Unofficial NaNoWriMo – Science Fiction!

November is National Novel Writing Month, abbreviated NaNoWriMo. For those who aren’t familiar with it, the idea is to complete 50,000 words of a draft novel over the course of the month. While I’ve never officially participated, I did complete 52,000 words of my still unfinished novel Demiurge two years ago and finished my novel Ipswich last year. I submitted Ipswich to my publisher last summer and am still waiting to hear back, and while I think I’ve finally worked out a good way to end Demiurge, this time around I wanted to try something totally new.

For my project this month I decided to ditch my usual urban fantasy genre altogether and go for hard science fiction. Think Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein as far as the style goes, the sort of SF that was popular in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Generally speaking, it’s less character-driven than many other genres and more centered around speculative future technology rendered as accurately as possible given the current state of scientific understanding. Also, rather than the dystopian stories that constitute much of SF these days, science fiction of that period tended to be more about how awesome the future will be rather than how badly it will suck. The story I’m working on is much more of the former variety, since overall I find that perspective a whole lot more fun.

So far I’ve been on track at 2000 words per day, which actually places me ahead of the quote for NaNoWriMo if I can keep it up. At the end of the month, I’m hoping to have at least 60,000 words completed, which would be my most productive month of writing ever. I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on how that turns out.