Scribbling Saturday: NaNo Planning

NaNoWriMo time is coming round again. To remind you, that is National Novel Writing Month - participants commit to writing 50,000 words in one month. The month in question is November, and that makes October the month for planning.

The idea is to do all the research and work out each chapter, so that when November comes, you only have to write. The question is, research and plan what? I don't actually have a novel to write. I have a couple of ideas, and I'm working on them both in the hope that something takes off.

I have a science fiction short story that I want to make into a novel, but I'm not sure I have enough plot yet to sustain it. At least, being science fiction, I can make most of it up. The other alternative is to write a historical novel based on my Alina book. But again, the story of her life is not enough to sustain a novel, and although I can make up a lot of it, it does have to be reasonably historically accurate.

So I am doing a lot of reading in the 14th century and desperately looking for some subplots. And in between, I'm looking for subplots in the other novel. I wonder if it counts if you write two 25,000 word novels in a month??? It's still 50,000 words.