I expected you guys to have gone crazy posting this weekend, but it was actually a pretty reasonable amount of posts to go through.
Yay, Smiley!!!! I also finished my R&R. I did it on Thursday, but I haven't had a chance to post here or send it out since. We can figure out how to write the e-mail to the agent together, haha. Those e-mails are harder than a novel, IMO.
Okay, new, just-as-exciting subject:
I spent the weekend at a regional convention for the Sweet Adelines, which is female barbershop (you probably recognize barbershop as male barbershop quartets, such as in The Music Man, but there are female quartets and choruses as well). They told me that it would be a lot of cool vocal technique classes, but this year they focused on choreography and marketing to younger folks. I thought it was great fun, although I have a sore throat (so it's just as well that we didn't do vocal stuff).
Yesterday, some of the people in my chorus talked to a group from a local high school that had come to learn, even though they aren't Sweet Adelines. It was a female barbershop chorus from that school. Then last night they had a contest for teen quartets, and watching the first group (who won), I started to think of the girls in the group as individuals and what their stories were and how it would be to be in a barbershop quartet in high school. (It helped that half the presentations focused on what would attract teens and 20-somethings to this type of music).
So now I'm totally inspired to write a story about a female barbershop quartet in high school. I got contact info from the director of the high school choir (I didn't want to look creepy and approach the girls), and I also got the phone number of one of the girls in the winning quartet so that I could interview them if I want to (Look at me, making contacts and doing research!) And there's a thing called Harmony Camp that some of the ladies in my chorus volunteer for and it's a weekend camp for teens doing barbershop, so I think I'll volunteer for that if I'm not doing field work! And of course, there will be competition in April, and I'll be able to see how teens deal with that (there should be at least one teen quartet from each region, and there are at least 23 regions. ETA: What am I thinking? That's international, and April is regional, so I don't know what the make-up of teen quartets will be like).
I don't have a story yet, beyond them working towards the International competition, but I envision giving each of the four girls a POV, and maybe titling each chapter with their vocal part, which I kinda envision determining their individual personalities and story-lines. I have a little background for one, and an inciting incident for the story, and one of the gals I was driving back with had this great anecdote that I totally want to put in some novel some day, maybe this one.
I'm both jazzed and nervous about this. Another story idea that will take some research, and also it's contemporary, and I'm going to try my hardest not to add a ghost in this one
but I don't know if I can sustain a contemporary plot.
I'm aiming for it being a NaNo novel, which gives me a whole year of Sweet Adeline's events to kinda see how everything works, instead of just guessing, as well as interviewing these girls.