Watching Mayhem

Watching the Mayhem is what my family (especially Thor) calls it when there is endless TV news coverage about anything. It can be election results, it can be snowstorm reports, it can be breaking news about any topic. It's all mayhem. We enjoy watching mayhem -- well, we enjoy it when it's something like election reports or snowstorms. Sometimes it really is mayhem, and that isn't really too enjoyable.

We all went and voted. We are all sitting in the family room, watching the mayhem being reported. Well, they guys are paying more attention than I am. I'm watching and nanowrimoing and surfing the internet tubes and doing laundry and drinking tea. And blogging. They say women are much better at multi-tasking than men. That may be true.

My Nanonovel is almost at 4,000 words. That means 46,000 to go. That's not really a good way to look at it, because that is very intimidating. It's been flowing pretty well, but I'm really not sure if it's good or not. I might post excerpts on my Nanowrimo page, and if I do, I'll let you know. I haven't yet.

I read a few books and articles about writing novels, and I got the idea from what I read that the best idea is to come up with the characters and then just see what the characters do. So that's what I've been attempting to do. I have no outline, just some general ideas. And the characters are all completely made up. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with a character that wasn't a copy of someone that I already know, but it turns out that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The characters really are their own people. They might have things in common with some people I know, but just in the same way that any one person could have something in common with any other person. The setting, though, is very definitely my own neighborhood. I need to picture the place that the character is moving around in. I'm not calling it by the same name as my neighborhood, but it is laid out exactly the same.

So just like the advice I read suggested, for my Nanonovel I'm just sitting at the keyboard and reporting what the character does next.

It's kinda like nanomayhem.... (groan) :P