Sure, I'll Be Your Monkey

Midnight tonight marks the official beginning of NaNoWriMo, and yet I still haven’t decided what to write.

My first option is the story I’ve been working on, which is the story of a young man in LA who is having a particularly bad weekend of mental health. After mulling the idea for many years, I started writing this book at the end of August of this year for the novel writing class I enrolled in. So far, I have written about 19,000 words.

Reasons I should keep working on the LA story, and make my NaNoWriMo goal to write 50,000 more words of it:

1. It is unwise to stop in the middle of writing something that’s going reasonably well.
2. I’ve written all I can for the class, so this would give me a goal to keep working.
3. It’s a Halloween/fall story so I may not be interested in trying to pick it up again in winter or spring.

Excuses to not keep working on the LA story:

1. I’m not sure this book would even need 50,000 more words to be completed.
2. It’s against the rules. You’re supposed to start a whole new book/project.

The other option is to go crazy with this idea that’s a combination of something very new and something quite old. Prior to the LA story, the thing I was writing for a year or so previous was a strange little story about this love triangle between some people in Las Vegas, but the story lacked any real direction and was just a mess, which is why I dropped it when it was time to do the class. I thought I’d let it simmer and see if I ever actually came up with a plot for the story. Then one night I had this essentially unrelated idea for a story about a young woman who at first befriends a couple but is soon being terrorized by them. Clearly, these two ideas were destined to be intertwined into one story. For lack of anything better to call it, I think of it still as the Las Vegas story.

Reasons to do the LV story:

1. It’s the perfect thing for NaNoWriMo. Since I don’t have much of a plot, at any other time I’m likely to sit around not writing, waiting for inspiration to come. NaNoWriMo would eliminate that luxury, I’d just have to BS my way through it.
2. It’s not a project that is especially near and dear to my heart, so I wouldn’t mind that whatever I get written will inevitably be kinda crappy.
3. You know how us crazy writer-types are. Always flitting around, unable to focus, eager to move on to the new thing, new idea, the new, the new, the new!

Reasons not to do the LV story:

1. When I say I have very little in the way of plot in my head, I mean I have pretty much no plot in my head whatsoever.
2. What tiny bit of plot and theme I have considered suggest a story that I would be more than a little wary of ever showing to anyone, let alone wife, friends, family, or total strangers on the Internet.
3. I’m pretty confident I know how to tell the first third or maybe half of the story. After that, I haven’t a clue and even the “forced” atmosphere may not help.

Any of you want to put in your two cents? Help me make up my mind already, I’ve got less than 15 hours.