There's a challenge out there called The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge. It's an art challenge with a list of thirty kinds of monsters, and the challenge is to draw a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I'm doing this challenge a bit differently, and I'm writing a short story about a different monster girl every day for thirty days. I did change the list a little bit because the last handful of days don't specify a particular monster, so I've replaced those with monsters from The 30 Day Monster Girl Challenge 2. This also means that for the first time (excluding Camp NaNos) I'm going full rebel and not writing part of a first draft of a novel, but rather first drafts of short stories.
I have many reasons for this, and I hope to get a few things out of it:
- Plotting. Although world building and characterization come easily to me, plotting is and always has been a weak point. I want to force myself to write stories with a beginning, middle, and end for practice and to make myself feel better about my abilities.
- Back to writing as opposed to editing. Sometimes I'm in the mood to edit. Right now is not that time. It's been so long since I just wrote something new and it's freeing.
- Back to short story beginnings. The Firebird story was an experiment for me. It's about six story ideas mushed together and it's not how I usually go about writing a novel. All but one of my novel length stories have started as short stories that I later expanded into a novel, either making the short story the first chapter or using the structure of the short story as an outline. I want to go back to this tried and true method in hopes that
- One of the stories will spark something in me and become my next novel length project.
- Back to writing as opposed to editing
However!
You may notice that I am amazingly far behind on this project. It's embarrassing. The reason is that the last month has hit me with blow after blow, and I've yet to be able to recover before it smacks me down again. I started off November in the hospital, where I stayed for a few days when I had big plans to get a tumblr up and running to do a daily blog of my progress and possibly post the stories as I went along. I also had plans to make myself (for lack of a better term) a NaNo advent calendar: a new, brief, funny thing about writing every day for motivation. Alas! There's always next year.
When I got out of the hospital, my family ganged up on me to make me nap instead of write. This is a real thing that happened. The month continued on, being rude to me, until finally (and I've had it, so it is finally, or so help me God) Lennard Cohen died, and as well as I'd been holding it together, that was the last straw and I turned into a blubbering ball of tears.
Come on, life. I'm already down. Stop kicking me.
In terms of NaNo, I'm likening it to a marathon. Let's say I trained for a marathon and I was in great shape, then suddenly broke my leg. The cast came off the day before the race and I was technically all healed up, but when I went to go run, I mostly hobbled along, winded and sweaty, chanting, "No, no, I got this. I got this. I got this."
I've also let the blog get away from me, if you hadn't noticed. I've eaten up all the book reviews that I'd written ahead of time and scheduled to go up. So I have a plan now to every day do some work on the blog and write 500 words of my NaNo project until I build up my endurance and get the blog under control and can write 1,000 words a day of my NaNo project. Then when December starts, I'm going to pretend it's my own personal NaNo (Solitary Novel Writing Month, or SoNo) and buckle down and fly.
It's a bummer missing out on all the community and enthusiasm of real NaNo, but on the scale of things that have been bummers this month, it's pretty low.
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