There’s some “hooking-up” on the American show, but the deed (not shown on the network episodes, but available for those who pay to watch the 24-7 feed on the Internet) is prefaced by a massive amount of drivel. It used to be a fun show to watch because the contestants were so over-the-top outrageous, and edited in ways that exacerbated that unintended humor. At some point, though, I think it stopped being fun.

I got the idea of having someone on the show who was NOT an idiot, but who the producers had completely underappreciated. Someone who’d be thinking about the way the show is constructed, and not just about how the game is played.

Eh, we’ll see if it works out.

Congratulations, everyone, on doing so well in these first few days of NaNoWriMo!

@Meghan 11,000 words is excellent progress. Well done!

@Magdalen Your fictionalized version of Big Brother sounds intriguing. I must be one of the few people on the planet who has never watched a full episode of Big Brother. I saw about 10 mins of the German version a few years ago because a guy at my university was on it. Apart from pouting and posing, all they seemed to do was have sex. Do they do that on the US version, or is it all edited out?

@Kwana Yeah, the dedication is definitely helpful. Much as I despise getting up so early, it’s definitely the way to go. I seem to write fiction best when I’m not awake. Actually, that’s a scary thought…

My unwritten books are all in my head. A book starts to let me know it’s getting close to “its time” when I start thinking of solutions to practical and logistical problems that my initial set-up may have generated. I start to imagine the first scene: where logically does the story start? I don’t have an outline — remember, at this point nothing is written down; it’s all in my head — but I can visualize the linear sequence of events for the main character, often superimposed on a conventional 12-month calendar.

I did click on Alicia Rasley’s 30-minute exercise; I couldn’t answer half the questions. My character’s goals are situational, and rather human. For example, in my NaNoWriMo novel, my heroine wants two things: to help out her sister and a family friend, and to do well in law school and a subsequent law career. Boring. Until somehow those two goals combine alchemically and land her on a fictional reality TV show. That was never one of her goals, and she certainly doesn’t want to win the show’s prize. And she really doesn’t want to fall in love with one of the producers while she’s pretending to be her twin sister.

See? I can’t get that to fit the Rasley format. I just have these people in my head and I want to write about them.

[shhh -- don't tell Sarah, but there's a teensy kerfuffle over at Dear Author about authors using shortcuts. As a reader, and now a writer (but not an author . . . yet), I can't help thinking -- how does a writer know if she's using shortcuts? If I polish my NaNoWriMo novel, get a bunch of people to read and comment on it, am lucky enough to find an agent, and/or publisher to publish it . . . what if NONE of these people points out some shortcuts I took? Who are the shortcut police? I respect that Jane et al. are going to point them out if I were so lucky as to have a published novel that got reviewed on Dear Author -- okay, so not me, as Jane's pretty clear she won't read novels with lawyers in them (and hasn't that explained a lot?!) -- but who's going to point them out in advance of publication? Just my thinking, you understand... and not a word to Sarah about this!]

Okay, so last night was a wash-out writing wise: We’re on holiday for Ross’s 50th birthday, and when we got back to the room (I tend to write at the end of the day), the wireless internet connection was broken. It took the techs an hour to fix, so very little writing got done. I’m up around 8,000 words, and will be able to do better once we’re back home on Friday.

And if anyone wants to don a Shortcut Police Officer’s uniform and come read about a fictional version of Big Brother . . . I’d be happy to share.

Nothing much to read for December. There is a YA book called Beautiful Creatures getting all the raves that comes out Dec 1 and I still have the latest Anna Campbell to read.

Back when I wrote novels, I would not plot out the story at all. If I plotted out the story, then I knew what would happen. And if I knew what was going to happen, I didn’t really see much point in writing it down. This why I no longer write novels.