My Goal for NaNo — Finish “Changing Faces”

Folks, I’m going to set this in stone right now: my goal for NaNo is to finish, for once and for all, my novel CHANGING FACES (a non-Elfyverse spiritual, transgender romantic urban fantasy).

NaNo, for those of you who are new to writing, is National “finish a novel” month — or “write a novel month” if you’re so inclined.  Writers are encouraged to write 50,000 words or more on a novel, and some writers work the whole rest of the year setting up what they’re going to write in November because it’s become a very big deal.

Me, I don’t do that — I don’t plan my whole year around November — but I do have this novel, CHANGING FACES, that has been in need of completion for a few years now.  What stopped me was this: my husband’s death.  That, and only that, has been the main reason CHANGING FACES hasn’t made a whole lot of progress in recent years; I have finished a few more chapters, and am very close to the end, but up until now I haven’t been up to writing the resolution of this novel — how these two lovers, who are transgendered through no fault of theirs (a Deity figure intervened, for reasons that seemed good at the time), manage to become reunited.

Now, there’s a coma involved — body displacement — with only one of the lovers awake and aware (knowing full well he’s in the wrong body, but not knowing why the Hell he’s in this situation), while the other one is speaking with an alien life form inside her own head (but also in the wrong body).  In effect, these two lovers have “changed faces” — the man’s in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s — due to a tumultuous situation that happened long before either one met the other.

For the longest time, I didn’t know how to get these two out of this situation — reversing the “body displacement” won’t work.  Having it all be “a dream — a terrible, terrible dream!” (as Pam on “Dallas” said years ago when a whole season was wiped out) — won’t work, either.  This has to be “played straight,” or it won’t work at all — and as some of it is really funny, I have to let it play out the way it wants.  Not the way I want.

I now have an ending that works — not just the final scene, which I’ve had for years, but the whole ending.  I have the additional characters I need.  Now I just have to see how it all “plays out,” that’s all.

So that’s my goal — I plan to finish up CHANGING FACES in November.  No, it won’t take me 50,000 words to finish it; it might take 30,000.  (I am already at 108,000, but I believe a few thousand will go after the final edit.)  It will take a lot of time and energy to do . . . but I believe it’s worth it, and I believe the final result will be a positive one, which is why I’m discussing it at all.

So expect some CHANGING FACES updates in November, along with my irregular “Elfyverse” updates (if and when I make any progress in any of the ELFY-derived novels), and of course the usual flotsam and jetsam of my other, non-publishing related posts.