Old Hat

I'm not as excited about participating in NaNoWriMo, or that international month of writing 50,000 words toward a novel,  as I need to be.

I'm not sure why. It might be because this is my fourth NaNo, or because I didn't succeed last year, or because I've succeeded two years before that. It could be because there aren't others in my area to have writing sessions with, or because I've discovered that the officially sanctioned NaNo group events seem more about cliquishness than encouragement, or because I suspect I wouldn't notice it was cliquishness if I were part of the clique (which embarrasses me).

Things are so much more motivating when they're shiny and new, aren't they?

I need to fall in love with my ideas:

Anna Schmidt/Annie Smith, an anthropologist, embarks on a quest to find the origin of a post-Fall fairy tale in the ruins of the United States.  She senses the ghosts of a traumatic incident following her as she pursues her quixotic journey through a world of black-market economies, scrapyard ingenuities, border skirmishes, and attempts at law and order.

In the high desert of Owayee, Anna meets Daniel in the nick of time, and he takes her to his home, an underground communal enclave. She suspects she has discovered the people of her fairy tale, who are in fact real but more unusual than she had guessed.  Then her secrets are revealed to the commune, some of which not even she knew. Revealed also is a plot that could cause widespread deaths -- and Anna and members of the commune must stop Free White State from accessing a super-lethal virus Anna's stepfather, a cryptographer, had once locked up.


I need to get a better feel for the characters, perhaps through more interrogation, or through writing a fun part of the story.