Skip to main content

NaNoWriMo!

Hi Friends! After our fun discussions during coffee on Wednesday night I was inspired to write a bare bones summary of my Nanowrimo (Nation Novel Writing Month) novelette. It is very much a work in progress, but here is the summary of what I'm thinking of writing so far!

The year is 2010 and the heroine is a 30 year old career focused historian named Chloe. Her area of research is on literature and art during the early middle ages (5th to 1000th century) and her and her assistant Luke are on a flight from Canada to London where she is supposed to be speaking at a conference on monasticism during the dark ages . Chloe decides to arrive a week early so she can take a train up to the Northern edge of Scotland and make her way up to the island of Iona where she can spend some time in peace and quiet to retreat and prepare for her conference. Her assistant decides to join her as he has recently broken up with his girlfriend and is hoping to dive into work and take his mind of his worries. While there, the two of them start to notice each other and tension ensues. This is disturbed by a visit to the ancient burial ground, called the Rèilig Odhrain. A sudden wind storm forces the two of them into a small cave located against a hill where they spend the next little while hding from the storm. Somehow they both fall asleep and wake up to what appears to be a beautiful day. Both are feeling confused by their strange dreams and this confusion is further enhanced by the fact that everything appears quite different from the place they had just been. The year is 880AD and Chloe and Luke are stuck. How did they get there? How can they get back? They end up on an adventure involving Vikings, monks, and the famous book of Kells as the monks try to protect this important work and preserve the beauty of art and literature during the age of illiteracy.

Thanks to Michelle of thinking that my heroine would likely need a protector of some kind on her adventures in the past (Luke will hopefully do). Thanks to both Michelle and Danaya for making me think about what period in history interests me enough to write about and that I already have some knowledge about. I hope that you both will continue to share any ideas you have!

Comments

  1. MichelleOctober 8, 2010 at 6:11 PM

    That sounds like the skeleton to a really good story! Everything fits together well and has reasons - nothing is just hanging there. I'm excited for your story, and I'm glad I could be a little part of it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. ~mOctober 29, 2010 at 8:03 PM

    it's so amazing that you're doing this! i've thought about trying it myself, but my creative writing skills leave much to be desired. best of luck!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excursions in beautiful Riviera Nayarit!

Well it's been just over a week now since I got back from my vacation. When I look back it's clear that outside of the normal bumps of any vacation, it was a very pleasant one! My parents and I flew into Puerto Vallarta at around 4pm on Friday July 1. As we stumbled into the crowded airport and attempted to manuever our way through the throngs of sales people, the kissy faces of a number of Mexican men made me suddenly all too conscious of my "Kiss me I'm Canadian" shirt. Oh well, like anyone would dare try with my Mom nearby (she gives off very protective Mom vibes...I think it may be because she's very protective). Anyway after a run in with a sales man who had briefly convinced us he was our Sun Wing Rep, we managed to slump into a nice air conditioned bus that took us the 20 minutes or so to Riviera Nayarit and up to our Resort "Riu Jalisco". It took me a good part of the trip to realize that the "j" is Jalisco is pronounced "h...
1 comment
Read more

Redemption

I spent some of this weekend thinking about the word redemption and what it means. Not necessarily the religious context of it, but the taking a wrong and making it right idea. I think this stuck with me because I watched a few movies over the weekend in which the themes were about making things right and using your pain to help others. Like everyone I have had some painful things happen to me and have struggled with the anger and despair that often accompanies being hurt. In the book The Shack the author calls his main character's pain (due to the murder of his youngest daughter) "the Great Sadness." This makes sense to me because some of the bad things that can happen in life seem so consuming that they haunt you no matter how hard you try to ignore them. I am often reminded of this fact when something new in my life causes me pain (a conflict. a death, etc). All of a sudden the floodgate of old pain re-opens and I find myself back at the beginning of my pain...
2 comments
Read more

Community Theatre is Failing Women

I have grown decidedly more Feminist in my thinking over the years which has made enjoying theatre harder to enjoy lately. There are, of course, excellent shows with diverse and interesting female casts but more often then not, the female characters are flat and uninteresting. It seems like Theatre show creators, performers, and viewers are often more liberal than the average community of people but strangely, despite this, sexism is still rampant. Something I often think about when viewing TV shows and Movies is whether or not what I am viewing would pass the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel Test, for those who are not familiar, was created by Alison Bechdel in her 1985 comic, “Dykes to Watch Out For” and has become a well-known measurement of gender bias in movies. Basically to pass the test the movie must have three things: Two female characters (preferably named), Who talk to each other, About something other than a man. When I first learned about this test...
Post a Comment
Read more