NaNoWriMo, Day 6

So I've ended up going with the sequel to 2253 -- the time-travel story. It's so weird writing this novel now. The main character was based off my friend Brittney, who died unexpectedly in 2015 at 22.

Brittney and I initially met at dance, but later reconnected and bonded over our shared loves of writing, photography, and technology. She was such an upbeat and caring person, and I miss her so, so much. She read the original rough draft of 2253 and really liked it. When I told her that the main character was based off of her, she was ecstatic. She had already told me that she really identified with that character, which I took as an honour and proof that I had succeded in my job as a writer.

2253 was written in 2010, five years before Brittney's death, ten years ago this month. I skimmed it the other day to remind myself of some of their personality traits (and some of the character names...), and it was like it had been written by a completely different person. And in a way, it was.

I was still in high school. I was at the apex of my fascination with computers and programming, and there's far more knowledge of that in 2253 than I currently have. Brittney and I were exchanging messages every single day so her voice was fresh in my head.

It's also interesting to note that the premise of the book was that the time-travelers get stuck in the year 2253 with a deadly respiratory virus on the loose. I literally used the words 'this is the next Spanish flu' in the novel. Even though this sequel is not about the virus, reading 2253 back a few days ago was a strange experience, given the current reality. (And I was rather gratified to see that I actually got quite a lot of details right about pandemic life, ten years before I'd live it myself.)

Writing the sequel now is so hard. Reading 2253 again the other day reminded me of so many things that I had forgotten about Brittney. She had been such a huge daily part of my life in 2010 and now, five years after her last breath, it's like I don't even remember her. I swore to never forget... I feel like I wrote this novel too late. I've lost so many details, and I'm scared the Elyssa of the sequel is not the Elyssa of the original.

As far as stats go, I fell behind on day one, but today I had a day off work so I made a big push and now I'm literally exactly at the word count goal for today: 10,002.

I feel like this novel has no plot. I've been sitting on this one-sentence plotline since before I wrote 2253, and only now that I'm 10k in am I realising that it was an extremely thin plotline and I have zero idea how I'm going to milk 50k out of it. I've written ten thousand words of exactly nothing so far because I'm trying to delay the actual exciting bits so I have something to look forward to to keep me moving. It's hard to trust the process anymore. I think of my old novels, like 2253 or Reuben or Rebecca's World or Chasm, and I remember how nothing fazed me and it all came so easily. I just somehow came up with ideas like drunk Mafia games or 10,000-year old roller rinks or magic teddy bears. I didn't have to work for it, it was just sort of there. And I haven't felt that since before Brittney died. I still maintain that Kyrie (2014) was the best thing I've ever written. I think it's no coincidence that it was the last novel before Brittney died, setting off a chain reaction of death and grief that I still feel to this day.

Writing Update

Been a while since I did one of those, eh?

Lately I've been feeling this pull back to the keyboard. Do I have inspiration? No. But I do have this urge to write that I haven't felt for a very long time. I also, while cleaning out my old room at my parents' house in recent weeks (that's a whole other blog post and also probably one of the main forces for this sudden nostalgia for the writing beast that I used to be), I found Chris Baty's much-lesser-known work Ready, Set, Novel!, a workbook for novel planning. At the time my parents gifted it to me for Christmas, I had inspiration coming out the wazoo and it was all I could do to keep up with it (remember when I'd do three novels a year? Ah, the good old days). But now... now that I've survived a college degree that did everything in its power to kill me, now that my only real writing buddy is dead, now that I've moved for good out of my parents' house... I'm tired of the seismic shifts, and I want to go back to the good old days, the way things were. Not literally, of course, I was living with an emotionally unstable caregiver and being ostracised by the church that is SUPPOSED to be loving and kind. But back to the days where I could escape by writing. Back before all the deaths. I want to time travel, just a few years. And the best way I can think of is to write again.

So what does that mean?

I've started on the workbook, though I went through my 'story ideas' file the other day and found one idea that feels promising. I'm also tossing about the idea of writing the sequel to 2253... the first actually decent novel that I wrote. I had a synopsis for a sequel sketched out before I even wrote the original in 2009, but in my early college years I started to lose the ability to write sci-fi, then I lost writing altogether after my 2016 novel. But if the goal is to time-travel, this would be the perfect choice -- the novel itself is about time travel, and this novel in particular is very strongly tied to and influenced by my dear late friend Brittney. She was the inspiration for the main character, and she also read and endorsed the original 2253 draft. Even before her death, I had planned to dedicate the book to her. If I write the sequel, I get to re-live -- just for a few more days -- the good times when she was alive and we would talk about computers and science together and we would write things and critique each other's work. It would be the continuation of a novel I have dreamed of writing since I was fifteen years old. My concern is that I'm so far removed from the person I was when I wrote it in 2009 that I wouldn't be able to get into the characters and the world of the novel properly and I wouldn't do it justice.

The other idea -- the one from my 'story ideas' file -- deals with societal and evangelical corruption, a theme I have visited several times over the years (probably because my writing is the only place I can have the illusion of even being heard, let alone getting justice). My main concern is that it would be too heavy for me to write this year, given everything that's happening in the world. I'm worn out from reading about and seeing injustice on my social media, and I don't know if writing a novel about it will make me feel worse or better. I'm also struggling to resist the temptation to overly-politicise this novel (which is difficult to avoid given the amount of social media I've been consuming lately -- no, I'm not proud of it, but I've been too worn out/unmotivated to do much else). This temptation has so far not been an issue with the 2253 sequel.

I'm not sure yet if I'm actually up to the challenge of NaNoWriMo, mentally. Yes, I did it last year, but that novel was actual garbage and I only won with fifteen minutes to spare. I have literally never cut it that close and never hated every word as thoroughly as I hated those 50k.

For now, I'll keep percolating these two ideas and probably decide at midnight on November first which one I'm going to do, like usual (I suppose it will be nice to have a 'usual' thing though -- there's so little of that left nowadays).