Gearing up for National Novel Writing Month

Next month National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) will be upon us again. This will be my third year participating--with last year being the first year I complete a novel. I'm excited to be participating again and this year I'm even planning to donate to show my support, my issue is that I can't decide what I want to do this year--there's also the other issue of having my previous novel edited and only about halfway retyped for my husband to read as I promised him he'd be able to do long before this November rolled around. 

I've gone through about eight "perfect" ideas now and have lost interest in every one of them. I gave myself until the end of our vacation last week to decide on the current four ideas that have popped into my head the last couple weeks. Here I am at Monday and, at best, I'm down to two of those. The two I've decided to discard are the flash fiction entries here in my blog. I'm sure I could do more with both of them, but I don't want to right now. Of the remaining two, one falls into the children's literature/mystery category and the other falls firmly into the mystery genre. 

Mysteries are my first love and no matter how often I move on to something else, I always find myself wanting to finish a mystery of my own. I have a very clear image of my protagonist and his life, which has me excited because I haven't had this clear a picture of a character since the two main characters in the novel I wrote last year. I'm wondering if he's finally the character who will help me complete my first mystery. But I also realized when examining his life that he's gay and I'm second guessing my ability to do him justice. The rational part of my brain is telling me to just write the story and see where it takes me. 

The children's literature idea came to me after reading Liana Brooks' post in which she discusses the void in role models for boys in today's children's literature. I have to agree with her: As much as I love super heroes and fantasy worlds, I want a new "Hardy Boys" for my son when he's old enough to, hopefully, enjoy reading as much as my husband and I do. That had me thinking that maybe I needed to create one of my own. I've got the idea there but the characters I'm not completely convinced are the right ones. 

The more I sit here and write this, the more I think that perhaps the mystery is the one to go with. If only because of the feeling I have about the protagonist. But being the person that I am, I'll probably end up spending at least the rest of the day second guessing everything.