NaNoWrimo

So, I'm thinking about nano-ing this year. I keep thinking about writing a crime novel. Then I remember I don't write crime novels. I write SF&F.

I'm well prepared!

All this goes back to one of my appearances on Evil Editor, when I pitched a query for a novel I was thinking of writing at the time. The idea came from my extensive researches into Roman history and culture--I thought I might as well make use of all those books and scraps of information, even if the Marcellus novels never did sell.

So I wrote a query for a semi-humorous novel about a chap whose life is in ruins.

Coldharbour Lane.

No, it's not SF or Fantasy. What can I say? But EE's suggestion that finding a body might liven things up made me wonder if he had a point. And then my thoughts wandered to the Case of the Pictish Roundhouse, and whether that too (even though it doesn't exist as a story even in embryonic form) might also benefit from a body. Or two. By which time I had probably wandered as far away from SF&F as it's possible to get.

But it is nanowrimo after all, and the point for me is surely not so much about WHAT I write, but about whether I write at all. So I've been plot noodling for Roundhouse for a while now, inbetween travelling North, then South, then North again.

My understanding with a crime novel is that you write the ending first (whodunnit, how they got caught), which enables you to fill in the clues and the herrings once you revert to the beginning. This would be something of a departure from my usual organic approach.

I've also wondered about this BBC news story from my vast collection of "news stories that might provoke writing ideas" and if it would make a useful aspect of the novel. Maybe all this noodling and wondering will produce something worth working on. And maybe not!

:)