Oh Woe, NaNoWriMo

Wow, that NaNoWriMo internet writing challenge to create a novel in a month was a real adventure. There's nothing like the exhilaration you feel immersing yourself in your own imagination, creating characters and situations that seem almost as real as real life.

Though I did reach 50,000 words, thus becoming a "winner", my work is by no means ready for public consumption. Too many things "evolved" between the beginning and the end. A character who might have been svelte and handsome at the beginning became hulking and ugly by the end, not because it was part of the plot, but because I did not have time at the end to check what I had written at the beginning.

Even the genre changed. It started out as a romantic mystery, for which I thought I could enlist my wife Wendy's help since she's a huge fiction fan, of romantic novels in particular. But her opinion after reading the first few chapters was, "This isn't something I normally would read." She said if I were writing romance, I needed to include more hand-holding, loving gazes, and long walks.

Screw that! So my novel changed to a mystery-suspense-thriller that included a climactic bar fight and car chase. And I no longer let my wife proofread the chapters. There are still romantic elements, so I figure my novel has cross-over appeal. I even included a cat among the story's protagonists, in case the folks from Disney think about adapting it to the screen. I left no literary stone unturned.

The working title and tagline are Return to Salem--A beautiful young woman must uncover the secrets of her past to reveal why she is being stalked by mysterious strangers. Doing so unleashes a chain of events that ends in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.

Cool, eh. Anyway, that's how I've spent my last month. It's kept me so busy I had time for little else. While my adjacent neighbors have been putting up all kinds of colorful Christmas decorations, my yard and home remain unadorned. Since I did have time in October to construct an elaborate Halloween yard display, my neighbors probably figure we're a family of satanists.

And neither is this blog the official end of my hiatus, since I continue to have computer and internet access problems. In fact, in the final days while I was rushing to complete my on-line NaNoWriMo, my computer screen would suddenly freeze up and the hard drive would whir to life. That lasted for a few minutes before I was able to continue. Maybe my computer was doing his own NaNoWriMo, or maybe he thought I was working him too hard . . . I don't know.

Later.