So, I’m going to give the National Novel Writing Month a shot. 50K words in a month. Ei-Nyung did it last year, and really, really enjoyed it, so I figure it’s worth a shot. Sort of like the 24 hour comic, just 30 times longer. Fun fun. Since work tends to be a little slow in November, I should have enough time during the evenings to work on the project.

Basically, my plan is to take a concept that a couple of us had worked on for a game, called “Chimera,” and turn that into a novel. Some things will be necessarily different than the plot for the game, and I’m convinced I need to pretty substantially alter the conclusion, but because we’ve already outlined the entire story structure, it’s a stronger head start than I’d be able to get otherwise. Fundamentally, I’m most concerned about finding a “voice” with which to tell the story. I don’t tend to write well in a narrative setting, and I certainly don’t have an ear for dialog. Still, there’s a couple really vivid images in my head from when we were working on the game design, and a few bits of real life I’d like to interject into the story – little moments that were really vivid experiences that I could write about in a different context.

It’ll be interesting to see if I can keep up the enthusiasm for an entire month – I tend to get burned out really quickly on projects like this, but at the same time, most of the time, when I do something like this I’ll really burn through it when I’m motivated – so who knows, I might get to 50K in two weeks. Who knows.

Anyhow – figured if I wrote a little about it here, I’d be a little less likely to quit without completing it. 🙂