It's that time again. . .novel writing time!

It's that crazy time of year again. . .National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo began at 12 am on Nov. 1. Since I'm finishing up my last semester of graduate school (taking 3 whopping classes) and I have about a billion papers to write before the end of the month, and I'm also in the midst of an epic battle with morning sickness that lasts all day long. . .well, I was going to sit this one out. (I think I may have said the same thing last year too - due to working full time and taking grad classes.)

But then I thought about it, and this would be my fourth year in a row participating. Ever since November '06 I've been hooked. And due to writing billions of term papers on subjects I couldn't care less about, I haven't been doing a lot of "fun" writing. And then I realized that maybe a little NaNoWriMo was just the kind of stress relief activity I needed to get me through this last semester.

So I decided on Oct. 31 that I would do it. But then I had a big problem. Normally, I spend the months leading up to NaNoWriMo coming up with a plot and characters, and I usually have at least an outline when I get started. Not this year. The last few months have been consumed with studying for the comprehensive exam.

Then it hit me: everyone is turning out teen vampire novels right and left these days. Certainly that would be much easier to tackle than the elaborate restructuring of Jane Eyre into the Southern Gothic mode that I undertook last year (and have yet to finish). And better yet? Why not borrow a famous plot for my teen vampire novel?

To make a long story short (although hopefully I'll be able to make my actual story at least 50,000 words by Nov. 30): I decided to steal the plot of Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (which I'm actually writing about in a paper right now, so I had a chance to brush up on it), but write my novel about a teenage girl who is so obsessed with teen vampire novels (like Twilight, the Vampire Diaries, etc.) that she starts to suspect that everyone around her just might be one of the walking undead. So that's what I'm attempting to do right now. And so far, I'm having a lot of fun. I've read so many teen vampire novels myself (hate to admit it, but it's true) that it's coming pretty easily. I finished out yesterday (day 2) with 4,332 words (about 1,000 words ahead of schedule). Hopefully I can keep cranking out 1500 or so words per day to get to that goal of 50,000 by November 30!

(And hopefully no one will read my blog and steal my already stolen plot since I laid it out there. Shouldn't be a problem - pretty sure no one reads this blog anyway. Also, hopefully I won't get my novel confused with my Jane Austen paper and start writing about vampires in Northanger Abbey. That could be problematic.)