NaNoWriMo 2007–Many Happy Returns

October 29, 2007 at 4:12 pm — Writing — Tags:

My NaNoWriMo novel this year was inspired by an idea posted by roefactor on last year’s NaNoWriMo “Adopt-a-Plot” thread:

What if everyone started living the same day over and over again, but, unlike most situations, everyone knew about it?

I’ve adapted this marvelous idea slightly:

On August 10, 2008 at 2:39 am GMT, the universe reverts to the state it was in on August 8 at 9:28 pm GMT. Then on August 10, it happens again. And again. The universe is stuck in time loop that lasts 29 hours 11 minutes. Only one thing transcends the resets: consciousness. People retain their memories through the time loops.

That’s nearly all I have to start with. I currently have no plot and no characters. I do have a scene or two in mind to get my fingers moving. And I’m starting to flesh out some of the social, political, scientific, and religious implications of the time loop. All of that speculation has yet to yield a single plot idea, but this is NaNoWriMo, so it’s okay if I have no idea what happens next.

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5 Comments »

Comment by Dwayne Phillips — October 30, 2007 at 8:52 am

Dale, here is a possible character. A person writing in the NaNo WriMo month.

How would that work or not work or confuse or inspire the person trying to get out 1,500 words?

Comment by Dale — October 30, 2007 at 12:52 pm

Interesting. Anything a writer wrote in those 29 hours would vanish with the next loop. Only readers’ memory of it would survive.

The time loops offer no possibility of taking months to write a novel and more months to publish it.

So… the best publishing medium would be blogs! A writer writes a new episode and publishes it on a blog, and readers read it before the end of the loop. Next loop: a new episode.

Because the blog posts vanish at the end of each loop, readers would have to keep up. Or… each day a few readers might retype yesterday’s episode from memory.

Thanks, Dwayne! This gives me further ideas about some of the larger implications I’ve been pondering.

A related idea: How would this affect, say, a project manager in a government organization?

Comment by Dwayne Phillips — October 31, 2007 at 6:48 am

Oh no change at all. Government project managers erase their memories everyday when they leave the office ;-)

Comment by Dwayne Phillips — December 1, 2007 at 4:31 pm

Dale,

Now that we are in December, I see that you made it over 50,000 words on NaNoWriMo. Well, what do you have to say?

Comment by Dale Emery — December 1, 2007 at 6:03 pm

For now, I say: I’m tired, I have a cold, and I still have no plot.

I’ll have more to say later.

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