Goal for this year’s November National Novel Wiriting Month: one urban fantasy novel without any murder, warfare, apocalypse, or other horrible things happening to good people. Every UF book I’ve picked up recently has had either a Buffy plot (defeat the Big Bad) or a CSI plot (murder most foul). I’m tired of it– and I think it’s one of the reasons that I’ve been procrastinating so heavily on my own WiPs.

Outlining the “Natural Instincts” for the June Camp reminded me that there are plenty of storylines out there that don’t include people dying. I’m not going to kick the puppy this time around– come heck or high water.

So instead I’m writing a story about a recently downsized alpha werewolf who’s trying to rebuild a shattered pack and is more concerned with the IRS finding out that there are immortals afoot than fighting off the next Big Bad.

Yup, it’s the return of the Southside Dump Pack!

But if I’m avoiding death and the end of the world… what is there left that can go wrong?

Possible Plot Points

• The pack voted her in as alpha, but now that the killer is gone it’s back to chaos as usual
• Her car breaks down
• Now that she’s alpha she gets a salary from the state pack so she doesn’t really have to find a job, but her old human coworkers don’t know that and are trying to help her job hunt
• The old alpha messed up the pack’s finances like woah and she has no idea how to fix it
• There are several wolves that need new identities, you can only pretend to age well for so long
• One of her wolves has a family friend they’d like to have take the family oath to become a werewolf
• The Northern Alpha still doesn’t like them and is causing petty bureaucratic headaches
• The state pack wants to dump more wolves on them: survivors of an abusive alpha
• Theo is picked up by animal control when they catch her off-leash in the dog park
• Her father is disinherited by his pack, which strips her of her own werewolf status.

Not a bad start, maybe I can pull this off after all! 🙂