Getting so excited

It's that time of year again: the novel ideas are falling like leaves and the plot bunnies are jumping into your neatly raked piles and scattering your thoughts and plots alike.

But this year, I'm ready. While in the past, I'd be dithering between this story and that character and wondering how to make it all work, this year I'm just raking it all into one - and jumping into those tantalizingly crinkly ideas alongside the plot bunnies. The difficulty of dealing with the dastardly bunnies is what my novel is all about, and that means I can do pretty much anything I want.

So far, that means reading The Maltese Falcon and watching clips of Humphrey Bogart - for research. It means going to the Night of Writing Dangerously fundraiser (you can still donate on my sponsorship page!), and incidentally spending American Thanksgiving with my boyfriend and his family in the San Francisco area. It means buying a trilby (like a fedora, but with a narrower brim that turns up sharply at the back). It means trying to learn how to draw bunnies - this hasn't worked out very well so far!

Mostly it's just a lot of fun.

Soon it'll be a lot of work, too. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days doesn't happen without a little effort: 1,667 words per day. I'm hoping for more, and this year I've challenged myself by joining the Vancouver regional word war team, which is challenging "fake" Vancouver (Vancouver, BC vs Vancouver, Washington). And if this still sounds like fun and not too much work, you should join too!