It’s on again. It doesn’t feel like very long ago that I won NaNoWriMo 2011.

I’ve got writer’s block. I’m finding it practically impossible to write during the day; every three minutes one of my children needs me to do something for them. I guess that goes without saying. I could never work at home. No wonder Monte loves it when we are all out for the day so he can concentrate on his work.

Anyway, I am writing a trashy chic lit piece. I won’t tempt fate by calling it a novel. I don’t know why I chose a trashy novel to write (oh, wait – yes I do! Too much Fifty Shades of Grey!) but something semi-realistic is appealing to me. I find it hard to think. I am tired aaaallll the time. It is my life. I have so many distractions and jobs to do that it’s hard to knuckle down and write write write. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that I should be writing. Well, I am writing; I’m just not writing about Natalie and the sexy blonde she is about to meet at the local bar after an arduous week at work whilst her best friend flaunts her sexy boyfriend in her face, boasting about their sunny, sexy holiday in Bali… I know! Gag! I’m writing trash! I can own that. I don’t care. If I can reach my 50000 words this November I will feel proud of myself. I can set goals and reach them. I hope.

Anyway, what I was going to write about today was something that I decided, or discovered, this morning. I don’t like Natalie very much. She is boring. Poor lady, she only exists on a few thousand words on my MacBook. I realised that I *have* to like her. I have to love her! It is up to *me* to make her admirable and likeable and all that. Once I realised this fact that everybody else probably already knew, I thought of a few things I could do to Natalie to make her glow.

(Was that a trashy line? See, I can do this trashy business!)

Number One: to make Natalie likeable for me, I need to be able to relate to her. Not completely, but practically mostly. I had her in a job I know nothing about! Therefore, I decided to make her something I could relate to. My choices are: athlete, McDonalds chick, nanny, student, teacher or mother. I chose teacher. I am going to make Natalie be a teacher. Teachers have so many interesting and exciting and challenging and difficult and slightly boring things happen to them every day! However, Natalie’s career will not be the entire focus of my story. Gak! Boring! It will, however, be a bit of a sub-plot – a problem that Natalie has to deal with.

As an aside I thought I would just say that I am teaching narrative writing and narrative structure to my grade 3/4 class. We recently had a great lesson that got me inspired to plan and write again. I didn’t mean it to happen that way. Nor did I mean to completely change the story that I had planned back in October! When my students were planning their stories they discussed ideas and plans with one another, talking about stories (books, tv shows, movies, computer games, comics) that they enjoyed. The boys who play computer games all the time were really pleased and somewhat inspired that their games are actually stories that they are in control of! Yes! “Yes, you can imagine you live in the world of Minecraft and write a story about it…”

Ok, the next part of my plan to make Natalie a better, more dimensional character is the love story part. She has to meet a boy, fall in love, discover a problem, solve the problem by either leaving the boy or deciding to stay with the boy, then reunite with the boy, or meet a new boy, or girl, and live happily ever after. But what, may I ask, do I know about dating and such? I met Monte nearly 20 years ago and that’s it. I’ve never been out in the dating world. I am grateful for that! I am going to have to read more trashy stories to find out how people meet and fall in love. Do you have any ideas? My meet-in-a-bar idea is lame. Surely there are more interesting ways to meet a hottie these days.

I’m feeling inspired and energised after writing this post about my writing process. I think that writing to be published (as in, published on my little blog!) gave me a bit of a push to write. If I wrote my trashy novel and published it on a blog somewhere, I wonder what would happen.

PS As I finish typing this post, all geared up to raid my story and change everything and make Natalie have all sorts of interesting events happen in her fictional life, I reckon it’s about time Elora wakes from her sleep!