NaNoWriMo Blogging One

NaNoWriMo. <- Right there. Link at the top for nice easy search engine access, right? I love that name, by the way. You ever try to go through the day an use all of a word right up to the first vowel? You get a crazy, flexible, mutable code that pig latin has nothing on. After all, everyone knows that one right? Oh, sorry, right, this is my blog so I was talking about whatever I want. I’ll do that, you know. And I meant to talk about writing and I wound up talking about cryptology. Wonder why I did that, huh? No, I wanted to talk about writing because I kinda, sorta, maybe made a promise late last night to talk a bit about NaNoWriMo today – like the promise you make during a drunken phone call at 4AM and wake up in a dead sweat because you can’t quite remember them the next day. So, you were warned: no one asked for it but you’re getting it anyway.

Because when I write I make copious notes, annotations, iterations, diagrams, charts, maps, and other references I can’t quite parse into any language I quite know yet. And sometimes I even bother to write them down so I don’t forget them. I’ve known about this yearly “competition” to get people off their duffs and actually for some time, of course, but I’ve never bothered to sign up because I figured I didn’t need any competition or arbitrary deadline or rules to prompt me to write. I’d write when and if I wanted to and if I had a novel in me it’d dribble out eventually (In case you haven’t noticed. I can write. A lot. No, really, it’s true. I don’t even get paid for this, imagine.). But, you know, it’s been a couple years and more than one NaNoWriMo has come and gone and I’m still short a finished novel. Oh, I’ve started a couple but never been able to wrap things up to my satisfaction. So, this year for experience’s sake if nothing else I decided to sign up and see if the power of a looming deadline might spur me to actually finish something I started for once. Great on the starts, lousy on the finish. Always hopping from one idea to the next, planning and leaving threads and ideas and concepts and characters and scenes in half-finished unrefined form just waiting for me to pick them up and make the connection.

See, for some reason most people think you write a book from the first page to the last page. A to B to C to D. And that’s never been my way. See, I like to skip ahead. I go from point A to point D directly and only go back when I have to fill in the parts in the middle so people can follow along. I’ll start in the middle, jump to the beginning, then the end, then a little bit before the end, and that means I’ll have to go back and change the beginning because I want to put a pistol on the wall. And then there’s keeping a consistent tone throughout the story which, with something the length of a novel requires considerable effort to impose orthodoxy on scraps of writings from various days and perspectives. And, then, of course, I have to actually figure out what I want to say. Which is to say while I signed up for NaNoWriMo, I haven’t really made that much headway. If I could post my notes, I’d have enough to win the competition twice over. At least. But for the actual text of my actual novel? Well….I’ve kinda gotten a bit distracted. And so, before we move on, a brief moment of silence for the never was. From my ghost file – what I like to call where I stash the ideas that still haunt me but have no substance yet - a selection of rejected ideas for my novel in no particular order. You might pick up that I was in an extremely different frame of mind while gearing up to write as some of my ideas come from or lead to very, very dark and scary places. Not that I would have thought so at the time, for the most part, but, man, there was some mopey, navel-gazing stuff I was planning.

I. Untitled Roman a clef

• Synopsis: Based very, very loosely on personal experience of my college years. In short the story of a group of interdisciplinary students from a good school (We’re not talking Ivy League or anything here. But if I were to drop names you’d probably know it for any number of reasons, and rightly so. A bright group of people from there really shines, you know?) who are on a trip to Europe in general and western, pastural formerly communist East Germany in particular. They’re artists and musicians and engineers and philosophers (in training, anyway) and they’re out to put on a series of…call it performance art shows on and around the annual Love Parade held in Berlin. They’re focusing on something the Deutch call “smaltz” and we call “kitch” and it’s a wild, zany, and diverse group of characters wandering around a foreign country for a month or two with little to no adult supervision beyond their faculty advisors who are just like the students just a bit older and with more beer money. I’d focus on a particular quiet stretch where the Smaltzvald Collective, as they call themselves, has holed up in a working farm in the deep east where hardly anyone speaks any English and are gearing up for their next appearance like cultural rockstars. Hanging out in a close space with long drives to and from places to get anywhere.
• Pros: Let’s see. Ready made characters with built in conflicts of interest and opinion. A foreign and exotic setting. When I get stuck I can just lift wholesale from my own memories for a twist or turn. Close spaces, interesting characters, and lots of room to let them drive the story through dialog and whatnot. Lots and lots of German beer. What’s not to like?
• Reasons for Dismissal: It’s a story I’d like to write but one I’ve been meaning to come back to for a long, long time. So, it’s really going to be just rehashing over things from the past and looking backwards. And I’ve forgotten a lot of German so that’s a lot of research for the sake of accuracy. Then there’s the whole “if I put this into writing who’s going to read it because the people these characters are based on are still out there and we’ve gotten into trouble with that sort of thing in the past” issue to deal with and that’s just going to result in an uncomfortable level of self-censorship. Also, not really sure I could stretch what’s basically a four-character dialog driven play into a novella of 50,000 words without it being a muddled, directionless mess. Just too organically grown, if you catch my drift. Hard to part with this one but just not its time. Maybe next year. Or maybe for this upcoming script competition I hear is in the offing.

II. Clash of Civilizations

• Synopsis: Here’s where I start going headfirst into the Abyss of my own depression and disatisfaction, by the way. To explain this story I have to explain where it’s coming from. And that’s the – then – current geo-political situation of an imperial United States making a serious overreach and, basically, pissing the valuable notion of American Exceptionalism down the drain. In short, people don’t like us and, if they could get rid of us, some of them cheerfully would. So, in the fine tradition of such dystopian futures as A Brave New World and 1984 and everything else that’s sent up a warning flare that down the path we’re headed there be dragons, I wanted catastrophy and the death of nations and peoples as the wheels of history ground inexorably onward. A big, epic space opera slash alternative history slash fantasy epic kind of thing like what I’d been reading lately. Purely for the sake of an intellectual experiment I began to consider what it would actually take for a group, any group, to defeat the United States of America and everything it represents in a heads up, fair fight. The group I came up with makes Al Qaeda look like the pack of cave dwelling troglodytes they are. It would be, basically, a secret, hidden nation-state or collection thereof kept tucked away in a corner of the world no one visited by a conspiracy between the great powers since the time of Columbus if not earlier for the convinience of having a place where the normal laws and rules don’t apply and the fact that colonizing such a place would prove prohibitivly costly – just couldn’t do it the way Africa and the Americas were put to the sword because it would be just a little too strong and a little too vicious and a lot smart. It would be everything America is not and at the same time a dark, twisted mirror version. Where the US is a federation built on law it would be a confederacy of diverse, conquored peoples coexisting only through the threat of overwhelming force. If the US is behaving imperially well, then, this place is an actual Empire. With an actual, hereditary ruler called the Empress. Because, yeah, if the US is a patriarchy then the Empire’s a matriarchy. Where the US is free, the Empire’s not. Slavery would be legal, trials and executions would be swift, there would be no free speech, and there’d be a hereditary caste system keeping people locked into their fates from birth. Yet, where the US was restrictive, the Empire’s not. So, any and all drugs are freely traded and the moral constraints that limit things like homosexuality and genetics and other things here would be entirely absent. A different creature from a different niche. Not the same as the United States, a little backwards here, a little ahead of things there, but a genuine equal. And once the Cold War ended, this Empire decided that it was either going to come down to them or us and decided that “keep your friends close and destroy your enemies” was really the way to go, so there could be no surrender, there could be no lasting peace, there could only be the death of one or the other. So, it’s the story of a ferocious war between two equally matched civilizations with existencial continuation as the stakes. And no one, in that war, is sure who’s going to win.
• Pros: Big, large, compicated, soaking in allegory and meaning. If I could pull it off could be interesting. Cast of thousands, herds of elephants, big fights, big explosions, and lots and lots of drama. Yet, at the same time, recognizing the undamental tragedy of war and death and conflict. Dulce et ducorum est and everything you don’t see watching, say, Rambo.
• Reasons for Dismissal: I’m all for a good challenge every now and then but this was getting a bit ambitious. And just as no one in the story was sure how it would turn out as massive death machines were constructed and the population of the human race dwindled to smaller and smaller fractions, neither was I. Couldn’t find a good and satisfying ending that didn’t involve blowing up the world. History doesn’t have an end just a series of new beginnings, after all. So, I needed to simplify and by the time I’d figured out how one side or the other could win, I’d moved on to the next idea.

III. The Girl with the Singing Brain

• Synopsis: Based on the idea for the previous novel, this one was going to concentrate not on the war but on the aftermath. In that horrible dystopian future where America had actually lost and this crazy mixed up Empire wound up in charge of things. It would explore their ideas and their technologies and just how they managed to defeat a country with as much military might as the United States (Answer: they cheat. A lot. And do it completely honestly.), invade the country, and conquor not jus the US but the whole world or enough of it that the difference doesn’t matter. So, as I was going for a smaller, more personal setting this would concentrate on a group of particularly gifted young Americans in a refugee “re-education” center where an example of the flower of the Empire – the titular Girl with the Singing Brain (matriarchy, remember) was trying to teach them to reject their ideas and embrace the Empires. To get them and the reader, of course, to question whether this was a dystopia or a utopia or something else.
• Pros: Challenge assumptions, break boundaries, and attempt to innovate with all of the innate ability for cultural and political commentary of the previous iteration and fewer of the logistical problems. Me likey bouncy. The whole thing would be a series of essays, conversations, and “class projects” between the students and the teacher playing to my strengths as I’d much rather write an anthology than a novel and playing with perspective and points of view would let me paper over any plotholes that cropped up. Also, came up with the idea of the “Grundlewich Curve” a fictional device for explaining why the Empire would fight so hard to defeat the United States yet at the same time preserve its citizens and consider them valuable enough to not only preserve but attempt to “brainwash” into becoming Imperial Citizens. It’s an interesting framework for viewing things – for me, anyway - and probably deserving of a post in its own right.
• Reasons for Dismissal: The current political climate being what it was I had a not too comfortable feeling that putting such a thing out there on the internet was going to get me put on a list in some database in some government office somewhere or auditied or blacklisted or who knows what because I was talking, if I was misunderstood, about the overthrow of the United States and its system of government in an attempt to liberate its people. And that was a chilling realization in and of itself because I was just thinking my way through a problem and, if anything, I was trying to help America by pointing out some flaws in our system that might be corrected not actually suggest violent overthrow of our leaders. No need. We’ve got the ballot box for that. And that revolution took place, was taking place at the time, and the world looked a little brighter and it seemed like thinking about the end of things wasn’t so much fun anymore as figuring out where we go next.

IV. Untitled Fantasy Novel

• Synopsis: Retreating from reality into the unreal, I’m more of a sci-fi fan than I am of fantasy. They each have their strengths, of course, but I like science fiction because when it’s good it’s really holding up that mirror. But, fantasy can do the same – look at Tokein from the perspective of the second world war, after all - it just tends to be concerned with other things. Fantasy, well done fantasy, is just sci-fi where you don’t have to worry about the technology because you can just wave your hands and say, in effect, “a wizard did it” (Not quite that simple as magic will only work as a device if it has some internal, within the story consistency, in my experience, so it needs to have some vaguely defined, nebulous rules that limit what you can do with it. Prevents you from using it as a crutch, though, so it’s not all that terrible a thing.). It’s sci-fi where you can fudge and get away with things and no one with a slide rule is going to come along and tell you that you’ve made an error in your calculations and that laser on page 3 isn’t going to fire so your whole story is going to fall apart. Especially if you happen to be one of those rules lawyering folks yourself. Anyaway, I have any number of started and stopped manuscripts, and campaign notes, and maps, and characters to blend and weave into a fantasy story. The rules of our little competition say that I can make any preparations I want as early as I want in advance just so long as I don’t reuse any prose. And old PnP geek like myself looks for loopholes like that, you know. The story I settled on was about the gathering of a group of unlikely heroes. Nothing too extraordinary although rather than settling the fate of the world, I’d have had them settling the far reaching and evocative family matters of one of their number.
• Pros: Fantasy seems to have untapped potential, if only for me, in explaining and exploring the human condition. Just have to get past the elves and hobbits the same way you get past the blasters and robots to get to good sci-fi. From what I can tell, I can avoid those pratfalls and race around the track a few times. But a series of short vignettes, showcasing the strengths and weaknesses of each character and then a quick dungeon crawl beat the big bad so the campaign’s over? I can do that I just don’t usually do it with prose.
• Reasons for Dismissal: The main problem here is the sheer amount of information I have available for such a project. There are a lot of scraps out there and stringing them together into a coherent story might well get me to 50,000 words but that’s just recycling my old ideas and rephrasing and retyping things. I would rather, all things told, come up with something original, an idea within the confines of NaNoWriMo so that I can just start and write a novel from start to finish within a few months. Not opposed to nicking an idea or two from my past, just not at the level I’d be tempted to do so here as the deadline began to crunch me.

As for what I’m actually writing, well, it’s gone back into development hell. I mean, I’ve made a start, have a bit done and plans for a bunch more. As well as escapes and trapdoors to cut the whole thing short if I get a bit ambitious. Might wind up being part one of a series, that sort of thing. And I might end up tossing up the whole thing and running up a different tree. I’m mulling things over at this point so I’m going to be a bit coy about the details until I make up my mind. Maybe I’ll post some excerpts once I figure out how to get one of those word counter dealies. Those seem nifty. But just you all look out. At some point I’m going to burn through my ghost file. And then I’m going to get…creative.