It's 2003 and I stumble across this little website called National Novel Writing Month. Well, that sounds like fun. I like to write and this could be a fun challenge. So, I start to write, but of course NaNoWriMo starts on Cup Day Weekend (a small public holiday only celebrated in metropolitan Melbourne, not even the entire state or country, for the Melbourne Cup Horse Race) which means long weekend and no school on Tuesday (Cup day is a Tuesday, so technically we still had school... But... It's kind of accepted that a lot of parents just go away. Some schools surrender and make it a student free day, others don't... Mine didn't, but we went away anyway!) We were travelling by Campervan for the first time and I was kind of bummed out, because how on earth was I going to make my 1,667 words a day word count while on the road all day? Laptops were big, they were bulky and their battery life stunk! I had this big, boxy grey (I think) Toshiba, but hell, I loved that thing!
The story was called "The Valley of Longing" and if I recall correctly was about a group of kids who went trick or treating for Halloween, or maybe they were attending a Halloween party... and got sucked up into a magical vortex and had to save a mystical world where they took on the powers of their Halloween costume characters. Unfortunately computer crashes and upgrades and hard storage and cloud storage and all the evolving technologies has resulted in me most likely losing that story and unfortunately most of the pictures from that trip. Above is one of the few pictures with our home away from home.
But there are two things I recall most vividly is how our trip inspired the story. The first, aside from the obvious, we were on a road trip and the characters were on a journey, but during their journey, they encounter these fields upon fields of purple flowers and that imagery was exactly what we were looking at. We driving up from Melbourne to Sydney along the Hume Highway and every open field along the boarder was covered in purple flowers, kilometres and kilometres of what should have been grassland for cattle, covered in purple flowers. I've driven that road many tines since then and to this day, I have never seen anything like it again (except at the flower farm, but your expect to find endless fields of flowers at a flower farm!) I wish I could find a picture of those flowers! The second was being only 30,000 words in and the story being finished. OMG! What on earth was I supposed to do? They'd travelled the Valley, saved the world and gone home (or had they?) Yeah... I did the epic cliche! The last part of the story of them saving the day and going home was just a dream. I got the rest of my 50,000 words, so I have no regrets!
In 2004, I was at a loss though, I had no idea what to write. That inspiration that had flooded through me during November the year before failed me and I couldn't focus. I tried to continue my previous story with "Return to the Valley" but I only made about 30,000 words words and struggled the entire way.
Little did I know at the time, that this would be my last NaNoWriMo until 2011.
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