…and, surprisingly, I have a story idea ahead of time that I think I really like. It’s not The Divergents, that madcap romance of jazz, punk, and higher mathematics that I’ve been pondering. For one thing, I haven’t been doing the research — into jazz, punk, or higher mathematics — that I really ought to in order to make the story work. My metaphors aren’t going to work, and so on.

So I’m going to go a different route. Back to the tried and true. Comic horror. Cthulhu. The Necronomicon. Horrific beings from beyond the stars. Trains. The old west. And some romance, just because I’ve never had the guts to write any sort of romance at all. But I’m excited about this one. I’m going to draw on the history of Sacramento, the Gold Rush, hopefully hang out at the Train Museum and possibly some of the Living History folks around here, even though Sacramento won’t be part of the story. It’ll be a town called San Augustin.

It is, all in all, the sort of story that, if they made a movie out of it, would star Bruce Campbell. And I’ve already got some cool scenes in mind, like the scene where the young professor is assassinated, and the scene where the young woman fights off hordes of byakhees (or nightgaunts, or something like that) with only a sword on the caboose, and the scene where the lawman crawls along the outside of the train to get to the engine, where the engineer has already been killed by the nameless horrors.

This is going to be awesome. 50,000 words of pure unadulterated Crawford Awesome.

Soon I will begin soliciting titles in my usual way. I’ll let you know.

In other NaNoWriMo-related news, I and my friend  will once again be co-ML’s in the Sacramento region, which seems to range from Fairfield to Placerville, with points north and south this year.