NoNaShoStoWriMo update the first
As day 4 of NoNaShoStoWriMo (explanation here for those of you just tuning in) draws to a close, my as-yet-untitled story stands at a commanding…1101 words! At this rate, the end product may turn out to be more of a short-short than a short story. My mantra, for the time being, is “You just have to get a draft done.” Also, in the words of Neil Gaiman’s helpful NaNoWriMo pep talk, “One word after another.”
Some initial observations: Journler is working out quite well for this project — automatic word counts, for one thing, and I’ve set up a separate linked file for story notes, into which I’m dumping relevant images, like pictures of apartment buildings in Chicago, where my main character — first name Lucia, last name as yet unrevealed, profession: computer scientist at a made-up university — lives and works. I haven’t yet quite worked out what neighborhood she lives in, but I’m leaning toward somewhere around Wicker Park or Bucktown or generally in the vicinity of Logan Square.* A small nugget of Plot depends on what El or Metra line she takes to work, and I’m waffling a bit about where to put her workplace as well, but I at least have a sense of the beginning and the middle, if not, at this point, the end.
So far, my favorite line is “What the hell are we going to do? We can’t just say to the [fictional name] Foundation, ‘Please don’t continue this project because it’s making ghosts appear on street corners.'”
It may have been ill-advised for me to take on this project during the same month I’m using to pull together a paper proposal for Material Cultures 2010 (of which more in a future post), but I figure that if all the switching back and forth between brain hemispheres doesn’t drive me nuts, it might help. We’ll see how it goes. (Which is another of my mantras for this month.)
* I haven’t lived in Chicago since I was an undergrad, and I lived in Hyde Park the whole time. Research for the Chicago-related parts of this story keeps tipping over into “ooh, look at that beautiful vintage apartment!” procrastination.
I LOVE your favorite line!