About "Cold"

[Originally written at cold-brrr.blogspot.com, a private invitation-only blog where I posted all my NaNoWriMo posts during November 2007.  Since Cold is still a work-in-progress, most of those posts still remain private.]

You can read more about what NaNoWriMo is & why I’m doing it in my main blog. The origins of the idea for Cold, the novel I plan to write this November for NaNoWriMo, is there too. But about Cold itself:

About Cold. Cold is (or will be) a novel about two young women who live on a planet in the late stages of terraforming. They’ve just met again at age 17 after one of them, Boleyn, returns from a sort of exile that she & her family have been in since Boleyn was 12 due to some kind of disgrace that her parents got into — they’d been sent to some kind of hardship duty at a remote project facility for five years. Emphasis will be more on human & social issues than on science (good thing, since I’m not a scientist) — I want to explore how human communities, & the overall ecologies they are part of, might evolve in a place that’s truly new, with no other populations whether human or alien to be “conquered” or “assimilated”? How does a planet that was formerly barren of life become, eventually, “home”?

About this blog. I’m writing this post on October 1, just a few hours away from the opening of sign-up for this year’s NaNoWriMo. A good time to start up the blog, then. When November comes along, I’ll mostly be posting the actual daily writing necessary to meet the goal of a 50,000 novel (or some travesty thereof) in a month. But before then, & probably also during, there will be other posts that are notes, lists, speculations, backstories, maybe some scribbledy maps — the kinds of stuff that gets written around the actual writing. But no actual novel-writing until November 1. I’ll make it easy to distinguish between actual novel writing & notes with labels. For example, notice how this post has the labels notes and about (below). A Table of Contents will show up at some point too.

Feel free to comment or ask questions. Anyone invited to read this blog is my friend, & comments, whether critical or laudatory, are welcome. Questions too! Yes, & I’ll even answer ’em! Just remember this will be a hell-bent-for-leather writing, so you can expect some rough spots. We’ll save the polish for later.