It came to my attention earlier this week that this marks my 10th year doing the annual madness that is National Novel Writing Month. I suppose that it’s only natural that I’ve kind of come full circle in a way.
My first NaNo novel turned into Greetings from Buena Rosa. The impulse to write that particular novel was two-fold: I wanted to write a pulpy Gato Loco novel, and I had heard a news report on NPR about a number of unsolved murders of women in the Jalisco/Chihuahua area of northern Mexico. The police were under so much pressure that they were arresting random women and torturing them until they confessed to crimes they knew nothing about. It was outrageous. And it made me wish there was some sort of justice there.
I visited justice upon the border region in the form of Gato Loco. Considering what’s going on there in our world, I suppose I was naïve to think a vigilante and his panda sidekick could change things.
So here I am gearing up to write again. The tenth anniversary of that weird baptism. I had my outlines ready to go. Everything was set.
Then a good friend and fellow author, Jeremy Zimmerman forwarded a piece about sex slavery here in this country. And after a particularly long week where the toxic vitriol of the anti-feminist movement kept trying to out-do itself, it was kind of the last straw.
I wanted justice.
So I scrapped the other story and put together something different. Something darker. Something far more compelling. Something featuring a trio of morally complex and compelling women in the lead. Something that I felt I had to write.
We’ll see how it goes. But I’m excited to see where November takes me.
Tales from the Ragged Edge 