Thinking about NaNo 2020

This is where your Thinking about NaNo 2020 comments are to be posted.

I'm torn between two ideas. One is continuing my urban fantasy fae bounty hunter series. The other is something I've done in short stories and was thinking about kicking to a novel - a witch fighting demons and thumbing her nose at angels.

I'm definitely going to do NaNo this year even though I haven't written hardly at all this year.

Right now I'm thinking about using NaNo to get on with my current novel rather than writing something new. It's half done and at about 350 pages long already (have to look up the word count.. 🤔). It's about people with magical abilities who can control one of the elements and is written from three alternating perspectives. The reason why I haven't been writing within the last few months is that I'm still not sure what I want one of the leads to do/experience next. It's not quite a typical person I tend to write about and therefore it's rather challenging for me. It might help to have such a goal like in NaNo to go on writing again 🙃

Partners are assigned. Let's get posting those NaNo thoughts here in the chat.

As I write this, my thoughts about NaNoWriMo 2020 are taking three paths: one toward a romance, one toward a single-title mainstream novel, and the third toward being a NaNo Rebel and finally finishing a manuscript that has been stuck in revisions for a while.

ROMANCE: This past weekend (Aug. 28-30), I attended the Romance Writers of America national conference, virtual this year like everything else. My first novels were romances and it has been a long time - five years - since I worked on a novel that was exclusively romance. Romantic suspense was the bridge into crime novels, which has been my focus for a while now.

MAINSTREAM: A novel I mentioned in another swap -- set in Memphis about a woman who took the fall for a crime she didn't commit -- is tugging at me.

NaNo REBEL: This would be returning to the revisions of the first Mercy novel. The protagonist's name is Mercy.

One of the RWA speakers talked about writing to your id. That link is to a blog post someone wrote a few years ago about Dr. Jennifer Barnes' presentation at a previous conference. (You have to be a member of RWA to access the actual workshop.) Basically, it means writing the things that make you happy -- as opposed to writing what you think you should, what you think will sell, whatever is trending, etc.

So, I'm going to make that list of things that I enjoy and see what comes of it. I've done this before in a different way (listing all of the topics I like to read about). As September starts, I'm kind of all over the place. But I know by the end of this month, I'll have narrowed my focus.

At this point, I'm likely going to be working on my OQ Advent Calendar project for NaNoWriMo again this year ...provided we do the Advent Calendar again. And I'm really hoping we do. But if we don't, I'm quite sure I'll do another collection of short stories for Regina, because I always have those to work on. LOL