"the only thing keeping me dry..."

[thanate]

(is actually the fact that it's stopped raining...)

I was going to be productive this afternoon, to make up for the rest of the weekend, which, while on the whole good, was not particularly useful in any concrete sense. Only I appear to be in that state where my brain is working on things it can't be bothered to tell me about yet, and so there is a great deal of staring into space contemplating things that, if asked, I would be totally unable to explain or possibly even remember. Apparently I am only able to achieve a meditative state when I'm attempting to do something else instead.

So the fact remains that I have not finished my novel. Which I intended to do last month. And there's been Stuff, but existence of boy and tiring work are not in fact good excuses, and I'm only one or two chapters from the end, plus the one I skipped half of, but I strongly suspect that I will not be finished in the next few days. Which brings one to the next question...

What am I writing about for November, anyway? (I could, of course, just not do NaNo, but then I never would get around to finishing things. And once you're in, you've proved you can do this thing, you can't just quit...) So I had a couple pseudo-ideas, the one of which I'm sort of leaning towards at the moment involves a mouse archaeological site. Only for some reason, I feel that an archaeological novel ought to be a murder mystery (I'm not sure why...) and I have no ideas about mystery plots, which is the sort of thing one really ought to have a plan for in advance, so you can throw hints and confusion around in appropriate directions.

Comments

Murder Mysteries

[saladmonkeylamb.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's not always the case. Lawrence Block writes his mysteries without knowing who did it and then goes back and adds the clues in once he's written the ending and figured out who the clues should point to. Anyway, mine seems to be murder-mystery-ish too and I don't have a clue as to who the murderer's going to be.