NaNoWriMo 2008, T-27.5 hours

This year, my NaNoWriMo novel is entitled Revenge, Comma, Petty. My protagonist, who has been more-or-less-arbitrarily assigned the name Owen Glendower, is a "revenge counselor." Once a professional private investigator, he now helps his clients plan and execute acts of petty revenge. Like the movie Hitch, only with revenge instead of romance. However, our hero's life is turned upside down when an unexpected visitor comes into his office: Vengeance himself.

Last night, in the interest of preparing myself for the trials to com, I came up with a brief story of Owen's adult life, which should be helpful to me as I write the story. As I came up with this information, I felt as though I got a better handle on what the character was like.

Owen Glendower

Dropped out of the University of Connecticut owing to a disagreement over the curriculum. Began educating himself. At 23, he took a job with his uncle's private detective agency. Two years later, he left the agency for unknown reasons and opened his own. Eighteen months after he opened his agency, a case led him to Morocco. The case was solved but he was not heard from for some time afterwards. Six months later, his clients all received letters, ostensibly from him, referring them to his uncle's agency. He was not heard from again for some time, but the lease continued to be paid on his office and his secretary continued to receive paychecks monthly by mail. Three years later he resurfaced in Croydon operating as a "revenge counselor." After one year he has returned home to Hartford, Connecticut to open up his revenge counseling business. He is 31 when the story begins.

As I've alluded to in the plot summary in the first paragraph of this entry, there's rather more to it than just the character of Owen, and I'll go into that in another entry. But for the first 10,000 words at least, I'd like to focus on Owen and his career as a Revenge Counselor, so the more fantastic elements of the story will have to wait.

NaNoWriMo news

NaNoWriMo begins this saturday, and I'll be sharing my progress in a slightly different way this year. For the past four years, livejournal has been the place to get detailed updates while I wrote my novel. For the past two years, I have used facebook to post brief updates about my word count and morale. This shall now change.

This year, status updates and short excerpts will appear at my official blog, which can be found at http://www.tawm.net. I will try to post at least one entry per week, but it may be more frequent. We'll see how it goes. I've been trying to get this blog off the ground for quite a while and this is my latest attempt. Should be fun.

As for my up-to-the-minute word count and morale, those will be updated via twitter. My twitter page can be found at http://www.twitter.com/tdickinson. If you're also doing NaNo, I highly recommend signing up and joining in. It can be a great way to keep tabs on how people are doing, but only if a lot of people participate. If you want, you can even set things up so that your twitter status is synced to your facebook status. I (obviously) don't do this, but some people do.

Happy noveling to all of my fellow Wrimos and apologies to everyone else for this yearly insanity.