Ahchooo!

It's quite late on October 31, I have an assignment due in in just over 12 hours, NaNoWriMo will start at midnight, and I'm ill. This is not a good combination. My head is all stuffy, my eyes are streaming and won't focus properly, I keep getting either too hot or too cold, and I feel like death warmed up. On the plus side, it looks like I'll be having tomorrow off work, so I'll have a few more hours to get my assignment done...

NaNoWriMo short stories

I've decided I'm going to revisit Dawn Bell for NaNoWriMo this year. Dawn is the character who grew out of a Heroes fanfic that I wrote a couple of years ago.

There were several characters in the story that I wrote that I would like to explore more - Lois McBride, a teenager who can see infrared and ultraviolet; Morgan and Ellie Callahan, felonious siblings who can alter their gender and hair/skin/eye colour respectively; and Dawn herself, who can push abilities from one person to another.

I've decided to do a collection of short stories on these characters rather than set out to write a novel-length story straight away, and if the stories end up intertwined then that's great; if they don't, no worries.

Back again for NaNoWriMo 2012

I've had a couple of months off from blogging but now autumn is here I'm starting to get the bug to write more again. I haven't made a proper concerted effort to write fiction for several months and I want to try to get back into that now.

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner now, so I'm planning to do that. What I haven't decided yet is what I want to do. I've been wanting to revisit a story I wrote during Camp NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago, but I was also thinking about doing a short story challenge, and trying to write a different short story every day during November. Of course, there's no reason why I shouldn't do both - I could use the characters from my already-created story Thief and give them more background with short stories focussing on each characters for longer than the ensemble cast of characters in Thief allowed me to.

Children's stories

I've started another course with the Open University, this time in children's literature. I figure if I want to write children's stories I should understand them.

The first part of the course asked about what makes a children's story - what sort of themes run through them, and what common denominators are there to the story?

Some of the themes I found were that the protagonists are children and the antagonist is adult, there is often a well-meaning adult who stops the hero(ine) from doing something important, the children are always right, and they always get away with doing things which would never be allowed in real life.

Any more?