Tag Archives: Plot

Plot #2- Harry Potter and the Giant Prehistoric Chicken

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This idea will no doubt be the most funny/amusing of the 3 novels I’m going to write this year.  The giant prehistoric chicken is a great story; it is also a bit of an inside joke, so I won’t mention that particular story here. 

So how did I come up with Harry Potter and the Giant Prehistoric Chicken?  I was leaning towards doing something involving harry potter.  And I was also trying to figure out how to work the giant prehistoric chicken into my novels, when I realized that I could write about Harry Potter and the Giant Prehistoric Chicken.  

I’ve decided to write an alternate 5th year- ignoring books 6 and 7, and keeping some elements of book 5.  Luna will bring up the prehistoric chicken- she’s such a quirky character, and has a lot of…interesting theories, to say the least, so she is the perfect person to bring up a giant prehistoric chicken.  I’m still debating on whether to use Professor Umbridge as the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, or if I want to bring in something new.  I know for sure the giant prehistoric chicken  is the secret weapon, and that it needs to be resurrected.  I also know is that the gods/goddesses of the underworld will play a role in resurrecting the prehistoric chicken.

That pretty much sums up this novel.  I haven’t done too much planning for it, mainly because it’s based off of something already written, there’s no need to plan characters, or do any world-building.  And I think I may be trying to make up for all of the research I’ve done with Plot 1.  Balance is pretty important.

Plot #1

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My first plot for this year’s noveling attempt is about a 16-year-old girl named Kiora.  My inspiration for the idea came from a couple different sources.  I happened to catch 1st Daughter on TV, and my imagination sprang into action.  It also reminded me of one of last year’s novels, so I started coming up with characters and possible reasons as to why a 16-year-old girl would need secret service protection.  The idea has changed a lot since my coming up with my original notes. 

I had originally planned on them falling in love, but promptly put that on the backburner once I realized there would be a huge age gap between them.  I did a rough timeline of the career path of a Secret Service special agent, and assuming he went right from college to the secret service, I placed him at around 29-30.  13-14 years is quite a big difference.  And yes, I could make her older.  I could even make him younger, but at most a couple years.  I decided not to change up their ages at this point because I definitely want their age difference to be a major source of conflict/tension throughout the novel.  For now, I’ve decided to go for a more one-sided thing.  She has a crush on him, thinks he’s cute, will do whatever he says because of her crush.  And as for Dustin, he resents her because he’d rather be protecting the president instead of some 16-year-old girl. 

Going back to my original idea, I had come up with the idea of her being a niece of the president, but slowly the idea morphed into her being the daughter of a cabinet member.  I’m leaning towards the idea of threats towards the cabinet and their families.

I still need to work out some details on her family.  Her family tree is seen below.  Her mom died when she was a baby, her aunt Arabella has spent a lot of time in and out of psych wards, and her dad doesn’t get along with his sisters, so she has no connections to her other two aunts.  Her grandparents aren’t in the picture, since 3 have died before the story starts, and the opening scene is Poppy’s funeral.  Poppy will most likely be (at the very least) mentioned, since she helped Blake raise Kiora.  Arabella may be mentioned as well.

        

As far as the other characters go, there’s Dustin (who is one of the special agents assigned to kiora), the president, the 1st lady, and their three children.  I’ll probably add a few other minor characters as well, but that still needs to be determined. 

I have character profiles for each of the characters above, although some are much more in-depth than others.  It pretty much amounts to Kiora and Dustin having a more complete profile than anyone else, but I’m pretty sure I can come up with likes and dislikes for everyone. 

I have a pretty decent collection of notes and websites that I will (hopefully) refer to during November if I need a bit of research.  I’m not aiming for accuracy right now, especially since most of what I want to know is stuff I probably won’t be able to find out anyway.  Wikipedia has been a really good starting point for research…everything else can wait until editing starts.

I think that pretty much sums up this novel.  As November progresses, I’ll probably post random tidbits about my characters, and some of the more interesting things I’ve come across during my research. 

This Year’s Ideas

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I’ve done two novels the last couple years.  This year, with additional time on my hands, I thought I’d go for 3 novels.

I had 3 perfectly good ideas.

The first idea was about a 16-year-old girl (named Kiora) who needs Secret Service Protection.  My second idea was Harry Potter and the Giant Prehistoric Chicken.  And idea number three was about a novelist who gets derailed from their novel while trying to get fired from their job.

And that was when two shiny, new ideas came out of nowhere, and decided they wanted to be written. 

Idea number 4 was about a girl who commits suicide and ends up in the underworld.  And idea number 5 was a sequel to my 2006 novel.

So that left me with 5 ideas, and two weeks.  While 5 novels in one month is certainly possible, I’m not at all ready for that kind of committment.  So my plan was to keep planning the 1st 3 ideas, and start working on the other 2 ideas, and on Halloween, see which 3 I felt like writing.

I realized a couple days later that idea #3 and idea #5 could be combined.  After all, the female main character in #5 wanted to be a writer.  Her greatest wish is to be a best-selling author.  So what better way than to have her do NaNo, and get completely derailed from her attempt.  And she becomes more disillusioned with her job, which she can’t exactly quit because she is going to school full-time, and she has bills to pay.  

So part of the problem was solved.  But that still left me with 4 ideas, and that was when I realized I could combine idea #2 and idea #4.  Harry Potter and friends end up in the underworld in the search for the Giant Prehistoric Chicken.  I decided to leave out the suicidal girl for this one, and shift it over to the newly combined ideas of 3 and 5.

In the next few days, I’ll probably talk about my 3 plots in-depth.  Expect to see a post about my magical binder, and I’ll probably even talk about the two shiny new ideas too.

Hey There!

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I thought that this year I’d try blogging my NaNoWriMo experiences this year.  I have no idea how well it’ll turn out since I tried to a couple years ago and failed miserably.  However, I have a lot of time on my hands, and I’m feeling inspired to chronicle this years attempt. 

My first year doing NaNoWriMo was in 2006.  I won, somehow, with a rather depressing tale of an 18 year-old girl who is the sole survivor of a car accident.  It follows the year of her life after that car accident, and highlights what went wrong in her childhood, and her struggles to overcome everything that’s happened to her.

2007 was certainly an interesting year.  Not only was I writing a novel, but I was working full-time and going to school full-time.  Not to mention that it was my first year as ML.  2007 was the year that I thought I would write about a fictional natural history museum in a fictional town.  I managed to win, which was surprising considering I was really stressed and cried a lot. 

2008 was the first year I attempted two novels.  I had two perfectly good ideas, and couldn’t decide which to go with.  So why not write both?  One was the sequel to the 2007 NaNo, and the other was the sequel to my 2006 novel.  However, a few days in, the only file I had for the 2006 sequel got corrupted, and I lost it, which was just as well, since I didn’t like the direction it was going in anyway.  So I started from scratch going off of Stab My Back by the All-American Rejects, one of my favorite songs at the time.  Going in completely blind was certainly an experience, but one I have no plans to do ever again.  I still have no idea what the novel was about.  I managed to win twice, and miraculously finished both novels early.  That was definitely a fluke, because it only happened the one time… 

Fast forward to 2009, when yet again I wrote 2 novels.  One was about a girl who witnessed a murder, and had to go into witness protection.  The other was the quest for pants, and was entirely based on the dares thread.  Writing a novel based entirely off of dares was definitely an experience, and while I don’t mind incorporating dares, a whole novel based on dares is something that I’m not sure I want to do again.  I did win twice, so I have a pretty good track record.

And of course, there are this year’s novels, which I’ll be talking a lot about over the next few weeks, so I’ll leave that for another day.