Much more gratuitous word count padding and very little plot development. Hey, I can’t lie, this is basically a useless, “I’ve given up on the story but refuse to quit, because I’m stupid like that, and because the other option is cleaning the house, putting away laundry, or working on the bathroom remodel” chapter. So pointless writing it is! At least the pitiful re-use of things written (but yes, written this month!) for other reasons has stopped in this chapter! That has to make it better, right? Yeah… I wouldn’t take that bet. Though longer shots have come through, thank you very much, Cleveland Browns!.
Melissa stared at her computer screen. There were so many things she should be doing, instead of working on the fetid pile of crap that was her National Novel Writing Month novel. She could be folding that serious mound of laundry, vacuuming the rec room, doing dishes… or starting to work on the numerous Christmas presents she still had to craft. But no, she was determined to stick this out and finish, no matter what.
Maybe just a quick check of Facebook, a little bit of Farmville, an update on Twitter… no, she had to buckle down and write. Something, anything. She was already willing to throw in the towel on plot and any semblance of a decent story for the sake of word count, why couldn’t she just write? Stream of consciousness, even! Anything! But her mind was a complete blank, except for idea that her mind was a complete blank. And you couldn’t very well just write that, even in a story as bad as hers had become.
Because what can you say past ‘my mind is a complete blank’? Past that, she was, well, blank. You can’t just go on and on about having a mind as empty as space, as devoid of thought as, well, Paris Hilton’s. That was bound to get boring after awhile. And it was weird, the one time she needed her head to be full of thoughts and ideas, and it wasn’t.
She’d never been able to clear her mind like this during yoga, had, in fact, gotten tossed out of a Ti Chi class for being to… rambunctious, because she couldn’t settle down and meditate. Her brain was always going on about all sorts of projects and ideas, and bombarding her with things she needed to do – e-mails she needed to answer, posts she should respond to, all sorts of things. That reminded her, she did actually need to leave a few messages…
Flipping to her internet window – yes, she should have closed it, but she didn’t, and it was there, waiting to distract her – she went to her blog and posted just a few, quick responses. It wouldn’t take too much time and she’d be right back at it, getting those last three thousand words before she put this horrid NaNo experience behind her. And maybe a quick post. She hadn’t been around much, and maybe people would appreciate an update? Not that most of the people weren’t busy with their own NaNo projects, most far better than hers, for sure.
But what would she update them on? “Oh, bother, still have writer’s block, don’t know why I’m bothering with this whole NaNo thing at all this year”? That seemed a stupid update, and they already knew she’d gone ‘round the bend. She’d written crazy things before, but this year… this year was over the top. This year the crazy had a whole zip code to itself. And really, there was a fair amount of cheating, so is it really a clean win? Yes, she wrote those words herself, but recycling them into her NaNo seems unfair. But is it any less fair than stream of consciousness writing? They say quality is not the issue with NaNo, you’re just supposed to write. But doesn’t that imply some story? Some thread that runs through the narrative that presumably leads you to an ending?
Or is narrating the Battle of Gettysburg – bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang, etc – a viable option? Could she simply have a character that is unable to fall asleep, and counts sheep endlessly? One thousand, three hundred and twenty one sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty two sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty three sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty four sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty five sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty six sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty seven sheep, penguin!, one thousand, three hundred and twenty eight sheep, one thousand, three hundred and twenty nine sheep, one thousand, three hundred and thirty sheep, one thousand, three hundred and thirty one sheep, one thousand, three hundred and thirty two sheep¸ one thousand, three hundred and thirty three sheep, one thousand, three hundred and thirty four sheep… and so on.
The web site says that it’s up to the individual to decide what is right, what is fair, and what should count. If grammar and spelling aren’t an issue, and lack of plot is no problem, is it really much of a writing exercise? Maybe for the more prepared, it gives them a goal, a motivation, but she’d always approached it as a blank slate – no pre-planning, nothing. Was that really the spirit of it? And if so, is it fair to call the end product a novel? Again, yes, for some people. But is it still an accomplishment of anything but typing to vomit out fifty thousand words of meaningless text?
This was seriously depressing her, so she went to get a glass of wine. So close to the end, to the accomplishment, and she was talking herself out of that finish. Telling herself she didn’t deserve to win. And maybe she didn’t. In years past, yes, she had produced a halfway decent, coherent story. But when one goes so far out on a limb, does so many insane things, all in the pursuit of some word count goal, what is the point? Or can the ridiculousness itself be a point? In some ways, the cheating is hard – how do you work, say, a scientific paper on the mating habits of the wax worm into a romance novel? Badly, sure, but with some creativity. How do you shoehorn in the words to a disco song into a piece set in Regency England? With style, naturally. How do you think up ridiculously long character names, or work in horrendously long numbers?
That reminded her, she still needed to work in a character that could recite pi to at least a hundred digits. That would be good for… hmmm, only a hundred words, and was it really worth it. Maybe her character could recite Shakespeare, instead. Or Jabberwocky. Literate gibberish and word padding! That had to be a trifecta record. Or maybe she should write a musical, and her characters could burst into song. Modern rock songs, like Mamma Mia did with ABBA. Except that had been done. With Mamma Mia and ABBA, and, frankly, looking for songs she could tie together into a story would take longer than just writing something off the cuff. Come to think of it, a lot of the word count padding techniques were a lot of work, at least compared to stream of consciousness writing.
Would it be cheating to use a speech to text program? She could certainly babble out fifty thousand words in no time. She could probably write her whole novel on her commute to and from work. Though what she really wanted was a program that would read the internet to her as she drove. How hard would it be to come up with an application to read your blogroll to you as you drove? Yes, she normally liked to listen to audio books, when she could find a decent one, but she’d struck out lately. The last one she’d listened to, Body Movers, had been so annoying. And yet she had started listening to the next one in the series, because she thought that she could tough it out and get some resolution, but the main character drove her insane.
The basic premise was that a spoiled rich girl gets stuck raising her little brother after her parents skip town to evade legal charges. She’s eighteen, her brother is eight or nine, and her whole life falls apart. Of course her rich friends – and her fiancé – drop her like a hot potato, she gets a retail sales job, and they scrape by. But at every turn both she and her brother are so irresponsible with money it sets your teeth on edge. Her brother is nineteen before she makes him get a real job, and she’s constantly blowing money on seriously overpriced designer clothes (she works at a Nieman Marcus). And her brother gambles and is in debt to loan sharks, on top of all their legitimate bills, like being behind on the rent. It’s enough to drive you crazy.
Of course they put the teaser out there about her parents at the end of book one, which led her to start book two, but more of the same and she’d returned it to the library unfinished. And she’d picked up a few others, just by the titles, but hadn’t listened to enough of either to decide if it was decent or not.
Titles. There was a whole other ball game. She couldn’t count the number of times she had picked up a book based on the title. To be honest, it was probably most of the time. Sure, if the blurb didn’t sound like her cup of tea she put the book down, but it was almost always the title that led her to pick up the book in the first place. Sometimes the gamble paid off, and a quirkily titled book was an amazing find. Sometimes, not so much. Gun, With Occasional Music was one audio book she’d recently tried that had seemed good, but hadn’t really caught her attention. Maybe it was something about the near future alternate reality that put her off. Things were recognizable, to a point, but not. And that whole evolved animal thing was, admittedly, weird.
A sudden noise outside the apartment drew her to the window. It sounded like someone running down the back alley, pulling over all the trash bins in their wake, like the bad guys do in movies to slow down their pursuers. She’d always wondered if that worked in real life, and it looked, at least for now, as if it was. The naked guy carrying the large cucumber seemed to be increasing his lead over the guy dressed like a Viking, though it could have less to do with the trash cans and more to do with the fact that the Viking had a large pair of bloomers stuck to his horns and it was interfering with his ability to see properly.
She shrugged, let the curtain fall back into place, and went to get herself a slice of pie. She’d think of something to write about, eventually.
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