This picture fed through in my Facebook feed earlier today and hit me with an epiphany:

I now have a title for the Camp NaNoWriMo novel I'll be writing later this year! Super excited about that because I'm usually scrambling for a title, but now I'll at least have a working one. It's apt because while my current project has some secondary characters that do actually fight/control shadows (and are shadows at times... Etri, would you get back here and solidify?), that's going to be the main theme of the next story.

I'm still chugging along with my current '13 novel Unexpected Inspiration and have been filling in the last quarter of it or so, but even if I don't finish that one by July, I'll put it aside for a bit to work on the next one. Three months late and I'm still wondering how anyone can get to "the end" in thirty days. I'm nearing 80,000 words, well past the NaNo 50k I reached in November, but the ending scenes are still taunting me from a great many chapters away. As the story takes shape, however, I'm starting to eye an earlier point as a potential split into two books. I do love all of these carnival performers, so I wouldn't mind writing a series about them. That's such a relief after having to force myself to get even a quarter of the way through my (currently abandoned) '12 novel!

I'm already starting to jot down ideas for "Sciamachy" (which Firefox refuses to acknowledge is a word) and have two characters so far; one's a secondary character from "Unexpected Inspiration" and the other is the daughter of characters from that same story. It'll be a challenge to write a mute mime as a protagonist, particularly when he's been stuck outside of time and reality for a decade, but I'm willing to try! (It can't be any harder than writing a blind protagonist...) It's possible that the other main character flirting with disaster from the magic she wants crossing with the magic she has will be easier to write. Light and shadow really shouldn't be mixed in one person, but I think she's going to have to risk that in order to free the weird shadow-boy who keeps leaving invisible objects where she can find them. Plot subject to change between now and July, of course. (Unless I hold this back until November's NaNo.)

Now back to working on the current story. That daughter's entire existence hinges on me finding a way to bring her father back to life in a way that isn't contrived or asinine. I'd rather not have the ghost of a goth teenager following me around from story to story, bemoaning sarcastically my shortcomings as a writer. ;)

~Meri