Crossovers!

While I'm sure we're all delighted that things are going so well for Jake, I suspect that he's sort of unusual in this respect. Certainly things aren't going at well with my novel. The good news is that that's normal for week two. The even better news is that I've devised a madcap scheme to help us bust out of this funk.

What do network television shows do when they're out of creative juice and it's sweeps season? Actually, I don't really know; the world of television writing is pretty well entirely foreign to me. But one thing that I think they might do is crossovers: elements from one show imported into another, in the hopes (I assume - again, I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about) that audiences will follow.

So here's what I'm proposing that we do: anybody who's interested writes up a description of some element of their novel that they think could easily be imported into another novel. It could be a character, an event, a setting...whatever. Send it to me by Sunday at midnight, and I will randomly distribute these among participants. Then you have something new and exciting and not from your tired old imagination to spend some words on.

The downside, of course, is that in writing up the description, you'll be devoting words to something other than your novel, which you probably shouldn't be. But if you're like me - and my guiding principle in interacting with humanity has always been that everybody is like me - during NaNoWriMo writing about things other than your novel is suddenly extraordinarily appealing.