November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’ve participated in each of the last two years’ typing marathons. In the lead up to the first, I was concerned about having a story inspiring enough that I could tap out half a novel in thirty days. But then I started musing on the role of psychoactive medications in my life, how they affect my mood and even my perceptions, the whole way I view the world. I wondered what would happen if a medication could not only alter the way I think, but the actual way I physically see everything around me.
Vision More Glorious follows a young English teacher in Tokyo who takes part in a drug trial for a new antidepressant. To his amazement, it quickly alters the range of light he is able to see, giving him a wonderful, though almost useless, superpower. After the tale of faithless love I told in Kintsugi, I wanted to write a sweeter, more hopeful love story. I found this one, though, wrapping itself up at about the fifty-thousand-word point. There wasn’t enough to it. So I added a drug company as a complication. That got me to ninety-five thousand words that were not entirely internally consistent. So I did a significant rewrite after NaNoWriMo to fix things. That included writing whole new scenes and weaving details together so they made a whole story. I’ve done a lot of editing even since then, but Vision More Glorious is now ready to give to a few readers for feedback before I send it to an editor.