High Hopes for a Halcyon Hat Trick

The National Novel Writing Month web site is relaunched for 2009 (though I note it's overloaded as I write these words -- wouldn't be NaNo without a few good server crashes, would it?) and I'm reminded by Selestial's recent blog post that it's high time I updated Dragon Dreams with this year's NaNo plans. So here it is: the official "yep, we're doing this for a third time" post.

"Soaring sights of a sophomore scribe" is replaced with "High hopes for a Halcyon Hat Trick" (I'm feeling confident) and I've updated my NaNo profile with the working title of this year's effort.

When I first conceived of "Love on the Rocks" I thought it would be a < 2000 words short story. I worked on it for a couple of days last spring and quickly realized that, to tell the story I wanted, it would need to be much longer. Much, much longer. That's good news for a NaNo effort, but not so much for a story one is hoping to submit to a short story contest, so I shelved Love and got to work on a different story entirely.

I think that, during my realization that Love on the Rocks needs to be a novel-length work, I fleshed out a decent outline for the piece -- but as I've been working on completely different projects in the months since, it's a safe bet that I'll be revisiting those Love notes soon to see just what it is that I have. (I flew by the seat of my pants for my first NaNo and, while I enjoyed the experience, I'm not eager to do it that way again anytime soon.)

I've got a relatively clear schedule for November again this year, so am going for 100K words and a full novel draft. Looking forward to the ride.