write on, right on, write now

So I plough on with my writing project - no idea where I am going, but NaNoWriMo say that's OK!

Curiously, doing a quick bit of research with keywords for 'the story so far' - Barcelona, street performers, reincarnated Cathars, 'coincidence', etc I found that someone had already written the damned book I had vaguely (very vaguely) thought of.

Google is a great humbler, when you think you have an original idea. The library I work in happened to have a copy, too, and I had to decide whether to read it and be influenced, or to not read it until December. I chose to read it.

What puts it into the synchronicity class (for me, at least) is that the author lives in the same city as me, and teaches creative writing at the Uni! He even put a dog in the title.... heh

The colour of a dog running away... Richard Gwyn.

Whether this will alter the course of my own piece I don't know,but I still have no idea what to do. I can't categorize it (they don't have Roman a clef in their choices, so I put Mystery and Suspense (it's a mystery to me what I am doing, and I can hardly stand the suspense of waiting to see if I fail), but I think that would draw me into the wrong group of people, as they seem to find murder interesting...

I could try to bring in a magician, I suppose...and maybe a robbery...

I feel more inclined to relabel it, although 'literary fiction' just sounds far too grand...the other labels seem too specific (Sci Fi, Romance, etc)

And I have opened a can of worms here (or a can of memes).

• NaNoWriMo asks you to start from scratch.


• NaBloPoMo asks you to write a blog post every day for a month (something I often do spontaneously, but not every month).


• nanofimo is set up to finish incomplete works (which may come from November's NaNoWriMo but could be for any unfinished written piece)


• NaNoEdMo is apparently for pieces completed, but needing editing, proofing, tidying, etc


• And there's 24 hour Comics for the graphic artists


• And, in June (but you can visit the site any time) there's Script Frenzy, for you playwrights and screenwriters

PS: my mate Sunshine Gray emailed me to tell me who the woman in that Gwyn book set in Barcelona might have been based on. (!) You can listen to some of Sunshine's stuff (including a comment about the Barcelona Chair (sic) on MySpace. Hi Sunshine!