I think I’ve diagnosed and cured, if not the cause of, at least a contributing factor to my below-mentioned grumpiness. I’d been planning to rework Charlie Ravioli for Nanowrimo this year. Trouble is, much as I love the novel (and fully as I intend to rework it and try to get it published), it was spawned by a painful event in my life that I’m currently trying my utmost to get the frick over. I just ended that run-on sentence with a preposition, didn’t I? I also used the word frick, because I’m a mother now and should at least make a token effort towards not swearing like a sailor. As Sarcastor has noted elsewhere, my once-feared edge is lost, a mere memory, gone with the wind, I might as well just buy the minivan, adopt the Labrador and get REPUBLICAN SOCCER MOM tattooed on my head.

(Fragment of a dream last night: “She had no mottos, only tattoos.” Also, I was Mina Harker, having an exquisitely pleasurable lesbian love affair with a gorgeous vampire trapeze-artist in an alt-history Victorian England where they’d discovered genetic engineering and cloned the Kraken. Strange.)

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes; it turns out that reworking an existing piece is against the rules. You didn’t think Nanowrimo had rules? Think again, kiddo. Obviously these rules are unenforceable in practice. There’s nothing to stop you cutting and pasting, oh, say The Voyage of the Beagle and submitting that as your novel, except for your innate sense of honour. Aren’t you gallant? But the FAQ in its wisdom states:

“No works in progress allowed. You have too much invested in them. Give yourself the gift of a clean slate.”

2003 was supposed to be the International Year of Cope. It didn’t quite work out that way, or hasn’t yet, but we live in hope, because that’s just the kind of cheese-eating surrender monkeys we are. So my early Christmas present to myself is a clean slate – My! Second! Novel! The title is Breeding – Sarcastor, would you please stop sniggering like that? It’s scrummy, and it’s about ponies, and it’s set in an alt-history Victorian England where Dorian Gray is the A-list dinner guest (“He looks so young!”). I can’t wait to get started.

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