750words and worries about NaNo
Well, after reading the lovely Asheyna’s blog post about Morning Pages and 750words.com, I decided to give it a go. First day so far, but let’s see how it goes.
Anyway, I just finished it and I thought I’d share my first 750+ words of rambling with the rest of you if you happen to be interested.
To be honest, I don’t really know what I’m going to write for this first post of 750 words. I haven’t though it through and I haven’t made any plans. Originally, the reason I had for joining was to explore it’s usage for NaNoWriMo, using th emonthly challenge to kick my arse double so (rather than just the usual ass kicking of NaNo itself). The statistical analysis of my writing intrigued me as well. I wonder whether there is any API or something for this that I can pull interesting stuff from to do my own analysis?
Anyway, the main problem I have at the moment with NaNo rapidly approaching is coming up with the “meat” of my story. The story in question being “Urges”. Urges is based off a short story of mine I wrote for the Protagonize Halloween competition. Well, I say based, it’s more “inspired” by it – the actual plots and events not necessarily follow.
As I was saying, the basic gist of Urges is that there is a hidden world beneath our own, a world where human urges and desires, suppressed deeper and deeper, eventually coalesce into something tangible, like the corpses of plants and animals being buried deeper and deeper until pressure and time turn them to oil. Much like oil, time and suppression make these urges dark and powerful. So among us, human urges – dark desires made flesh – walk among us and seek expression in those people that allow themselves to be taken by them, or if the Urge is strong enough, the victims have no choice at all. In the world of untamed and dangerous Urges and desires stands a force to hold them back, a force well versed in the expression of desires and urges, a force that knows the folly of lying to oneself and of embracing ones own unique urges. This force exists as another community hidden beneath the fetish community, the kinksters, the freaks. These people know what it is to be truly themselves, to take control of their desires and urges. Urges is about the few people that are Aware. Those that see the creatures in the dark and would protect their unseeing flock from them. They are the shepherds of the unwary and they are our protectors.
Urges focuses mainly around the story of a single character, a University student named Caitlyn and her desire to explore her kinky side. Through no fault of her own, she gets exposed to the world beneath the world and has no choice but to join the select group of kinksters that have developed their kinks and harnessed their urges to control, contain and destroy those Urges that have taken form and gone out of control.
However, I don’t really have much of a story as of yet in my head. I have the basic idea of girl gets involved with stuff outside her control, get inducted into secret organisation but I don’t really have an overall story arc. I have some basic sub-plots revolving around love-triangles, relationships within and without the group and the exploration of the fetish scene but otherwise no overall idea for a proper story. I need help.
One of the ideas I’ve been entertaining but haven’t really taken any time to develop yet is that something is happening with the Urges. Rather than being the mindless, desire-driven beasts that they are, something seems to be controlling them and it is perhaps through an expression of this control that Caitlyn gets exposed to this world of Urges and protectors. As the story develops, perhaps investigations into this controlling force can reveal something greater at work and the group begins to break down from within, the suspicion that it must be one of them, since only they have the requisite skills to even entertain the notion of controlling these things, slowly drives them apart. Caitlyn, new to the group, is immune to the bickering and the flows of power in it and so sees a bigger picture and it takes her to use her unique talents to find and confront this unseen force that is controlling the Urges and breaking down the one thing stopping them from running amok from within.
The only thing is, I’ve got it in my head that Caitlyn is a submissive and until I can really learn more about the fetish scene and exactly what being a submissive means in terms of personal empowerment and desire, I’m not sure I can really work that into a story that requires her to take a leading role and defeat a power that quite clearly has master/dominative overtones. Anyone who could direct me towards material about the theory and psychology about dom/sub relationships and power transferal would earn my thanks.
750words.com gives some pretty interesting statistics too. I like that.