Forget Me Not

That's the title of my NaNoWriMo novel. I changed it from Dance with a Dragon. Changed the entire story back to the one I had originally planned and began writing on the 10th, right after my last blog.

It was an interesting process actually. The scene I wrote first was actually the first "touch" of the hero and heroine--a scene that would end up about a third of the way into the story. In the course of writing the actual beginning of the story, I have them meet briefly in passing so he can see her condition--they haven't met in 17 years--and she can be jogged out of her static state of amnesia.

Here is the story premise--it's a fantasy where magic is accepted, reluctantly by some and studied by others as a science.

A man has been in prison for 17 years, placed there on the testimony of his wife who he thinks betrayed him to their mad leader's secret police. Now he's out of prison, he's come to find her and exact revenge.

Except when he finds her, he discovers that she was tortured and bespelled to betray the secrets of the conspirators who were planning to overthrow the country's leader. And she is still under the spell of her tormentor because she can't remember a thing about him or her life from the time she left her hometown until she returned to it. And if she tried to remember or hears about it, she gets violently ill.

So now he has to decide: does he still want revenge on her? Does he want revenge on the ones who really betrayed them? And what does he want to do about his wife? Everyone thinks he's dead. Should he stay that way? If he helps her to remember the past, will she want him back? Will he want her back?

All questions that need to be answered in 50,ooo words.

Last night, or rather early this morning, I got through 11,000 of them! And that was in just a week.

The point of NaNoWriMo is to get people to write and to keep the writing.

I would say this has been a resounding success once I was about to get myself motivated enough to actually do it. And I'm glad I did. I just need to find a way to continue it beyond November.

I was excited to see on Robin Owens website that she also writes out of order as I did which is not something I've ever thought of doing before. I guess I thought because I read a novel from beginning to end (usually, sometimes I cheat and read the end after about 50 or so pages to see if it's worth going on!), they should be written that way. But they don't have to be.

It's been pretty linear since then but I may just jump ahead again to another pivotal scene and work up to that as I did with this one.

the one thing that did disappoint me to find out on her website was that she and one of her commenters use more than one piece of writing for their word count for the month. The commenter is using short stories! I guess that's okay but I think it defeats the purpose. I know that if I collected all the writing I do between journaling and posting on the web and articles and such, I'd have over 50K of words by now for the month but that's not the point. The point is that I've worked on a single piece of work, a single story for an extended period of time and not stopped.

Oh, well. To each their own I guess. I don't know this woman. And for Robin, she has more than demonstrated on her blog that she has the discipline to write daily or nearly daily and hit her word count, so the month's exercise is just really a fun thing for her.

I'm the one that needs the help.

Well, Pinky shall just have to help herself.