Almost time guys!! Here is Chris latest post on the website:
One week remaining until writing commences! It's been inspiring to see so many folks roughing out ideas and characters with each other in the forums.
For me, one-week-out tends to be the magical window when I begin receiving a wealth of half-baked ideas from my imagination, all of which it fervently pitches as the centerpiece for that year's novel. Most of these tend to be barely altered versions of real-life stories that people tell me that week, or news headlines or advertisements I misread.
This morning, I saw the following headline on Yahoo news: "Seven orcas missing from Puget Sound, researchers say"
Being half-awake, I misread it as: "Seven orcs missing from Puget Sound, researchers say"
At which point my imagination galloped over. "Hey!" it said, excitedly rubbing its little hands together. "Check this plot out! What if there were some sort of floating orc pen off the coast of Washington State? And over years of seaborn captivity, these grumpy orcs had become passably good swimmers, had developed a taste for kelp, and had renounced their slaughtering, pillaging ways to become friendly tourist attractions, complete with hoop-jumps and show-stopping finales where they leapt out of the water to nimbly pluck a mackerel from the mouth of their trainers? All is going well, until one day seven of them simply disappear? Yeah? And, over on the mainland, some very strange things start happening. Boom! What do you think? Pure gold, right?"
Trying not to offend, I'll grab the little notebook that I keep close at hand in October and November, and jot down something like "orcs escape mackerel sound," a note so cryptic that I'm guaranteed to read it a few days later and have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
Still, when you amass enough of those, eventually something sticks. My tip: Get your own wee notebook if you don't already have one, and keep it and a pen handy these next couple days. Go on walks. Take long showers. Good ideas come at the strangest times, and I have a feeling some humdingers will be coming your way soon.
Enjoy the weekend, everyone. We'll be posting a new WrimoRadio on Monday.
Chris
NaNoWriMo
