JuNoWriMo

If you’ve never heard of NaNoWriMo, go here.

I believe this June I will be participating in a home-grown NaNoWriMo, a sort of Ju(ne)NoWriMo that I’ve inherited from Chera. And I believe instead of a nearly unattainable 1,667 words a day, I’m going to push myself for 2,000, to fill up all the silent, empty weekday evenings. Sixty thousand words in a month. I know I can do it, since I’ve done it before.

And it isn’t as if I don’t have writing secrets up my sleeve. Taking a literary criticism class has done more for my writing than I would have thought: I’m going to be writing a fantasy novel following all thirty-one of Vladmir Propp’s narrative functions of a fairytale. A Russian Formalist-turned-mythological critic, Propp analyzed more than a hundred Russian fairytales and came up with thirty-one plot points which always occur in the same order (though some might be left out). It will be fairly exciting for me to work from an outline already invented for me, only to supply the particulars. Happily, I have no idea what said particulars will be, which is decidedly in the spirit of –NoWriMo. Working on a novel will help me keep my sanity through the month, I think.

Also, finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay this evening. Took me a while to get through it, since the adventures were, indeed, as encyclopedic as they were amazing; I’ll think on them in my sleep and post a review (a real review this time, not a blurb) tomorrow sometime.

List of Propp’s ‘narratemes,’ for the particularly interested.