If you haven't seen my posts on the Nano forums, I have finally formulated an outline to the plot for this year's Nano novel. I suppose I could call it magic realism although anything "magical" happening isn't going to faze any of the characters--it won't be as if they suddenly discovered that their universe was unraveling. My main character is going to be an out-of-work programmer (who will soon get work in the course of the story, but that's not the point) who's attached to a cat-spirit.
I'll explain here a bit about cat-spirits since I probably won't in the story since cat-spirits in that world is as old hat as electricity in our world. They're beings of a sort and only 10% of the population can actually see them (believe it or not, I spent last night fiddling with numbers so I could figure out how many people would need to see cat-spirits so it wouldn't be so unusual in that society). They can walk through objects like ghosts, but they are not ghosts. Here's where it gets a little mind-numbing: string theory. According to string theory, our universe has four visible dimensions (three spatial and time) as well as several other "hidden" dimensions which are curled up below the Planck length (that's incredibly small, way beyond our current methods of detection). In my story's universe, the other dimensions aren't so curled up so that some things can exist on that dimension. Only certain people can see into that dimension (the ability can be inherited)--think of it as how color-blind people and color-sighted people perceive things differently. At any rate, I won't go so much into the physics. Although with this explanation, it's more like hypothetical sci-fi realism than magic realism.
Well, enough about what I've planned. I've noticed on the Nano forums that a new genre has been added: chick lit and women's fiction. Are there really that many people writing that stuff? How about thriller? Western? Choose-your-own-adventure? And I won't name any names, but there are some weird topics on the forums--I guess the internet really does bring out the fringe people.
