NaNoWriMo Madness Continues

I made a lot of progress and then the past couple of nights had some other things to take care of in the evening.  I am over 10,000 words which I find amazing every time I see the word count on the page.  The madcap idea of trying to write 50,000 words in one month is obviously working for me.  I have throttled the inner editor completely (well, almost completely) and I am just writing.

I am taking to heart the advice that Neil Gaiman gave in a NaNoWriMo pep talk, "You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days.  Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die.  Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny.  But that does not matter.  What matters right now are the words, one after another.  Find the next word.  Write it down.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat."

The novel that I am writing was a collision of ideas that fell into my lap.  I've been writing fantasy recently and decided to try something completely different for NaNoWriMo since one of the rules is that you have to start the novel in November and finish 50,000 words in the same November.  On a whim I decided to try literary fiction.  I didn't know that most literary fiction tends to be quite a bit longer than 50,000 words until I learned that the average word count of the world's "great novels" is about 135,000 words.  Good thing I didn't read that until after I was committed to my idea!

Ignorance is bliss, though.  I decided to try a literary fiction novel about a woman who is my age and feels vaguely suicidal.  She wants to escape from her life. I thought that I should be able to muse and ponder and toss about 50,000 words around that.  Literary fiction is, after all, more about the character than about the plot, right?

Funny how it happens, though, I started wondering why she'd vaguely feel these things.  It turned out that she was being surplussed at her job and wondered how she'd support herself and her young daughter.  It isn't easy to find a job when you're fifty, as plenty of currently unemployed people can attest.    And then out of the blue, she learns a secret about her recently-deceased mother that changes her life.   She thought her mother was an orphan but she wasn't.  Her mother has a sister and grew up in Hermann, Missouri.

As if that weren't enough, a few days after starting the novel, more plot fell into my lap.  I went to Missouri wine country and started reading about my own ancestor's contributions to early Missouri wine-making.  I've always been a genealogy buff and knew a bit about my third great-grandfather.  I read about a varietal that he'd cultivated that I've never heard of, mostly because I don't think it exists any more (dang prohibition!)

More to come later, but now, back to the novel, which has the working title of The German Diary.