NaNoWriMo! (Beautiful People)

Georgie Penn is doing a special NaNoWriMo edition of her "beautiful people" tag,* so I thought I would participate. I would have done it sooner, but I literally did not know what I was writing about until just now. Yes, I am aware that NaNoWriMo begins in three hours. I am not a very plan-y person.

*I would link the awesome "beautiful people" badge, but A: I am lazy, and B: I have two and a half hours to plan a novel.

1. Sum up your novel in five words, or less.

Misguided steampunk knight gets lost.

2. Novel title?

Prophecies are Sometimes Wrong*

*Not really, but I haven't named it yet so this will be the working title.

3. Sum up your main character(s) in one word.

I don't know yet.

4. Advice for newbies in three words?

Coffee
Rewards*
2,000**

*I use a short term reward system because I am impatient... every paragraph or so I get another M&M or Skittle.
**I recommend writing 2,000 words a day instead of 1,667, both because it is easier to remember and because you will love the extra words around the end of week two.

5. Tell us about your secondary characters, how do they affect the story?

Well, I haven't exactly fleshed them out yet. I know the main character will team up with at least two or three other people who may or may not be insane, and some of whom have their own enemies to deal with.

6. Do you plan on staying up till midnight on the 31st?

Absolutely.

7. How many years have you done NaNo?

This will be my fourth year. I won the first two and didn't finish last year. Hopefully this one will be more successful.

8. What came first, characters, or plot idea?

Let me show you the first thing I jotted in my notebook about ten minutes ago. These are pretty much my first thoughts, word-for-word.

Maybe a story of someone who is proficied to be "the one" who is completely not the one. Gets lost on his way to the battlefront to save the day; has adventures along the way while constantly hearing news of battles being won without him. Ends up finding a different quest and meeting lots of friends. Maybe one of the friends has an enemy?

**written sideways next to this** Set in kinda a steampunk King Arthur's world.

Okay, truthfully, this is all I have written down.

9. How much prep do you do before November?

Hahahahaha.

10. Now be honest, how do you really feel about NaNo?

Today, as I was thinking about the fact that it starts tonight, I said to myself, out loud, "Are you insane?!"

And yet I am still attempting it.

In my opinion...

Sometimes I realize that my opinions are not the solid ground I thought I was standing on, but are closer akin to childhood toys: played with, rejected, loved, discarded, changed to have snazzy asymmetrical haircuts and crookedly home fashioned clothes, or kept, in the original box, with the original accessories, gathering dust as though I were still a child of ten who is obsessed with Babysitter Barbie’s lime green blow-up plastic babysitting chair.

And this terrifies me.

Sometimes I realize that I am holding an opinion the way I would realize that I am standing in the middle of the street holding someone else’s wombat—there is no logical reason for it, I’m not entirely sure where it came from and it could kill me, not out of malice, but simply because of its basic nature.

Sometimes I realize I am holding an opinion on one hand, and holding an opposite opinion on the other hand, as if I have eaten my cake and yet still possess it—something I acknowledge I am doing while at the same time asserting it to be impossible, creating a logical paradox that I could never possibly understand while holding a wombat.

And sometimes I realize that when I analyze my opinions, I begin to liken them to dolls and small furry creatures and baked goods to try to fathom what it is I am doing with them. But these analogies are not enough. An opinion is something that is driving my actions and controlling where I go, whether I am aware or not—something large and full of explosives. That is why the closest I can come to describing the danger of holding opinions is being a Babysitter Barbie lime green blow-up plastic babysitting chair obsessed ten year old holding a wombat in one hand and eating cake with the other, blissfully unaware of the fact that she is in sole control of a battle tank on full throttle.

Be a ninja

Okay, I was recently convicted about the fact that I believe in certain things but I wasn't doing anything about those beliefs. I realized that part of the problem is that in order to do anything big, it helps to have a network of other Christians.

Then I thought, we are living in a world where everything is connected via the internet. Why aren't Christians using the internet more fully to organize and fellowship and just be connected to one another?

So I started a website specifically for that purpose. Please join and read the "about" page and add stuff and let me know what you think could be better.

www.truthninjas.ning.com

Jane