My 2013 NaNoWriMo novel: M5

I swear, it’s nothing like Mister Ed (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I prepare for NaNoWriMo 2014, I realized I never got to tell you guys anything about the project I did for NaNoWriMo 2013.

I’d like to introduce you to a new work in progress: M5. It’s short for a very long alliterative title.

If you went to middle school with me, you actually may know what this is but, for the rest of you, let me give you a little background. In 6th grade, I wrote a children’s story for a class assignment. It was about a talking horse who was created by a mad scientist and was also about… golf for some reason. (I know nothing about golf. Including it was admittedly a poor idea.) If I had to describe the tone of the book, it’s like a cross between Bunnicula and Darkwing Duck. The story was only about 10 pages or so and included some illustrations (which are terrible as I am no artist) but my teacher really liked it and had me read it aloud to the class so allegedly it was good in the way that anything you write when you’re in 6th grade is “good.” 

But the story stayed with me and I kept thinking about more scenes I wanted to add to it and things I wanted to do with the characters over the years. About 5 years ago, I actually sat down and wrote some notes to rewrite it, this time as a Middle Grade book. I would’ve been completely over-hauling basically all of it, keeping almost none of the original plot or characters. Really just the main human (whose name changed) and the talking horse were staying and not much else.

I had the first scene of this new version pretty solid in my head but then I had no idea where to go with it so I left it. Finally, when I was at a loss of what to write last year, I decided to pull it out. After all, the tagline of NaNoWriMo is No Plot, No Problem, right? I would “pants” the novel, as they say, and see where I ended up.

Well, I’ll be covering exactly how this draft went in a future post but the part that really matters is that I realized my outline was for an older book than Middle Grade (more like YA) but the silliness of the rest of the story was for a younger audience so it didn’t work as I’d first envisioned it. I really needed to rethink everything. It took me a month of changing things but I finished it… sort of. I think I have a serviceable outline for a Middle Grade novel now and a very terrible first draft which is much more than I had before so I’m happy.

Why choose that novel to write last year with all the other works I’ve got in progress? Well, I actually had two other ideas outlined ahead of time and was waffling between the two of them when it struck me that, as both were YA, it would be many years before I could read them to my daughter. But my horse story skewed so much younger, it could be something I could read her much sooner. It’s hard to deny the appeal of that!

The only thing is that I don’t anticipate editing this one anytime soon. Firstly, I have too many other revisions I owe to various people right now to start on a new one and, secondly, I need to get into a different mindset to work on this book. When I came up with this book idea in the first place, I was in the middle grades myself and reading a lot of that kind of book. Now I read mostly YA and plays and so my brain is mostly in that mode. I’m confident that, in a few years, when I’m reading my daughter her first chapter books, my brain will be back in that method of thinking and I can get back to work on it them.

Is it weird to bang out a first draft and then ignore it for a few years? I don’t think so. My brain is always working on things in the background and since I have a draft now with some kind of plot instead of the big fat nothing I had before, I at least have something to work off of and let my brain work on passively over the years. And the beautiful thing is that, if I really come up with a good idea and become passionate about this project, I can jump right back into it and finish it up then.

The shorter word count of middle grade is very new for me. I’m looking at the finished draft and going, “But it’s so short! I need to add more!” But, really it’s just right. My biggest issue is trying to get the voices right which was hard for a first draft when I was writing like a demon during NaNoWriMo. I know once I get the character’s voices set in my head, it will actually be a pretty fast rewrite because everything about this book is just so much fun.

Is there any value in my writing a middle grade book at this point in my career? Who knows. Who cares? I just wanted to write something fun and this was definitely more fun to write than any of the other ideas I’d outlined.

Now if only I cold decide what to write for this year…