Things for this year's NaNo.

Dares

• Dare: Have one of your characters say "I'll give you a cookie if you do this for me." to another character.
  
  • Bonus Points if the character actually gives said other character a cookie.
  • Double Bonus Points if it's a chocolate chocolate chip cookie.
  • Triple Bonus Points if the character your using for this is the MC.
  • Quadruple Bonus Points if your MC says this to the villain in the middle of the big end fight.
  • Quintuple Bonus Points if the villain accepts.
• Dare: Have a character flipping a coin randomly.
  
  • BP: It's a personality quirk.
  • DBP: It happens at the strangest points in the story.
  • TBP: No one seems to notice, let alone care.
  • QBP: Exactly ONE and ONLY ONE character comments on it as out of place.
  • QuintupleBP: Neither the coin flipper, nor the one commenting are main characters.
• 
  

Subplots

• One character discovers another character killed or harmed a member of their family at some point in the past, completely by chance. It's murder, or wanton cruelty. How can they interact now? Does it change anything?
• A character is raped (possibly by another character). What new interactions take place as a result?
• 
  

Opening Line

• 
  

Closing Line

• The kiss was as sweet as the seasons and long as the rain, and she started to think maybe they really could make this work.

Random Lines

• 
  

Plot Twists

• Your MC or major secondary character develops insomnia or begins to have really bad nightmares halfway through the story, and never sleeps more than two consecutive hours for the rest of the the story, even if it lasts years.
• 
  

Random Scenes

• A first kiss scene between two adults
• two characters sit atop a roof and watch the sunset.

What-Ifs

• What if the events of two decades switched places?
• What if your radio started talking specifically to you?

Places

• A little graveyard about ten miles away from the edge of some huge city. The graveyard is old and grey, it is raining most of the time. Moss covers the gravestones, you can't read the names on them. The iron gates are rusty. In the middle of the graveyard there is a little white chapel, with broken windows and decayed door.
• An old cathedral that clearly has seen better days. The large doors once looked ornate but have now almost rusted off their hinges, and what statues remain are missing limbs or whole sections, some of which are still strewn around the place.
• MC goes to somewhere he/she's been, only to find out that something they did affected that place so drastically that it changes the plot

Names

• Female:
  
  • Samantha Elmstone
  • Marcail Rose
  • Mackenzie Rae

• Male:
  
  • Desmon Brice
  • Gabriel Gagandeep "Gabe"
  • Elijah Wyatt

2008 NaNo Dares

Opening Line:

"Glass crunched beneath her shoe, the sound abnormally loud in the silent world of dawn/dusk."

Plot point:

Places:

a gentle wooded area where the sun seems to filter through the trees at impossible angles and the air smells like sweet honeysuckle and roses. in the middle there is a concrete park bench and a statue of an angel holding a rose looking down smiling sweetly. like an adoring type stare from a marblized love.

- The Gardens (suitable probably only for fantasy). I really adore these, but I'm not doing fantasy :( First is the Twilight Garden. The vegetation within is autumnal, no matter what the actual season outside is. The garden itself is always in twilight (think Zelda - Twilight Princess), no matter what the time outside, and the entire thing seems to glow faintly orangey-gold. Next is the Midnight Garden - always midnight, always winter. There's snow on the ground, but there are also flowers - all white, all glowing faintly. There are no leaves on the trees, but they are strung with fairy lights. The Dawn Garden is eternally dawn and eternally spring, coloured in soft pinks and golds and yellows. It's packed with flowers covering nearly every single surface, including wisteria dripping down from the trees. And the Midday Garden is always noon and always summer - it's like a tropical retreat, swelteringly hot and with a constant sound of cicadas. There are a lot of fruit trees - apricots, nectarines, mangos, grape vines, bananas - but also tropical flowers, like hibiscus and frangipani. The canopy is so thick that a lot of light is blocked out, but what does reach the floor causes little patterns over it as a breeze moves through the trees.

Quotes:

"It was a cold and rainy day when I died the first time"

"It's funny how my life didn't really start until the world ended."

The moon rose, red and deadly, on the night of the twenty-first of October -- a night I will never forget.

"If good is evil, and evil is good, then what's the point?"