First off, I shall start off by saying that I have no idea what is going on within the seething mass of Family Drama anymore, but apparently my uncle is going to be going through chemotherapy and radiation, and he may live a few more years, or he may not.  And I have no idea if Trashy Cousin is a villain in this real-life story or just another bystander.  At this point, I am just counting down the days until I can get out of here–August 28–and daydreaming about being back at my lovely college home.

I never thought I’d see the day when I’d long to go back to school, but since college…

Now, on to what this post is really about–writing.  The Mpreg o’DOOM is almost finished.  Within the next 5k-10k words, everything will be wrapped up in a nice, semi-neat little bow, and I will be able to get on with my life.

And I’m not really sure what to do next.

I don’t quite know what it is that got me this far with You and Me Could Write a Bad Romance.  Maybe it was because it was a discard novel, never meant for anything more than entertaining practice.  Maybe it was because of the characters–because I already knew them, because they were easy and fun to work with, because they really did not like being broken apart and had to fix things OMG NOW.  Maybe it was because I had a clear, obvious plot from the beginning.  Maybe it was because I had readers who kept begging me not to kill it (and one even did so in person).  Maybe it was because I was sick of not finishing stories.  Maybe it was all of these things, maybe it was none of these things–I can’t say for sure–but for some reason, it worked well enough to get me a soon-to-be-complete story.  It’s not perfect, it would need to be edited if I ever wanted to do anything with it besides sharing it on LJ, but it’s semi-coherent and it’s a story.

But it’s going to be finished soon–probably sometime next week, if I can make myself keep going.  NaNoWriMo is still months away.  I have a goal to write one hundred words every single day for the rest of the year.  I am not very good at staying consistent when I’m only writing one-shots, short stories, drabbles, and poems.  So I have no idea what (besides schoolwork) is going to occupy me between now and November 1.

Oh, I could take a break, I suppose, give up my goal and just plot sporadically until NaNo begins.  I could try to make one-shots, short stories, drabbles, and poems work for me.  I could slow the pace of my mpreg writing down to a crawl, then drag it out until November (yeah, right).  I could spend the weeks until NaNo wasting valuable writing time, feeling like I should be writing, and not getting anymore practice at all.

I need the practice.  I keep feeling like I’m going to be a One-Book-Writer, somebody who can only manage to finish one novel-length thing in their life.  I don’t want that.  It’s not fair to my characters, it’s not fair to my (few) readers, and it’s definitely not fair to me.  I have this massive story ‘verse lurking in my head, waiting to be used, and I don’t want it to whither away into nothing.  I want to write.

So, I’m starting to poke at the ideas for my next project, and I think it’s going to be Glam.  Glam is unabashedly a romance novel, centered around pansexual pop star wizard Jonathan Cooper’s attempts to woo an enigmatic purple-haired artist, Davin Haverford.  To Cooper’s surprise, Davin won’t go out with him because Davin’s still married to the abusive jerk he’s trying to leave, Ran, a fashion design student who steals other people’s (especially Davin’s) designs.  Davin’s scared, broke, and needs a way out.

It also features Adam and Zeph, the MCs of the Mpreg o’DOOM, as Adam works toward ending his relationship with an unappealing guy named Lucas (the father of the AU mpreg baby, who isn’t nearly as bad in this) and toward finally getting together with his best friend, while Zeph gets increasingly frustrated with Adam for not getting a clue and dating him.  Oh, boys.

Meanwhile, Cooper’s best friend, Dr. Rhys Coursey, continues to date the absolute worst girls EVER and consistently does not Get a Clue about the kind of girls he should be dating–one of those things that will probably never get resolved, ever, because Rhys Has Issues and Very Bad Taste in Women.

Basically, Glam is a modern day off-world fantasy/romantic dramedy about a teen hero turned very adult singer who has just impossibly risen from the dead trying to woo a troubled married boy, a pair of best friends who are afraid to get together, and a guy who really needs to stop sleeping with the dregs of society before something bad happens (like his friends killing him for bringing home awful girls).  It’s like my brain threw Harry Potter, Monty Python, Adam Lambert’s Den of Iniquity, a pinch of Grey’s Anatomy, a pinch of House, a bunch of Harlequin romance novel plots, a few tabloids, and a ton of slash fanfiction into a blender with a bunch of glitter and some booze, pureed the heck out of it, and now hopes to serve it as a literature daiquiri.

…I may be working with another discard novel here, guys.  Or something rather fabulous.

Or I may end up going with one of those options I don’t want to go with.  I tried to write Glam once before, and it didn’t work.  Like so many of my other WIPs, it fell apart.  Because of this, I can’t help but worry that it’s going to fall apart again if I try to write it.  Even though it could be fun and fabulous and a great stress reliever when classes get crazy.  This thing I’m working on now is the closest I’ve come to having a finished novel draft.  So, naturally, I’m worried, because worrying is what I do.

But I think I’m going to try it anyway.  Consider this my public commitment to attempt Glam after I finish the mpreg.

…Crap.  That means I actually have to try.