At the beginning of November, I posted about participating in the 2011 NaNoWriMo contest, with my beautiful wife and co-author, Stacia Kelly. NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month, is a challenge for writers to complete a 50,000 word novel over the 30 days of November. We’ve participated individually and together in past years, and we were very excited to tackle the challenge again this year.
Our project is the 2nd novel is a series about urban samurai – a group of sisters who guard mankind from the things that go bump in the night. This novel, just as the first, features Shia Ronin, the samurai protecting Washington, DC. She is partnered (not by choice) with Metro DC homicide detective Ryan Calder, who certainly doesn’t believe in all that otherworld stuff. Ryan loves his car, his job, and his Rev3 energy drink. (Yes, he’s easy to write.)
We had a lot of changes to our approach this time around. We even created the type of crime board you would see on ABC’s Castle, CBS’ NCIS, or NBC’s Law & Order – complete with victim photos, maps, crime scene data and more. That gave us the chance to make our victims people, not just names. I love to storyboard and have a plan, and our brainstorming sessions were a ton of fun. Plus, we got to involve some local places we’ve been. After reading J.A.Konrath’s Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels series, I have fallen in love with having a character with an intimate relationship with his city.
Of course, this time, Ryan and Shia get a little closer, which makes things very complicated sometimes. We have a tricky villain, lives on the line at every turn, and some humor – especially between Ryan and Shia’s Artificial Intelligence program. Let us wrap up a few scenes and do the first quick edits, and I promise to post an excerpt soon.
The end result was enough to get us over the finish line on the last day of the month. 
We probably would have finished sooner, but Stacia got the cover art for the first book in her Goddess Chronicles series, and took some time to do edits on that book. Look for it in eBook format in 2012.
Interested in reading a bit about Ryan, Shia and the Urban Samurai? Leave a comment.
All the best,
nK
