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| Nothing at all intimidating about a blank screen |
On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).
Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.
With a website that's more than half social-media tool and local chapters seated around the globe, NaNoWriMo has grown from its start in 1999 and currently hosts 200,000+ active participants.
Now, 50,000 words is a short novel, I would guess most people could get through a book that size in a short-length road trip (one or two days). Some books that are about this long include Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (46,118 words), Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (49,459 words), or Lord of the Flies by William Golding (59,900 words).
(information courtesy of indefeasible, a bog on wordpress)
By comparison, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is about 100,000 words, or twice as long as a NaNoWriMo novel. Watership Down by by Richard Adams and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are both about 150,000 words. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is about four times this long, the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is about seven times this long, and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien all told is about ten times this long.
The tricky thing about shorter works is it tends to get harder, at least for me, to convey a good story clearly with only a few words instead of many; coming up with a lot of words isn't as important as choosing exactly the right words to say what you want quickly and cleanly.
So writing 50,000 words in a month may be doable; in my experience it's getting the story and the characters to a satisfying and definite conclusion in that time that's difficult to do. Going over 50,000 words is certainly allowed, but hopefully going over 30 days to get it right won't be necessary.
But it's an undeniably a clever and worthy idea, especially since for many aspiring writers (yours truly included) doing the actual work of a complete first draft, beginning to end, is something they struggle with developing the energy and focus for.
I'm looking forward to this year's project, now that I've put a few short stories on here, as an exercise in building a comparatively complex story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Will it be any good? Who knows. Will it be fun to read? I hope so.
Post one follows! Let's see if this is any good.
The Stats:
Words this entry: 1912 Words total: 1912 Words to go: 48,088
The Stats:
Words this entry: 1912 Words total: 1912 Words to go: 48,088
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Chapter One
When she’d first met the Rooters, Eva wasn’t bothered by their ideas, or the weird way they talked, but by their smell. Their stink -- and it was a stink, there was no nicer word for it -- was a strange one, not dirty like mud or garbage, or like most stinks really, but very clean-smelling, as though something stainless but also not very good for you for you had been dissolved in hot water and thrown into a vapor all around. It was a smell that got your attention and set your teeth firmly in place, though it didn’t make you want to get away, on the contrary, it made you want to breathe deeply, analyze it, find out what it was, because it was a smell you’d never smelled before. Later on, when she did start to understand their ideas, she found that these were at least twice as bad as the stink, and for similar reasons.
Eva first smelled late one night, or early one morning (she had lost track of the time), at the big computer lab across the campus from her tiny lodging. She was feeding the equations of her thesis proposal through the big computers there to see if they would work correctly, and had been scribbling over a pocket notebook beside the control console for hours, trying to get her math work make sense, which in the big picture was rather poor form, since she had booked time on the big computer more than a month before. She really should have known what she was doing with the time before she’d booked it, but she’d imagined, and hoped, that she’d be able to make her ideas make clear and sensible sense before the time for the computer actually arrived. Besides, she needed something to show her advisor soon, or else they would start to suspect that she’d spent the last ten months doing nothing at all (which was essentially the truth), and she’d be kicked out of the department without so much as a letter of recommendation for her efforts. Or lack thereof, whatever.
The important thing was: she was onto something. These ideas had substance to them, though she was still chasing after a guess of it, there was something hidden in what she was struggling to express that had weight to it. She wasn’t sure what the idea was, but she knew what it involved, and it was almost paralyzing with excitement when she took the time to hold her breath for a moment and dare, just dare, to believe it could be true. It could change everything. If it was true. But it was a long way to proving what her numbers said was true; first she had to figure out what she was actually even trying to say. And so far, despite a month and a half of nights just like this one, cramped in an uncomfortable student’s chair, swapping and tweaking and erasing numbers and symbols until the paper nearly tore from re-erasing and the smudges of graphite from the edge of her hand blotted over everything she tried to put down, and she wanted to go lay down in the dark somewhere and cry.
She guessed (she didn’t dare look at the clock) there were about two hours of her four-hour block of time still left. She had maybe an hour, maybe to get this figured out, and get it all fed in, if she wanted even partial results to present on Monday. She stopped again, erased what she had written down, noticed her paper had been reduced to the consistency of ashy kleenex, and flipped to the next page of her little notebook. She pulled the rumpled paper out of her pocket on which she had her starting equations, copied them down onto the new page (more than half from memory at this point, but by now the paper had become her talisman, she needed it in order to feel like she was getting off to the right start -- this was also why she hadn’t copied these important equations onto a new and less crumpled piece of paper), and started over. She wanted a break, to stretch her legs and get a cup of coffee from down the hall, but there was no time for that now. After a moment the struggle of making the numbers fit together had her attention and her imagination again, and she quite forgot the coffee anyway.
She had hoped that the pressure of the session on the big computer would help trigger whatever was holding back in her brain and make her ability to get this right fire into action. At first, when she’d started realizing what a struggle it would be to make this work, this belief had come from a sense of exciting crisis and emotional satisfaction: just in the nick of time, everything would work out, the story neatly told and happily ended with plenty of danger averted. Later, especially in the last feverish week, it had become a last hope: nothing else had worked, so surely the prospect of eminent failure and disaster would cause it all to work. But so far it wasn’t working. If anything, the numbers on her notepad were getting harder to read.
Whump!
At first the sound didn’t clearly register, she was so bent on making just that part of the math which she was then struggling with work. But it did occur to her after a moment that there had been a sound, or a something, and she looked around herself and up in the air with a baffled expression. The lab, except for the creak of her chair, the chitter of the tiny lights on the board, the whoosh of the cooling fans, and the steady hum of the enormous engines of artificial portions of thoughts in the next room, was perfectly still. After a moment she went back to her work.
Maybe if she went down the hall for coffee and stopped staring at the paper for just a few moments it would be fresher, she would be fresher, and it could make a little more sense. At least it would be nice to get up off this chair. She thought a little longer about it, sitting and staring before her the way a person does when they wake up too early for their custom, and are in a daze: she was doing her math still, in just another minute, the way a sleepy person is getting up to grab their socks in just another minute. She thought that way while three or four precious minutes slid by. It cost a lot of money, first to purchase and then to run, that powerful and expensive computer array. The value of those three or four minutes’s worth of time, for instance, would have paid for an expensive meal for you and I at a better-than-middle-luxury-grade restaurant. It was a very powerful and cutting-edge array. Eva stared at her paper.
When she realized she had been staring blankly and not working, she started, and reproached herself, and tried to get back to work, feeling like jumping up and down on her papers and stamping them into the tiled floor. Then did the only sensible thing she could think of. She got up, put her papers into her satchel, drew out her pass-key for the lab doors, left the satchel slung over the back of the chair, and walked out to the hall, down towards the coffee room.
The corridor was long and only half-lit at this hour, every other fluorescent light set in the ceiling left alight by the cleaning staff, who had probably finished long since and gone home. She wanted to look at her watch, but resisted the impulse. She would look as soon as she got back; maybe that would make her panic badly enough to get to work. Had the cleaning people finished, though? There was a funny smell in the hallway.
Whump!
She halted mid-step. It had come from behind her somewhere, as if a heavy bundle of clothes or something had been dropped on the floor. She didn’t want to turn around at first, but she did.
There was nothing there. Just empty hallway.
It’s finally happening, she thought as she continued towards the coffee room. I’ve started hearing things. Seeing things comes next, or hearing voices, she wasn’t sure which. She felt like yawning but didn’t. Coffee.
The break room was more of a furnished closet, counters and a sink down one wall, fridge at the end, coffee machine on the counter. It was the big inexpensive kind that she loathed (she wished they’d had an espresso machine, though they took time and care to operate and she had no idea how) where the steel shelves held glass-bulbed caraffes with the orange and green handles. The green-handled caraffe was decaf, and no use to her: the orange handled one had the good stuff. Except it was empty.
She was reaching over to pull open the drawer when she saw a figure standing in the open doorway. She gave a little shriek and jumped back, she was so startled to see anyone there. She landed in a half-karate stance (she didn’t know any martial arts), hands half-closed in little fists and elbows hovering against her sides. She was about to say “who are you?” or “what do you want,” just as soon as she got breath in her to speak. She noticed at once, but didn’t process the information for a moment, that the smell had gotten much stronger.
It was a man, she’d never seen him before, very tall and odd-looking. He had very large eyes behind very thick glasses, a pointed chin and a large nose, like a stork’s bill. His hair was cut longish short and very neat, and his dress was the weirdest part: he was dressed in a grey pinstripe three-piece suit and blue tie, which had something about it that looked old-timey, and was holding a grey bowler cap in his right hand. He stood very straight, shoulders back and chin up, as if he was more or less standing at attention. Though his clothes looked neat and clean and freshly-pressed, there was something rumpled about him, as if he’d just been knocked over or fallen down and hastily re-arranged himself on the go. A shiny watch chain was slung across the vest buttons at his narrow abdomen, only the middle hook had fallen down and hadn’t been fixed yet. He looked a little like he was lost.
He moved his left hand, the one not carrying his hat, and Eva started again, raising her hands into a defensive posture. He fixed his watch chain so it hung properly (he must have noticed her staring), and then raised the hand in a half-hearted greeting.
“Good evening,” he said cheerfully, and a little apologetically. “Or good morning. I’m very sorry to startle you. Do you happen to have the time?”
“Who are you?” asked Eva finally, not moving her feet from their semi-combat ready stance, in case that part of her was at all intimidating.
“My name,” said the man, “is Nibb. I was wondering if you perhaps could use any assistance this evening, or morning, with checking over your maths.”
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