I don't think I ever came back and reported my plan for NaNo. I'm pretty excited. I'm going to do a series of kids books (I haven't figured out if they'll be chapter books or low middle grade) using characters I once wrote a YA for. My sister suggested that I write kid books for them, and the idea stuck.
So the premise is that Bex is a girl who tries so very hard to be good for her minister father, and then one day she finds Trouble in her backyard. Literally. Trouble is the spirit of trouble (in training) and he has to practice on the only human who can see him, which turns out to be Bex. They do eventually become friends, but he's also very annoying to be around since he causes so many problems, and Bex gets blamed for all the trouble he causes. What's fun about doing a kid's book for them is that you always have to wonder if he's imaginary or not, whereas in the YA, Bex nips the "imaginary friend" theory in the bud right away.
When writing the YA, I was torn between giving it a more fantasy-oriented plot (Bex's life is in danger, they go to Trouble's world, etc.) or to have a more contemporary plot (Bex goes through normal high school problems, only she has Trouble around to complicate them), and I went for fantasy because I knew I couldn't sustain a YA plot with the contemporary version. It would have become too episodic, which doesn't really work for YA. But in CB and low MG, episodic is totally okay, and I am confident I can do "the adventures of Bex and Trouble" in the real world.
So, yeah, that's my plan. Every NaNo I do something I've never done before, and for a while, I was just going to give in to the fact that I would break that streak this year. But I've certainly never written for this young an age before, so I'm happy to say I'll be continuing that tradition
