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meltintall3 ([personal profile] meltintall3) wrote2013-10-29 08:34 pm
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NaNo2013: An Anticipation

Do you know what time of year it is? It's the time of year when I go, "What shall I do for NaNoWriMo this year? I could do A, or B, or C, or..." and I dig through my idea piles and previous manuscripts and ponder whether the time has arrived to re-write any of them. (The answer so far is, tempting as it is, no.) It's also the time of year when Word-of-the-Day appears and I try to expand my vocabulary.


10-13 nanowrimo coverNot By Thunder
by Meltintalle
NaNoWriMo 2013

Civilization has reverted to the Dark Ages. The thunder god strides through the heavens with his big blue ox, not much concerned with the affairs of men. The wolf howling at your door might walk on two legs. Life has never been easy for Allan Fishel and his brother Lyndon but, when a young lady rides into their lives with an ancient poem on a scrap of paper, it's about to get a lot more complicated.

A pair of Wolves seek asylum in the village, the poem turns out to praise a forgotten god, what Lyndon really wants was never part of someone else's plan for his life, and Allan has to decide what he believes about the way events are strung together.


Wolf is a fancy way of saying robber and bandit; the Wolf packs are like the Vikings or Visgoths and they prey on travelers and isolated homesteads.

What else do I want to tell y'all about this?

I still haven't figured out exactly how or why Christianity has pretty much vanished from the face of the earth and that's probably an important piece of set dressing, especially for Lyndon's part of the story.  I want this to have the feel of taking place in a North American landscape, specifically the Upper Midwest; I want to repurpose things like sports team memorabilia... and by the end I want to have deliberately said something about humans and their relationship to God.

Characters:

  • Allan Fishel (main character--probably)

  • Lyndon Fishel, Allan's twin brother, and their family (father, mother)

  • Sarah Horst and her family (father, mother, uncle, maternal grandfather)

  • Nijal (a Wolf about Allan's age; the other candidate for main character)

  • Inga (Nijal's wife)

[identity profile] valiantarcher.livejournal.com 2013-10-30 02:42 am (UTC)(link)
YES!!! I love this time of year!! :D

Oooh, it sounds very neat. :D And I really like your goals. :) All the best with it! I'll be cheering you on from the sidelines. (And gleefully following the word-of-the-day excerpts. ;) )

*is very happy, even if it's not more Harold North this time* ;))

[identity profile] ladyadeone.livejournal.com 2013-12-12 01:08 am (UTC)(link)
This sounds like an excellent story! You definitely have some good goals there. Now I've got to go through all your Word of the Day posts...
I'm curious about the repurposing of sports memorabilia. :D

[identity profile] meltintall3.livejournal.com 2013-12-12 03:01 am (UTC)(link)
The repurposing of sports memorabilia sounds super cool, doesn't it? :D It was fun imagining what sort of things would end up surviving/being kept in good shape and then used for something other than their original purpose. I don't think I ended up doing anything with that idea, unfortunately. Unless I did and I've totally forgotten about it. ;))

[identity profile] ladyadeone.livejournal.com 2013-12-15 07:28 am (UTC)(link)
Mind sharing an example? :D Definitely understand ideas falling by the wayside, though.

The ancient poem, now - was it a Psalm or? (If you don't mind me asking. :P It's a great plot idea!

[identity profile] meltintall3.livejournal.com 2014-01-03 12:55 am (UTC)(link)
Well, road signs turned into siding/insulation/wall art...

Yup, it was Psalm 23, as I believe you found elsewhere. :D