To all the haters: Suck it. Suck it hard.

Ah, the sweetly sorrowful feeling of accomplishment. The ringing echo of the cymbol is in my ears. The final gun has gone off. In case you missed it, I wrote my novel. Oh, I’m by no means done and I only “won” the NaNoWriMo by moving the goal posts from having a complete manuscript to having a first draft that exceeded 50,000 words. But, well, it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written and damn if I’m not going to be proud of it. NaNo is a blast and I want my place in that particular madhouse cemented. Just don’t ask me if you can read the whole thing any time soon.

Anyhow, I think – for tomorrow at least – I’m going to take a break. I just wrote 50k in less than a week (To say nothing of everything else I’ve written. I’m just saying but I have about 40k worth of half-finished posts sitting in my ghost file this very moment. I I can’t even contemplate how much verbiage I’ve poured into things here. The scary thing is that as the week’s gone on I’m writing more. And faster. Just not sure if it’s better.). It’s taken a toll. The waiting arms of the always welcoming sleep call to me because I’ve been neglecting her a bit. I’m going to take a well deserved vacation and veg out someway, somehow, before I put pen to paper again.

Or, I might just wake up from a good night’s sleep – for once – and feel like there are so many things crowding around inside my head that I just have to write them down before they burst. I could go either way at this point, I think. I mean, I just realized a good way of explaining the veteran’s effect vis a vis the Pareto curve. And heard an idea about treating a fictional message board as a troupe of actors that just blows my novel out of the water from over the horizon. And I’ve had about two ideas for a new novel today. I mean, tell me this doesn’t look good on a book jacket, so to speak:

A casual group of players are friends even though they’ve never met. One day one of them says they’ll be afk for a bit but then when they come back they act incredibly strange, log out, and don’t log in again for a few weeks. Later on, the police contact one of the group to question him about the disappearance/murder of the missing player as well as the wealth of racy e-mails and chat logs between the two left on the player’s computer. He’s the prime suspect, something else his wife isn’t too happy about. The rest of the group hears about it and (along with a CSI type techie person who also plays the game and a message board campaign) begin searching for the missing player. Who logged in *after the police said she’d disappeared*. As the online world collides with the real one public hysteria mounts, the police are under greater pressure to catch the killer, and the whole group falls under suspicion. Which doesn’t help the fact that they’re exploring the shadier side of online gaming with RMT and Asian farmers whom the missing player was an advocate for/friend of (the missing player was a grad student who was preparing a paper on online gaming and its practices or, perhaps an investigative reporter) and up to some mighty suspicious things. And it doesn’t help matters when the game’s publisher puts the lockdown on things to avoid any more bad publicity. But was it some overseas corporation that wanted to silence a voice of protest, the game’s developers who wanted to protect their business model, the jilted e-lover, or something else entirely that’s responsible for the disappearance of the missing player – whom no one is quite sure is dead or alive? It’s up to a ragtag collection of players to mount a real world quest for virtual clues and seek out their illusory friend. The game they played just turned deadly serious.

And the best thing is now that I’ve fleshed out a game like ClotH I have a ready made world and community to plug that plotline into (Wonderful thing about persistent worlds, you know). It’s a paragraph like that I spun into my novel, after all. Oh well, no time and no energy at the moment. But I did it once. I can do it again. And different, possibly better, the next time around. Tomorrow, who knows, but if nothing else I think I have at least one solid idea for the next NaNo. Because, oh yeah, I’ll be running that race again. And tomorrow I think I’m going to be all over the boards as the craziness reaches fever pitch, if nothing else.

Outlook: Hibernation awaits.

[1] Absolutely no clue whatsoever