Yup, here I go again.  Time for NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month for those of you who have been living under a rock for the last several years). I signed up again for the insanity of writing 50,000 words in a month.  I’m starting to think that this is truly my preferred method of writing, and that I may never publish.  Just participate in NaNoWriMo once a year and spend the rest of my time knitting.

I’ve tossed about story ideas for this go-round.  Should I be my typical self and just sit down and write whatever?  Or should I try a little planning, maybe use NaNoWriMo to polish one of my many rough drafts?  At this very moment (which will be gone by the time this post is actually published because I’m writing all this on the afternoon of Sunday, November 1), I’m still undecided.  I’ve signed up, but I thought I would rehabilitate a short story that I wrote several years ago.  It needs a lot of work, and I was thinking that turning it into a novel would be one way to do some “world-building,” dig into the details of the landscape and characters more than I did with the original story.

Here’s a brief synopsis:

Jane Hilton is a young lawyer and native Floridian working desperately to save what little remains of her family’s once extensive plantation in the Florida Panhandle.  Justus Tanner is also a native Floridian, and his and Jane’s families share a long and adversarial history.  Tanner is Jane’s nemesis, a developer prone to making deals based on threats rather than promises.  He wants that last spit of land that Jane calls her “Green Bubble,” the only legacy she has from her mother.  Jane is determined to keep Tanner from getting it, even if it means one of them must die.

Yes, yes, yes, again someone is likely to die in this novel.  I do have a (bad) habit of killing off characters.  But, you know, therapy.

So, off I go to write, write, write.  And because I’ll be spending so much time writing (a draft of) a Great American Novel, my blog posts for this month will be skimpy and closed for comments.  Priorities, my friends, priorities.

To tide you over, here are some photos from our road trip last month.  Scenes from our hotel room in Staunton, Virginia.