Year of Words: November — Neon Paint

Greetings and salutations. It’s been a weird month.

It began with making a strong but short-lived start on a new part of Pine, while slowly working away at the memoir-type thing I still haven’t quite worked out what to name. However, for the majority of this month, I’ve been slightly swept up with a new project. And by slightly, I might just mean completely.

There’s not much to it, really. Two characters, complete opposites, both living in modern-ish London, slowly falling in love. I’m calling it Project Fringe, due to various overlapping coincidences, but it isn’t quite a project in the same sense as the others. For one, it’s not one single, unified piece, but a collection of scenes set on a nebulous timeline across a growing relationship. A lot of it has been inspired — in structure and in content — by fanfiction, and I’ve been dipping in and out of a couple of different pieces, two of which are now complete. I’ve experienced some really unexpected joys writing in this new space: in modern settings like bus stops and jazz clubs, but also in a new romantic genre. This kind of writing feels fun, loose, and a bit less serious: each oneshot (a self-contained story, for the uninitiated in the fanfic space) is titled after a song lyric. It’s ridiculous, and more than a little cliché, but it’s a taste of the fervour I felt typing away on my phone at the back of the bus as a teenager. I imagine my good friend, the long-suffering T, can probably attest to that.

It’s been a touch paradoxical, though: on paper, it’s really far out of my comfort zone as a writer, and yet I’ve kept returning to these pieces, day after day. Although fantasy is incredibly expansive and versatile, and I still adore the arcane wonder of it all, it can be very limiting in scope. Writing modern fiction has felt like a fresh set of paints: after a long while working in tea-stained greyscale and natural dyes, I suddenly have a neon palette to play with. It’s been a well-needed refresher, and I hope to carry some of what I’ve learned here back into my other projects in Nerai. Once I’ve shaken free of the hold these characters have on my brain currently, that is.

At least I’ve been productive: over 11,000 words this November, the majority of which is within Project Fringe. And on that note, now gazing over my gorgeous spreadsheet (which I hope to share some parts of next month) a realisation has dawned: I’ve officially written 100,000 words in 2024. 101,007, to be exact. That gives me a metric ton of thoughts and feelings, but let’s save those for the finale.

Until then, who knows what I’ll do. I hope to get back on Pine. It’s only fair, given that we’re about to cut one down to keep in our living room for the next month. ‘Tis about to be the season of frantic bedazzlement, tupperwares of leftovers, and yearly wrap-ups for apps that absolutely don’t need them. So, as I find myself saying a lot these days, I guess we’ll have to see what happens.

Until the very end, then: fare well, wherever you fare,

— H