I also cheated last year. My friend Kelly, a cool chick from the U.S. who is an amazing singer at karaoke (and introduced me to lots of angry girl rock) and beautiful and talented in many ways (the art of conversation, art, using American English), invited me to join and I jumped on the bandwagon without much thought. Another friend, Susan, a cool chick from New Zealand who is an amazing, hilarious conversationalist and gets on with EVERYONE, also joined and November 1st we all set off on our novels. Kelly wrote a fantasy-thriller set in Tokyo and Susan chose to write about a person who traveled through time and ended up in a different country each time jump. They followed the NaNoWriMo rules to the tee and ended up with fully fictional, complete novels by the end. My concept was a little different. I decided to do a sliding doors type expose on my own life. I would look at every memory / event I ever experienced and see how it could have been different. Yes, you're right, that doesn't sound like a plot, it sounds like going through therapy - and basically that is what I did. I ended up with 50,000 words of the most honest drivel I could possibly come up with and have not been able to look at since I finished it on November 30, 2007 and submitted it to the NaNoWriMo to achieve my false "winning status" as a novel writer.
This year, I thought, would be different. I even came up with some plot ideas that on the surface did not look like they could possibly be related to "brainwork, cerebration, cogitation, contemplation, deliberation, excogitation, meditation, rumination, speculation" of oneself (thanks, www.thesaurus.com - you will be duly linked to this blog in appreciation).
The sum of my plot ideas:
1. Someone finds out (not sure how - possibly told by a fortune teller) when they are going to die - how does this affect their life and actions and dealings with other people?
2. (Somehow manage to work in the latest obsession with craft that seems to be sweeping the world - this idea came to me at 3am in the morning, so not the best)
3. Friends go to a fortune teller - one gets told they will die when they are 40, the other when they are 90
4. Could be people on the JET programme in Japan...they go to a Japanese "uranai" (fortune teller)...
5. Write the novel via a series of blogs....
6. Each blog has a different theme on something I am interested in....
7. Make sure I write 50,000 words on my various blogs to combine, and submit to NaNoWriMo, thus achieving false novel status for the second time via an obviously self-absorbed route.
VOILA! Here I am.
I have decided to re-name the month to either "Revelation Month" or "Reflection Month", either of which can be reduced to "Re-Mo" (I like it because it has "emo" in it - a popular buzz-word of recent years relating to...heck...I thought it related to being overly emotional, but all I can find is this info on Wikipedia:
Emo (pronounced /ˈiːmoʊ/) is a genre of music that originated from hardcore punk [1] and later adopted pop-punk influences when it became mainstream in the US.
It has since come to describe several variations of music with common roots and associated fashion and stereotypes.
In the mid-1980s, the term emo described a subgenre of hardcore punk which stemmed from the Washington, D.C. music scene. In later years, the term emocore, short for "emotional hardcore", was also used to describe the emotional performances of bands in the Washington, D.C. scene and some of the offshoot regional scenes such as Rites of Spring, Embrace, One Last Wish, Beefeater, Gray Matter, Fire Party, and later, Moss Icon
In the mid-1990s, the term emo began to refer to the indie scene that followed the influences of Fugazi, which itself was an offshoot of the first wave of emo. Bands including Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is the Reason had a more indie rock style of emo, more melodic and less chaotic. The so-called "indie emo" scene survived until the late 1990s, when many of the bands either disbanded or shifted to mainstream styles. As the remaining indie emo bands entered the mainstream, newer bands began to emulate the mainstream style.
Today popular bands like Fall Out Boy[2], My Chemical Romance[3], Panic at the Disco[4], and Paramore[5] are described as emo despite playing a differing style of music from the previous emo bands.
(Me again): So, I guess I got it wrong and...NO WAIT! Google might be better than Wikipedia in this case and I found this video from searching for "what is emo"..which describes it thus: "Emo is short for emotive or emotional and describes an emerging social trend".So, ANYWAY (and yes, I did cheat at NaNoWriMo last year by copying and pasting liberally from: Wikipedia, my own emails, my journal, just to get the word count up each day).
The reason I am a bit obsessed about the reflectiveness of my "novel" (aka a series of blogs about whatever I am interested in that hopefully have some kind of "self-improvement" flavour to them) is that in the NaNoWriMo bible "No plot? No problem!" written by its founder Chris Baty, it specifically says that this is NOT AN OPPORTUNITY for self-reflection or self-improvement. Fair enough too, because who wants to read about that?
Ah ha, but I am not writing my "blog novel" for anyone else but me : )
Possible Blog topics:
1. Using a blog
2. Teaching
3. Re-discovering cooking
4. Crafts
5. Blogs I like
To make it all sound a bit fancier, I will add Blog to Re-Mo...thus becoming "Blo-Re-Mo"...and here ends the first chapter at just over 1000 words.
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