Mar 25, 2011

National November Writing Month 2011

I entered NaNoWriMo last year, and failed. The story was going to be steampunk, a genre I knew nothing about, and I entered a week before NaNoWriMo. I had no plot, no plans, no nothing. So, I gave up.
I woke up this morning with an epiphany. Why not enter again this year, plan months ahead, set-up goals, and do this while I'm stable in the Navy?
Then "The Dragons of Venus" kicked in. I have been wondering and been wanting to write Science Fantasy for a while, now. In fact, I looked over an e-mail on the subject sent by Yoon yesterday.
Also, I've been looking for ways to write Science Fiction and have been heavily interested in the genre, reading many shorts in Asimov's, Lightspeed, and some free stories in Analog.
So, I figured why not! Why not write a 50k word Science Fiction novel? But the title bugged me. No way I could just leave a book titled "The Dragons of Venus" without thinking of Dragons in space. It's probably been done, but hell, it's cool to me. I also wanted an adventure.
That's when I remembered a type of story called Pulp. So, now I'm studying Pulp Science Fiction, first starting with ERB's "A Princess of Mars" and reading the chapters of Scott Lynch's "Queen of the Iron Sands" (I'll even try out Tarzan stories) with the goal of writing "The Dragons of Venus" as an epic pulp science fiction adventure. Oh yeah, I've begun A Princess of Mars a long time ago, and I believe it'll be a huge influence over my pulp.