Announcing My NaNoWriMo 2022 Novel: The Mystery of the Body Thief

During this year's NaNoWriMo I am working on the 3rd draft of The Mystery of the Body Thief. So, here is some information about my project and my plans ahead for the 3rd draft (and other drafts) in general. 

As a quick update, I'd like you to know that I've updated two pages. I've added a new character for Dolls of Wax, Eyes of Glass which you can see here. And, I've updated the page for the characters from The Princess Arisias mystery series here. 

                                                                        Synopsis- 

                 Genre: Fantasy | Murder Mystery Series: First book in the Princess Arisias mystery series 

Horatio wakes up from being in a coma, but he doesn't remember anything that happened before he fell into unconsciousness. All that he remembers is a name, "Arisias!"

Also... Detective Inspector Time finds himself having to solve a case without Princess Arisias. Murders have been happening throughout many different kingdoms, and no one knows who exactly is behind it all.

                                             Characters- 

A lot of things have changed about the characters since I last made a post about them, including some of their names, so here are the characters: 

                                                  Horatio- 

Horatio is a servant who works in the castle, and who has amnesia. 

He is still discovering who he is, and wants to know more, 

for he feels very lost and confused.  

                                        Princess Arisias- 

Arisias is a princess, who never woke up from her coma, unlike Horatio. 

Before the coma she worked as a detective part time, while also fulfilling her role as a princess. 

                                                                   Ophelia- 

            Ophelia is a healer and a priestess (to the goddess of the earth and the god of air). 

             She is a quiet, but very kind person. Though she doesn't talk a lot, when she does she always has something thoughtful to say. 

                                                                                         

                                       D.I. Elyerin Time- 

He is called "Elyerin" by those who know him well, and "Detective Inspector Time" when he is working. He is an elvish detective with time related powers from the god of time. D.I. Elyerin Time is currently working on solving the case of murdered royalty. 

Cerawen & Vonivera 

Cerawen and Vonivera are Arisias's ladies-in-waiting. 

Cerawen- is from another kingdom and was sent over to Dragons' Province for undisclosed reasons. 

Vonivera- is a fay, who used to be close to Arisias before the accident. 

Marigold- 

Marigold works for the civil guard and is training to be a detective. She has not gotten there, but she is working towards it. She hopes one day to be a detective like her father. 

My Plans for this NaNoWriMo- 

I decided to take a long break before working on the third draft. When I finished the second draft, I took some time for reading to get into the mode of writing the third draft. One book I found particularly helpful was Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I usually don't find self-help writing books useful, but this was really inspirational for me. 

In fact one piece of advice King gave was to embellish references/imaginary. King referred to his book Carrie, where he used blood related imagery, which he embellished more in later drafts. 

This made me think about the imaginary/references in my own work, that I plan to embellish more this time through. 

Since I wrote my post about finishing the second draft, I've come up with fantastical names for the characters: Cerawen, Vonivera, etc..  At this point only one character still needs a fantasy name, and that is Marigold. She has two names, an elvish name and a human name. Marigold is the name she goes by as a human, but since she lives among elves and was raised by an elf, she also needs an elvish name. 

I'm also rereading  Lord of the Rings for inspiration, and I'm thinking about ways to describe my elves without immediately saying that their ears are pointed. They are pointed, but I don't want to just rely on that imagery to define them as elves. I need to capture that something which makes my elves different than humans, and I want to show that without directly saying that they are elves all the time to my readers. This is something that will take several drafts to figure out how to do, but it is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. 

 My fantasy world has been built much more, since I last wrote about it. 

I'm actually working on a side project, a collection of myths involving the myths of the gods and goddesses of that world.  I realized the stories and the myths are very important to that world. And while I have talked about the myths in blog posts, I want to steadily build a collection of short stories. I should add, I was partially inspired by Bardugo's Lives of Saints, for the Grishaverse series. While hers is much shorter than this is going to be, it definitely served as an inspiration.

 I've found that it helps to understand the world, because the world will effect the characters' actions in ways, whether unconsciously or not. 

So, those are my plans for this NaNoWriMo. I hope NaNoWriMo is going well for everyone else!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Are you doing NaNoWriMo this November? If so, what are you working on? If not, have you re-read any favorite books of yours recently? 

-Quinley