It’s ON!

The short version: Me and NaNoWriMo this November? It’s ON!

The slightly less short version:

A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about The Diagram Prize, which is a prize given to the book with the oddest title at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Any book with an unusual title can be nominated, and the unique thing about the awarding of the prize is the judges can’t actually read the book, because then the title might make sense and the humour is gone.

All of the titles in the article are amusing in one way or another, but the one that had me scratching my head was Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llandudno? because really, did that question merit a whole book? And who, besides the residents of Llandudno [1], is really interested in something like that?

That’s when it hit me: this would make a great NaNoWriMo story! I could write about a scholarly type writing about an author’s visit to some obscure town, and have half of it be the scholarly article, and the other half being what really happened! Excellent!

I’m starting to get excited about this, especially since last year was a complete bust. I’d been working on essentially the same story for four years, and basically decided in 2006 that it would be the last year I worked on it. I even went so far as to write the ending without there being an actual middle to the story. Last year, I spent months trying to come up with an idea, but couldn’t think of anything and dropped out before I began.

However, I think I can go somewhere with this story, having thought of a good opener on my way to work and a scene involving a bar fight on my walk home. I don’t want to jinx it by saying that I have a good feeling about it, but maybe I’ll go as far as saying that I will be spending the next month [2] giving a great deal of thought to this idea.

[1] Which is a seaside town in Wales.
[2] When I’m not trying to finish my Christmas knitting because I’ll be busy trying to write in November.