Novel planning

It's now less than a week to NaNoWriMo, and I'm still not quite sure that I have a solid place to start writing. I fully expect to be staring at the blinking cursor line for a while before anything gets on the page screen.

Monday morning's timesheet entering doldrums sparked one idea that I've played with a bit in my mind-- a woman is brought into a psych hospital (for an unknown reason, to be developed over the course of the book), and the story goes through the layers of self-discovery to figure out why she's there, and how she needs to change.

It works-- but can I get 50K out of it? Eh, not sure.

Then Miss Marya (of two other NaNo years) came knocking on my brain, asking if maybe I was up to explore her character a bit more. I told her yes, but not for NaNo. I want to work on developing her stories on a long-term basis and possibly develop them into something publishable. Her stories are moving into a someday, I'm going to publish this... realm, and I don't want to screw around with it for NaNo.

Yesterday afternoon, one of my coworkers and I were talking about NaNo. I mentioned how I just needed to flesh out a couple characters to get myself going. If I put a somewhat fleshed out character in a room (or a park, or whatever) and just write about how they interact with the environment, it will get me started. I'm an environmental writer-- I want to connect to how a character interacts. I'm fascinated by textures and shadows and being so pissed off that a person's vision is blurry. So give me a good character, and I'll make up a story about them...

Anyway, my coworker just stares at me and says (along these lines- not verbatim), "Mel... you really need to write yourself. Do you realize how different your life is compared to most of the stuff that's out there on the market? Everything is about mothers and daughters and someone having some freaky incest trauma in their background. You're a member of a subsect of a subculture that few people know much about (referring to being a female gamer geek, I suppose) and are involved in so many things that most people wouldn't think twice about considering for themselves, but would find just fascinating. It's so different than anything else out there right now. I give you two models for your characters-- yourself and Erich. Discuss."

And I blink.

And then I retort, "but I'm weird and abnormal." (and thinking and boring)

"Exactly! Well, not really abnormal... different," she says.

I ponder.

And ponder some more.

And have a small discussion about this weekend's Forgotten Realms game with Erich.

And forget all about it until tonight.

Would I really want to write about myself? And honestly, would it really be that interesting? (or would it come out like entries in my blog usually do... boring as shit?)

*sigh*

There has to be ONE topic I can write about come next Tuesday...

Divine Intervention, please?