Too Busy? Never...

Longtime readers may have wondered -- Is she still writing a novel in NaNoWriMo?

Heck yes! Well, planning on it anyway. For the first time in my writing life I actually had a playlist before I had the plot. (Despite the fact that I eat, sleep, and breathe music, usually the plot idea does actually come first. Barely.) This summer Daniel Amos released a 'Bonus Bonus Disc' to accompany the already double-disc ¡Alarma! re-release (because apparently the first bonus disc didn't have enough space, such is the sheer epic genius of this band), and it includes a lot of instrumental mixes (plus a heartbreaking vocal mix of As Long As I Live). Listening to all these instrumental mixes, I thought You know, this would make great writing music.

Great. So I had music, but I still didn't have a plot.

Then, while reading up on the history of ballet in Russia (I'm not this boring in real life, honest), I came upon a brief account of Nijinsky, how he had been the star of some bigshot Russian ballet company and then was dismissed while on tour in America because he (gasp!) got married. The director of the company pretty much made his life a living hell after that, and Nijinsky suffered a mental collapse before he even turned thirty.

The concept intrigued me, but I kept reading, on through the account of what happened to that company and all the others in Russia at the time. Then I set the book aside for a break, but my mind kept chewing on that idea -- of the director of a ballet company deliberately driving his former star to insanity out of sheer bitterness.

Within an hour and a half, I had a solid plot sketched out. Two days later I named the characters.

This will be interesting, as it's shaping up to be quite a dark book. I mean, I've written a book containing hallucinations and a rather violent murder (Reuben); a book that opens with a drug-overdose death and continues with the subject of drugs and drug addicts throughout the book -- to say nothing of the fact that one of the characters is, quite literally, in Hell (Chasm); and a book where a heinous plague is threatening to wipe out an entire world (Rebecca's World). Aside from the aforementioned murder, I've written at least three other death scenes in my novels over the years. But this one looks like it will not only contain murder and a stalker and one man actively trying to drive another insane, the story goes that the ex-star and his nine-year-old son live out of dingy motels, mostly working in sleazy bars just for food. It's all here, people -- drugs, murder, crime, cheap women, booze... the whole bit. Kill or be killed.

Then the kid discovers that his mother's death years before was actually murder. Not long after that, he's kidnapped and while in captivity he develops a fierce determination to avenge his mother's death -- even if it means taking out the director of a world-renowned dance company.