Sometimes throwing out a brief precis of your novel can help gel ideas in your head.
What will you be tackling this Nanowrimo? No idea? Okay, share that too!
-Betty-
(Who is suffering from too many plots and no bucket...)
----------
Participant / Winner: 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08 ...09
Winnipeg, MB Municipal Liaison: 04, 05, 06*, 07*, 08*, 09*
* with help
-=-=-=-
Reach the Winnipeg co-MLs at
http://www.nanowrimo.org/mlcontact
36,739 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 12 28
TITLE: "Hateseed"
PLOT: It's the near future, and a PETA-like organization has released a global pandemic virus intended to stop humans from eating meat and lead to an end of war. It's triggered by aggression, and is lethal. Unfortunately it also kills creativity (an unintended side-effect), so world culture is frozen in a state of bland and soul-killing peace.
Most people take drugs to inhibit their aggressive tendencies, but some people are naturally immune to the virus, and some choose to go off their drugs on occasion, risking death for a few hours of vital emotional life. There's an illegal underground subculture celebrating the "bad girls" and "bad boys" who take these risks. Part of the story takes place in that subculture.
Another thread of the plot concerns the leaders of PETA, who were vaccinated against the pandemic before it was released, and the naturally immune, some of whom have organized into a terrorist organization dedicated to battling PETA at every turn and, hopefully, restoring full emotional life to the human race.
That's all I know so far, except that one of the main characters is Natalie, an elementary school teacher by day and part of the "bad girls" culture by night.
----------51,028 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 13 47
I have a title: The Undertow
I have a blurb:
It is Imre's civic duty to watch for omens, but neither she nor anyone else in the Citadel has an explanation for the strange black bird that lands on her windowsill one day. She quickly discovers what it might herald, however, as she loses her job, her rank, and her reputation, all of which were distressingly fragile in the first place. Now she has no one to turn to but the raven itself, and nothing else to cling to as she and her whole world plunge into the final stage of an ages-old deception.
And I even have a basic caste system set up! This is kind of scary. I've never been this prepared before, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping it won't destroy my efforts to get into the swing of things.
40,473 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 13 59
Title: Aardvark Lite
Basic Plot: Carolyn, a newcomer to the city, is mistakenly hired as the overnight host for a small easy-listening radio station, CAAR Lite. She rechristens it Radio Aardvark, and sets out to make her show something unique without being fired for it. Her show, and her new life in the city, is threatened by a strangely vindictive co-worker, and a past she wants to escape.
41,076 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 14 07
Title: We Started The War
In the Kingdom of Trivann there has been a war waging for the past 23 years. Our novel starts on the day a treaty was meant to be signed between the ruling family, The Valentines and the rebellious forces of the 'Peoples Revolution'. After the introductions an explosion goes off, killing a large portion of the people present and after which all hell breaks lose. We jump ahead to two years later, Sonnet Valentine is traveling the country side with her personal body guard in hopes of finding other members of the royal family and regaining their ruling role.
But along the way they find themselves trying to fight a future that has already been foreseen by a group of people called 'The Watchers'. Sonnet fines herself having to deal with ethical issues of sovereignty and destiny, following the path that has been decided for you or fighting for what she believes is her birth right.
It's hard to tell from that, but it's actually a pretty modern setting with guns and vehicles and possible chemical warfare...
----------45,345 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 18 51
This November, two foes will square off for an epic battle exactly 50,000 words long. Mason Lawless, is a no-nonsense ex-cop who lets his fists do his talking for him. And he has a lot to say to his (as yet, unnamed) arch-enemy, the meanest crime boss in their (as yet, unnamed) city. They'll fight with blades, guns, shoes, a stray cat, rocket launchers, whatever they can get their hands on. They'll fight in casinos, shopping malls, taxi cabs, maybe even in a helicopter.
This November, vengeance has a new name: retribution.
Mason Lawless in Vengeance Part IV: the Revenge of Retribution, a Mason Lawless Adventure.
----------LJ: gruberman.livejournal.com
AIM: NoGuitarMercy
twitter: ywgdana
41,076 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 20 13
Now Dana, will they be fighting with a stray cat as a weapon or will it be an equally as challenging opponent?
----------51,028 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2009 - 20 16
Ooh, maybe both! First as an opponent, then when it loses, it can be used as a (treacherous) weapon!
45,345 / 50,000
Oct 21, 2009 - 05 04
Hmm...what I had envisioned was the stray cat used in a grenade-like fashion, but your idea is good, too! Especially if I have the combatants zapped with a shrink ray at some point...
----------LJ: gruberman.livejournal.com
AIM: NoGuitarMercy
twitter: ywgdana
36,530 / 50,000
Oct 21, 2009 - 09 05
I am horrible at writing summaries so I'm going to be bad and steal this from my profile. This was painful enough to write once.
Character 1 (Tom) is a twenty-six year old photographer, losing his eyesight. Character 2 (Jamie) is a nineteen year old English major at some Chicago university. The two meet at a party through mutual friends and form a relationship over bad alcohol and good art, eventually becoming roommates. Their relationship blooms (or plummets, depending on which way you look at it) when Tom goes blind.
Tom is callous and Jamie is obsessed. Together they're a total mess.
2,699 / 50,000
Oct 21, 2009 - 09 39
Some pretty neat ideas so far. :)
I've got a novel story that's been simmering for a while, but which I haven't found the push to just write.
"E2" (All info subject to change!)
Over half of the Earth is no longer habitable due to humanity's rampant waste. A few Northern cities are left in what was Canada and Russia, with most of humanity's population in tight, overloaded "population pods" orbiting Earth. Mining operations have been started in nearby planets for resources, but the supply isn't enough to meet the demand for new ships, and billions of people are starving. Earth is dying, and humanity is on the verge of following.
Enter in a small, exploration company, run by an idealistic, wealthy heir who plans to save Earth. By chance, I-CO finds the only planet capable of saving humanity and her home planet, a mirror image of Earth in her verdant youth. A biologist is chosen to head the team that will bring back various flora, fauna, and soil samples to assess whether "E2" could really have all the resources to bring Earth back. But while planet-side, she discovers E2's secret. E2 isn't just a planet - it's a living creature.
(Can you tell I work in marketing? :P)
38,000 / 50,000
Oct 21, 2009 - 10 46
Right now I'm planning on writing the life-story of my childhood imaginary friend. We'll see what happens.
23,716 / 50,000
Oct 21, 2009 - 13 18
My working title is "Wild Nerd" and I'm hoping for it to become a kind of coming of age story. I'll see where the month leads me, though. :)
----------Padfoot7 <3
42,693 / 50,000
Oct 21, 2009 - 15 16
Title: Shift
Three teens find themselves randomly shifting from body to body and deal with it all in different ways. One tries to help the bodies he lands into, solving their problems and improving their lives. One goes on wild sprees of carelessness - after all, there are no consequences. One does whatever he wants, actively setting out to ruin the host body's life.
----------NaNo 2008 - Death Sentence (won - 90,112)
NaNo 2009 - Shift
3,057 / 50,000
Oct 23, 2009 - 10 46
I'm torn between writing a hockey story and a zombie story. Gosh I sound so Canadian. Lol!
Unfortunately I have no plot for either, really. Excuse me while I go panic in that corner.
----------NaNo '07: A Zombie Story (50k+, unfinished)
NaNo '08: Apocathaire (29k, unfinished)
NaNo '09: Undecided
44,897 / 50,000
Oct 23, 2009 - 21 20
Title: Withdrawal
Katy Pearse was the Canadian government's most unique asset, and best kept secret. Gifted with mysterious and potent psychic abilities, she served a vital role in intelligence and counterterrorism. Until the day she quit smoking, and discovered that her abilities relied on the presence of nicotine in her system. Choosing to sacrifice her unique power rather than resume her addiction, Katy found herself abandoned by a government that had no interest in funding a specialist without a specialty.
Three smoke-free years later, Katy works as a security guard, and is finally comfortable with her now-purposeless existence. Her complacency is shattered when she is contacted by Chris Trenholm, an old coworker and largely forgotten friend. Her former superiors have requested her assistance in dealing with an unexpected and disturbing threat. A violent terrorist attack is made all the more shocking by the perpetrator's open use of the same abilities Katy once kept secret. Now Katy's old employers want her expertise in tracking and neutralising the new threat.
Partnered with Trenholm, Katy embarks on a hunt for a young man whose violent power can cause immeasurable destruction. But with her own abilities long lost, how will she face this threat when she meets it face to face? How much is she prepared to give of herself in order to save countless innocent lives?
----------http://hypnerdic.wordpress.com/
http://z3.invisionfree.com/10kClub/
http://twitter.com/Zenbomb
34,532 / 50,000
Oct 24, 2009 - 18 12
Title: Journal of a Dream (tentative)
Premise: It all starts when Teresa 'Tess' Warren is dragged to the bookstore by her best friend Jess, who is obsessed with romance novels. There, she finds a strange diary filled with indecipherable script except for the name and phone-number of the owner, and the title: Journal of a Dream. Tess takes the journal home, intending to return it, and that night she has the strangest dream...
She finds herself in a world where names have power, where people have strange affinity to the elements around them and gods walk the earth (whenever they get bored, that is). Mistaken for an avatar of Kerithinye, Goddess of Dreams, by a wandering empath named Semyin, Tess finds herself drawn into the center of a struggle between powers great and small. The problem is, she only goes there when she sleeps, and when she's awake in our world, she's asleep there. As Tess finds herself falling into the other world more and more often, the boundaries between realities begin to blur. What is real? What is fiction? And where did that journal come from, anyway?
These are all questions I'm going to have to answer at some point. XD
1,539 / 50,000
Oct 25, 2009 - 09 54
No title yet.
Reeling with heartbreak, our heroine has taken a job in the north to escape a workplace affair gone wrong. She meets new people, falls in love. The novel opens with her and her new love in a cabin on the trapline; she is scientific researcher who is there to observe the affect of climate change on animal migration while he lives off the land in the manner of his ancestors. She is pregnant, but we don't know this when they set out. In the snow and the cold, her man changes from adoring and attentive to cold, distant. Calculating. He disappears for long stretches and returns uncommunicative, sometimes with game but more often not. Her belly grows with his odd behavior. Mid-blizzard, she is alone, worried. She hears the voice of the Wendigo in the wind and realizes that when he returns, it will not be to comfort her, but to eat her unborn child.
40,025 / 50,000
Oct 25, 2009 - 20 14
After a family disgrace (father bilks charity out of large sum of money), lingering death of mother, disappearance of beloved older brother, and betrayal of sister, MC leaves planet to look for better opportunities (and leave the family bad rep behind).
Life doesn't seem much better as she ends up the grunt on a small cargo ship. While making friends with several of the crew, she resigns herself to life in a cargo hold.
A sudden series of strange events changes all this as quick thinking, luck and an unusual ability changes her life forever.
From there it's a wild ride that includes pirates, a major smuggling ring, and some interesting family history.
Lady Bhugg
36,739 / 50,000
Oct 26, 2009 - 08 05
... Aaaaaand I just changed plot in mid-stream. Had a "Eureka!" moment last night while lying in bed and rediscovered an old storyline I came up with years ago, as a comic book proposal. It immediately grabbed me and seems much more obviously fertile ground than "Hateseed", which is intellectually challenging but doesn't promise to be half as much fun as "Micro Noir".
TITLE: "Micro Noir"
GENRE: A sci-fi/fantasy/mystery hybrid, but I'll call it sci-fi just to simplify things.
PLOT: Raymond Archer is a police detective with the NYPD, in a New York City set in an indeterminate time but which has elements of both modern and 1940's culture and technology. In this universe, bacteria and viruses (referred to as Micros) achieve a collective sentience when they infect a human body, and (in the case of bacteria and some viruses) confer benefits on their Hosts; in the case of most viruses, they become dominant, ruthless, and criminal, often mutating their Host's body for their own purposes.
Archer is an anomaly: in a world where almost every human being has a bacterial infection with its attendant advantages, he has an immune system which is too robust to allow him to be a long-term Host, even with immunorepressive drugs. His job takes advantage of that disability. When someone is murdered, Archer is called in to have some of the victim's blood injected into his body (if it's soon enough after their demise), allowing their bacterial Micro-culture to speak through him, revealing details of the crime; similarly, if a criminal won't talk, he'll take in some of their blood and make the Micros talk instead.
Late one night Archer is called to a murder scene where the Micro in question turns out to be an entity called McTavish, who is a whiny and somewhat stupid low-life he's run into before ("What happened to you, McTavish? You used to hang out in a better class of people.") Because it's after midnight and McTavish begs not to spend the night in a petrie dish of nutrient solution, Archer grudgingly takes the Micro home with him -- where he finds a beautiful, exotic Asian woman waiting for him. She slinks up to him, bites her lower lip, kisses him in true noir fashion... and bites his own lip, hard, mixing their blood. In a moment it all becomes clear to Archer: the woman IS from Asia, where the ruthless Viral Tongs run the show, and she's just infected him with the viral Micro from her dead brother, who was killed by one of the Tongs.
A cross-country adventure ensues as Archer finds himself dragged headlong into a potent mix of sex, intrigue, murder, and the Viral Tong's plot to take over North America and the rest of the world.
----------36,097 / 50,000
Oct 26, 2009 - 11 52
Steve Williams has a secret.
The government wants to use him. The corporations want to destroy him. The criminal underground wants to control him. His family wants to mourn him. The military wants to reproduce him. The environmentalists want to canonize him. The media wants to prove he exists. The scientific community wants to take him apart and figure out how he works.
All Steve wants is to be left alone and allowed to live a normal life.
Too bad nobody cares what Steve wants.
~~~~~~
When an average Canadian teenager is abducted by the American military after discovering he generates electricity when feeling strong emotions, he finds himself living a strange combination half-life of lab-rat and psychiatric study.
"Stan W., the man who will solve the world's evergy problems" is the American government's worst kept 'secret' and a bizarre meld of reluctant, faceless media darling and social pariah. Nobody really knows who he is - maybe not even him.
Finding himself suddenly at odds with a beautiful assassin sent to kill him by a corporate conglomerate of oil and energy companies, Steve decides there's more to life than being a test subject.
(Imagine if John Ringo, Michael Moore and Travis Taylor wrote the X-Men franchise. *evil cackle* Because let's face it, anyone with those kinds of abilities would be captured and tested on long before they'd ever get voted on in Congress.)
(Sorry to my American friends, but I just can't see CSIS and the DoD doing something like this...)
----------Participant / Winner: 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08 ...09
Winnipeg, MB Municipal Liaison: 04, 05, 06*, 07*, 08*, 09*
* with help
-=-=-=-
Reach the Winnipeg co-MLs at
http://www.nanowrimo.org/mlcontact
34,214 / 50,000
Oct 29, 2009 - 09 18
Title: The Box
In a land where science is the ruling religion and the people live under it's crushing hand, scientists have captured God in their Ionic Encapsulator. The only hope of the faithful to overthrow their oppressive government is freeing God from his captivity. Finally, after several false messiah's, the true messiah has come to free God, and Suong must help her.
611 / 50,000
Oct 30, 2009 - 19 30
Tentative title: Dreamscape
Plot:
When Will's grandfather dies and he inherits a seemingly ordinary pocket watch, Will finds himself entering a strange world when he falls asleep. This world, Haven, filled with creatures and peoples unusual and bizarre, finds a place for Will as he is drawn ever more into their plight with an invading force from the nightmares from beyond the Vale.
His problems only seem to multiply as he spends more an more time within the dream realm and problems in the waking world begin to affect his grades in school, his best friend, the school bully and the girl he secretly likes. To make matters worse, when Will is in the dream world, he has no knowledge of the waking world.
Can Will save the dream world and his personal life? Or must he choose between the two?
3,057 / 50,000
Oct 31, 2009 - 11 32
Title: Bullets (because really unless you have some stats in your physical slot, this is pretty much your primary weapon in a zombie apocalypse)
Genre: Horror - Zombie pre-Apocalpyse/Apocalypse/post-Apocalypse (time jumping, yay!)
Plot: I really have little to no plot at this point. Basically it follows the story of our protagonist (who has no name at this moment) who trying to hoof her way up north, where the RCMP have set up some sort of camp where at least they have reprieve during the winter. She was with her family and friends, but at some point gets separated from them (I don't know how yet -- and no I am not using a herd of wild zombie bison XD) and has to make the trek alone. She comes to conclusion that she is more than likely going to die, but continues going anyways. The novel begins with her writing her "memoir" about what happened and hopes that someday someone will find the letter.
Am I going to finish?: I have no freaking idea. XD But it seems that my mind wants to write zombies this year.. every year. *facepalm*
----------NaNo '07: A Zombie Story (50k+, unfinished)
NaNo '08: Apocathaire (29k, unfinished)
NaNo '09: Undecided
41,213 / 50,000
Nov 4, 2009 - 03 35
I don't know about a title, but my story's about time-traveling clones who don't understand time travel or cloning.
Maybe the title could just be: Time-traveling Clones.
46,291 / 50,000
Nov 4, 2009 - 10 17
*Very nice* - I love it !!!
18,022 / 50,000
Nov 5, 2009 - 04 13
Oh no! I'm late!!
I have no idea yet. I had one, but I wrote it last month as a halloween story...which turned into a poem, but that's...uh...the details are unimportant!! I wasted that one last month!!
And I don't have a computer to type it on! Well I mean I do have it, but it's not set up yet. I buried it under the Christmas decorations last year, and now there's no where to set it up.
AAAAAAAAUGH!!
18,022 / 50,000
Nov 11, 2009 - 08 37
This is horrible. I still haven't been able to set up my computer, so I still haven't started. :(
Hopefully I'm about to get it all fixed in the next couple of hours. Then I'll have to type like a dyslexic monkey on caffeine and speed. I'll probably end up writing about bananas and poo-flinging.
This sucks....
51,028 / 50,000
Nov 12, 2009 - 09 01
Oh man... best of luck to you! At this point, breaking it down day-to-day, looks like you'd need just over an extra 1k daily, on top of the customary 1667, I guess? Harder, but not impossible!
18,022 / 50,000
Nov 12, 2009 - 20 49
I have begun!
Finally.
I had trouble finding the power cord. It's my old computer, which I only use to run Word Perfect 5.1 (no other version suits me -- no other version does everything WP5.1 does). Trouble is, I only seem to need it once a year!
Today I wrote nearly 3,000 words. It's a good start. And I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface yet. I've done NaNoWriMo several times, but I've never reached the goal of 50,000 words (not in time, anyway). I think I was 2,000 words short once; that was heartbreaking.
I actually have high hopes this year. Isn't that weird? Starting 11 days late, and yet I have high hopes.
(Can I count this post in my word count? Ha!)