NaNoWriMo: so it begins…

For all none of you who follow my blog, I’m going to deviate from the “Iowa Year” postings for this month.  Mostly.  I’m participating once again in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  The goal of this project is to write a novel-length story (50K words or more) in the span of 30 days, an average of 1667 per day.

For my novel, I decided to expand on an old favourite, “Abstinence Rocks!”  It’s a story I’ve already told in at least four different variations, ranging from a non-fictional account of a real abstinence only rally for teens I attended, to a ficitonalized retelling of the same rally, to a fictional first-person short story based on a similar rally, to a fictionalized third-person short story that barely resembles the actual event.

For this, the fifth edition, I’m going to expand on the themes I’ve touched on (or brushed against) in previous editions: the loss of faith, that moment in adolescence when you begin to recognize the facade of existence, and reconciling religious truths with reality.  The story will be told from the viewpoints of three characters: Grace, the minister’s daughter; Thomas, her new boyfriend and lacrosse captain; and Sarah, whose relationship with her boyfriend has been suddenly and awkwardly halted by the fact that he’s now her stepbrother.

I’ll be expanding more on the story and these characters as the story progresses.  I have a good skeletal outline drawn up, and I’ve been fleshing out the characters; but I also don’t write rigidly, so a lot of the future developments that I’ll be adding haven’t been born yet.

Word count: 2281.