About my novel: I wrote a story in eighth grade that I remember quite vividly. I remember the first words that I wrote in the story. They were on the blank piece of scratch paper that teachers give you when you take and EOC test, a state mandated one. I had finished my English test with ample time to waste and back then (when it seemed so much easier to write) I would just get so many ideas and every time I put the pen to paper I would start rambling out some new story that I had NEVER previously thought of. I still have probably a hundred one page stories that I began and never finished, stories that today I have no idea where I was going with but are nostalgic just the same. Anyway, I wrote front and back of two pieces of copy paper and was really excited because I loved what I was writing and it was not until after the test when materials were being collected that Mr. Byrd, my homeroom teacher, tried to take the pages from me. Obviously I wasn't going to let him, I knew that I would never be able to write those words again and I had a feeling that the story (back then they were all stories, never novels) I was writing had potential to be finished unlike so many of the other things that I had started.
I was able to persuade him to put in two blank pieces of paper with my bubble sheets so I could keep my story. All for the rest of the day, since it was a testing day, we had free time and one of my closer friends at the time, Anna, was used to me writing randomly and often times I would write funny one pagers for her to read and then we would go back and forth adding things to it. She wanted to see what I had written, mainly because she wanted to stop me from writing more, so that I would talk to her, and I think she knew right away that this one story was different.
Although I often wrote funny stories for her they were actually rare anywhere outside of the classroom. Most everything that I have ever written has been macabre in some way. I love horror and love to write it, very rarely does one of my heros survive. They will progress through the story and learn what they must for the story to be complete and relatable, but then they will usually fail in the end. Maybe there's some psychology voodoo someone can do to tell me why but that's just how it is.
The very first line of this original story had my four year old protagonist walking through a church filled with rotting, putrid corpses. She read this thinking it was just another of my stories that went no where but after she read it she gave the pages back and sat back without talking as if asking me to write more, the last line had been the boys inner thought of how he wanted to kill his mother.
To her it may have seemed as if I knew where I was going with the story but I had no idea. I never write with an outline. I will write about a certain piece of action and during I will get a thought about something that would be cool or a line that sounds good and add it in.
For instance, the novel I was working on before Nano started with an argument between two brothers and afterwards they go into their house and I thought that it would be interesting to have their mother dead at the foot of the stairs. I had not had the idea to put her there a mere four seconds before typing the words. I really love to write on the fly. While it probably leads to more errors later and more editing it creates an exhilarating feeling during the writing process.
That story that I wrote in eighth grade was the third story I had ever completely finished. The first being a vampire story called "De ja' vu" and the second being a haunted house story called "Stephen's Story," all three which are probably nearer to novellas, since it seems that length is something I have no power or desire to restrain. "The Other," the last written of the three was always my favorite and so when I decided to do Nano it was the first story to pop into my head. I knew that I would be fully capable of rewriting it and making it novel size, there is plenty of story there to make it more than a novella. I have yet to ever let anyone read anymore of the original story other than those first few pages because of how embarrassing it is now that I am older looking back at the way I wrote it. The original story for me serves as my first time ever writing using an outline. The original story now is the skeleton of what my novel will be and I am using it extensively because despite how badly it may have been written I do not want it to lose that magic that I felt when I first wrote it.
The story itself is about a boy who is slowly becoming more and more aware that he hates his mother, although he has no idea why and as things in the story begin to escalate more and more out of control the boy and his mother learn that there is something more sinister going on inside of the boy and have to take the steps to fix it.
Personally, this is right up my alley...
