NaNo Plans 2015

It's that time of year again!! (ﾉᐛ )ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

I got lazy with the design. Don't judge me. 

If you're new here, NaNoWriMo is essentially a challenge to write 50,000 words for a story in the month of November. This is my fourth time attempting it and hopefully my third win! (My first attempt back in 2012 was really half-hearted and I can't even remember which story I worked on for it ...;; )

The past two years I worked on Aperture; in 2013 I wrote 70k as part of Marissa Meyer's NaNo challenge, and in 2014 I wrote just over 50k. I have well over 200,000 words in total for Aperture (this calendar year alone) and I still have no real "novel" to prove for it. This is mainly because of where I draw my inspiration from and the fact that I keep going back and tweaking the plot and creating butterfly effects.

A lot of Aperture's inspiration comes from my life, and because of that, I've hit a metaphorical wall with it recently. I crossed the two a little too closely and I feel like I have to take a step back and re-evaluate a lot of things. (This has happened at least once before, so I'm not too worried about it.)

Because I'm feeling so conflicted about Aperture, I decided to use one of my numerous other story ideas I've been collecting since sophomore year. Back when I started Aperture, I had no idea it would last this long; I had a tendency to start and abandon projects quickly. I grew to love Aperture too much to do that, so I focused solely on it up until senior year.

Even with my focus on Aperture I still hoarded new ideas like they were going out of style. I have about four or five now that I've developed past hypotheticals and actually started writing for. (These line up almost exactly with the Pinterest storyboards I have.) This is a huge accomplishment for me and I'm excited to explore a new world past the couple thousand words I have per said new projects.

So, what am I going to be writing this year?

I decided to work on Casanova this year because it was the idea with the most solid plot at the time. It's a compilation of a couple different plot bunnies I've had, and I'm still working on a lot of the details, but I'm really excited to get this story out.

The basic premise: Toni earns back Carter's soul after it's wrongly taken by a demon known as the Casanova.

So far my writing playlist is all country songs, mainly picked up from when my dad listens to country radio stations while he's working, but I have a feeling I'm going to be adding some Halsey songs in, too. The strongest inspiration songs so far have been "American Kids" and "Cowboy Casanova" (go figure).

Casanova is going to be a challenge for me in a couple different respects, but I'm really looking forward to tackling it. I've got a lot of research and worldbuilding ahead of me since I decided to set the story in Texas and I included a little too much religion in my initial ideas. It's also going to be difficult to switch gears from Aperture to Casanova for an entire month, but I'm also looking forward to it.

So far, it's been really fun to work on preliminary world- and character-building. I've mostly moved out of that phase for Aperture and only started to scratch the surface with all my other ideas. Casanova's been the only one recently where I've had to sit down and anticipate stuff that might come up in the plot that I should know beforehand. I also have a few days' worth of writing from before I decided to use Casanova for NaNo this year.

Keep a lookout on my Casanova Pinterest board and my NaNo stats page! I'm going to be updating both a lot over the course of November, and I'm (hopefully) going to have a mid-NaNo blog post go up around Nov 15th.

Good luck to everyone else participating in NaNo this year! Please feel free to add me as a writing buddy ♥ None of my friends seem to have made plans to do NaNo this year, so I'd love to have company!