As Halloween gets closer and closer, so does the month of November. And with November comes NaNoWriMo. I told myself this whole year that after winning last year with my Danny Phantom fan fiction Hail Storm (fmr. Snow Storm), I would retire and not do it again. After all, I'm buried in homework and Hail Storm remains 1/3 incomplete and in dire need of editing, and TSWODF's not done (my "not-quite NaNo", my co-author PhantomPearl signed it up and didn't write a single word, so I had to take it back). But I feel very sad that apparently I've been peer-pressured into it once again by a pair of real-world friends that plan on doing it their first time this year and want me to join in. And coincidentally, I've managed to gestate a plotbunny for it, too. It's probably a month old and I wasn't very serious about it, but it looks like I'm going to be. I'm planning on keeping my story private and not post it online at any time, because it is likely my first shot on a non-fanfiction story.

I can best describe it as an "affectionate parody". Basically, I'm taking inspiration from a multitude of sources, cutting them into bits, extracting some and welding them together into a single mass, and then coating it in paint to make it look good. The story is a new twist on a science fiction classic, the Great Robot Uprising, only this time the robots didn't want it or plan it and are into it against their will (but they don't know it). And the main characters aren't humans, but two other robots that have devices installed so they cannot intercept the rebelling signal in the air waves; they set out on their own to do what they can to stop the uprising. So there's two robots that have to survive together while travelling on the road. Their owner (a renown roboticist that constructed them by hand and designed them to be unique) had fled to escape getting hurt. And neither side will trust them; the humans won't trust robots to be friends and the robots know that the pair had gone rogue. They are therefore on their own.

The theme would pretty much be centered on the logic and point of view of robots and would be very atypical. Because it's not about robots thinking themselves to be like humans. It's about robots considering themselves a unique race as artifical sentients and what that means to them. It's about how they are built, how they are programmed, and how this affects them. A majority of the robots in the story were (by order of law specifying how robots could be designed and programmed) made for domestic purposes, and those robots are fairly content. And they are so easy to make that every high school robotics student and 9-year-old that explores junkyards have been able to build their own. But then there are those that build robots with weapon systems and program them with intent to harm others (the law forbids this for most; military grade certification and special monitoring is required for operating those), and those robots tend to get very depressed. Mostly it has to do with the fact that robots and humans are supposed to cooperate as friends instead of enemies; and it wasn't a good idea for humans to build thinking machines just to get the edge on other humans.

So far all I have planned is the beginning of the story and I have no idea what twists and turns the plot would take (but I have a few strange ideas on events along the way) and I could drop a few inside jokes in it for giggles. I don't know whether or not I can carry it for 50,000 words, there could be multiple opportunities for me to cheat my word count through parasitic padding. Wish me luck; I'd wish it to you to if you are NaNoing. Though I know it's going to eat up so much time I don't have.