author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Because I am that much of a nerd. Or something.

So, earlier this month, I became aware that NaNoWriMo was approaching. And fast. But was I worried? Well...

I figured, what with riding the rails again in late September, I'd have plenty of time to brainstorm my way toward A Plan. Possible plans included a series of interconnected stories among the people who appear in "First Breath," a real concerted effort to rewrite Melissa's Ghost or maybe Like a Bad Penny, or... I dunno. Those were the only Plans coming to mind.

OK, yes, I was worried. But I was just about succeeding at convincing myself otherwise.

And then I was driving home from the airport, having dropped off a visiting friend, and a plot went and hijacked me. A potential plot. A sort of treasure map leading toward a plot, maybe, with plot elements dribbled all over the landscape.

Long drives in traffic require music. To this end, I had my laptop headphone jack connected up to my car stereo via the cassette-tape-with-a-wire doohickey, and my laptop was dutifully playing through four a-ha albums. The first three, plus East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Playing through them all. Repeatedly. (One of these days, my laptop will send a hidden transmission out to some vigilante corner of the net, and I shall be hauled off for sound card abuse. Until that day, my guilty pleasures are MINE ALL MINE and NO ONE WILL TAKE THEM FROM ME.)

And I had that thought I often have when listening to this particular collection of tunes: "Dang, these lyrics have some surreal & evocative corners to them."

And then somewhere in the crossroads between "Early Morning" and "I Dream Myself Alive" I ended up with two characters in my head having an on-again, off-again relationship. One of them happens to be a dimension-hopping assassin. Who may or may not, in actuality, be an angel. It was totally obvious. And each song that came on after that made me go, "Oh, OK, and they meet when one of them picks up the other hitching on a desert highway." Or, "I get it! She's a shape-shifter." Or, "Someone gets killed here. I'm not sure who, but it's not good."

Later, very excited, I told John about this Plan. He gave me a bit of a skeptical look. "Where are you getting this assassin stuff from? Where does that ever come up?" But it does. It's all there. There is an amazing amount of implied violence in a-ha's discography. Also dimension-hopping, if you take literally lines like "I knew this world would break my heart."

All of which eventually gets me pondering the line between "inspired by" and "fan-fiction about." I suppose it's hard to call it fan-fiction when the canon material is so nebulous. You sort of need a defined, consistent worldbuild in the original to have fan-fiction about it. Put another way: I can imagine fan-fiction based on the title track to Rush's 2112. (Imagine, hell. I've written some.) But I have a hard time imagining fanfic about Rush's Presto, because I just can't see an intentional story being told across the course of that album. Writing a story that incorporates themes from each of the songs in order might possibly count as extreme fanwank, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the author used those eleven songs as a very complex writing prompt.

And so with this. So I spent a great deal of my writing time on the train just listening to those four a-ha albums while writing descriptions for possible scenes in yWriter. The working title is Death in a Dream, because the assassin travels to other worlds by going to sleep in her own and dreaming, and after completing her assignment she ends the dream and causes herself to wake up by killing herself. Maybe it should be Deaths in a Dream, plural, like that.

I'm really, really impatient to get to the actual writing. And that's good. Obsession gets the ideas flowing. But it's also unfortunate, because I intended to have two or three short-shorts out the door by the end of October. It's not too late, but with my mind thoroughly distracted like this, it's going to be difficult to concentrate on revisions.

Poor me. My life, so hard. Heh.