Friday Forays in Fiction: NaNoWriMo 2012

Find me on nanowrimo.org as user joywrite

Twelve days until NoNoWriMo 2012 kickoff.  Halloween night as the clock ticks over to midnight where ever you happen to be.  for me that is USA Pacific Coast.

I've decided on my 2012 NaNo novel.  It's going to be a sequel to my 2008 NaNo novel tho that one is still unfinished and a massive mess.  But it makes sense to do it because that story was set during the summer and fall of the 2008 election season and now this one can be set in the 2012 election season and follow up with some of the characters' last four years.  The mobile home park setting is well established as is the theme which means a lot of prep work is already done.

The 2008 novel was called Mobile Hopes and featured a large cast of characters living in a mobile home park superficially like the one I live in, each of whom were dealing with personal crisis either created by or exasperated by the economic conditions that year.  This sequel, Occupy Hope, will continue to carry that theme..

Here is a snippet from Mobile Hopes.

Here is a snippet of my 2011 script for Script Frenzy based on that novel snippet.

They feature irascible Gerta aged 97.  She would be over 100 now.  But tho I never wrote the scenes in 2008, she was supposed to die before the end of that novel and keeping her alive for Occupy Hope would mess with the structure of Mobile Hopes. 

No worries.  There are at least 30 odd remaining characters to play with and surely there will have been babies born, new neighbors, marriages and divorces, high school grads moving on, vets returning from Iraq, and Afghanistan, addicts getting out of rehab, drug suppliers getting out of jail, evictions, a  new crop of migrant workers, other deaths from illness, old age, accident and murder.

Speaking of murder.  I'd been playing with this idea for over a week but could not close the deal in my mind until this evening when I heard what sounded like 3 successive gunshots very near by.  There was not following sound of sirens so if it really had been gunshots, surely someone else would have heard it and called the police.  Unless everyone is like us and doesn't want to get involved and maybe isn't quite sure what they heard and not sure what direction it came from.

At any rate my novelist imagination took off on all of the what ifs.  I made a special note of the time just in case it ever because an issue.  6:56pm.  One shot followed by 5 seconds or so of silence followed by 2 back to back shots.

But Gerta has come to symbolize that whole novel for me somehow.  I guess if I can't stand to do without her this time she can be a ghost.  There was a ghost in Mobile Hopes so there's precedent for it.