I’m insane.

NaNo starts in 3-ish days, right? As in 72 hours from now I will be sitting at my laptop, hopefully hammering away at the keys, beginning my 50K wordcount for the month.

So naturally, today seemed like the ideal day to decide for sure and certain to sit on the project I was planning on working on during NaNo, because it took something of a wrong turn and I need to stop and figure out what the right turn is before I can get it to progress any further. Plus it’s almost too cold to write that novel right now. That’s a summertime novel.

So I needed something to write.

I’d had a project going over the summer. Or rather, over the summer I’d outlined and storyboarded and worked on characters and whatnot for a project. And then I started writing said project and the MC (main character for the non-writers) just… didn’t fit. I could see this whole huge story, but the character I had planned on shoving into it steadfastly refused to work with it. She was too logical and even-keeled for what the story needs. The story needs a daydreamer. The MC as I had originally conceived her dismisses daydreams as a giant waste of time. I need an MC who doodles in the margins of her notebooks during class and wants more than anything to do something crazy – like strap fairy wings to her backpack – but is afraid to do anything like that because she doesn’t want all the attention.

To sum up: I’ve completely tossed the roughly 5K worth of writing I had for that project and will be starting over and NaNo-ing it come November. So I will be doing the full challenge as rules state. I still don’t have a name for this project, so it will be “nameless YA Fantasy project” until such time as something pops into my head. I’ve completely revamped the MC (although I’m keeping her name) and I’m flipping POV/tense and all kinds of stuff to see if I can get into her head differently and in a way that works better for the story. And in doing all that, the entire opening I had planned out doesn’t work at all, so I’ve still got to figure out what I’ll be writing about come 71 3/4 hours from now.

But I will figure it out, dammit. Because I won last year and I’d like to win this year, because I’d like to get the wordcount on the novel so that I can convince myself it’s really finish-able. And NaNo, in its greatness, lets me feel like I can finish it, and shuts up my inner editor for a while so that I can just sit back and go.

When things get really hard, I’ll be popping onto Dr. Wicked’s and bitching about it here. Enjoy, people.