A bit, kinda? I kinda completely failed to prepare at all in October, and when November finally rolled around I had to scramble to pick a story idea and decide what to do with it. Then when I finally made up mind I was forced to choose between fixing my sleep schedule and doing D&D stuff or NaNo, D&D won out.

I'm still in it, though! Just starting a week late, that's all. I've decided to try my hand at one of the novels I mentioned in the elevator pitch thread you posted a while back, The New London Paranatural Society. Featuring the adventures of a British army veteran, a young mad scientist with a certain distaste for gravity, a Scottish werewolf in a very fine waistcoat, and a cloth dragon named Patches, as they search for the anonymous head of the Society who has mysteriously fallen silent.

I actually remember taking part a few years ago. The ending result included multiple Sues, excessive dialogue, and match butchering of various mythologies. Needless to say, it has been destroyed.
This year, I’m probably not reaching the word count goal, but I will be writing a collection of short stories featuring two increasingly frustrated people who are permanently in the bodies of teens and get stuck into various universes that always eventually get at least one Mary Sue invasion, and every time the invasion is taken care of, they get stuck in another universe.

I'm Collin Frisbee on the site if you want to send me rude messages over it in order to slow me down and thus gain an edge over me in the competition.

I'm writing Lamppost Saint, a sort of episodic surrealist journey across a barren, haunted Sydney, starring a man in a full-body prosthesis suffering constant phantom sensations and generally having a tough time telling what's real and what isn't.

It's a sort of spiritual successor to an earlier story I wrote (that I have not shared with anyone here), and fulfils a very similar purpose to me, in that I intend to use it as a way to sort of - go nuts, I guess, and have fun with all the imagery and kooky dream logic.

It's based a lot on my interest in folklore and weird fortean cryptozoological kind of stuff, and was influenced a lot by Hellboy and stuff by China Mieville, and the way that, for instance, many UFO stories very much feel like old fairy abduction stories, but from a modern, more scientific context. There's this really bizarre and fun dream-logic to many old fairy tales and folktales, and capturing a sort of similar feeling, from a modern context, is one of my main goals.

I mean, there's actual plot there, too, no worries mate.

However it ends up, it has been fun so far!

I've tried to get started several years, but never even got in the first day of writing. But this year I did, so I'm very excited!

I'm actually cracking down on a fanfiction, Kathryn's Adventures in Middle-Earth (a stand-in title), which is, as you may have guessed, a girl in Middle-earth story. It's not satire; I've set myself the challenge of taking this premise and taking it seriously.

I've set myself a couple of other challenges as well; I generally avoid first-person narration because it's hard for me to get into characters' heads, but this will be told in the form of a series of letters from the titular Kathryn to her mother, who is presumably still alive and well in the real world. I used to write a lot of letters as a kid, so I thought it would be easier than straight-up first person. So far I'm discovering it's really not.

I also discovered today that because the first half of the letters are written with some time between the events and the writing and the second half are written more or less immediately after the events, character development is a difficult thing to show. Some of it is happening days, weeks, or even months before they're written about and the narrator will be somewhat aware of it. Some of it, though, is happening in the immediate past and it's unlikely she's going to realize how she's changing and growing. One thing I'm trying to work in is self-contradiction. Earlier this year I read the diaries of Christopher Columbus and it was fascinating to see how his viewpoint changed as time went on. As an example, in earlier entries he thought of aloe as a very valuable commodity and gathered as much of it as he could. Later entries, though, referred to it as a very commonplace thing and he stopped collecting it. I suspect this is because he discovered how common it is in that part of the world. This is naturally never overtly acknowledged in the writing of the diary, but the diligent reader can pick it up. I'm hoping to capture a similar quandary in Kathryn's letters, for the purposes of both realism and character development.

But then, I probably shouldn't be thinking of this too much at this stage. It's just the first draft. Still, if I manage to pull it off properly, I think the letter format will be one of the great strengths of the story.

I'm stretched a bit thin this time around. I've got two short films to write, produce, direct, edit... and two essays as well.

That being said, I am halfheartedly poking at a superhero story featuring two old favorite Mutants and Masterminds characters of mine, Phantasm and Galeforce. One's a petty supervillain, one's the star hero of her home city, and together they form a sort of buddy-cop alliance.

Yours sounds much better thought out.

I forgot to get a website account this year, probably because last year I did one of the summer sessions.

This year, after consulting 7th Sanctum's random plot generators more times than is probably healthy and having to drop my original idea, I'm reimagining the story of the Golem of Prague as being about a group of programmers for a fantasy game instead. Jury's still out on whether their dream of an autonomous protector AI goes horribly wrong or entirely too well.