Fun with NaNoWriMo (even though it's not November)

Why do I never have money in February? I guess it's the winter heating bills and the post-Christmas bills. It should motivate me to do my taxes! Or maybe to keep working on my NaNoWriMo novel. Did I mention that here? Apparently not. I've won NaNoWriMo for three years in a row. This isn't exactly an honor; all it involves is writing 50,000 words between November 1 and November 30. I should do this every month. Maybe not that many words, but I should set a goal for how many words to write - and then actually write them.

My first completed novel, in 2006, was called "Everyday Magic" (I still like the title) and involved a divorced woman of my age who developed magical powers. What the heck - I could use all the power I can get. There were fairies and witches and evil developers who wanted to cut down the fairies' woods and build houses. (The woods where I played as a little girl has been pretty much eradicated; McMansions sit there now.) My heroine made some close friends, learned some good things about herself, and, of course, found romance. The resulting story was frothy - light, no substance. Cute. I doubt anybody would buy it.

My second "completed" novel was the post-apocalyptic one I've been developing for the past 10 years. I seem to get it out every 5 years. I worked from my 1997 notes and my 2002 notes, but didn't use anything I'd already written - that's against the NaNoWriMo rules. Once again, you've got your divorced middle-aged woman; this time she meets the daughter she never had, who has come over from a parallel universe. (Are your eyes glazing over yet?) In that universe, a plague has killed off a large percentage of the population. In 1997 I was thinking 90%; in 2007, I was working with more like 50%. I wrote 50,000 new words between November 1 and 30, so I got the "Winner!" graphic, but the novel was nowhere near completion. It still isn't. The story interests me, but I don't think it'd interest anybody else. And it's very dark, so it's difficult to write. Still, I may get back to it someday.

But this year's novel might have some commercial value. I wrote a mystery set in the Boston area. This year's heroine is in her early 30's, never married, no kids; she lives with her cat in my old apartment in Somerville, which I moved to Cambridge for the purposes of the story. I knew all of this going into November, but the basic gimmick in this novel came to me in a dream the morning of November 1st: she's a mind reader. I swear, I'd never read any novels where the main character read minds. When I picked up Volume 1 of Charlaine Harris' "Dead until Dark" series, I was nonplussed. Sookie Stackhouse reads minds? Oh, geez, everybody will think I stole the idea... In that book, though, Sookie refers to it as her disability, and Alex (my character) thinks of it as a talent. Totally different locations, totally different people, totally different stories. Really. Not a vampire to be found in my novel. Or at least not in Volume 1. I've already started preparing a draft for Volume 2, and there's going to be a vampire scare (although not necessarily any vampires) in it. That little aspect grew out of my distaste for Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" franchise. Turns out the same theme is found in the Sookie Stackhouse books - vampires as lovers. Ewwww! There's a name for that: necrophilia. Not my thing at all. I haven't read any of the Twilight books, since I'm not a teenage girl any more...

Anyway, Alex, my mind reader, will end up helping the police solve crimes. Isn't that what mysteries do?