Yesterday I wrote this post about Dry October, and then I went out for my slow jog around the dark neighborhood. I thought about the success I had been having with one month challenges. There was the Sealey Challenge back in August, where I really did read one volume of poetry each day of August.
Is there something about the fact that a challenge is a month long?
As I wrote to my sister this morning: "I think that settling in for a month of this also helps. If the goal just a few days or one evening, and if there's wine in the house, it's easy for me to ditch the plan."
I've been thinking about the people who do NaNoWriMo, those folks who write a whole rough draft of a novel (the goal is 50,000 words) during the month of November. I've never done that challenge, but I find myself intrigued. I need something to snap me out of my writing funk. I need something to think about rather than the dismal state we're in.
Of course, it occurs to me that those of us who arrive early with our novels that compelling document this pandemic time may have a shot that others don't get. But I want to live somewhere else with my novel.
At first I thought about some sort of The Big Chill plot device, college friends reunited for some reason, but reunited late in midlife. That idea appeals, but I just have a general shape of what I would want to do. To write 50,000 words in a month, I need more specific shapes.
This morning I thought about how I long to be on a college campus, more specifically, my undergraduate campus, more specifically, certain points of that college campus. I realize that young women in college in the 1980's might have been done to death, but not the way I would do it. I've had those characters and variations of that plot in my mind for decades now.
Let me let that idea percolate as I start one of my big southeastern driving tours tomorrow. While my spouse holds down the fort at home, I am headed to a quilt retreat at Lutheridge. Let me see what my brain comes up with!
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