Welcome to Literary Fiction 2011! Introductions Here.

Salutations, bonjour, greetings, and hola~

You can call me twiggilala or Laura, and I will be your fantabulous co-moderator of the Literary Fiction forum this year. I am quite the fan of literary fiction, and I cannot wait to discuss the tricky monster that it is with you.

Feel free to introduce yourself and your plot here. Some ideas to start you off: what's your plot, what is your favourite work of literary fiction, and tell us something fun about yourself.

Greetings! I am signalbeam, and I'm very excited to write my first NaNoWriMo novel!

My novel is about a boy named Flanders who meets a boy named Cam, who teaches Flanders to realize (and embrace) the wildness around him. Will Cam go too far? Also contains fantastical/surreal elements and weird stylistic stuff that I tend to play around with. Youth and reality are the most evident themes.

My favorite works of literary fiction are Invisible Cities (Calvino), Dandelion Wine (Bradbury), Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) and Einstein's Dreams (Lightman).

And me? I'm nineteen (turning twenty in November), a boy, a junior at university, and an avid reader/writer double-majoring in English and History. One time I got in a car chase, but I got away. Another time a jellyfish floated onto my foot and I panicked and kicked it out of the water. It hit a European tourist in her thigh, and while she was unhurt, she wasn't too happy with me.

Hallo, I'm Inoru, and as you can see, I'm a long-term resident of NaNo. \o/

This year, I shall be writing about a man who wakes up one day and literally can't remember the last seven years of his life, and thence tries to pick it back up. Seriously character driven, and may end up being seriously meta, which I figured means LitFic.

I'm honestly not quite sure what all I've read that fits under "literary fiction", so not sure I can give a favourite. Sorry!

As for myself, I'm almost 23, unemployed (still), severely hard of hearing, crafty and creative in various media, and am generally hanging out on Twitter, fangirling over Adam Lambert, and reading fanfiction in a truly impressive number of fandoms (or so I'm told; I even read in fandoms I don't know the canon of).

Hey everyone :)

I'm Tim, or Timothy (honestly have no preference) and this is my second year officially doing NaNoWriMo - last year was a success! I'm a bookseller (which I love doing), and am getting married this coming summer.

My novel this year chronicles a 24-year-old man named Adam, who, as the result of a tumultuous former relationship with a budding cocaine addict, is single father to a little girl named Amara. On the one year anniversary of the disappearance of Amara's mother, Adam's friends take him on a ski trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, to try to keep his mind off of his former love. But the weekend quickly turns disastrous when, on the trip home, a fire aboard the ferry sends the enormous boat to the bottom of the Georgia Straight, claiming dozens of lives - including Amara's.

In the days and weeks that follow, Adam must rediscover what it is that defines him as a human being, now that the axis of his former identify - his beloved daughter - is gone. An exploration of how disaster reshapes us, how we relate to the world around us, and the factors in our lives that define who we are. I have high hopes for this project, and can't wait to launch into it!

My favourite work of literary fiction? That's tough. At the minute, I'd have to say Nicolas Dickner's "Nikolski"... probably because I just finished reading it and thoroughly enjoyed it. My all-time favourite author in this genre is Michael Ondaatje, who I got to meet at an event hosted by my work recently!

Feel free to add me as a friend if I seem like somebody you'd like to be friends with!

-Timothy

Kat here!

Been around here since 2008. I'm doing this novel while working on my first year of post-grad.

Currently this year's novel is going to be told in epistolary style: via letters. My narrator won't do much--he's reading the letters of my protagonist, a playwright and actor named Darren. Darren has a lot to work out:: he's pushing 30, still not yet settled, about to leave a job, in love with his married best (guy) friend Emil, and estranged from his family. The story is basically about the genesis of a play based on Darren's friendships with Emil and a lady named M.

Hello, hello, again.

I'm Raquelin. I have only vague semblances of plot. This year it's something about terrorists/freedom fighters and the corruptive influence of love (I'm so excited for this, oh my Baty), and of course more epic Pokemanz. My MC needs to finally 'grow up.' This will, obviously, entail getting body slammed by a raging Charizard. I've already done the research on flail chest.

Not entirely sure what constitutes as lit fic, since I only really read YA and even then, YA that tends to be 10-20 years old.

As for something interesting... well, I enjoy incorporating crack-addled challenges into my NaNo experience and pushing myself to the point of wailing, wine-drinking, numb-fingered exhaustion by Thanksgiving. (I hear this makes me a "real writer." Compensates for the Pokemon and the random hilarity.) Yay!

Hi! I'm Anna, been poking around with lit fic now for a bit, my second actual year hovering in this forum. This year's plot is part coming of age, part dealing with middle age as two sets of best friends endure tragedy. Phil and Julia have been together as buddies since they were twenty. Now their eldest children are wading through similar murky waters, as well as falling in love. Phil and Julia are helpless as Abe and JJ lurch from one angsty situation to another, until Abe dives off the Golden Gate Bridge. As Phil was abandoned, now JJ is bereft along with the rest of Phil and Julia's families, Abe's body unrecovered.

My fave lic fic? Well, In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan is one of the best. Being There by Jerzy Kosinski rates highly, but my new most favorite is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, part metafiction, all brilliance!

Something funny about me... I LOVE to bake and cook, especially sweets. However... pie crust scares the hey outta me! Not the eating, but the making. Which is probably good, or I'd make far too many pies and never get any writing accomplished!

Hey everyone!
I'm Sadie, my third nano but first time doing LitFic (that's what I figured my nano is this year, not really quite sure though).

My novel doesn't really have a plot as such, just developments in the characters thoughts and relationships... or something.
It's basically about a year in a young man's life who sort of befriends a not-quite-so-young widow(though their precise relationship is quite hard to pinpoint) whose lost touch with her life after the death of her husband and just can't seem to get it together again. I guess I'm sort of pondering the questions of whether it's worthwhile to give your whole life to someone if losing them will be so painful, and also how do you rebuild your life when its been completely uprooted. There's other stuff too, but that's hard to put in a short description.

My favourite to LitFic? Hard to say, I can't really tell what's LitFic and what's not... If Watchmen counts (yes, I know it's a graphic novel) then that's my absolute favourite.

Something fun about me? I'm OBSESSED with sewing. My flat is full of fabric and patterns and everything else sewing-related :) DIY ftw!

Hey everyone! I'm Tesni. Nice to meet you. *waves*. I'm fourteen years old, and this is my third attempt at literary fiction (the other were last years' NaNo and a random other novella I started writing over the summer). It's also my third year of participating in NaNoWriMo.

My NaNo this year is based loosely off a short script of only about 600 words that I wrote in the spring. It's about a teenage girl, Julie, who's reached some major crossroads and turning points in her life. Following the death of one of her best friends as a kid, her mind has been constantly inhabited by an imaginary friend she had for company, but now who refuses to go away, manipulates her a lot and basically won't let her get on with various other aspects of her life. So, ghost in tow, she leaves home to revisits all the important locations of her past that she associates with him as a way to shake him off, and I imagine that there will be all sorts of surreal escapades and little vignettes of the people and places they go weaved into it all. I imagine it will be very character-driven and such, so we'll see how it goes.

Favourite works of lit. fic? Ahhh that's such a hard question because I devour just about all the books in the genre that I come across. However, I guess my favourites are the Dance Sequence by Aidan Chambers, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Under a Glass Bell by Anaïs Nin (if that counts), We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.

When I'm not writing I can generally be found singing, playing the double bass, guitar or piano, overenthusiastically studying German and Russian, listening to French singers from 80 years ago and obsessing over Marlene Dietrich and Clara Bow.

[Duplicate Post]

-barges in through the door-

Hola.

I'm known outside of the internet as Julia or Jewels, and occasionally My Little Sunshine/My Sunshine [obviously, a nickname my parents have given me ^^].

On the internet, I am called Natalie Field, a little pen name I came up with. I like it when pen names and author names are four syllables (J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens, Terry Pratchett, C.S. Lewis, S.E. Hinton, Very Quick In-A-Nutshell Summery of My Novel:

FMC (Anneliese Mencken) moves out to the country, gets lonely, joins a writing club and meets a bunch of kids who she decides to befriend and help - even if they are different and her parents may or may not approve.

Naturally, it's a lot more than that. Lots of internal conflict. Society and generally people also seem to be doing a lot of conflicting. o.0 There's a distinct lack of plot. Lots of pondering.

Yeah, it's LitFic.

And I honestly don't know what my favorite LitFic is. I didn't even know such a genre existed until NaNoWriMo, really. /shot. Does The Outsiders count? Probably not. But the so-called "plot" does seem to be summed up in the characters. Sort of. Never mind.

Something fun about me? Ouch, tough question. I don't know. I write. That makes me awesome. Right? /shot again. I play the piano and some guitar and sing a bit... I'm a music nerd. I don't know if that's something fun about me, but there you are. And music comes before writing for me. Yeah, I'm a BIG music nerd.

Oh yeah, and I clog. Warning: a lot of the videos on youtube about clogging fail. Just a warning. o.o I used to do Irish dance. I did it for five years before switching to clogging. Both dances are extremely awesome. The clogging technique is easier to master, but the steps are just as hard as those in Irish. The Irish dance technique is ten thousand million times harder to grasp. And Irish music has stolen my soul. But I don't rank one dance over the other.

Well, there you go. Pleasure to be writing with you guys. ^^

Heya, all! Teresa here.

There's so much to tel I don't know where to begin anymore. The series I am writing is a complex one, which makes me chuckle because of the fact it started with a single question or idea I never thought would fill a single novel. It grew like the roots of a rosemary plant. Last November, I barely came up with what was then the fifth of five novels, and I wrote the first 50k or more words for that one even though the other four were not yet written. A month later a sixth was added. Two more months after that, the universe of my series expanded. The novel from last year became the ninth of thirteen. That was the gestation and birth of the Unbound Saga. This year, I finally wrote half the first book back in August. I mean to write book #2 come November 1.

There is another series--a science fiction trilogy--I wish to write, but this bigger series demands far more attention. I thought back in December/January I was going to write the first part of the trilogy during this year's NaNoWriMo, but it did not happen that way. Ah well.

I'm called Simonetta on here. This is my first year doing Nanowrimo and I'm really excited!

My plot is... well, like most LitFic, there isn't much of it. It takes place during late 1917-1918, and the MC is a young man named Neil Philbin who's quite a loner, and finds himself bored and aimless. He works in the film industry, getting bit parts and stunt work to make do. He meets a young, little-known actress named "Viola Eden", and the story is mainly about their relationship, their ponderings about their meaning in life and future, and the desire for recognition and fame. I have little of the outline completed, so more than likely, I'm just going to see where the characters take me.

Hi. You can call me Jamilah or, if you prefer, Linda, which is what my parents named me (and what still appears on all official documents).

I can't remember offhand how many times I've attempted NaNoWriMo now. I know that it's been a while since I've finished anything. I actually have a work-in-progress that is nearly done (well, first draft) and I need to finish that before the end of October.

About sixteen years ago my husband and I suffered at the hands of community members, many whom we had counted among our friends, when politics entered into our religious institution. I suffered more than my husband, partly because he's mostly immune to stress (must be nice) and partly because he got a six-week reprieve away from the mess to be with his dying mother thousands of miles away while I coped with the community and our six sons, one just a newborn. The effects of this whole trauma have been long-lasting for me, mentally and physically, and I'm still trying to shake them completely.

A few years ago I thought it might help if I could write about the whole ordeal. But it took me a while to figure out my angle. Now I have it and I am ready to go. A family moves to a small town, looking for a better life, and at first they are pleasantly surprised by the warm hospitality of everyone around them. But. . .

Hello, Debbi here

This is my third NaNo, hopefully my third win and Hopefully, my second actually complete novel (kinda failed at that the first year ... ah well ...)

I write Lit Fic because I love characters more than just about anything and I'm a bit preachy on opinionated subjects that often have to do with character strengths and flaws (politics, religion, etc.) so that's where I end up.

This year's novel is the aftermath of a pandemic - about 60% of the world population has died and the other 40% get to rebuild their lives and societies while mourning what is lost. My protagonist will be leaving all that she knows behind and heading out west to the Teton area where she'll meet all sorts of characters I have yet to outline and they will all try to rebuild their own little corner of the world in the image they see it.

That's about all I have now but I have -what?- 20 days and some odd hours and minutes and seconds to refine from there :)

Looking forward to it!

Hi everyone :)

This is my second time doing NaNoWriMo. I wrote a really cheesy fantasy novel when I was in high school, and now that I'm done with college I wanted to give it another try. I read a lot of literary fiction over the past few years and it's warped the way I write, so that's why I'm here. That said, I tend to enjoy literary fiction that overlaps with surrealism/magical realism. I hope to someday write a novel as excellent as Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, but I'd settle for writing something half as good :)

I have no idea what this November's novel is going to be about, though. I want to see what I come up with on November 1st. I'm afraid I'll lose my enthusiasm if I plan too much.

Good luck everyone! Nice to meet you :)

Hi there everyone, I'm Rebecca. This is my 4th time doing NaNo, first year writing a LitFic (more like YALitFic, since it's slightly coming of age), previous years I've done a fantasy YA (failed), and two mystery/crime YA even though I'm not at all a fan of mystery novels.

This year I'm wringing a story of a young girl who's life has always been a struggle, and is now dealing with the aftermath of her life taking a drastic turn. She didn't get into college, and her parents are in the middle of an ugly divorce. Then she meets a young boy who is a lot like her young self, and they form an odd sort of friendship.

My favorite work of literary fiction? I have to be honest and say I haven't read much literary fiction, and those I have read are Swedish, so I doubt it'd say much here.

Something fun about me? I will probably change my plot around 7 times before November, and I will stick with the idea I get on oct 28th. heh

Hello, my name is Ally. I'm a junior in high school (home schooled), and besides writing I love swimming and playing the piano. This is my second year year doing NaNo, and hopefully my second win. Last year I wrote Lit Fic as well. I love the genre, because I believe character development is more important than a good plot.

I don't have a plot for this year yet. I may end up just writing a collaboration of short stories. I do have plenty of ideas for those. I think short stories are great for showing string character development.

My favorite Lit Fic novel is Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. I know I've probably outgrown it, and most of the other books I read are totally different, but this is the book that led me to start writing Lit Fic. I also enjoy reading Sharon Creech's books.

I'm very excited for this year to start!

Hi, My name is Laura and this is my first NaNoWriMo. I am a high school secondary teacher and I have been writing in one form or another since I first picked up a pencil in Kindergarten.

My LitFic story idea has a plot summary and I am currently graphing it out, but the basic theme is the mother/daughter dynamic and how it works with the overlay of mental illness. The story is told through the eyes of the daughter, and I want to explore the bias that she has as an unreliable narrator. Her POV is skewed by her emotional state, and her latent feelings of hostility towards her mother who struggles with mental illness.

The title, which I've had in my head forever it seems, is Far from the Tree.

My favourite LitFic author is Margaret Atwood and some of my favourite books from her are: The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace and The Robber Bride, just to name a few.

I'm looking forward to see if I can get this done!

Hi! I'm Christine. This is my second NaNoWriMo. I'm a writer and poet from California.

I started writing my book during NaNoWriMo last year and will be writing part two (or book two, if you will) this year.

My book is about two students at Columbia University who are ushered into the world of the intelligentsia by their professor, where middle-aged professors and artists live vicariously through and manipulate young people for the benefit of their work and creativity. Working title is Wherewithal or Daybreak.

My favorite works of fiction are Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham and Burmese Days by George Orwell.