It's time once again for National Novel Writing Month! This year will be my fifth year in a row. For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo is a worldwide event in which writers all over the world attempt to pump out 50,000 words in one month. It's a personal goal more than anything - a way for writers to motivate themselves and improve their productivity. There are write-ins to attend, where writers can meet face-to-face in their local regions. It's a rather informal, casual affair to promote the creative spirit.
Realistically, I find that 50K words in a month is more than do-able - it amounts to 1,667 words a day (a few pages). It doesn't have to be pretty - editing while writing is actually counterproductive and unwise during this period of unbridled drafting. It doesn't even have to be finished. As long as you can pump out 50K words by November 30th, you're a winner. You can always use December onwards to finish, edit, and rewrite the novel.
Technically, there's nothing stopping you from copying and pasting one word 50,000 times and calling yourself a winner. The problem is, if you do that for whatever reason, you're doing a disservice to yourself (unless you truly believe 50,000 of one word is actually sell-able as a novel - in that case, good luck). It's all for a writer's personal benefit.
This year, I plan on tackling a story idea I've had in mind since 2012 or so. This is an idea that came up out of a conversation I had about how technology often does our thinking for us, and removes our own capacity for thinking. As technology becomes more convenience and intelligent, what reason does a person have to learn or exercise existing skills? If the mind doesn't get exercised often enough, it is bound to be come dulled, leading to a society of people who can't think or function without technology.
Out of that line of thinking, my new novel will be about a future where everything is run by an omnipresent artificial intelligence. It is called NORA - the Neurological Oligarchy of the Reformed America. It is a future in which NORA runs every department in the government, and it uses implants in every citizens' brain to analyze their lives and make their decisions for them. It would tell everybody what to eat, what their careers are, who they should socialize with, who to marry, what to say to people, and everything else.
In this setting, the story will be about Tom Guilding, who works as a police officer in an elite first response team called D-40. He will become involved in a case in which a terrorist named Lucifer has stolen funds from NORA, and plans to destroy the AI through some unknown, nefarious means. In order to catch Lucifer, NORA takes out Tom's implant and sends him undercover. It is up to Tom to find Lucifer, uncover evidence, and learn what his plan is in order to stop him. However, without the guidance of NORA, Tom will have to exercise his mind for the first time. He will have to operate and overcome challenges on his own. The more he learns, however, the more he questions his loyalty and questions who the real villain is.
This novel will be entitled Thoughtless. It will take after a lot of sci-fi classics that I know and love - stories like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell's 1984, and films like Logan's Run, Equilibrium, The Matrix, Swordfish, Point Break, and The Dark Knight. Tom is a character inspired by the heroes of these various stories - usually authority figures who are made to see the evils of a dystopian society. Lucifer is an unhinged, unstable villain originally inspired by the various villains that John Travolta played in various films, but at this point Lucifer has become a much more menacing figure in the same vein as The Joker or Fight Club's Tyler Durden. Altogether, my story will carry some pretty heavy-duty themes concerning the dangers of allowing technology to take over responsibility over our lives, and at its heart this will be a story about a man freeing his mind.
Some music to inspire me for this project can he heard on 8tracks. My playlist includes a ton of electronica - bands like Kosheen, BT, the Chemical Brothers, Phutureprimitive, The Crystal Method, The Glitch Mob, Celldweller, and more - and some soundtrack music, such as the film scores for The Dark Knight, Takers, Transformers, The Social Network, Ghost in the Shell, Lucy, and more. There's a ton of beat to it all.
This is one of those projects that's been bouncing around in my head for a while, and it'll be quite a blast to finally manifest it into a tangible form. My progress can be tracked at the NaNoWriMo website, and I should be able to get this whole thing completed before the end of the year.
