Sonja Foust, Romance Author

If you think just because you sold your book, you’re never going to have to pitch it again, you’re wrong. Go over to Promo-ho.com today and get some tips on your elevator pitch.

My elevator pitch for the past 2 weeks wherein I have not been blogging would go something like:

Sonja is going nuts. Really, really nuts. She is trying to write her NaNoWriMo novel but is pretty much made of fail right now. She admits that she will probably not get it done in November. And will not win. Again. She’s getting used to it though, so the sting of failure isn’t quite as harsh this year. She does have good excuses, but you know the drill: “Excuses are like [insert vaguely insulting body part name here]. Everyone has one and they’re all full of [some kind of gross body function byproduct].” She hopes you will not abandon her blog for something new and shiny, at least not until the end of November, after which time she will have no excuse not to resume blogging. (If she doesn’t start blogging after Thanskgiving again, you are allowed, nay, encouraged to leave her sorry butt behind.)

NaNoWriMo starts October 31st at midnight, so if you don’t see me this weekend, you know what I’m doing. I have to plot almost the entire novel on Saturday as I have been procrastinating. (Well, does it really count as procrastinating if you really honestly just have not had time to do it? I mean, I have 3 loads of laundry sitting on the rocking chair in my bedroom– that’s how busy this week has been.)

In any case, wish me luck, and join me if you are equally crazy and would like to write 50,000 words in 30 days (plus an extra hour because of the time change). It’s fun! I promise!

I need a title. Ok, well, I don’t need a title. I haven’t started the book yet. But part of the fun of NaNoWriMo is wasting time doing stuff like coming up with titles and making banners and cover art for your book that doesn’t exist yet. So, yeah, I kind of do need a title.

Here’s my one sentence premise line (which may change, but hey, we’ll go with it for now):

A beautiful and bookish historian falls into a time warp and ends up on an adventure with the infamous (and surprisingly non-fiction) gentleman scientist from H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE, to keep his invention out of the hands of an evil government official bent on world domination.

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I’ve been following the awesome Alexandra Sokoloff’s pre-Nanowrimo workshop on her blog. If you haven’t checked her out yet, do. She’s got tons of great information on her blog, especially if you are a plotter. So far, we’ve made a list of ten movies that are somehow related to our Nanowrimo ideas, and we are now writing premise lines for all 10 of those movies. I just finished mine, so I thought I’d post them here. I used Netflix to get me going, so some of these are lifted almost word-for-word from Netflix because they were really good! (Others from Netflix were awful and I pretty much had to start from scratch.) So, here are my master list and premise lines. (See if you can figure out what I might be working on for Nanowrimo!)

1. The Time Machine (1960)

On the eve of the 20th century, December 31, 1899, a scientist invents a time machine that allows him to travel to the distant future, which he hopes will be a peaceful utopia, only to find that earth’s future harbors a more sinister evil than he could have imagined.

1b. The Time Machine (2002)– This one’s a bonus because I felt like I should do a different one for each movie, since the motivations were so different. (more…)

In the fiction writing world, we tend to divide ourselves up into two distinct groups: the plotters and the pantsers. The plotters, well, plot. They outline, they plan, they do all the anal-retentive things you might expect. The pantsers write by the seat of their pants, hence the term. They often say, “If I know how the book ends, I’m not interested in writing it anymore.”

Nanowrimo cometh. Inherently, Nanowrimo tends to foster the pantsing school of thought. Chris Baty’s guide to all things Nanowrimo is even called No Plot? No Problem! It’s a great book, and pantsing really does work for some people… but not all of us.

I am, by nature, a plotter. I plan pretty much every aspect of my life, including what I write. That’s not to say that everything always goes according to plan, but I’m paralyzed without some idea of where to go and what to do. So how do I swing Nanowrimo?

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