works wonders for my creativity.
Some of my best novels (in my humble opinion) have come from NaNoWriMo. We Are Saul, Life and Other Dreams, and I Remember Everything are the standouts, but there have been others.
A total of eleven since I was bored on sick leave in 2014 and decided to use the challenge to have a go at a second novel. That whim became the Sci-fi adventure, Ribbonworld.
Every year around this time, I review my part-completed projects and decide which, if any, should get the November treatment.
This year, I have a choice between a few new stories and several sequels.
Of the new ideas, they are all short stories that I can see a lot more of. Two are the result of prompts, while the third was triggered by a news report. I’ll be jotting down some ideas over the coming weeks before I announce my choice.
Here’s a rough idea of the three front-runners.
And All Because is a crime mystery with a delicious twist. Based on a prompt from the Exeter Authors, ‘The thief had left behind his usual calling card — a box of chocolates.’ This reminded me of a TV advert from years ago, and gave me the basic idea for a police procedural.
Crime of the Century features a way of using time travel that nobody seems to have thought of. It revolves around the question: how could you use time travel to commit the perfect crime? More importantly, would you get away with it?
Do You Want to Live? is my first attempt at magical realism. Based on a picture prompt I saw on Medium of a moonlit Victorian-style railway station. There was a train stretching away into the distance. I wondered where it could be going. A land quite unlike ours was the answer. But, like all such places, I soon found that it had its own problems.
These are my current favourites, although there are several other short stories with potential for expansion.
It doesn’t mean that I will definitely write one of them in November. A new idea might arrive at any time and take over my mind, until I have to do something with it. It’s happened several times before.
As for the sequels, they are something that’s been hanging over me for quite a while now. In fact, there’s going to be a whole post about them soon.
Apart from the next Andorra Pett, which I’m working on, there are currently six. That’s three Steampunk and three Sci-fi. They currently don’t feature in my plans for November.
Of course, that all might change.
Leave me a comment if there’s one particular story you’d like to see more of.
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