…and I have a story. I grouped together all of my story ideas and whittled them down, and down some more. Twenty, twelve, nine – all of a sudden, only one story really fit everything I wanted this year. Fantasy, here we come!

A lot of my runners-up got ruled out because they do not have a complete plot yet. I know it is not necessary, but I like to have a beginning and an end when I finish NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month challenge). When you write without a plan, it is called “pantsing,” because “pantsers” write by the seat of their pants. I plan to try writing with this method at some point. To this end, I have put a few ideas aside for it, and purposely not outlined them.

Some of my older story ideas, including this year’s selection, have scenes which I wrote long ago. I need to figure out how best to incorporate highly edited scenes into November’s word count. New words will be added directly; that is obvious. Copying something straight in would simply not count. But for scenes which are still essential to the story, yet written long enough ago that they no longer fit with the style or continuity of the rest of it – how do I count the words then?

Another interesting problem I face: I do not know how this story ends. I know the protagonists triumph by defeating the usurper king. But do we defeat him via death, imprisonment, or exile? How did he usurp power over the kingdom in the first place? And should I kill off a major supporting character along the way? I have never killed an ally before, and not many enemies, either.

Perhaps it will become obvious where, or if, that scenes belongs as the rest of the story fills in. And the beauty of NaNoWrimo means that I can write the scene, and the words in it count whether it makes the final draft or not. I witnessed plenty of people in my region adding the word counts for high school or college reports to their total. Technically, that makes them rebels – and rebels are welcomed and cheered on as enthusiastically as everyone.