( )scription

Call it a NaNoWriMo Hat Trick. This now my third consecutive win out of four attempts (and a year off for the child).


Overall, I'm not as happy with this attempt as with any of the previous others. Perhaps my opinion will change after some time away, but for now I feel like the writing was particularly weak and that I've lost a lot of facility for writing dialogue.

The title of this year's effort ended up being In Decision. The main character is a twenty year old university Junior named Mackenzie Peterson who is rather determined not to choose a major, even though people have grown very intense in their pressure to do so. Mackenzie also has an ability to slip into close alternate universes. At the start of the story, when she slips, time stops on this end and her visit to the other world lasts about ten days. She's been doing this for as long as she can remember. As the story progresses, the slips start to happen without warning and for random amounts of time, varying from a few seconds to a few days.

Over the course of the story, she learns that she is what's called an Anchor, as in she holds a cluster of universes together. Anchors are also the people whose decisions will cause new universes to splinter from existing ones and whose presence prevents close universes from colliding in to each other. The cluster that she's in charge of all stem from the Influenza pandemic of 1968. The splintering was caused by the deaths of some, all, or varying combinations of the Anchors on those worlds.

Ultimately, Mackenzie learns that to be an effective Anchor, she needs to take charge of her life. After all, an anchor that's floating in the sea, can't stop the ship from drifting. She starts taking charge by declaring a major.

As with all other NaNo novels, this one started with one idea (what would you do if you had two weeks of time that didn't count against you) and went to entirely other places that bear only a vague relationship to the source. Also like usual, characters started doing things that had nothing to do with any plans I was making. The biggest plot wrench was when Mackenzie's aunt and uncle show up to take her out to lunch and to berate her for her life's choices. They bring along her Grandma, who spends the meal trying to get Mackenzie to take her purse. It turns out that there's a small wooden box in the purse that Grandma wanted to give to Mackenzie secretly. I spent the back half of the month trying to work out who Grandma was, why she wanted Mackenzie to have the box, why it had to be a secret, and what the box contained. I'm still not clear on the contents.

Another wrench was when Mackenzie refused to get together with her best friend, Oliver, with whom she spends the entire story flirting. It turns out that she has a boyfriend on another world named Mattheo.


As of today, I crossed the 50K line and pretty much stopped writing, even though the end is further off than I thought. There's probably another 10K of story outstanding.

For my winter project, I'd like to pull out last year's novel and give it a going over. I reread parts last night and realized that they're quite good.