Sunday, October 5, 2014

It's NaNo Season

I know every year I promote NaNoWriMo. I'm sure some of you are sick of it by now, with the camps and the off-season 'mos, it's a bit cultlike, but I like the challenge. For me it's big one because it forces me out of my comfort zone. I'm a slow writer by trade. It takes me an hour to write a short blog post, so a 50,000 word novel in a month is insane. I edit as I write, a NaNo no-no so the results are usually humorous, which isn't to say I don't take my NaNo writing seriously, but I tend to view it as an exercise more than a work of art.

I wasn't going to participate this year. I'm editing piecemeal another novel, or novel-type thing, and I really wanted a clean first draft by the end of the year, but I got a sudden burst of inspiration and began outlining what should be my 2014 NaNo novel. I like the main character. Without giving much away, I like that she's different from a lot of other people I've created. I wanted a character who was solidly working-class but smart and resourceful and with her own brand of integrity, even if her morals are a little iffy. And I don't want her to be "likable" in the way that female characters are supposed to be likable. I just finished Sara Levine's Treasure Island!!, a book with an unlikable female character (rec'd by Roxane Gay in Bad Feminist). The thing is, I don't see her as all that bad. Sure, she killed a parrot...

Right now my biggest issue, and it's one I seem to have every time I sit down to write, is that my story is probably too "adult" for YA, but not adult enough to be adult fiction.

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