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lea_hazelI'm giving NaNoWriMo another crack. I dropped my plans for a reason and it was because I was exhausted, stressed, ill, and dispirited. Except now I'm more dispirited by not writing than by invisible fake deadlines, so I'm writing again. This is a new story that I've been nurturing, which takes place in the cannibalized corpse of last year's NaNo story. Which means it's a story about Bat-Jews (na na na na na).
Now. I'm not saying I solved the problem of writing about Fantasy Jews when they're clearly not human, because I didn't. I do feel like I've improved the premise by changing the support community for the main characters. A big chunk of last year's NaNo took place in the protagonist's family home, with her birth family. That was good and I'm keeping the family as I built it, and even expanding it because that's what the story calls for. But the protagonist this year is another sister from the same family, and she spends most of her time living away from home. Thus she has a home away from home, and a family away from home.
She lives in a city that's very diverse but also does not really have any major community of her people, who tend to form major expatriate communities because they maintain non-nuclear family structures. Instead her local community consists of her, the second major protagonist, and about six other people -- one of whom is a convert. Theoretically this should let me explore their community life from both a typical and atypical perspective.
I did still keep a lot of the quirks and details that I got attached to last year. But I also have more of a plot. I don't expect to be able to finish it this year, and I'm not even sure if I'll succeed in writing every day for the rest of November. But I'm doing something and that feels better right now than doing nothing.
Now. I'm not saying I solved the problem of writing about Fantasy Jews when they're clearly not human, because I didn't. I do feel like I've improved the premise by changing the support community for the main characters. A big chunk of last year's NaNo took place in the protagonist's family home, with her birth family. That was good and I'm keeping the family as I built it, and even expanding it because that's what the story calls for. But the protagonist this year is another sister from the same family, and she spends most of her time living away from home. Thus she has a home away from home, and a family away from home.
She lives in a city that's very diverse but also does not really have any major community of her people, who tend to form major expatriate communities because they maintain non-nuclear family structures. Instead her local community consists of her, the second major protagonist, and about six other people -- one of whom is a convert. Theoretically this should let me explore their community life from both a typical and atypical perspective.
I did still keep a lot of the quirks and details that I got attached to last year. But I also have more of a plot. I don't expect to be able to finish it this year, and I'm not even sure if I'll succeed in writing every day for the rest of November. But I'm doing something and that feels better right now than doing nothing.
