Clearly, I Need A Calendar

Well, I'm a new sort of special this week.

As I mentioned last week, I was late updating because I was too busy writing a post I decided to hold off on publishing. The main reason is that it would be a perfect segue in to November's NaNoWriMo. So, I went ahead and scheduled for it to post the last week of October, and then wrote last week's update.

That's where the issue started. Even last week I stated that this delayed post would be "next week." I went to bed Tuesday night proud that I had this week's update set for close to ten days.

Then I went to work, came home, went to post on Facebook about the update, and realized it wasn't up. I checked to see what went wrong with my scheduling... only to discover that yesterday was the SECOND to last Wednesday of the month.

So, here I thought I was ahead of the game, and I was actually behind the 8-ball once more. Add in that I didn't get to the computer until about 3pm, and then I had laundry to do, and I ended up distracting myself with stuff to post on the Struggling Writers Society's forum... and then I had work first thing this morning....

Thank god this isn't my job; I'm so bad with these deadlines....

Well, at least I had another concept that I wanted to talk about anyway. I was actually partially lamenting not having one more week to discuss this, and settled on writing about it the first week of November, given it's about NaNo anyway. So... silver lining! I get to talk about it now like I originally wanted.

For the past week or so I've been trying to figure out what I wanted to write next month. I had a few ideas.

• Use NaNo not in its "pure" form of writing a 50,000 word brand-new story concept, but use the "write daily" idea to finally move forward again with X-Future: The Second Generation Begins
• Take on NaNo's new "Script" feature - a way to make up for them cancelling April's Script Frenzy - and start writing some pages of the X-Future comic reboot
• Work on the Gyateara Mythology collection some more
• Use a random plot generator and actually participate in NaNo the way it was originally intended: goofy and uninhibited writing.

I decided to go with my last idea though: Work on Lottie's story.

Who's Lottie?

Well, for my newer readers who may not know, I participate in a Live Action Role Play called Vampire: The Masquerade. Lottie happens to be the most recent vampire I created for the game. She's still relatively new to even me. She came to me randomly at work back in August and this Saturday will only be the third game I've played as her. However, her story kept getting revealed to me a little more and more each day over the past week or so. I figured, why not just ride this train while it's already passing by?

I've mostly figured out what she did the first 20years she was a human, that and researched southern United States during World War II; when Lottie was turned in to a vampire.

I debated writing in first person, but she has the older dialect with Southern pronunciations. Plus, despite her parents' attempt to teach her otherwise, Lottie has horrible grammar riddled with double negatives and improper use of words.

Yep. That's Lottie...

Lottie is also semi-up with the technological times, but being a vampire, she gets just as confused as anyone from that generation. Last game she tried to comment about Tumblr, but couldn't remember the site's name. She kept horribly attempting to describe it until Cyhyr's character Katelyn finally proudly cried out the site's proper name:

"Oh, whaz da name of dat site all the kids get lost on these days... I know it's somethin' acrobatic. Somersault? Cartwheel? Backflip?"

*Room is silent and staring*

"Oh, come on. Someone has ta know. Maybe one of you younin's. It's gymnastic of some sort. Dat site where e'eryone has all a deez pictures an' long comments an' fans of shows get lost foreva there."

*Katelyn jumps up giddily*

"TUMBLR!"

*Lottie snaps and nods*

"See!? I KNEW it was somethin' acrobatic!"

Well... as you can see, Lottie's a bit rough to read if I were to write her dialogue phonetically; like in comic books. However, even with writing the words out properly - not how she'd pronounce them - there's still a lot of grammatical errors that would hold people up. It's all fine and dandy for her dialogue, but to hear an entire 50,000 word story in her voice might be much.

So, I'm about 99% sure I'm going to go with Third-Person-Limited for my NaNo story. Then again, I have about eight days to change my mind, so we'll see.

I'm really hoping that writing about a character I'm trying to get to know better will give me the drive to stay on track this year with NaNo. I'm sure it doesn't hurt at all that we play our LARP every other Saturday, and so I should be actively in Lottie's head at least twice during NaNo. Throw in that I'm more-or-less going to be writing out what happens in-game - but with my own flare and flavor added in, just like with TSGB - and I shouldn't have to worry about running out of ideas during the month; only running out of time to write.

I'm going to aim for the same goal as last year: at least one new chapter each week when I update my blog. Given that I've been working Wednesdays now, I'm probably going to have my story update days actually be the Tuesday before; so that I can then link to the update when I post my blog.

I'll also most likely post in true daily diary form like I did the last time I participated in NaNo, as well as the two times I participated in Script Frenzy before the event was cancelled. I'm just hoping I give myself the time to write...

What about you guys? Are any of you participating in NaNo? What concept are you going to be writing about? Those of you not participating, what are your writing plans for November? Let me know in the comments section.

Happy writing, and I'll catch you next week. I swear this time the post will go up at noon since it's been scheduled since the 14th..