I haven't posted about Nanowrimo yet, but I am doing it.  I'm just over 11,000 words in, of 50k, and I can already tell that, like last year, this story is going to be much longer than 50k.  Unlike last year, however, I'm planning to finish it eventually, even after November's over.  There's a timeline already set up, and it's fanfiction, so I can post it on a few sites, ff.net and a couple canon-specific sites.  Complete strangers telling me to finish will help me actually finish, so yeah.

A word on fanfiction: as a rule, I find it embarrassing.  I read it anyway, b/c I, like thousands of other people, suffer when a book is finished from just not knowing enough.  Until now, however, I've refrained from actually writing it, b/c come on.  Fanfiction?  That's for people who can't come up with original ideas, right?  In some respects, I still believe that.  Fanfiction takes the world and character building issues out of the equation, to some extent, so that people who'd prefer to jump right into the plot bunnies in their heads don't have to bother with research or pre-writing work.  And that's fine.  And others enjoy the ready-made fanbase that comes from writing in a beloved canon.  People fall in love with characters out of books all the time; it's sometimes nice to make those characters do what you want them to.

For me, I like to imagine what else might have happened, behind the scenes or with other characters off-camera.  I haven't written much - I say this is my first, but there are actually two other examples I can cite.  When I was ten, I read every Star Wars book I could get my popsicle-coated hands on and then set my pen to the start of my very own Star Wars book.  It was set in the far future, which brought it to about nowish, and Earth existed.  Basically, Star Wars with American teenager types as main characters.  I never finished it and it sucked so hard, but hey, I was ten.  And then last month I jotted down some ideas for this Veronica Mars thing I'd intended to write for Nano and discarded.  I got 1300 words into this "jotting" thing and realised I'd actually been writing a story, and so I scrapped it so I could start fresh and official-like on Nov 1 in a different canon.

SO.  I'm still embarrassed to be writing fanfic, but I posted this tiny chunk on the Nano LJ Excerpt post yesterday and got some nice compliments back: