Time for NaNoWriMo 2012

Heh. Talk about stuffing my foot into my mouth. Not too long ago, I said something to the effect of not having a story to tell and having a rather complicated semester that is affecting the way in which I could plan and write a story.

Well, things have changed. There are a few rather earth-shaking changes in my life at the moment (no, I'm not getting married or jailed) that those who are closest to me know, and from those changes, I managed to come up with some kind of story line for the upcoming NaNoWriMo. So yes, I am back for NaNoWriMo 2012, as seen via the setting up of the customary word count widget on this blog.

So far, my entries for NaNoWriMo had been some sort of modern-era story line with a very strong ``slice of life'' flavour. Nothing out of the ordinary there, since I am basically following the old adage of ``writing what you know best'', and in my case, writing about my experiences from a different perspective was the easiest way to tackle this. This year, however, I have changed tack. It will be the first time that I am writing a fantasy novel.

Now, if you know me, the first thing that ought to come to mind would be ``no way, him writing fantasy? But he hardly reads anything fantasy to begin with!''. Well, yes, there is a strong ounce of truth there---I have not really read much fantasy in a long while, because really, fantasy is hard to write. I mean, there's a ``new'' term to describe fiction that take place in not-now (speculative fiction), but really, trying to invent a world and write it up such that it does not suck [in content and realism] and yet sucks [the reader in without him/her realising it] is just not that easy. So of course, there is a caveat hidden somewhere.

I cheat, obviously. For the most part there is a strong fantasy component; I blame this on my recent re-reading of Girl Genius and Wapsi Square, together with some rather... odd dreams/nightmares that I have been getting. But that is only part of the story; I will include quite a bit of vignettes of life in a style that is similar to my usual ``slice-of-life'' method of writing. All done with juxtaposition of course---it is hard to convince me to do do otherwise.

So the long and short of it is: I am back for NaNoWriMo 2012, with a slightly different genre from my usual comfort zone. We will see what kind of story I can come up with for my fourth 50k-word novel.