So, remember last weekend when I said I had found my next NaNo Novel idea? I found two more this week. One is an idea I’ve been cultivating since my first NaNo back in 2005. The main character is a pretty quiet guy, so I ended up writing Lane’s Girl instead, just because I couldn’t get Mio to say enough (Lane, however, never stops talking and we finished NaNo that year in 19 days). This week while watching the History Channel I found a setting that would work perfectly for Mio’s story. I still don’t trust him to talk enough to do a NaNo though, so that will be something I write outside of November (plus, I have to do a lot of research for that novel, since it will be historical fiction and I’m not yet an expert on Roman Britain).
So that left me with last week’s book idea about the world-hopper, or the third idea I had this week: Apollo and Daphne. If you’ve never read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, you are missing out on a plethora of ancient mythology. These have been some of my favorite stories since I was a child and first read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Unfortunately, a lot of people are turned off by the style of writing in Metamorphoses (just ask my husband what he thinks of it!) so I thought I would re-tell the story in the context of today’s world. It sounds like bad fanfiction on the surface – take the Greek gods and throw them into high school – but I think the story of Apollo and Daphne can really speak to young readers. It’s about first love, about losing your first love, about never even getting your first love although you try and try. And in my version it will take place in Olympia, WA instead of Olympia, Greece.
As you can probably tell, it didn’t take me long to change my mind and decide to write my NaNo Novel about Apollo and Daphne instead of the world-hopper. And you are sure to see more stickies about it in the near future, since I have already filled one page of my writing notebook with stickies I brought home from work.