NaNoWriMo Update and some rambling thoughts.

I always knew that if I ever wrote stories, they would be fairy tale stories and purely fantastical fiction or really Romances. The Goblin Market and the Pre-Raphaelites, Coleridge, Victorian novels and yes, Victorian fantasy influenced me. A. S. Byatt's fairy tales and novels. Angela Carter's fairy tales, especially The Erl-King. Even Gothics would play a part. The Bronte family, who really wrote brutal novels about love, almost horror, certainly fairy tale-ish. I remember China Mieville talking about Jane Eyre and how brutal a novel it was. Jane was practically starving her entire life and few people had been kind to her. She ended up marrying a brutish, spoiled man who had committed all sorts of offenses and their love could only completed after he was fully punished. Blind, the first wife dead. And then there was Heathcliff and the two Catherines, and all those other unpleasant or awkward offspring. Dickens was full of murder and brutal people. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White haunted me in more ways than I can write here. Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy. What can I say. All these stories have, though not officially fairy tales, "fairy tale things," really. It would always be fairy tales for me. It would be about people, love, superstitions, maybe magic, and death. It would be about the weight of history. Because I understood the importance of geography and history. Ordinary girls would have to wage wars against extraordinary things to survive. And because I was southern, family would always play a part. Rambling thoughts this morning. I am almost finished with Nano. I have almost written 50,000 words in November. Good words. I never write really bad first drafts. I don't like them. I never use them. But this book is far from over. And of course, revisions will be done. I had to ask myself why now and not before? It was pretty easy to answer. This is very hard work and I just could never commit to this kind of life while my parents and Johnny were alive. They took up too much of my emotional capital. It's just that simple. And it's not even deeply psychological or frustrating, because I chose them over writing all the time. Writing a novel is a selfish act, it's not democratic, and sometimes it's not even sane. People who write for money do it better. I know this personally. Writing for a living makes sense. A job. I just pretended I was writing for money again, and I had a deadline and it was a job. And I will continue to do this job until the day I can no longer do it. Smiling.

My NANO word count today is 46,311 words at present. Because I am working and it will change.