sophronia_chaos

I caught up with an old friend from high school today, and we agreed to do NaNoWriMo together (I had already decided to do it next month). Now I can’t decide which novel to use for NaNoWriMo. I have two ideas I could use. One would be really time-consuming because it’s an epistolary novel containing a lot of electronic correspondence with typos and abbreviations, which Microsoft Word makes absolute hell, and I’m always going back to correct the autocorrect. The formatting is also going to be a bitch and a half because it would consist of IMs, journal entries, emails, newspaper articles, etc.. It also would require a lot of planning because it will not follow a linear timeline. It’s about members of a college newspaper org who are dealing with the suicide of their treasurer, Olwen, but the reader doesn’t find out how Olwen died til the middle of the story. But it is so much fun to write, particularly distinguishing the different characters’ voices. I really like writing epistolary stuff, it would seem; I haven’t done it before.

The other was developed for the sake of being a NaNo novel and has a linear timeline, but I’ve grown attached enough to it that I want to do a good job on it, and I kind of want to Do the Research and set it in Egypt. See, the story is predicated on the idea that the ancient Egyptians were right about what happens after death. The main character, Ssala, is part of a race of humanoid beings that derive sustenance by consuming the ka—the type of soul that leaves the body after death—of humans. These beings become incorporeal to feed, but at one point in their evolution, they were de facto incorporeal and only turned corporeal to pass for human. Ssala is queer in that she is into incorporeal mating (with any gender), but she is not attracted to any corporeal beings. She runs away rather than be pressured into marriage and encounters an infestation of evolutionary cousins to her people; these cousins are completely noncorporeal and feed maliciously on/psychologically torture humans instead of only taking ka from humans who were already beyond saving. I could set it in Newark/fictionalized Newark and change it to Egypt later, I guess…

A third alternative is my superhero novel, which is all plotted out and all the characters are developed…I just haven’t started writing it because I wanted to finish a draft of the DnD-IN-SPAAAAAAAAACE-meets-Ender’s-Game novel first. I just care a lot about the superhero novel, possibly too much to produce a shitty NaNo novel as my first draft.