NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, and I think I might actually be ready for it.  Maybe.

Anyways, here is a quick rundown of the concept for the novel

Stuck within the I-435 loop, a group of survivors take shelter within a local high school after a repeat of the 1859 Carrington Event takes down the global power grid, hoping to use its pool for water, its library for knowledge, and its machine shop to build the tools they weren't able to buy before the storm hits.  While they have a reasonably large stash of supplies, it will take quite some time before they are comfortable with clearing the cars blocking the over and underpasses leading out of the 435 loop and trying to escape the city by car.  While they wait, they discover a radical Luddite-Eco group calling themselves the Children of the New Dawn who seek to destroy the knowledge of the old world from before the Coronal Mass Ejection destroyed it.

The main character of the story is Staff Sergeant Jason "Jayce" Forrester, USMC (Ret.).  He has just returned from a disastrous tour in Afghanistan where he watched his entire squad die on his first day in command, and is suffering from PTSD, when the storm hits.  Now, as the one in the colony with the most command and leadership experience, the rest of the people holed up in the abandoned high school are looking to him for leadership and protection.

In addition to having to fight off the Children of the New Dawn, they are also going to have to deal with outsiders looking for shelter, the return of diseases such as Dysentery and Cholera, food shortages, fires ripping through the abandoned neighborhoods, the winter cold and blizzards, and much more.  Having been thrown back into the stone age, and with communications unreliable due to the magneto-sphere still in flux after the storm, they have no one they can call upon for help and must rely on their own skills.

NaNoWriMo

I am doing NaNoWriMo this year!  I think I might have lost my mind, but oh well.

For those of you unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, it is a writing "competition" in which you try to write a +50,000 word novel in 30 days.  That is roughly 1667 words a day.  I am pretty certain I can do this...  Maybe.

Anyways, I will be posting the novel here.  Look for the Blackout and NaNoWriMo tags.

As a heads up, they WILL look bad at first.  This is because you are not supposed to edit the book until you have hit 50,000 words.  It will get cleaned up in December, but in November it will be as rough as you can get.  I will post some of the character profiles up here as well.

Keep your eyes open and feel free to comment!  Just know, I won't see them until December for obvious reasons.