NaNoWriMo 2006

In the strict sense, yes:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.

But let's face, nobody's looking over your shoulder. Everything I've done for it was totally from scratch, but the ideas had been kicking around one way or another.

Good luck to all of you guys, though.

I really should register.

Those who have read it will only have the impression of something missing. Something unnatural. Something unwholesome.

Also, I should add that my husband is also trying it again this year. He beat me last year and that is so not going to happen this time. (Grudge match!)

Suddenly I am all nervous! What if my novel is a pile of poo! What if, on top of the 15,000 words a week I already write for my job, I am unable to write another 12,500 words a week?

Yarblon!

Watch the metaphors, too, they'll get you into some tricky corners.

Actually I suspect this year time will actually start going BACKWARDS when Ned puts fingers to keyboard. Faster computer this year, right?

God help me, this is going to suck big donky balls.

I am definitely in, happily. Need to restart the account.

I'm already having dire feelings about my success with this. But my number one reason for participating is to motivate myself to write more, so anything will be good.

Ah, spam.

I prefer to let the writing lead me to the title.

I just added you, perhaps I did it wrong.

now all can larf at my writing.

As for "pain in the ass," I have realized that I will do anything to avoid writing actual words of my novel down. But I'm proctoring exams at Carleton this weekend, so hoping that somehow I'll be inspired there. (Also, only taking along a laptop that has Word on it and stuff to study. I will be forced into virtue.)

The boy rolled his eyes. “EVERYONE knows we come from the field, and when people want to play with us, we take them to the field and we have fun. We took your stupid friend with us the other day and we had a great time – he was whining, though, so we got tired of him. We don’t like dorks.”
Smart kids. “I have problems with them too but sometimes I can’t escape them.”
“ANYWAY,” said the girl, “we come from the field and that’s home, and that’s where more of us come too.”
“More?”
The girl jabbed a thumb behind her. Bill looked up and noted with astonishment that what seemed like thirty children were ambling down the road to the park from the field. Some adults walking nearby saw them approaching and were shaking their heads. Two passing by near where Bill stood saw and one said to another, “Well, I knew THAT was too good to last. But we can kick them at Starbucks some more later.”
“Yeah but what if they try and break into our houses again?”
“Hey, I’ve got the shotgun.”
“Oh right – how good’s your target practice?”

Dan, don't give up. I predict that by the end of this weekend you will reach either 30,000 words or 1,300.

accentmonkey - always listen to FB, he's usually right.

FB - Go! You're doing great!

Dan - honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if you somehow got to 50K this weekend, just to mess with the rest of us. (Oh, was that a challenge?)

Get to it, slacker.

OMG OMG OMG

1. NANANANA
2. Show w/friends.

HOW DO I SHOT CHOOSE?

going to show.

Whatever had occurred in the seventies was still not fully understood, but apparently there’d been a revolt in the witch and magic world, with a dissident group of witches claiming they had been locked out of board decisions and that their candidates for the board were not being taken seriously. The resultant infighting had turned into a battle royale that was finally settled via various magical duels in Arizona.
“That was the problem, though – they finally couldn’t escape wider attention. They put on a rock festival as a means of disguising all the pyrotechnics, then proceeded to try and destroy each other while all the amplifiers were going off along with the light show.”
“That’s weird,” said Dara. “But did it work?”
“Well, there were a few deaths and everyone was beaten up pretty bad. The only problem was that they did this next to an Air Force base for some reason. Word seeped along that something bizarre had happened and needed to be investigated. That’s where we stepped in.”

"No, I didn't do anything. Nothing for months on end. I lived off my portion of the money we split up and wandered around mostly, trying to get a feel of the country I'd left behind so many years ago. It was 1969, the summer of love, and it looked like my father's worst fears had come to pass. The communists were continuing to expand, and Castro was still in power in Cuba. By his reckoning, American society should have been evolving into a classless anarchist technocracy, which was just the first stage of an evolutionary cycle that didn't make much sense to anybody other than my father, and honestly, I don't think he was entirely clear on the matter himself. But instead we were stuck with Nixon and the hippies and a small hand-full of increasingly militant revolutionary groups. Well, I felt like a total outsider. There I was a shepherd without sheep, no occupation and no direction. I bummed around getting high and I milled around a few happenings and protests, generally enjoying the finer aspects of the youth culture, namely lots and lots of free sex.

"Well there I was aimless and unmoored, on acid, and taking part in an orgy in the back of a semi-trailer with about two dozen college students and drop-outs from the University of Florida, driving through the southern leg of the 'Screw America Tour', when I literally bump into one of my old crew-mates. It was Malik Malika, the son of Malika Malik, a radical lesbian Pakistani poet, most famous for her letters to Alec Douglas-Home comparing Nevile Chamberlain to a potted plant. Malik was one of the few lads who joined the crew of the Black Sea Otter voluntarily, looking for something different from the years he spent cloistered at the divinity school in St. Andrews, where he went to study the British by way of their theology.

"'Malik,' I says, 'Get your hand off my hairy ass, you scurvy bastard. It's old Billy from the Otter.'

"Up snaps Malik's head from between the thigh's of a curvaceous blond Gator. 'Billy,' he says, 'You salty dog, I've been looking for you for months. Your trail went cold at the protest in Gainesville.'

"I pulled my arm out from beneath the breasts of a bucking young filly from Georgia, and propped myself up so I could see properly over the shoulder of a brunette who had just met my acquaintance, though we had yet to meet face to face, if you know what I mean," Billy winked at Zander, who's mouth was hanging open.

"'Well, that's where I hooked up with a troop of self-styled roving prophets,' I says to Malik, 'Called themselves "Cassandra's Crotch"--some sort of free expression collective that went around preaching peace from their nether regions.'

"'Ah,' says Malik, 'sounds like your kind of outfit, indeed.'

"'Aye, I was sated for a while,' I says, 'before I ran into a Pot-o-Gold gathering in the Ozarks.'

"'A Pot-o-Gold gathering. What's that,' says Malik.

"'Well 'tis a group of Irish descendants that started up a commune near Possum lake, on an old Gator Farm.'

"'Never heard of 'em,' says Malik.

"'Well,' I says, 'They weren't very open to other ethnic groups. Tried to keep their peace and love amongst a relatively narrow group of Irish clans from the Old South. They kicked me out when they realized my last name was Schafer and that my Bristol accent wasn't an Irish lilt.'

Nearing the end of a four-thousand word story that was sparked by the question, "How did you come to be a taxidermist?" We are nearing the end of Billy's career as a pirate, which came long after his youthful success as a shepherd in Scotland.

FB, by posting that you saved yourself a naggy Sunday afternoon phone call from me. Also, the parts of your novel that you have posted make perfect sense to me. I'm not sure what that means.

I wrote longhand last night while proctoring, but I think A. has fixed it so that I have a laptop for tonight.

You should see him open a stuck-shut pickle jar!

34,000:

The evening itself was a jolly enough one, for all the strained sentiments at work. The meals prepared by the skeleton chefs were quite delicious and won much praise, especially the various fatted roast children hams, which had been smoked for some decades before being used for this occasion.
“You can’t get children like this any more.” This was from current board leader Gwillim LaFleur, known as a gourmand when it came to his meals, especially ones involving young human flesh. “I think it had to be something to do with all those awful preservatives people eat these days, I think everyone tastes a little like plastic now.”
“To be sure, board leader, to be sure.” Leticia Wesking had spoken, a young go-getter over sorts that Mary was convinced assisted Gwillim in a variety of ways, not all magical. “It’s so wonderful to be able to enjoy the work of someone who truly cares about their meals.”
“Thank you,” said Mary, feeling a bit cool about them both – understandably, since they’d had an argument via crystal ball earlier that day. However, all was publicly calm in the face of nearly all the brethren – the room was packed and conversations and meals spilled out into various side rooms and corridors. Some skeletons were giving guided tours throughout the house, though Mary had forbidden anything to do with the lower levels to be shown yet – as she had told Grimalkin, “That will be a surprise for them all yet.”
Porter could have said something but Mary had cast a clever compulsion spell on him that rendered any attempt by him to explain what was forthcoming into a request for pie. As a result, the captured wizard sat miserably at a side table with fifty pieces of lemon meringue surrounding him. He waved off offers of help while trying to press the pie onto anybody passing by, so he could at least slump facefirst down on the table.

A+ for efficiency, in all areas, apparently. However, I hope you don't mind if I decline offers of pickles from you in the future.

Reading your excerpt makes me want to know what is in the lower levels! Well, and now I want some pie, too.

Perhaps finishing this will justify all the crazy taking up residence in my head since I started this.

Has anyone else noticed a spooky inability to relate to people after writing for a few hours, or is it just me?

(More serious answer: "after writing for a few hours," is where I can't relate. Because, unlike the rest of you, I am a bad, lazy person.)

Still, word had at least generally leaked out that the strangers in town had had something to do with the temporary kid reduction on the one day, and he’d already received any number of backslaps and thanks for ‘giving hope to this town again,’ as one old-timer had put it.
“You’d never had hope before?” asked Bill at the time.
The old-timer had spit and said, “Listen, young man, there was a time when there was life and merriment and music all around me, a time of celebration. It was this morning, when a bunch of those young hoodlums came and egged my house while playing some awful music. If you told me that you had found a way to bury them in a swamp all at once, I’d give you my first daughter AND my first son. I wouldn’t want to sound like a bigot, you see.”
Bill had reflected briefly on the generosity of the offer but concluded that he’d probably violate some internal policy he was unaware of if he accepted.

I, on the other hand, have fallen completely behind. A mere 26,000. Woe is me. Still battlin' though.

I'm still hopelessly far behind, at around 12,700 words. But look, I have immortalized some classic Hastings high-jinks (and a bit of its geography) into my bad, bad book:

I drove through down the main highway through town, which passed through the Clear Point’s only business district. My father’s first store, currently being run by one of his ubercompetent young managers, was dark and empty. Seeing it reminded me of my father and the whole horrible thing again. Grief is funny like that; you think it’s gone, you think you’re over it, and yet it comes back again and again to surprise you when you least expect it. I suppose that is to be expected in the first days after a loved one’s death – shock and regret and pain – but I’ve also found that even years later it can come out of nowhere and hit you again with unexpected for ce.
Driving on a bit further, I had almost passed the Dairy Queen when I noticed the sign outside of it, which advertised, “Double Oral Delight: Only $.69.� I was pretty sure that this was not what the very conservative owners of the local Dairy Queen had meant to have up on their ad board, and I starting laughing and half-turned to Carter to ask if he had seen it.

They peered from behind the tree. Ahead of them was the open area in front of the house, full of modified brooms and related vehicles in a huge jumble of parking that might have been organized at one point, but wasn’t as much any more. Some skeleton staffers, outfitted in garish versions of uniforms, wandered among the brooms, apparently acting as both security guards and vague parking attendants, idly polishing things as they chose.
They were spending most of their time chasing after the familiars, however, who seemed to want to swarm the brooms as a protest against not being allowed into the house. Cats ran around, bats flapped and awkwardly hopped from ledge to ledge, and snakes slithered about, wrapping themselves around the skeletons as they chose, even though it had no effect on them, as they pointed out regularly. One such combination was near where the two women crouched.
“Look, you can strangle me around the neck as much as you want, nothing will happen! I don’t have any larynx you can crush!”
A hissing voice responded. “Well I can at least snap your head off!”
“Like nobody’s ever done that to me before. That’s basic stuff! If you’re going to scare me you’re going to have to work harder! Now get out of here, I’m busy chasing a cat.”

“So, Grimalkin, what think you of my plans for tonight?”
The cat opened up an eye carefully. He was sitting on his preferred shelf in Mary’s chamber of spells and research, and he had thought he was asleep. Except he was reacting immediately to her words, so clearly he wasn’t. I really need to work on that, he thought, stretching and pulling himself upward a bit.
“I think your plans are as good as you want them to be. I’m just a familiar, after all – whatever happens is beyond my control.”
“Yes, yes, but I have you around for a reason, not least of which is because you are the only other intelligent being I can have a conversation with.”
“There’s always the mirror.”
“I said intelligent, not self-pitying.”
“The two need not be mutually exclusive.”

Nanowrimo is a microcosm of my life.

"Hhhhhheeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyy..."

Also, FB is apparently too shy to post that he has gotten past 24,000 words. Which is fabulous!

Not the "real" Fonz? I'm heartbroken! (Actually, I am chuckling at the Edina references.)