NaNoWriMo Win and Postpartum Blues

I did it again. I wrote another novel draft -- or 50,100 words of one, anyway. Which makes me a Winner in National Novel Writing Month terms. This is my seventh win.

As usual, I wrote a SciFi/fantasy story. This one includes time travel and people from the future. I love people from the future. And aliens. My aliens are simply people not-from-earth who look like people from earth. Generally, they are more advanced technologically or they practice magic.

I haven't been able to put this year's story into a log line yet. The through line is vaguely about love in that the hero gets involved in rescuing his wife. It's also about talent, a theme I love. Talent is generally under nurtured. I try to point out the advantages of talent and the waste of talent suppressed or undeveloped. In the books, talent refers to magic or magical powers or some combination of occult, magic, and intuition.

This year's main character, Lauren, is targeted by a society called the Pathbreakers as the crux of their plan to dominate the universe. She is chosen because she is gifted with a physiology that affects time lines. She is repeatedly abducted in her various parallel time lines to ensure the time lines collapse into one: the one that makes the Pathbreakers supreme.

Her husband, Ted, works with specialists from the Chronometry Department of the FBI, to rescue the "home" Lauren and return her to her native time, in an attempt to restore the parallels and defeat the Pathbreakers.

There's also an off-worlder (the PC term for alien) who is a master Chronometrist and a Philonaut (a philosophical astronaut) with his own agenda about how the Lauren time line should unfold. He's on his own side.

What Made This Year Unique
Storywise
1. Very few props or magical items.
2. No magical creatures.
3. Ordinary locations.

Writing Process
4. No zero word days.
5. Slow start.
6. Easy finish: 2500 words on the last day as opposed to 5000.
7. No coffee!
8. No write-ins!
9. No cafe writing!

It is, as usual, a big let down when I win. I'm off later today to the Thank God It's Over gathering. This helps a little to ease the pain.

I plan to go on writing. I was quite successful with this last year. I eventually finished and self-published that novel. This year I'm not so sure. I might dip into a past novel draft and work on that instead of working on this one. There are some thorny problems with the plot that should be easier to resolve if I take a break.

Anyway. It's over. I miss it. Writing alone is not the same. Still, it's a fun month and proved to me, once again, that having an ongoing active project is so good for me.