NaNoWriMo 2017: Playing With Vampires
So here’s the funny thing: Even though I had every intention of doing NaNoWriMo this year, up until the last weekend of October I had no idea what I was going to write.
Well, that’s not true. I had a couple of options:
#1: Rewrite my YA horror novel to remove the plot elements that make agents want to gouge their eyeballs out with a spork rather than read yet another one of THOSE stories;
#2: Just write that story over as a straight adult horror with a similar premise.
For some reason, neither of these ideas really grabbed me, and with NaNo almost upon us, that wasn’t good.
And then there was option #3.
I really didn’t want to do option #3.
Option #3
Earlier this year, I bought The Sims 4 entirely because they’d added the Vampires expansion pack. And I spent ungodly amounts of time playing with the vampires. (This was back during my unemployment period. I had a bit of free time.)
(Yes, I’m 48 and I still play the Sims. Don’t judge me.)
At first I basically created a Sims 4 version of “What We Do in the Shadows.”
But then I started making up this dark, complex storyline around a few of the vampire characters.
And at some point, I realized that I was putting as much work into developing characters and subplots for this game as I would if I were plotting a novel.
Ha ha, I thought. It’d be funny to write all this down and use it as the basis of a novel some day.
Except, of course, that the word “vampire” still makes lots of agents want to hold up a cross and scream (yuk yuk). The market got a wee bit glutted with vampire stories in the Twilight era.
But with NaNoWriMo almost upon me, that idea presented itself again, and on Saturday night I opened up the file with all the notes I’d taken while I was playing out that storyline.
And as I looked them over, I started getting that tingly, excited feeling. It was all there. Characters. A full storyline, a fairly twisty and turny and dramatic one that would be soapy fun to write.
And there was plenty of horror to be added too, seeing as this was a vampire soap opera. And these vampires were not lovelorn romantics. Some of them were cruel, scary things whose only interest in a teenage human girl would be her nutritional value.
Oh yes. This would not be an original idea, but it would be fun.
The last thing I had to do was let go of the idea that everything I write must be something I could send to an agent some day. After all, I’ve just spent two months in Pitch Wars getting last year’s NaNo novel in shape for the upcoming agent round. Which, oh hey, starts on November 1st, so I’m going to need a distraction, big time. Something to keep me from hammering the refresh button on my Pitch Wars entry page every, oh, five seconds or so.
So maybe this novel is just for fun, something to keep my storytelling muscles exercised.
Maybe not.
Maybe I won’t know until it’s finished.
But at least I have a project. And right now, that’s the most important thing.
