I am doing NaNoWriMo 2009!

[estirise]

Okay, I spent a few hours last night hashing out my novel idea over IM. It's not completely figured out yet, but I have a good idea of what's likely to be in the plot.

Blurbish thing, for the moment, to get an idea: Puberty can be a pain for anybody. But for 14 year old Erin, it's scarier than normal, especially when she finds herself pushing a pregnant friend up against a fence. When she goes to her mother, she learns that her mother availed herself of an alien's offer to carry Erin to term... an offer that sometimes left the children with small mutations. Now Erin and her mother must track down the alien that gave birth to Erin in order to figure out what's going on and to save Erin's sanity.

Yeah, that blurb kind of sucks. The general idea is that decades ago, an alien invasion fleet came to earth. The invasion failed, but there were alien survivors, the members of the alien third sex/gender. They have to be pregnant most of the time, or they die. So they started assaulting pregnant human women in hopes that they'd be able to survive that way. Gradually, the aliens and humans came to a sort of peace, and the aliens discovered that at least a sizeable minority of women were willing to leave the childbearing to them. Even a couple of cases of "mutations" didn't effect women much, especially when it was a cheap way to skip pregnancy. (The "mutations" were the third sex's body trying to contribute their DNA to the baby, just as if it was their own species.)

In Erin's case, she's the first more-or-less human third sex/gender. And guess what comes along with that? (A big mess, to be exact.)

So, there are some things to consider when posting this year's novel-in progress. One, I hope to either publish it through Lulu or through a small press publisher, so I can't exactly post it publicly. Two, the whole thing has to do with sexual identity/gender, does discuss biology/the process of sex, and it's likely that while there won't be a sex scene, this is a teenager who is going to feel (somewhat) sexual urges. So, I want to not make people uncomfortable.

ETA: This is influenced by Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (which features aliens with a third sex), and I'm being very careful to differentiate this from Imago (the main, hybrid character grows up to be the first third-sex).

[Poll #1465576]

Comments

[reka]

I didn't select Inksome because I don't have one. Not that I couldn't get one if I needed to, but since most of the people I talk to regularly do NaNo, I like to spend the month reading everything I can find that they've written. So I'd like to read yours, too. It depends how separate from your normal journal you want it, I think. If you plan to post daily, I recommend filters or a second journal/community, but that's dependent on how much you think your flist likes hearing about NaNo. I'm generally of the opinion that you should keep things in as few different places as possible, but DW is pretty nice to post on. I am unfortunately not very good at decision-making.