Getting Ready for #NaNoWriMo

I might have a chance of succeeding at NaNoWriMo this year. I have successfully cleared my writing plate, so to speak. My next novel, Accomplice, is edited and formatted and sitting in Amazon waiting for the magic go-date. And for once, I don’t have three other projects that are begging my attention. Well, actually I have exactly three other projects, but all of them are prime NaNo candidates and not mostly-done works in progress that I’ve been procrastinating on.

When I logged into my account just now, I reviewed what I have set up the past two years, where I participated but then failed miserably.  2012 I said I was writing The Vegas Affair.  2013 I said I was writing Take Me Down. So now it’s 2014, and those are two of the three contenders for my NaNo book. Because, you know, I never wrote them.

Take Me Down is the prequel (or really, just book 1 of the series) of the sci fi romance I wrote in 2009’s NaNoWriMo called Leap.  I have never sold or published Leap because after querying and revising it for a year or two, I realized that I really needed to introduce the world and some of the side characters in a different spot.  I already have about a chapter of Take Me Down written, but I’ve been dragging my feet about working on the rest of it.

The Vegas Affair is a sequel to The Paris Affair, which was my first published novel.  The Vegas Affair will pick up with the story of Kelsey, the sister of The Paris Affair’s hero Helmut.  Kelsey is the baby of the family and used to being coddled (and rescued) by her two older brothers. She’s also pissed at both of them, who have refused to talk to each other for over a decade.  Fed up, she comes up with a plan to get them into the same room—or at least the same city: she is going to elope to Las Vegas with the one man that both brothers can agree to hate, in the hopes that they will work together to save her from certain disaster. But, of course, things don’t go quite as she plans.

My third option is Steal the Sun, the next installment to Call the Rain, my fantasy novella.  Steal the Sun will also be a novella or short novel (short for the fantasy genre).  Trapped in the equivalent of an ivory tower by a ruthless dictator, my heroine will enlist the help of a criminal to escape the only world she has ever known.  But the hero has reasons of his own for helping the runaway princess. He believes that sacrificing her is the key to saving his own people from certain doom. The fantasy world for this story has been floating around in my head for three or four years now.  I have been reluctant to really start writing on this one, and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t have the story line solidified yet, or if it’s because I’m having too much fun musing over all of the possible directions I could take it.  Once I start writing, I lock things down and the playground in my head loses some of its adventuresome qualities.

So now, I need to decide what to write. And then strategize my November.  It looks like I will have a week of business travel to work around.  That week should include two travel days where, battery permitting, I can write many words on the plane.  But the rest of the week may be a wash depending on how stressful my days become.  Plus Thanksgiving.  It can be done. I’ve done it before. The travel may end up boosting my writing, because I won’t be bogged down by housework and the distractions of the real world.