Devious Journal Entry

I've found the notebook I had a year ago.

There's a ton of notes about story ideas. There's a hell of a lot of plotting for this really neat idea I had about telling two stories at once. There's a man returning to a city, perhaps from prison, out for revenge for some terrible incident from years before. It's interspersed with the telling of what actually drove him to seek revenge in the first place, with connected story threads. Both stories take the same amount of time to tell, so it's never made clear what happened until the very end. It's got twists (some bloody obvious ones), as well as all the usual noir and action movie cliches.

It's kind of funny seeing all the little notes around the edges of the pages too, places where I've written 'HATS?' or 'HONG KONG?' and circled it, or little badly drawn sketches of people. There's a few pages which I marked as being written at "4.06AM 5/11/08" where I wrote down my thoughts on having just watched Obama win the election.

It's definitely strange though. It's weird looking back at what I was thinking then. I used to carry this little thing around everywhere, and make notes on every idea I had, just in case it turned out to be good. There's even little bits where, towards the end, I was almost using it as a diary. Then, there's a page where I had unintentionally stolen the twist from Fight Club, then over the page from that there's a chibi white-angel-ariah drew, and that's it. It all just stops. I know why, there was just a day when I lost all that drive I had, and lost the will to write. It's sad seeing it again.

Despite that, I'm glad I found it. It's reminded me that, as much as I want to forget or change things, my past is what's made me who I am today, for better or worse. There's nothing I can do to change it, so I might as well try and get on with things. I reckon I'm going to use this. I won't make any more notes in it, but I'll start working on those stories again. A year is enough of a break.

***** EDIT THAT PROBABLY HAPPENED BEFORE YOU SAW THIS ANYWAY *****

Five minutes after writing that journal, I had one of those moments of sudden realisation that occur occasionally.

See, I'd decided to try out NaNoWriMo this year. "What the hell is that?" I anticipate you may be asking yourself. Why, it's the National Novel Writing Month of course! It's a project devoted to getting people writing. Their aim is to take those would-be novelists, the people like me who always intend to write a book 'one day', and get them to do it now. The goal is for each person to write at least 50,000 words by the end of November. But don't just take my word for it, here is their website: www.nanowrimo.org/ , where the "About Nano" section will explain better than I could.

So just now,I realised that I've been stuck for a plot for a novel. I can't think anything up, and with only nine days to go, I was thinking of giving up before I'd started. Now, I've found a book where my younger self has helpfully devoted a lot of time and effort to doing the best he can to come up with a good plot for something he never wrote. It's not really stealing if they were my ideas anyway, is it? Besides, it's not like that guy ever used any of this, is it? He gave up, the idiot. So now he's done the legwork, I'm going to take all the credit. Nice.