Well, I’m now well over twelve thousand words into my NaNoWriMo novel, which is called ‘Rock And Roll Is Dead’.
As I said in my last post, I’m setting up twitter accounts for the characters as I go along, and two of them are now on there: @Drum_Monkey_ and @TheDistanceMeg. They’ve been chatting to each other and with other twitterers, and some of those tweets are ending up either in or influencing the story. Drum Monkey even got a string of really smart direct messages giving him some advice on a guerilla marketing campaign! It’s turning into all kinds of fun.
Meg’s twitter name stems from their improv band being called Verfremdungseffekt, AKA Brecht’s concept of ‘The Distancing Effect‘ – she thought she was being REALLY clever with that one 😉
So please do have a chat with them, and if you want to read the book as it goes along, there’s a PDF version that gets updated every day or so out there… if you email me or send me a message on twitter, I’ll probably/possibly send you the link and the password 🙂
I’m having all kinds of fun writing this – it’s a really helpful creative exercise to
- tackle something without any expectation that I’ll be good at it
- have  a set ‘volume’ of writing to do but no other ‘aim’.
- have a way of weaving bits of real life into it, and through the characters tastes and interactions, give some other bands a bit of promo…
- have something to do while we wait for the baby to be born 🙂
Try it!
It’s a sad fact that all the world’s great band names seem already to have been taken. Though, admittedly Verfremdungseffekt was only the name of an album (a tribute to Stephin Merritt/The Magnetic Fields — see also http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/284_200507.html — which is now very hard to find).
Keep going! Once Flapjack arrives, trust me, you’ll find it hard to read a book in a month, let alone write one.