Every Nanowrimo teaches me something, and this year I learned that my main character has to be someone I love, a character I can be passionate about, that fascinates me. This year I tried to hold back from my natural tenancies. I created a main character without the guilt, anger, or dark past that most of my main characters have had. I wanted to do something different this time and, well … it fell a little flat. Maybe I’m doomed to burden my main characters with a Dark Past of some kind. That seems to be a lot of what motivates me to write, to dig into these characters, to see what they’re made of and how they deal with their current problems and the shadows of their pasts. I like to go with them down into the dark, and then out into the light.

I still haven’t done any new writing this month. I’m 3/4 of the way through my first read of Marked, and the quality of the novel gets better as it goes. It’s definitely fixable, and in January I’ll tackle edits.

I’ve got the spark of a novel idea floating around in my head, about traveling between broken worlds that were once a single whole, and a young man’s quest to save his home. Good old fashioned story stuff.