Between encouragement (well, mocking) from my family and a few people at work keen on the idea, I’m seriously considering giving National Novel Writing Month a try this year. Which means I have to start outlining… well, now.

I’ve actually wanted to try NaNoWriMo for about five years now, but I’ve never had a chance to. This year I actually do, and I have the energy for it as well — Whitechapel has really gotten me excited about writing longer pieces of fiction. While I’ve written whole books before, I haven’t ever even tackled a novel before, so this will be totally new to me.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t had ideas for novels all this time. In fact, I’ve had several. I’ve managed to narrow it down to five that I have interest in and notes for, but I’m having a hard time choosing, so I wanted to see what y’all thought. I won’t necessarily go with the most popular option — it might be that I look at that option and go "Ugh," which means that I really had my heart set on another idea and didn’t realize it — but it will help me boil my options down to one. Here are the "elevator pitches" for each, and any pros or cons against them.

• As The Devil Drives: A demon-possessed mobster runs afoul of a washed-up detective who has seen things most people won’t believe. (Horror detective fiction) This is actually a novel I wrote a chapter or two on a while back, but I could never get moving on it. In feel it would be pretty close to Whitechapel, which means I might want to consider something a little different to change it up.
• Night Fall: A witty female vampire hunter gets caught up in the society of the local undead who are all idiots. (Comedic modern fantasy) This is actually what started the idea of NaNoWriMo going — a parody of various female vampire hunter novels out there. Of course, this is pretty close to what I do for a living, so it’s got a similar strike against it as "As The Devil Drives" in terms of mood overlap.
• Terrifying Disappointment: The salvage crew of the HCSS Terrifying Disappointment find that they are the only hope left in their sector of space against an alien menace. (Comedic sci-fi) I’ve been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi recently, so this idea is pretty fresh to me, but it would be two genres I’ve never done before.
  
• The Bureau: A group of empowered individuals work together in secret to defeat a race of dimensional creatures from taking over the world. (Modern pulp superheroes) This is a pretty old idea that I’ve been poking at again recently. I like the idea, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s a novel or something else.
• Thy Kingdom Come: The War of Heaven comes to Earth in the late 19th century. (Dramatic alt history) Another old idea, and not something I’ve worked on recently, but I did a lot of research a few years ago, and I’m pretty sure I still have all those notes somewhere.

So, if youhave a second, click on the titles you think are interesting/would be interesting for me to write/think I would have fun writing. You can choose as many as you want — again, I’m not looking for hard data, but just collecting some random opinions to give me something to mull over and help me narrow these choices down.

(Note: Poll is not working for some, so if you can’t vote, just toss your thoughts in a comment, tweet them to me on Twitter, or email me.)