NaNoWriMo Novels 2005-2011
If I Loved You (2005)
(89,675)
This was a rewrite of a novel that I wrote in 2000. I had submitted that earlier version to some writing contests and got some rather negative feedback that was so damaging that I stopped writing in 2001. (The September 11 events didn’t help that damaged psyche either…). When I went back to re-read the 2005 draft I was so disappointed in it that I thought I would just give up writing. I had no ideas for 2006, until October 24th. And that became the normal trend…
Status history:
- 2005 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2006 (Jan-Jun): Competed Revision I
Current status: Set aside permanently
Night Music (2006)
(95,439)
This is the book of my heart, a story that I had been trying to write in one form or another for 15 years. It’s a “Beauty and the Beast” or “Phantom of the Opera” type story. I’ve been obsessed with Phantom of the Opera since the 1990s. I tried my first ‘type’ story in 1991, and it was horrible. I tried again in the later 1990s with the same results, and then put it aside after that. When the Andrew Lloyd Webber movie came out, the obsession kicked back in. I actually wrote a re-telling of the Leroux novel in late 2005 and worked on it again in 2006, which I think is what led to the idea that I finally came up with, an original story using some of the ideas from the novel. (Disfigured musical genius living as a hermit, discovers a young, talented musician–violinist in this case– and wants to help her…) I love this idea, I love this book, in all its revisions. I don’t know that I will ever stop trying to revise it and make it perfect. This book is so close to me, I don’t know that I could ever let anyone read it. Fortunately (really, it is fortunate), it is the only book I’ve written for NaNo that I feel this way about. 
This story is about Beth, a talented violinist (orphaned at 4 years old), who discovers a secret family history and travels to North Carolina to go to grad school at the same conservatory that her mother had attended. There she finds a mysterious violinist whom she begins a correspondence with, and eventually learns that he is tied to the past that she is trying to uncover.
Status history:
- 2006 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2007 (Jan-Sep): Completed Rewrite
- 2007 (Dec): Completed Revision I
- 2008 (Apr-Aug): Completed Revision II
- 2008 (Dec): Completed Revision III
- 2010 (Jan-Feb): Started but didn’t complete Revision IV
Current Status: Resting, still considering a Revision IV
The Third Time’s the Charm (2007)
(125,023)
This was the first novel that I ever wrote that almost fell into the ‘literary fiction’ genre. I realized as I started it that I was dealing with some pretty hefty themes: adultery, alcoholism, the relationships between mother and daughters, that sort of stuff. This is where I realized that I might be heading more into women’s fiction rather than romance, though my stories always have romantic elements. This story grew out of my new involvement in music, particularly joining a community orchestra. In my real life, I’d just started playing with the Phil, and we were preparing for our first concert of the year while I was trying to come up with ideas for NaNo. I felt like if I didn’t write about music and an orchestra, I wasn’t going to write anything, since I was so busy with it.
True to my genre fiction tendencies, all of the ‘hefty themes’ have become watered down in revisions. Not intentionally, it’s just happened.
This is the story of Heather, who leaves her husband after catching him cheating on her. She takes her 8-year-old daughter back home to live with her mother while she tries to sort her life out. There she rediscovers the violin, finds an old friend, and becomes infatuated with a member of a local jazz group. It’s also the story of Ryan, whose wife moved out of the house days after their daughter graduated from high school, then filed for divorce. He now finds himself 47 and alone in more ways than he’d anticipated. He notices a woman in the crowd at a gig, then discovers that she’s going to be auditioning to the orchestra that he directs.
Status:
- 2007 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2009 (Jan-Jul): Completed Revision I
- 2010 (Jul-Sept): Completed Revision II
- 2012 (Mar-May 9): Completed Revision III
Current Status: Resting
Mancunian Waltz (2008) (Rewrite 2011)
(163,218) – - – - – - – (50,471)
This was my 150k challenge. After November of 2007, a friend and I both committed to writing 150k for 2008′s NaNoWriMo. I knew I’d have to have a big idea for it, since I’d only write one book, and one book isn’t 150k (not in romance or women’s fiction, anyway). Earlier in 2008, I came up with two story ideas. The early idea for Mancunian Waltz was inspired by the television adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In addition to the Phantom of the Opera obsession, I’ve always been interested in age-gap romances. Large age gaps, not just a few years. I think my biggest age gap to this point (in a NaNo novel) was fifteen years (in Night Music). In Jane Eyre the age gap is closer to 20 years, and this fascinates me. Especially when you bring it into today’s western world, where it’s not nearly as common as it was in the 19th century. I wrote a bunch of scenes for the story in early 2008, but they went nowhere. It wasn’t really a story at all. I also started a story called Love Bytes that year, but other than a perfect title and awesome book cover, I got little done on it. Then I got obsessed with Doctor Who, particularly Christopher Eccleston’s “Doctor.” And I got interested in watching all of the behind-the-scenes type stuff and reading about these actors and the speculation about their lives, and… Well, the idea that became Mancunian Waltz grew from there, from those two different ideas. I actually outlined and planned this story quite a bit before November, and of course all of that planning was out the window by day 2.
This is the story of Jennifer, who is probably the happiest most perfectly adjusted of all of my female characters…ever. She’s intelligent, goal oriented, and devoted to her father (her mother died when she was a child). She knows exactly what she wants to do with her life, and is perfectly situated to make it happen. When she’s sixteen, she befriends Hannah, a girl form the U.K. whom she meets on an internet message board devoted to the works of Jane Austen. They become fast friends, and when it’s time to go decide on a university, Hannah surprises Jennifer by deciding to attend the same university that Jennifer is, in Bloomington, Indiana. This is also very much Hannah’s story. It’s also the story of Reece, Hannah’s father, whom Hannah has a rocky relationship with. (Hannah’s mother also died when Hannah was a child, which is one bond that Jennifer and Hannah share.) Reece is an actor, and an unwilling and mostly absent father. But recent events have made him examine his life, and he’s finally ready to change his relationship with his daughter. His opportunity comes when Hannah plans to spend the summer in England in order to be the maid of honor for a friend’s wedding. However, Hannah is planning on bringing her American friend to spend the summer there with her.
Status history:
- 2008 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2009 (Jun-Dec): Attempted rewrite, not completed
- 2010 (Dec) – 2011 (Feb): Attempted rewrite, not completed
- 2011 (Nov – Dec): Revision 1 completed Jan 2, 2012
Current status: Resting
Friends and Lovers (2009)
(95,715)
Probably the least thought out of all of my novels, and I don’t really know where it came from. I had been doing some research on Jacqueline du’Pre, had just watched a biography about her, and her story just saddened me. And then there was another cellist. I’m actually not sure if I heard about her before or after I came up with the idea. It was a cellist who showed enormous promise and potential for a remarkable career (in the early-ish part of the 1900s) and then vanished, disappeared into private life for no known reason, when she was around 20. I don’t even remember this cellist’s name now, but I suspect I might have heard something about this and that’s what led to this idea. (I know that I saw an article about her after I’d written this novel, but I might have heard of it before then.)
I actually had two idea for this story, and wasn’t sure which one was more feasible. I finally decided on a story type that resembles Night Music in some ways, in that there’s both a past story and a present story told at the same time (at least for part of the book.) It’s another one where a daughter learns about a secret life of her mother, but it’s very different from Night Music.
This is the story of Dierdre. It’s also the story of Dierdre’s mother, Lauren. There’s sibling rivalry, adultery, parental pressure on a rising star, messy divorces… You name it, I think I threw it in here. Since I haven’t yet revised this one (though I did read through it) it’s hard for me to summarize like I did the above. There are a bunch of story-lines, and this is truly a relationship novel: Dierdre and sister Heidi, Dierdre and unhappily married Dale, Lauren and Heidi, Lauren and Dierdre, Dierdre and Heidi’s husband, Lauren and Grayson McLean, and finally, Dierdre and Grayson McLean.
Dierdre is a successful chamber musician in New York. She has happily left her family behind and rarely thinks of them until she learns that her mother has died. While she considers not going back for the funeral, she finally does, and feels the disappointment only in so far as now she will certainly never learn who her father was. She learned when she was thirteen that her mother had had an affair, and she was the result of it, but her mother never told anyone the name of her father. Because for all these years Dierdre’s sister Heidi has been close to their mother, Dierdre doesn’t expect to receive anything from the will. But she learns that she has inherited everything, including a Stradivarius cello that no one knew Lauren possessed.
Dale (around nine years older) was a childhood friend of Dierdre’s, as well as her first crush. Dale broke Dierdre’s heart when he married his pregnant girlfriend and then moved out of state. It was years later when Dierdre confessed her childish infatuation to him, and he admitted that he not only felt the same years ago, but still did. His marriage kept them separated. Dierdre refused to be a repeat of her own history.
Heidi is Lauren’s estranged half-sister, the daughter of Lauren and Lauren’s husband. Before Dierdre learned of her mother’s affair, she always felt the pain of seeing that the man she believed was her father loved Heidi far more than he loved her. Even once she knew why, it didn’t lessen the pain and resentment. To add insult to injury, Heidi ended up marrying Dierdre’s boyfriend when Dierdre went away to school. The two sisters hadn’t spoken since then, until Heidi informed Dierdre of their mother’s death.
Lauren was the mother of Heidi and Dierdre, and had a secret past that she never spoke of to her husband or daughters. She was known to them as Lauren Gray, a quiet, seemingly content wife and mother who loved classical music and going to the symphony, but never showed a hint that she had once been on her way to a music career herself. She never encouraged music in either of her daughters until Dierdre showed an interest in the cello. Then she showed a single-minded determination that Dierdre got all of the education possible, but always leaving the actual doing to Dierdre. It wasn’t until Heidi turned eighteen, and Dierdre thirteen, that the truth of Dierdre’s birth came to be known. Lauren’s husband left, Heidi went off to school, and Dierdre and Lauren were left alone. Lauren never told Dierdre the name of her father, only that he had been someone she had loved very, very much.
Grayson McLean was a cello teacher in California, and was a famous soloist as a young man, before injury ended his performing career. He is a husband and father of five grown children. He, too, has a past that he keeps as secret as possible, always shunning any questions of his long ago past, especially those related to the mysterious disappearance of one of his most promising cello students, Lauren Spaulding. When his wife dies, he surprises his children by his desire to move back to Indiana, where he grew up, and stay in a retirement community there rather than move in with any of his children.
Status history:
- 2009 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2010 (Sep): Read through NaNo draft
Current status: Resting, will rewrite at some point
Love Bytes (2010)
(88,748)
This is a rewrite (can it actually be called that?) of a novel I tried to write in the spring of 2008, but like my early attempt at what became Mancunian Waltz, it never really got off the ground. NaNoWriMo worked its magic once again and I ended up with an 88k word finished rough draft, albeit with plenty of holes in it. This was my first year using Scrivener to write an actual first draft, and because of its non-linear interface, I was able to just skip scenes and leave placeholders where I couldn’t actually think of anything to write at the time.
This is the story of Emma, who is still grieving over the loss of her husband and children in a car accident. At the cemetery one day she hears a violinist, and on her way home she rescues a dog that is running along the roadway. When she goes to a pet store to get supplies for the dog, she finds a violin shop and buys a violin. She goes home and on the internet she finds a violin teacher who posts violin lesson videos online. She and the teacher, Mike, strike up a correspondence and friendship, and when he visits her area for his sister’s wedding, the two of them meet up for in person lessons. Near the end of his trip he confesses that he’s in love with her, but she is not ready to return his feelings.
Status history:
- 2010 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2011 (Jul-Oct): Completed Revision 1
Current status: Resting
Of Love and Coffee (2010)
(50,345)
When I finished Love Bytes on the 21st of November, I was at Starbucks and immediately decided to start something new rather than fiddle with Love Bytes for the rest of the month. I had a “Starbucks love affair” sort of story in my head before NaNoWriMo even began, and in that moment I decided that’s what I’d tackle. It would be only 50,000 words (rather than 90-100 thousand) and would just be a pretty simple love story. I had no idea what I was going to write after the first couple of scenes, but I managed to get 50,000 words in the 10 days that I had left. (Actually, I finished in 9.)
This is the simple story of Brianna, a Starbucks barista, and Tom, a regular Starbucks customer who comes in nearly every day to write his books. They fall into an instant friendship and attraction, but Tom is a playboy and not interested in settling down and commitment. That is, until Brianna dumps him and he realizes that she’s the woman of his dreams.
I started out not real happy with this, but I’m surprisingly happy with the last third of the book. I think I wrote my best love scene ever, and even the ending comes together better than I could have hoped. While originally I didn’t think I’d be interested in working on this again, or revising it, now I’m not so sure. I rather like the characters, even though their story came and went so quickly I barely remember writing it!
Status history:
- 2010 (Nov): Completed rough draft
- 2012 (Jan 17-27): Revision 1
Current Status: Resting
