Nobody Here

Congratulations to Paula and Hip, who I see have crossed the 50k mark. Archer can't be far behind. Yippie! I already asked Archer this, but, did anyone's story turn out like they imagined it when they started? The best laid notecards...

(Sorry there's no links in this post, I'm in a hurry. You can find all those blogs over there on the right.)

The guests are arriving, and the stuff isn't done. I have lots and lots to be thankful for, but no time to post about it, so just know I'll be waxing grateful over here. Meanwhile, I may not be back until it's all over so:

Happy Thanksgiving!

And:

Go NaNo'ers!

... And a quiet old lady who was whispering, "Put that out!"

Mary at ShortyPJs cautions us to set aside our copies of Goodnight Moon in a safe place. They're bound to make us lots of dough on eBay one day thanks to the recent decision that going forward, the jacket photo of illustrator Clement Hurd will be minus one cigarette.

This is what I said in her comments:

"The Goodnight Moon thing annoys me. What, we can't admit that an illustrator ever smoked? It makes his illustrations worse? I understand the importance of not glamorizing smoking for children but it's not like the freaking bunny is lighting up. Are those who write for children not allowed to themselves be adults, bad habits and all? I suppose if I ever actually sell one of my middle grade books I'll have to take my blog down. SWEARING, you know. Not to mention glamorizing candy consumption. "

But seriously. Would I really take my blog down? Yeah I guess I would, if one day I actually had young, ahem, fans who found it and started reading it. Not because I'm ashamed of anything I say or think or believe, but simply because it's not designed for children, and neither are the blogs it links to. Is that selling out, or responsible to a public audience for whom the material is inappropriate, or both?

Are there really parents out there who would not let their child read a book because they knew the author smoked, or drank, or voted in a way they didn't like, or practiced a religion not their own? I suppose there must be. For those parents, let me shatter the illusion right now: the books your children are reading were most likely written by grown-ups. These people have done Very Bad Things. They've got experience. It won't all be good. But it's one of the things that lets them write.

Of course, everyone has their limits. If I knew somebody was, say, an active neo-Nazi-white-supremacist, would I buy their book for my kid? No. Not even if the book was a lovely little board book about flowers and puppies that had nothing to do with their personal views, and no matter what their jacket photo showed about them. I just wouldn't want to support that person's career.

Personally though, I set that bar pretty low. I couldn't care less if Madeline L'Engle is a gin-swilling, foul-mouthed hussy.* A Wrinkle in Time is still a really good book. Yes, there is a difference between caring what she does and caring what my child sees; I guess I would prefer that her jacket photo not show her in a leather bustier with a bottle of gin in one hand. But if it did would I get sufficiently bent out of shape to discard the book? To demand the publisher doctor the photo until the subject becomes something she's not? No. It doesn't change one word of the book, which I would continue to value for its own sake.

You?

*Please note I'm not suggesting that Madeline L'Engle is any of those things. I think she's a scientist or something, right?

That sucked. And I don't mean the manuscript, although of course that sucks too, especially toward the end where I wrote three different versions of the thrilling showdown against the terrifying villains, none of which contain a showdown that is particularly thrilling or a villain that is particularly terrifying. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about NaNo itself. NaNo sucks. My fingers hurt, I'm tired, both my feet are asleep, I'm nauseous from eating too much candy, my house is a disaster, my dog is mad at me, I've spent $41 on 80's music, and I've got a huge backlog of stuff I was supposed to be doing when I was doing this instead. Not to mention, because there's no need on account of Hip mentioning it already, that they pick the stupidest possible month for this, one that is actually only three weeks long if you've got plans for Thanksgiving. What's wrong with February, huh NaNo planning guys? You've got, what, some big President's Day plans or something? NaNo sucks. Totally. So, who's doing it next year? I need to start brainstorming ideas. I'm going to need more index cards.

Shh! The small person is napping. Actually napping. This is a rare thing these days when she is so very busy plotting and executing the plots. At least someone in this house can plot. I should take advantage of this unexpected bit of time and clean for next week's guests. Ha! Good one! Shh! No scoffing! We musn't wake her. Ok then. Instead, I'm going to see how many words I can get in before she wakes up. If it's enough, I may stay up tonight and just try to get the whole mess over with before the weekend.

My Peppermint Pattie consumption has reached dangerous levels, at approximately 732 words per Pattie. I decide I will delegate such details to the elliptical machine, but still I am troubled. Will all this peppermint build up in my system? At what point will it reach critical mass and have a chemical reaction with the Diet Coke, causing my stomach to explode like poor Mikie with the Coke and Pop Rocks? Can you still get Pop Rocks someplace? What about the Reggie Bar? And what happened to my cupcakes? Have the Peppermint Patties taken over my office closet candy stash and done something with the cupcakes? Are they in there someplace, maybe in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, with little gags and blindfolds on? Am I becoming delusional and paranoid? Why is my office door closed? Has someone locked me in here with nothing but half a box of Peppermint Patties and a somewhat smelly beagle? If I feed him the Peppermint Patties, will he have enough energy to dig us out? The beagle is snoring. Bono is singing. It's eleven o'clock. Tick. Tock. But no, it's only 9:30. So what is he trying to say? What? What?

I approach the big payoff and realize that even the most unobservant of readers would have known all this stuff long ago, making it not so much a big payoff as a big letdown, and worse, changing my group of clever children into little morons for not having guessed this back when the reader did. I revise. I tinker. I change a few details and then I add a whole section where my fearless kiddos line up their clues and guess something kind of right, but also mostly wrong. This comes dangerously close to intentionally tricking the reader and is the cheapest and clunkiest thing I can possibly do, but that can be fixed in the editing. At least I've got a hey-this-is-where-you-avoid-giving-everything-away placeholder I can work with later. Despite the post title I know editing isn't cheating. But it is a big fat NaNoCriMo, isn't it? Anyway the additions increase my word count, so, like, whatEVER.

Who else hasn't been able to resist going back and doing a little editing/adding/revising? I know Lyda did some.

In an attempt to get saucy, I switch from cupcakes to fun size Baby Ruths. But I refuse to get all hopped up on Diet Coke, and this is my undoing. I peter out at just over six hundred new words for the night, and a two-day total of $34 spent on songs at the iTunes store, including several hair band ballads and other stuff I know would greatly disappoint Hip. I need to write nine thousand more words by Friday night to hit my target for the week. I am undaunted. I've got fun size Baby Ruths, and I've got Night Ranger. Tomorrow is another day.

I listen to 80's music when I'm writing, because I have really acute emotional memory attached to songs and it takes me right back to what it was like to be a kid. Except Netscape Radio is superduper annoying with all their ads and song limits, so I finally go ahead and sign up for an iTunes account, even though I don't have an iPod, and just buy some stuff to play on my laptop while I'm working on my nanuscript. I discover that at the iTunes store, the song "In A Big Country" (quoted in the post title), by the band Big Country, is available from an album called The Best Of Big Country. Come on. The best of Big Country? What else is on that record? Can anybody name even one other song by Big Country? I mean without looking it up. Anyway, what? Oh. The nanuscript. Yeah. Things are moving fast now. Probably too fast. We'll see whether I'm done with the story by the time I hit 50k, or whether I need to go back and fill in stuff to hit the 50k. I do tend to rush my plots once they actually show their ugly little faces, so smart money's on the latter even though I still have six of those bastard index cards left, out of fourteen. It's all still very, very bad, but I begin to see emerging a shadow of something that might, three drafts hence, be good. Oh, and Paula, before you call me a basstard, I do extra on Sunday nights because Mondays are really hard days for me to work.

As if the movie for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire coming out next week wasn't enough, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe opens December 9. The trailer looks amazing, and I use those italics deliberately. WETA Workshop, the guys who did all those effects for Lord of the Rings, worked on this film, and they are no slouches. The kids look excellent too.

I just hope I can handle the White Witch, who is the first thing I can remember being really and truly terrified of. Unless you count those gross monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, but the WW was much worse. Your nazguls and your dementors have got nothing on this lady. As you might expect, Narnia was big for me in my sixth and seventh years. I spent more hours than I can count lifting up rocks, diving into puddles, banging on the trunks of trees, and every other thing I could think of, trying to get there. I never once came across a wardrobe, more's the pity. I bet that would've worked. Then when I turned eight I read Lord of the Rings and my Middle Earth phase began. The seven Narnia books lost their place in the rotation of tattered-book-always-on-my-person and were relegated to mere once-a-year-rereads instead. Fickle and neglectful way to treat old friends, I know, but I imagine those books were happy to retire from their difficult lives of being folded, torn, slept with, and forced to endure popsicle sticks (used, not washed) as bookmarks. Anyway you've only to walk in my door and see my collection of lamp post pictures hanging right there in the front hall to know I never forgot.

Mary over at Shorty PJs has a post about The Chronicles of Narnia being marketed in chronological order rather than order of publication. That is, The Magician's Nephew, which takes place first in Narnia time, being labeled as the first book (and put in first position in the boxed sets) despite The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe having been written and published first. I'm surprised peeps are even debating this when it is so obviously wrong. It isn't how he wrote it. It isn't how he published it. And most importantly, it isn't how I experienced it. Like I'm really going to get my daughter some new-fangled Narnia set that can't even get the order right. Dur.

The good news is, things are finally happening. The bad news is, when things start to happen, you actually have to think of things to happen, and that can slow you down. This plot thing is a real drag. The good news is, I tried the pretzel in frosting thing. The bad news is, it was gross. I know. It's a total mystery. Like Oceans 12, it had all the elements for success, but for no obvious reason it just couldn't hit its mark. On some level I blame Catherine Zeta-Jones in both cases. The good news is, I finally hit my target for tonight and I can go to bed now and take the weekend easy. The bad news is, I was just writing something creepy and now I'm kind of too freaked out for going to bed. This is somewhat sad, because I write for ten-year-olds, and as I am not ten, I should not be freaked out by things that are ten-year-old scary, let alone things of my own construction. But mark my words, I will have nightmares. I wanted creepy though, and the good news is, it really really was. The bad news is, it was mostly only creepy in my head. On paper it looks more like a deleted scene from Chicken Run. The good news is, that's bad news that can wait to be dealt with until January.

Some people take long walks for inspiration. Others read Ben Franklin or talk to their grandparents about The Depression or pray. I like to look at things that suck.

Namely, my nanuscript from last year. I save all my drafts as separate files, isn't that just handy? So I opened it up. It is terrible, this thing. Unrecognizable to the finished book. Unrecognizable to any book. As soon as I opened it I was contacted by several members of Congress, who would like to sponsor a bill that will prevent this document's being read aloud as a form of torturing prisoners.

The important things about this very sucky document are: that it sucks just as bad as the sucky document I'm currently writing, and that a few months and drafts later, it turned out to be a pretty good book. Not great, because even in the final draft of that book I actually have my first person narrator more-or-less describe herself while looking in the mirror. Can you believe that shit? Not overtly, it's subtle, but still, she mentions the mirror and by the end of that paragraph you know some stuff about what she looks like. I blame Lyda for this. I almost want to call my agent and tell him to take it back from wherever it is and not send it anyplace else until I fix that. It would only require deleting eight words from one sentence. But I won't, because I employ a strategy with my agent more typically used by doormat girlfriends: I figure if I'm very very quiet, maybe he won't realize he's representing me, and forget to dump me that day.

Anyway. None of this is the point. That point is that overall that book turned out well after a most inauspicious NaNo beginning. I'm just saying, because yesterday I was thinking eh, maybe I'll just give up, I've got too much going on this year, I'm too tired. This particular story really isn't worth it. And I know I'm not the only one. Chris Baty over there at NaNo says this is the week where lots of peeps go, "Yeah, sure, I've got a lot of words, but where are they going? This isn't a novel!" and they scrap it. Anyone else doing this?

Too bad. Shake it off and just, in the immortal words of George Clinton, turn this mother out.

*Post title ripped off from Parliament's "Give Up The Funk"

I'm going to bed. That's right, it's 8:30. That's right, I've only written 902 words. You got a problem with that?

It would seem that nothing has gone on long enough. Last year at this word my story was nearly over. The NaNuscript was about 30,000 words. The final version of that book is 27,000. Now this year at 20,000 words I'm halfway through index card #5 out of 14, which the mathematically inclined among you will note is about 32% of my plot. If we extrapolate based on my prior data point of one - which the scientifically inclined among you will note is enough for most mass media to tout as a "study" - in the end this will be a 54,000 word book. Ah, but that's good, you say, that means you'll win NaNo! Sure. But eyes on the prize, peeps. No, not the NaNo icon. The other prize. What am I going to do with a 55k middle grade novel, huh? I can't sell that. I doubt I could even get Lyda to read that, and she's obligated, because next to being one of my characters, or one of my peppermint patties, being in a writers' group with me is about the suckiest thing that can happen to you. Plus, even if we stipulate that I'll cut lots out during editing, what do I want to go writing more than 50k on the NaNo draft for? There's no, like, extra icon for wordy peeps whose stories didn't end til 60k, right? Something has got to happen inside this house, and fast.

Jenny! Aren't you finished writing that book yet? There's a pile up a mile wide behind you! What's eating you?
Not happy with my work, I guess.
What?
I just don't like to write books.
Oh well if that's all - What? You don't like to write books?
No.
Jenny doesn't like to write books.
Jenny doesn't like to write books. Jenny doesn't like to write books. Shame on you.
Would you mind telling me what you do wanna do?
Well, some day I'd like to be a dentist.
A dentist?
Well we need one up here. I've been studying molars and bicuspids and incisors...
Now listen, you, you're a writer and writers write books. Now get to work.

[...]

My protagonist finally woke up, the sluggard, and by way of greeting I gave him a good morning just north of Gregor Samsa's. If you happen to be a character, my advice to you is to avoid my books entirely. Go live in one of Paula's or Archer's stories, where you are bound to have some fun. The people who live in my books either do nothing, or are tortured by scary people, or at least people who will be scary, when they are properly edited in January. Meanwhile, a protagonist awake is a protagonist who talks to people, and talking to people is good, because dialogue is an excellent word count booster. You get at least two extra words on every line, just by virtue of the attribution. What's that you say? I don't need an attribution if the speaker is obvious? Nonsense. The speaker is never obvious during the month of November. Alright then, she said. Good night.

And your earth moves beneath your own dream landscape. In my dream landscape, the earth moves so slowly as to be imperceptible. After 10,000 words, about eight hours have passed in the Land of Plot, and in that time the reader, who fortunately for him or her does not exist, has been liberally peppered with such rare and exciting treats as: looking at rooms and eating meals. As if that weren't rollercoasterbreathless enough, I now captivate this theoretical audience with the protagonist performing the adventurous and daring act of: sleeping. He'll be sleeping for a large portion of the next chapter, too. Certainly all of this would be forgivable, if it was told in some interesting manner. Sadly, it is not. This is, quite possibly, the most boring novel ever written.

I have yet to hit ten thousand words, and Paula and Archer and Hip are being all uberproductive. I begin to suspect that they are in league with the bastard index cards, and my bastard cold. I shall coin the word basstard, just for them. Out of love, you understand. I am still in the house, where for the most part I will remain until the end of the story, when I will burn it down. Out of love, you understand. Meanwhile I am at least through describing it, and still not a lot has happened, but now people are just beginning to talk about stuff that has happened, or might happen, so that's something, a small victory to sniffle off to bed with.

The world was moving she was right there with it and she was. I'm considering filling my entire manuscript with Talking Heads lyrics, except I'm not sure I know 50,000 words worth. Would it be cheating if I repeated Life During Wartime a few times, I wonder? Because really, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco. Although I guess it is fooling around, pretty much. And I always have time for dancing. So maybe that won't work anyway. I find myself with an unexpected but fortuitous pocket of time to work in today, which is good since I'm going out tonight (yay me!) and won't be writing. I fight the urge to delete everything I did yesterday, agreeing that not only is that against the spirit of NaNo, but it's unlikely that anything I write today will be any better. So instead of deleting I make up some more description of the same house I spent most of last night making up description of, and throw in a few lines of dialogue for good measure. I use cliched phrases like "for good measure" with reckless abandon. I inch up another 1,200 words. Almost 5,000 words in, and nothing has really happened yet. There's a house, though. We know that much. My house. Out of the ordinary.

My foot is asleep. My socks hurt. My socks are surely doing this to my feet. I take one of them off and beat it against the wall. I realize I've become unbalanced. I form a vague plan of redressing this with a cupcake, but as I try to stand my foot buckles oddly and I trip. I sit down again. I mutter to myself. I think in sentences that were once in Notes From Underground, but ended up on the cutting room floor. The clip in my hair is hurting my scalp. I take it out and consider beating it against the wall, the way I did with my sock. My sock is on the floor. I pick it up and put it back on. I leave the clip on my desk with the little stack of index cards that I thought were my friends, my tiny guides through the land of Plot. Instead they don miniature berets and sit there, like little stereotypes in a Paris cafe, mocking me from beneath a veil of sneers and cigarette smoke in an accent that makes them sound somehow superior. They mock the story and the sock and the clip and the box of Peppermint Patties and, most of all, me. They are bastards, those index cards. How I long to throw them in the recycle bin and go the way of my foot. Still, I need them. I have to hit 3,500 words tonight to stay on track, since I won't be writing tomorrow night. So I do, despite the fact that I hate roughly 3,499 of them. Take that, you bastard index cards.

I won't be writing until tonight, but I salute all the peeps who got up early (or stayed up late last night). If you're doing NaNo, it's a hard time to blog, I know, but you must post occasional updates on your progress and how much fun you're having. Good luck to everyone who's doing it, and much entertainment to everyone who isn't doing it, but is laughing at everyone who is.