Aren’t guys usually really interested in girls? I think so too, but experience shows that I am an inordinately lousy romance writer.

National Novel Writing Month. I have attended this creative stampede since 2002 at least. (It’s either that or 2001.) To be honest, I have never been less eager since I started than I am now. This is kind of a shame because the concept for this year is something I would like to share with the world. Unfortunately it does not lend itself well to novel writing, it seems.

I am going with the NaNoWriMo story germ I wrote about on October 18. There are some small changes: The main character is 34 instead of 18. This is mainly because in real life, it is rare to begin the inner journey that early, unless you are destined for sainthood or some such. Actually it usually starts off with what others call the “midlife crisis”, except it is not a crisis for those who find the way to another world. In real life the inner wold, and I mean that in a specific sense, different from the inner world of daydreams and feelings. It is a persistent world, and one that has been found again and again by people from different continents and cultures. While their details differ, the similarities are such that it becomes impossible to write it off as a coincidence. The question is whether it results from our minds finding some other domain, or whether it somehow reflects the fundamental structure of the human mind and brain. Or any combination of the above.

In my attempt at a novel, the main character instead enters a literally other world. But as with many of us, the entrance is found in night and fog, and it takes a time to realize that he is not in Kansas Norway anymore. It is this time that I find boring to write. I am going to throw in plot elements that are simply for making the story more interesting, and that have no deeper meaning. I am already throwing in a woman, because frankly, men without women are pretty boring. At least on the outside…