NaNoWriMo 2013: this year I challenge myself again

A few days ago this year’s NaNoWriMo edition started, in which writers from around the world challenge themselves to write 50,000 words of a novel between 1 and 30 November, with an average of 1667 words a day.

Last year I participated for the first time with the thriller “The Mentor”, which I will publish next spring in Italian (in 2015 in English), and this year I decided to try again.

This time the situation is a bit less controlled. In 2012 I spent the month of October to prepare a nice outline of a story I had conceived two years before. This year, however, because of the many deadlines, since I’m preparing the omnibus of “Red Desert” (in Italian) and the Italian translation of “Amantarra” by Richard J. Galloway, both of which will come out between late November and early December, I found myself at 1 November with an embryonic idea consisting of the first scene, the last one and the names of the two main characters of the story. Really a little, but I decided to try anyway.

I will take advantage of this opportunity to do an experiment, bridging the gap between that beginning and the ending day by day through the mind of the protagonist, who will be involved in a series of daring situations in the course of just 24 hours. In short, it will be an action thriller that will allow me to try my hand in a subgenre characterised by speed and unexpected changes of scenery.

I would say that at least conceptually it fits the principle of NaNoWriMo, also considering that I can devote myself to it for no more than two hours a day, in which, like a lunatic, I open the file, I start to write freely, dragging the protagonist from one adventure to the other, up to reach the target and then shut everything, and resume the next day.

I think it will be a useful exercise, not only to maintain a certain discipline in writing, which I have already acquired during the writing of “Red Desert” (the last episode was written at the rhythm of NaNoWriMo: 96,000 words in 8 weeks), but also to force myself to write without thinking too much and see what comes out, as well as to try out a very specific sub-genre, some of which is already present in my stories, but it was never the main one.

I don’t know how it will turn out. Tomorrow I’m going to face the fourth session, after three days when I was able to meet the target, complete the first chapter and start the second one. At the end I will tell you how it turned out.

If you want to follow me in this latest adventure, you can do it in my profile on the site of NaNoWriMo, here in the progress bar on the right column of the blog or on myFacebook page, where I will update those who follow me on my progress every day.

But I have not told you yet the most important thing. The title is “Affinità d’intenti” (a tentative English title would be “Kindred Purposes”) and here’s a short blurb.

The undercover agent Amelia Jennings shows up for an interview at the law firm Goldberg & Associates, with the aim of getting hired and investigate a series of murders that have as their victims some lawyers in the City. Behind them is an elusive contract killer, whom her squad is hunting for months.
Her plan, however, fails even before starting up.