The extended holiday weekend was a good opportunity for prolonged bursts of writing. Between Wednesday afternoon and very, very, very early Friday morning, I cranked out 11k words, breaking the 50k limit. I’m going to need to wean myself away from coffee again, but slowly, as I don’t want to have one of those massive “I can hear Woodstock and John typing their NaBloPoMo entries” headaches. Such headaches are alleviated only by ibuprofen and… another cup of coffee.
I ended up with slightly over 53,000 words in 27 separate “sections,” each corresponding to a topic. As the month progressed, I thought of ways to link them into an unified, twisted fairy tale scenario. Stuff like The Department of Homeland Toiletries will be easier to fold in than “Early Saturday Morning in the Life of a Part-Time Soccer Dad.” Still, reworking all of this is a lot of work, well beyond the scope of NNWM.
For fun, some metrics!
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And for posterity, here’s the daily writing rate. The drop on the 13th was explained earlier. |
And, for those reading this far, a selected excerpt:
(Phone rings.)
“Prince Craig Anthony John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, Christchurch Order of Merit,
Commemorative Medal for the Centennial of Saskatchewan, blah blah blah, speaking.”“Oh, hello George. Yeah, well, you know crowds are not my thing. I will be happy
to set her up with Duke Reginald the Lesser — ”“What? No! (sigh) Why does everyone here keep asking me that?”
Craig covers the phone and whispers to Mirth, his minion whose title I can’t
think of right now: “is it because I shower more than once a week… unlike
everyone else here?”Mirth shrugs, smells himself.
(Back on the phone) “Look, I was hoping to be polite about this, but she is twenty-seven and living with in her parents castle –”
“Okay, step-family.”
“Fine. Dead, Evil step-family. What-fucking-ever. My point is she
has spent the last nine years living at home. While her STEP mom and
STEP sisters partied each night until they were too blotto to stand, she
swept the floor… ”“I don’t care what you call it, whether she scrubs the floor by hand
or uses Lysol and a stick mop, it’s still cleaning the house.”“Well, yes, she’s cute. I’m sure she’s nice, too. But her aspirations
are summed up as dreaming ‘someone would take her away from all of
this?’ That only happens in cheap, one-dimensional fairy tales.”“Well, it doesn’t take an Apothecary Phil to realize she lacks self esteem and is in dire need of assertiveness training. As much as I hate the guy, his advice applies to her: ‘Sometimes you just got to give yourself what you wish someone else would give you.'”
(cups phone again, looks at minion. “Can you believe I just quoted Apothecary Phil?”
Mirth is having difficulty containing himself. “Fuck you, Mirth.” Mirth loses
laughter containment.“Uh, George, the connection’s getting fuzzy in this section of the
castle.” He rubs the phone on his gold-plated armor. “I have to ” (rub
rub) “go –” Craig pushes the red “cancel” button.“Damn.”
Congratulations!
And for the record, I believe Pinocchio was exmaple.