Short Check In, Belated IWSG Notes, and Some Plates

orgot to post for Insecure Writers Support Group day!

Rather timely, actually, because NaNoWriMo has been on for a week already (and ROW80 Round 4 is about halfway through) and I think I hit the wall this past Friday. I pushed for more words than the daily average, to make up for fewer words the day before, and I could tell that by the end, even though I was still in a frenzy of drafting, the words were growing increasingly repetitive and silly. I hope the second week is better.

Anyone have interesting writing prompts/questions to share?

Today is Remembrance Day, so I'm going to link to two specific bloggers:

Claire Gregory, with a post on her family in WWI, and research she did about another family in WWI.

Private Lamin's experiences in WWI.

For WWII, I just discovered this site: A Dutch historian juxtaposes photographs taken during WWII with modern-day photos of the same places.

With this year's NaNo, I'm close to having, at least, drafts of all my major story ideas from the past few years, except for the big one - the Canadian story that's set before the First World War. It'll be my own exploration of the loss of the world's innocence, an homage to England and Canada and the greatest generation (and their children, who fought in the Second World War), and a tribute to authors like L. M. Montgomery, all told through the lens of the romance between two characters, Alice and George. Maybe all the stories I've been writing have been gearing up to this.

Meanwhile, though, I've set aside Druid's Moon as I write Santiago and Mawdlen's romance in Captive of the Sea for NaNo, but Fred and Lyne are still in the back of my mind. I saw these plates in Anthropologie the other day and thought of the monster behind my beast (Fred is the Beast, but there's a greater horror at the heart of the caverns):

Also, I read my first e-book as an e-book this week, Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, on my phone. I think I could get used to this newfangled e-reading thing...