Eeep! Plot munchies!

This ... happpens ... every ... single ... year.

About 48 hours out from Nano, I suddenly felt my plot is not only the most boring and ill conceived plot ever, and my characters the least interesting or original, but I'm writing in entirely the wrong genre. Suddenly, I want to write about Dragons. And Elves. And Cthulhu. And romance. On Mars. And pretty much everything except Donna and her bloody half assed attempts at solving mysteries.

I've got the plot munchies, in other words.

Plot munchies stem from two sources. Either, you're losing confidence in your story and yourself, which is perfectly natural and the way it should be. In which case you have to stick to it with bloody minded determination. Or, your creative imagination is prompting you to address some problem you haven't identified. In which case, you need to work out what it is and sort it, otherwise you'll get blocked.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to tell which type of plot munchies you're experiencing.

I think I've managed to sate mine for now. I gave some serious thought to my plot (such as it is - being on holiday has meant nil planning has been done in the last week ... oh, well) and decided I didn't like it anymore. So I chanaged it. In my original version, my victim was a fairly anonymous person called Victor.

Problem was, I didn't see poor Victor as a real person. People could have killed him all day and I wouldn't have cared. He was just a corpse for the other characters to have a mystery about. So I'm changing focus and instead of dead victor in a warehouse, it'll be the killing of a school girl that Donna is called on to investigate. And even though Lucy dies before the start of the story, I care, and I want to find out why and who killed her.

Interestingly, a lot of my planning for the murder of Victor can be transferred straight over to the new conception of the story - a hint that my original version wasn't right. But now it all seems a better fit.

Still, 24 hours to go, for me. Plenty of time to change my mind again.