Writing update

Not too surprisingly, I lost NaNoWriMo. The goal was 50,000 words in the month of November, and I wrote 16,325. While I officially lost, I'm still happy with my effort. It's been a long time since I felt like I had a story inside me that I wanted to share with the world. The book is far from done, but it has been started.

Last February, I tried to write a novel about sailors and pirates. The main character, Amelia, grew up living the good life, but her father lost all their money, and the family ended up living in the slums of England. The father would do anything to try to make money, including pimping out his teenage daughter. Amelia ran away from home and joined a merchant ship while dressed as a boy. And then the story ended. I wanted it to be historically accurate, or at least more accurate than Pirates of the Caribbean, so I couldn't focus on the story at all. I was too busy asking, How many people live on a ship? How often do they sleep? What jobs could I give my novice sailor to do? How would Amelia hide the fact that she was a woman while on a very small ship?

I love pirates, and I hope to someday finish that story. Pirates provide a good vehicle (vessel?) for questioning identity and fighting against social norms. For now, though, I think I'll stick to my story that takes place in a coffee shop and explores the life of 20-something year olds.

My other writing plan is to write about my true love, SCIENCE. More precisely, I want to write about the people who did really cool science. In school, we learned lots of scientific facts but almost nothing about the art of discovery and the people making those discoveries. I think people are fascinating, plus I want to learn from those scientists who discovered amazing things. In that vein, I plan to look up information about Nobel Prize winners and share how they made their awesome discoveries. We'll see how that goes.