And you may say to yourself... "My God! What Have I Done?!"

It's October, nearly the end of a particularly crap year. This time last year, my lovely wife signed up for NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. (Why it's still National and not International I don't know... maybe InNoWriMo doesn't sound as good)

Foolishly, I decided I was going to try to keep up with her, matching her word count, and progressing with my little fiction project called "The Case of Lost Possibilities". You can read about my entry from last year here.

It went okay for me, it certainly motivated me and showed me that I could do 30,000+ words in a month, but real life got in the way (the wonders of working in retail at this time of year) and other writing projects came to light, so I had to drop out.

My lovely wife went on to smash through the 50,000 words in November target, but she hadn't finished the book, so she kept going... hitting over 80,000 words by the first week of December. The story is an excellent one, but "From the Library of Parker Prentice" remains mostly unseen as she's working on a second draft. Hopefully, it'll see the light of day soon, and everyone can enjoy the spooky tale.

So, this year, she's planning on doing NaNoWriMo again, and the initial ideas she's been chatting about sound fantastic. However, stupidly, I've decided to join in...  Officially this time...

I've signed up on the NaNoWriMo site, and I know what I'm going to write... I have no idea if I'll "win" as they call it by hitting the target, but I do know that the incentive to keep going, and to keep writing, especially when you find your enthusiasm failing, is going to produce a lot of words. Whether these words are going to be any good or usable in any way is another matter. Either way, it'll keep me distracted from the harshness of real life, especially at this time of year when everyone is trying to show their "family values" through ridiculous consumerism.

WILD has a backstory - a reason for the technology that allows dreamshare to be created. The fiction that I'm planning on writing for NaNoWriMo is the story behind the game, told from the point of view of those who experience the dreamshare tech for the first time, and the dreamworlds that they encounter. It's under the working title of "Running WILD" (yeah, I know it's awful), but that's likely to change.

The bizarre surreality I learned while writing The Case of Lost Possibilities will help, and it doesn't hurt that I'm reading David Wong's sequel to John Dies at the End at the moment (This Book is Full of Spiders - Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It!), so hopefully it'll mean that the story of WILD will be suitably dreamlike. Even if I don't end up polishing it off for a "book", it'll be a parallel fiction that'll be spread about the core rulebook to fill in the backstory.





Okay, that's it for this week. I thought it only apt to have a break from the "Roll Your Own Life" autobiographical entries as I'd reached the point chronologically when I'd had a break from gaming. Don't worry, it didn't last long, and next time we'll get into the world of darkness...