This year, I took the plunge. On the spur of the moment (one of a thousand clichés I’m sure to spew this month), I signed up for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month contest. It’s held every year in November, 30 days of intense writing with the goal of producing a 50,000 + word novel. I have no stats about how many are signed up around the world, but it’s in the thousands — 3,000+ in Toronto alone. What I like is that I’m writing alongside people in Tanzania, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Melbourne, Tunisia, Iceland …
Because it was an impulsive thing, I didn’t have a plan when I signed up. But here’s what I’ve posted on the NaNoWriMo website for my novel’s synopsis:
An organic farmer is wracked by guilt following the death of his mother. He has discovered how the corporate funeral business treats bodies and he considers it an indignity. How could he have allowed this to happen to his mother? The next spring, his wife is killed in a farming accident. With his boys at his side, he wraps his wife in a shroud and buries her at the foot of her favourite tree. However, to the rest of the world, the wife has simply disappeared. And so a criminal investigation begins. Police discover the body and exhume it. They charge the farmer with committing indignities to a corpse and bring in the Children’s Aid Society to relocate the children to a more suitable environment.
My working title is The Land. We’ll see how closely I adhere to the initial premise.
Watch here for updates on my progress/sanity.