Ever since I was a kid, I've loved roaming around in my imagination. It has always been my favorite playground. And what's awesome about my life now is that my job is to wander around my imagination and see what I can find in it. There are days when I honestly have to drag myself away from the keyboard, lest I end up with a serious Vitamin D deficiency due to lack of sunlight.
Today is one of those days where I'm having tons and tons of fun frolicking through my imagination. As some of you know, NaNoWriMo is coming up (and if you don't know what that is, check out the link!), and you may also know I'm planning on working on another Elizabeth Darcy/Fairytale Collection book during November. Today, I started laying some of the groundwork for that novel. I didn't write any of the novel yet--that would be cheating, and cheating makes puppies cry, something to which I am vehemently opposed! But I did start working on character and setting sketches.
So far, I've sketched out my main male and female characters, and I'm just going to come out and admit it: I'm already kind of in love with my male protagonist. I'm also very happy with the way my female protagonist is shaping up. I spent some quality time with Scrivener, using their nifty character sketch sheets to help me get a picture of what each of them will be like. I'd already been working on my female character in my ol' brain, but I now feel like I have a much better idea of what makes her tick, and what her relationship with the male protagonist looks like.
From there, I started working on setting sketches, and that was so much fun! The place templates in Scrivener really got my ol' imagination working. I got to imagine what the settings looked like, what made them special and distinctive, and that inevitably led to me picturing lots of castles and beautiful vistas and other fun things.
Basically, what I'm saying is, I was in nerdtopia today.
My writing style has always been distinctively pantser, but it only took me one attempt at NaNo to realize I needed a little focus or I risk ending up with a stream-of-consciousness mess that looks nothing like a manuscript--and that's exactly what I had at the end of NaNo 2010. Last year, I started out by doing some background world building before I ever typed a word, and it made the writing flow a lot more smoothly. The product of NaNo 2011 was Contributor, and I have lots of fond memories of drinking copious amounts of coffee while pounding that story out.
During the month of November, my blog will become something of a NaNo journal, complete with excerpts from the work in progress, which I'll post on Feature Fridays. You'll get a first peek at the uncut version of Asleep, my reimagining of the sleeping beauty tale. If you're planning on tackling NaNo this year and want a writing buddy to urge you on, feel free to add NCiacchella. Good luck and happy writing/reading!
