Help Me Choose a Story

I have three different novel ideas and I need to decide which one to do for Nanowrimo … a middle grade mystery, a second in the series of my YA thriller, or a YA dystopian-type thriller.

The middle grade mystery, I’ll call it Madness, is something I worked on in the past, so it wouldn’t technically be starting at the beginning … which is one of the “rules” of Nanowrimo. But at the same time, if I write 50,000 words towards the MG mystery then I really will have a complete novel. I loved the characters and the premise of Madness but put it aside when my son shared his idea for a screenplay that I offered to write into a novel. Every so often Madness calls out to me, “Finish writing my story!” I always have an excuse why I don’t finish it, which may be routed in some deep personality flaw or fear of failure. Or could be I wrote myself into a corner and need to start over. In which case, if I choose Madness then I won’t be breaking any Nanowrimo rules.

I seem to have made my case for Madness except when I think of the follow up book to Gator Moon I can’t wait to take my (our, I should say since my son thought her up) main character through another thrilling ride. I’ve already been tossing around the mystery she will encounter, and since I know the characters and environment so well, the research won’t be as time consuming. After all it is already halfway through October … I’m running short on prep time. The down-side is that 50,000 words will not complete the novel. Gator Moon is around 88,000 words and I imagine the second in the series will be close to the same. After all … every good mystery/thriller has lots of twists and turns which take up a few extra words. But like Cathi said last week, it would be a decent start on a first draft.

This leads me to my dystopian/mystery/thriller novel idea. By that description alone, you can see I have a lot of work to do in defining where I want to go with it. In fact, much as I would love to start writing this new and exciting premise, I’m thinking Nanowrimo in two weeks is not the time. Maybe this should be a project for the new year, to work on after I’ve started pitching my  Nanowrimo novel …

Well, that narrows down my choices to two: YA series novel number 2 or MG series novel number 1. I can be a bit indecisive at times, so I welcome feedback from any of my blog readers out there. You can contact me here, or on Facebook or Twitter. Because come November 1, I want my only decision to be whether I eat the Snickers bar or the M&Ms that I hid at the bottom of the trick-or-treat bowl.