NaNoWriMo 2020 Prep

That's right! Just a few weeks from now, National Novel Writing Month will be here. While I always look forward to November for a variety of reasons (hello, gorgeous weather!), I'm feeling pretty frazzled about this upcoming season. Does that mean I won't participate in NaNoWriMo? Of course not! I'll just suck it up. And be sleep deprived. For a whole month. It's fine . . .

But seriously, this year I have a bit more than usual going on, and that's definitely going to impact how I approach novel writing. Because I've decided to tackle a novel–instead of finishing my non-fiction idea or completing one of my other poetry manuscripts or even working on the novel I'd started and scrapped and started again over the last two-ish years. Mostly, this is because I need something fresh to work on. I've been in my head too much with the current projects and I think injecting something wholly different will only have a positive effect on my overall creativity.

So then, the question is: "What to write?" I actually hadn't a clue until earlier this week. I was wavering between a couple ideas I wasn't too thrilled about when I stumbled across a "prompt" while watching Beauty and the Beast with my daughter (the live action one, because I will listen to "Evermore" on repeat if my family wouldn't go insane), and I got crazy excited in just moments. You see, my husband made a passing comment about the mirror and then we started discussing how there were some unexplored things that we wish had been more prominent in the film. The smallest details catch my fancy, so I latched on to the seemingly random magical book that was really only in the movie as a single-use expository item.

I've had this essay idea written down in my main idea notebook (Yes, I have one. Yes, it's a mess. Yes, it might be full of junk, but you never know!), for several years. And paired with the direction I would like to take from a magical book or two, I think the novel concept could be a lot of fun to run with this year. I'm still hashing out the details, so I actually don't have much more to share other than the fact that I'm excited. I have high hopes for this November, and I really, really, really intend to win this year! So I might complain on Instagram. I may fall behind on some blog posts in the near future. Perhaps I will even disappear entirely. I don't know: Because anything is possible during NaNoWriMo.