Purple's Perpetually Untitled NaNo - 2010

[insanepurpleone]

So this will be attemp #4 at NaNoWriMo for me, and (maybe hopefully possibly) the first time I'll *actually* complete it.

The problem? It's October and I don't know what I want to write about. I've been feeling generally uninspired for a while now, which is lame.

Of course, there's also the fact that I'll be oh-my-goodness-so-much-stuff-to-do-and-prepare-for busy during the month of November, but I think I'll be able to work around it.

If nothing else, I might do a reboot of an older story of mine, since I've got characters and ideas for it already. I figure it counts for NaNo since I won't be using any of my old writing I've done on it. I've got two I'm torn between, but either way, it's a total revamp of plot and/or setting and/or characters, so it'll be interesting to write anew in any case.

[Deleted]

I have faith in you

If you need ideas, you should think about combining a few random things you've been thinking about using in a story and see what happens. I had two lines floating around in my notebooks for a couple months before I decided to put them together and a story came out of it. The farther apart the ideas are, the better; it generates all sorts of wonky things.

[Rikku]

^_^ Well, as long as it's interesting. That's the main thing. And there's always the chance that you'll get an utterly fascinating last-minute idea from out of the blue! xD Good luck.

[insanepurpleone]

Thanks, you two. ^_^ I think if I have the time before November hits, I might drag out one of my books from my fiction-writing class last year and try out some of the prompts to see if that gets any ideas flowing. I should just start writing random things every day for the rest of October.. since I usually change my mind a week into November about what I want to write, maybe I can get that bit out of the way early this year. XD

Also for some reason, I keep getting this nagging notion in the back of my brain that I should write a character who is a cyborg, though I've absolutely no idea why, nor do I really know anything about how exactly cyborgs work. I also kinda want to write about my detective character, who may or may not be heavily Dirk Gently inspired, (Ooh, now I desperately want to re-read The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul...) though I haven't really written him enough to be sure how much he comes off like that or not. (There may also be a wee bit of Pushing Daisies in the idea as well..) I had an idea for a story with him before, but I could never get past the beginning. It seems murder-mystery stories (even ones with a paranormalish twist) are not anywhere within my area of writing expertise.

[M is for Morphine]

Oct 11, 2010 0:49:09 GMT -5 @insanepurpleone said:

Also for some reason, I keep getting this nagging notion in the back of my brain that I should write a character who is a cyborg, though I've absolutely no idea why, nor do I really know anything about how exactly cyborgs work.

Anything that is a mix of organic and robotic parts can be considered a cyborg. If you want to get super technical, that includes people with pacemakers, cochlear implants, etc. might be called cyborgs as well. There are huge possibilities! There are people developing technology to create new senses, control extra limbs, all kinds of crazy things. Look up Kevin Warwick.

It's a fun way to give a deep theme to your work, since they come with 'Man's fear of dependence on technology' built right in.

The single best source of cyborg information and theory that I've seen is actually Masamune Shirow's comic Ghost in the Shell. There are TONS of interesting and helpful footnotes in the back. He talks about all sorts of things that you never would have thought of!

[insanepurpleone]

Oct 11, 2010 8:34:09 GMT -5 M is for Morphine said:

Oct 11, 2010 0:49:09 GMT -5 @insanepurpleone said:

Also for some reason, I keep getting this nagging notion in the back of my brain that I should write a character who is a cyborg, though I've absolutely no idea why, nor do I really know anything about how exactly cyborgs work.

Anything that is a mix of organic and robotic parts can be considered a cyborg. If you want to get super technical, that includes people with pacemakers, cochlear implants, etc. might be called cyborgs as well. There are huge possibilities! There are people developing technology to create new senses, control extra limbs, all kinds of crazy things. Look up Kevin Warwick.

It's a fun way to give a deep theme to your work, since they come with 'Man's fear of dependence on technology' built right in.

The single best source of cyborg information and theory that I've seen is actually Masamune Shirow's comic Ghost in the Shell. There are TONS of interesting and helpful footnotes in the back. He talks about all sorts of things that you never would have thought of!

Ooh! Thanks for the info, I looked up Kevin Warwick and that was some really interesting stuff.

I'm kind of playing with the idea of a cyborg character who didn't want to be a cyborg.. apparently I just like torturing my characters. But ideas are flowing! I shall post again when I have some more ideas fleshed out.

[insanepurpleone]

Woo double posts because I actually have something of a summary/characters/beginning of a plot going on here, and I'm excited enough about it (and have written it down decently enough) to share.

SPOILER: Click to show

Twenty-something Adam Linth is an aspiring novelist. By day he works to pay the bills at a job he hates, and by night he writes with the aid of his muse, a girl named Sophie who is actually a ghost, but hasn’t bothered to tell Adam that. When the sleep deprived Adam mistook her for a muse sent to help him write the next bestseller late one night, she decided to run with it, never mind the fact that she still hasn’t figured out why Adam is the only one who can see her. She likes helping Adam, and after all, muses don’t get people asking them nosy questions about how they died and what’s keeping them on earth, and Sophie doesn’t like nosy questions.

Adam might have some valid doubts about his own sanity, but he thinks everything is manageable until someone gets murdered, and all the clues tie a little too neatly into the plot of his latest project. Adam has his suspicions that Sophie has something to do with it, but she’s not talking, and he can’t very well tell anyone about the girl only he can see without getting sent in for a psych evaluation. So he does the next best thing, and calls in a favor to enlist Geoff Runner, private detective, to investigate the murder. Runner isn’t entirely above bending rules or dragging people into questionable situations with him, but even he doesn’t have any idea what he’s in for this time.

The murder victim’s name is Alex Carver, but unbeknownst to most of the world, he’s not actually dead. He came pretty close, but thanks to the wonders of cybernetics and a few less than scrupulous scientists, he’s become an unwilling cyborg who isn’t entirely fond of the computer wired to his brain. Not to mention the fact that an apparently unfixable typological error has left his half-machine body registered as .Alex Carver, creating for him a new identity, and a heck of a lot of red tape to deal with if he ever does want to get that death certificate of his taken care of. But as much as Alex isn’t particularly excited about being half robot, he’s a little hesitant to get his old identity back before he can solve the mystery of who tried to kill him - and why.

Still no title, and still not really sure of the answers to a lot of the questions that this brings up. Hopefully some more brainstorming will help, because as good of a start as this is, I don't really want to go into November blindly without any idea of where the plot is actually supposed to go.

[Rikku]

... I love that plot. =D Writers and cyborgs and ghosts and private detectives sounded like a fairly epic combination on the 20-word-description thread, but they all tie together in a way that makes reasonable sense. Bravo.

[insanepurpleone]

*blushes profusely* Thanks! Hopefully I can do the story justice once I actually start writing it!


Soo. So far I've got the main plot, solving the mystery of Alex's attempted murder. (Which means I need to figure out who actually did try to kill Alex and why. I also have to somehow have him come in contact with Adam and Runner in the investigation.)

Then I've got my subplots.. Alex dealing with his cyborginess (hm yes that is totally a word). Adam dealing with the question of his own sanity. And the mystery of Sophie. (I want her death to be connected to why Alex got attacked, but I'm not sure how yet. But the reason she is stuck on earth still should be connected to that. Maybe she was the one inadvertently steering Adam's story so that the connection to Alex's 'murder' became a little too convenient...)

[insanepurpleone]

I want a title! Nothing really appealing has come to me yet though.

But. I AM EXCITED. Two days in a row of surpassing the 1,667 quota without too much struggle. I eeked by today, but there's still time to write more.

I didn't like a lot of what I wrote yesterday, to be honest. It was mostly introducing a couple characters and the situation and it was pretty crappy writing. Plus plot holes! For now I am blaming the plot holes on the fact that Adam is paranoid and probably CRAZY. My timeline as it is set up currently really doesn't match up at all, either. OH WELL. I've decided to ignore all of that and just keep writing.

The stuff I wrote today was Alex, mostly. He just woke up and is very disoriented and the next bit I write about him will probably involving some flipping out about how he is now a cyborg. Fun stuff.

Also, I have totally been bribing myself with candy for every 500 words. This is actually a good incentive, as there is quite a bit of candy at my house currently and may be more soon if I can snag some post-Halloween sale candy soon. We'll see how long my bribing resolve actually lasts.

[insanepurpleone]

I wrote 1,275 words between midnight and when I went to bed (1:30-ish) last night. YEAH. Haha, I'm so proud of myself, I've never done so well in NaNo (I know, it's only the 3rd day, but this is still an improvement on previous years. Perhaps I've actually got a story that works for me!) And I'd *like* to get a buffer up before this weekend, so that I stay 'ahead' on the days I'll be out of town. Even if I can squeeze in writing time, I probably won't have internet access to update my word count after Friday afternoon.

Also whoo unexpected plot things! Sophie just basically let slip that she's dead. And Adam doesn't quite get it at first (and of course she's gonna clam up now because she didn't mean to say that), but I wasn't expecting to put that out so early in the story. Yet.. I think it will work to do it like that. My plot is so weird, sometimes I wonder if the things I'm saying about my story make sense to people who don't know it as well as I do.

[insanepurpleone]

Purple's first excerpt time!

SPOILER: Click to show

He had learned that the woman’s name was Evelyn, and there was a man, too, who came by less often, but Alex did not know his name. Alex asked questions, but there was very little that they would tell him.

“All the information you need has been uploaded into the computer implant in your brain,” Evelyn told him every time there was a question she did not want to answer. “All you need to do is access it.”

Alex did not want to access the computer in bis brain. He wanted them to take the computer out.

“We can’t take the computer out,” was Evelyn’s constant reply.

Eventually it became too much for Alex, and his curiosity won over his hatred of the computer. So instead of fighting that little computer sitting in the corner of his brain, he let it through. The computer had been there like a wall, a block, something heavy weighing down on him, constricting. The basic functions of it would work whether he wanted them to or not, Evelyn explained - the parts that kept him alive and kept all of his parts working. But opening it up was a whole new level. The information flooded into his brain, too fast at first, and he shut it off again. The second time he was more cautious, and it was slow and deliberate. He did not really know where to start in getting information from it, or what to ask, so he just let the information sink in. It told him the basics first. that he was a cyborg. How his parts functioned, things like that. How they connected to the flesh and bone and blood parts of his body. The computer told Alex how to ask it questions and access more information. It told him how to better control all the little parts and pieces of his new body. It was strange and terrifying, yet, Alex could not help but to admit, oddly fascinating.

Yet the things the computer in his head would not tell him were the things that Alex most wanted to know. Who had tried to kill him? Why had they tried to kill him? Why had these people saved him? Was it a question of good and bad? Of rights and wrongs, or just of chance? Was he simply a pawn in someone else’s game of chess? Whatever the answer was, he had to discover it.

Then the computer told him something else as he signed out of the information stream. His name, it told him, was .Alex Carver. “What does that mean?” he later asked Evelyn about the dot in front of his name.

She shrugged. “Typological error,” she said, as if it was no big deal. “We can’t change it though, once the system accepts that as your name.”

“What?” Alex did not find this amusing at all.

“Not like it matters, really,” said Evelyn, shrugging it off. “Alex Carver as the world knows him is dead and-”

“Wait, wait, wait! What do you mean, dead? I’m not dead!”

Evelyn sighed and pulled a newspaper clipping from her pocket - it was a report of his murder.

Seeing his name written next to the description of a gruesome murder like that made Alex’s stomach twist sickeningly.

“Well.. I mean, if I can prove that I’m me I can get them to change it right? Like null my death certificate?” Alex did not like how he did not feel like himself with this electronic nonsense in him - but even worse was the thought that no one else thought he even existed anymore.

“You can try,” said Evelyn, “but you’ve already been registered with a new name. Getting through that red tape is going to be incredibly difficult.”

“So what am I supposed to do now? If I can’t be Alex Carver, who am I supposed to be?”

Evelyn tipped her head at him, though there was no emotion in her face. “We’ll work something out.”

It still needs work, but eh, it's NaNo. Editing is yet to come.

I'm starting to like Alex. Which of course means he has all sorts of terrible stuff happening to him.

Also I'm hitting that awful point of "Oh no I kinda know what needs to happen in a very general sense but have no idea how to get my characters there because I haven't gotten the plot worked out that much yet aaaaaahhhh."