National Novel Writing Month – An Idea

(this is the first time posting to a circle, so I am not entirely sure what is appropriate material and what isn’t. So – you know – sorry in advance if this isn’t!)

It is May 1946. Following the utter failure of the D-Day invasion, The Nazi Army has managed to invade and occupy London and most of the home counties. After FDR’s death, the US has all but withdrawn from the conflict, signing non-aggression pacts with both Germany and Japan. 

Meanwhile, in France, Sean Devlin, his wife Veronique and their two adopted children are continuing their underground war against the Nazi occupation of Paris. And even though The Angel of Death (Deirker) has been killed, his vicious, brutal legacy lives on, and comes back to haunt them when their children are taken hostage by an unknown man and woman.

The story is set in the world of "The Saboteur" – a video game released for the x-box a few years back. It stars Sean Devlin – an Irishman who is drawn in to fighting for The French Resistance after a friend of his is murdered by a German Officer named Deirker.

And the story is set in an alternate universe – obviously D-Day didn’t fail, the US did not withdraw from the war and London and the home counties were never occupied. 

The plot will follow the same way that the plot of the game runs – you get assigned various missions which you have to complete, and then you move on to the next mission. Each chapter will be a mission (maybe more than one), and it will run from the children being taken hostage through to a final confrontation between Sean and "the big bad" either in London or in Paris (not sure yet!). 

There is also another twist, but since it is a major twist, I don’t want to write it here just yet, because what kind of a person would I be if I wrote the entire plot out for people to read before they read the story 🙂

I have been doing NaNoWriMo since around 2006/2007, and have only skipped a few years. My main problem with it is….. well – basically I tend to finish the stories pretty quickly. Most of the time I am done by about two weeks in, meaning the last two weeks are spent doing nothing, or possibly tweaking, because you can’t submit the story to be validated (to check if you reached the 50,000 word limit) until generally November 25th.

So to make it more of a challenge, I have been leaving it until later and later to come up with a general plot, and sometimes not writing out a specific plot. 

I honestly wasn’t planning on entering this year at all, but (and here is where it gets a tad odd) the story above – the general idea and the plot – came from a dream I had last night. There are a few minor modifications, but in general the prologue of the story (where the children get taken hostage) was entirely covered in the dream, as was the twist I mentioned and the next part of the plot. 

I have expanded on the dream a bit, but the basics of it were all a part of the dream.

(Oddly – this is the second time I have written a story based on a dream. The first was set in the world of Hyrule and Zelda, and was all about a boy named Bob and a girl named Cat). 

Under NaNoWriMo rules, I can’t actually start writing until Midnight on November the First (which is a pity, because if I am not out on Field Testing duty on Wednesday, then I am going to spend the evening watching movies and wishing I was writing!) so while I can do a bit of plotting, I can’t start writing the story for another three days, nine hours and forty six minutes. 

However, come the First of November, I am planning to start writing, and (in theory at least) posting what I write here. (Is that cheating on the NoJoMo? I mean – I will be writing an entry every day, just not an actual diary entry!). 

Anyway – I’m going to do some more plotting over the next few days (starting this afternoon after I’ve been shopping), and hopefully have the story suitably planned. Otherwise, I just won’t enter 🙂