Motioning to Write

It's NaNoWriMo month !

At some point, I will indulge in the NaNoWriMo initiative. What is it ?

The picture is from Two Brooklyn Cats on Twitter (link!) and they don't have nearly enough followers yet. Hint-hint.

NaNoWriMo is a yearly thing. I'm pretty sure I've written about it before, the aim is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I'd like to think I could write the stories that would make up a novel. I can rabbit on quite happily when the mood takes me and I'll run through conversations in my mind before they happen. Probably a bad habit because I assume that the conversation goes the way I want and I always tend to miss something which takes the actual conversation in a completely different direction.

I've written before about what I would write too. There are a few nucleic ideas :

Post Apocalyptic and recovery phase where my central group of characters scavenge and scout to help rebuild.
SPACE ! Firefly was an awesome series and didn't last long enough.
Fantasy with magic environments.
Scifi.

I think you get the picture there. But some of the stories I've enjoyed most have involved a central group of characters who bantered with each other. This was a main theme of David Eddings' successful series. Different characters who banter, bicker, argue, love.

I'm not going to do NaNoWriMo this year though. After a few spurts of thought earlier this year, I haven't actually turned those into something I could write something around that would make sense. All writing needs a plan. A pre-book if you will. A setting for the world you write the story in. The best stories have a certain consistency and you need that view of the world early to acquire that consistency so details aren't rehashed later because they didn't fit in with later elements of the story.

I have a plan for most blog posts I write, although it tends to just be themes I want to cover. For this one, it's NaNoWriMo morphing into writing about what I'm watching now. (In a minute). Nah. I want to be properly healed up as well so I can direct all my mental energies towards this. I'm still feeling a certain amount of wornoutness that partly comes from the feelings about my outsides.

I am healing ... steadily. My skin felt great last week, getting super smooth mostly. My arms are nearly all better. My ankles and a couple of other areas may need more help though. Or to be left alone some more. They're trying to heal but it's so ridiculously easy to aggravate the damage again. Even clearing some of the flakey to clean it up can be too much for the current strength and integrity of the skin.

But it is getting there. What am I watching though ?

Ok. Not that movie. But a close one to it. I'm watching Star Trek The Motion Picture, the first big screen effort from the Star Trek franchise. I'm a quiet fan of this movie, it hit the spot in many, many ways. It's actually a really good scifi movie and it has that core set of characters all giving it their all.

It is described heavily as an extended episode of the series. Don't all movies fit that description ? Perhaps.

It does show its age in the melding of computer imagery, artist imagery and the real acting. You can see the joins. We're far better now at stitching it all together but for a 1979 movie, they do a great job. It's a movie that I'll consistently enjoy as I am now.

My plan is to watch all of the Star Trek movies over the next month or so. I'll be watching on non-stream nights, that should work pretty well and it just might get me to where Star Trek Beyond won't be full price. See ? I have a Cunning Plan.

It's just getting to the climax of the movie though so I'll leave it off there. But how about this for an intrepid bunch of character to build a crew around ...

The one who points the direction to go. The centre point. The brain of the crew.
The sailor who is rescued from a dead ship and joins the crew for adventure, a warm meal and a hot shower. The pro.
The worker bee who throws herself into everything she can, who is the heart of the crew.
The pair who would be brothers in another life. Who played the games together before whatever calamity hit. Who can finish each others sentences. One is a writer, a philosopher, a student of the mental sciences. The other, a student of the physical sciences.
And finally, the mom who could not be a mom, who looks after us as her family. She's a mean shot with that sniper rifle ...

And there would be the dogs who scout for us and guard for us. Dogs are smart.

I think I'd have fun writing a book with that crew, although you need to throw them at drama to make the story interesting.

Oh and you'd have to figure a happy ending too. All the best stories have those.