A Loser, Again

Maybe it was the drugs.

In my effort to bring down a cold that had clogged my head with globs of phlegm, I had ingested, in one capacity or another, half a pharmacy:  DayQuil, NyQuil, their generic Target equivalents, Cold-Eeze lozenges, Halls Defense lozenges, Airborne “effervescent health formula”, Zicam “great-tasting” cinnamon-flavored Cold Remedy ChewCaps, and because my tongue could no longer tolerate such great taste, the nasally-injected gelatinous goo known as Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel.  I was loopy and goopy.

And so it was that with a head full of drugs and snot, I decided, on November 27th, that, with 43,716 words to go, I could finish my NaNoWriMo novel by midnight, November 30th.

Long-time readers of this column will no doubt recall our previous successes with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which fools, derelicts and other types of delusional novelists attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in a month.  Fifty thousand words is a rather short novel -- in some circles, only a novella -- but of course, 30 days is a rather short period of time; the idea is that the constricting parameters of the event free you from the wrath of your inner editor and let you just write without taking pains over petty things like punctuation, or, indeed, whether your sentences make sense.

I’ll spare you the details, but in 2002, we were NaNo winners with the epic, trilogy-launching Soy de Mexico, possibly the first-ever slapstick murder mystery involving soybeans set in Mexico, Missouri.  Its sequel, A New Mexico, returned, literally, to the scene of the crime, where murder again visits Mexico, this time in the form of a poison-tipped blow-dart assassination of the Chancellor of Mexico State University at the wedding of her daughter.

Filled with the hubris that comes from back-to-back wins, I embarked on NaNoWriMo 2004 fully expecting to complete the trilogy, with thoughts of the fourth installment (Mexico, 65265) already percolating in my head.  But a funny thing happened on the way to the finish line:  life got in the way, and Mexico Revolutions, which had easily the coolest logo of the three Mexico novels, stalled at 31,688 words.

I was bummed, but it was 31,688 more words than I’d noveled in October, so I wasn’t despondent or anything.  Nevertheless, I elected to take 2005 off.

As this November approached, I wasn’t sure whether I would take the plunge again.  I still felt incomplete, not having returned to finish Mexico Revolutions, and I didn’t entirely feel right starting another Mexico novel.  (In the end, Mexico, 65265 was little more than a clever title.)

But then while reading the October Southwest Spirit in-flight magazine, I was struck with an idea, and decided to give NaNo a crack again in 2006.

The premise was sound, in the ridiculous sort of way the previous three premises had been sound:  Roosevelt Montgomery “Roos” Washington, a self-made billionaire who’s never worked a day in his life (he’s made all his money investing) is frustrated by the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election, and wants to find a way to turn one swing state into a blue state on a consistent basis.  He decides to pour his considerable fortune (third in the world, behind only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) into building a liberal utopia, from scratch, in Missouri, a classic bellwether state.  He tasks his grandson, Charles Mingus “Mingo” Jones, a freshly-minted master’s graduate in city planning, with the assignment.

Not to spoil the plot for you, but in the end, the city, which becomes a paragon of environmental friendliness and technological advancement, comes under attack by radical eco-terrorists, because Mingo and his team have built the city on the habitat of the short-tailed round-bellied Missouri brown ground squirrel.  In perhaps the worst-ever-recorded case of left-on-left crime, Roosevelt, Missouri (named partly to honor Mingo’s Granpa Roos, and partly because of the warm bi-partisan feelings the name Roosevelt inspires) is reduced to smoldering rubble when the flaming cow-dung bunker busters used by the eco-terrorists accidentally land in a hydrogen fueling station.

According to some reports, you could see the smoke as far east as Ohio.

With this idea in mind, I sat down on November 1st to begin my novel, eager to get started, committed to success, and envisioning blowing past 50,000 words around November 15th.

But the words didn’t exactly flow like I thought they would.  I got stuck in a back story about how Roos made all his money (we was a compulsive reader of newspapers and magazines, from which he culled his stock-buying and -selling wisdom; simultaneously, he refused to pay for subscriptions -- he read everything at the library), and I got kind of bored.  I got distracted by other things, like that damn Internet.  And on or about November 5th, my word count got stuck at 6,284, where it sat for the next three weeks.

Thanksgiving fell early this year, so while in years past the end of Thanksgiving break often meant the end of November, this time around it meant four solid days remained before December crept in.  On the drive home from spending the holiday with my family in Philadelphia, I started thinking about my incomplete novel, and how pathetic it would be to leave it at less than seven thousand words.  At least when I failed in 2004, I gave it an honest effort.

And while I couldn’t write and drive at the same time, I could develop plot ideas, which I did.  I started getting excited about the story again.  I figured out a way to get one of the protagonists to appear on The Colbert Report, and how with that kind of publicity, people from across the country would begin to flock to Roosevelt, Missouri.  More scenes and plot twists started to take shape.  Finally, when I got home, I decided I couldn’t let this idea wither on the vine -- I had a novel on my hands!

Unfortunately, I had a bunch of non-noveling work to do Monday, and my cold, unwilling to submit to the purported preventative powers of Zicam and Cold-Eeze and Airborne, was clogging most of my senses, so Monday night, when I paused and thought about the commitment I’d made to myself and my novel only 24 hours earlier, I felt pathetic.  Could I really write 44,000 words in the next 72 hours?  Was it even worth the effort?

Like I said earlier, maybe it was the drugs, but I decided to go for it.  I had nothing to lose but time.

Because my head was so clouded at that point, I decided to load up on the generic NyQuil equivalent (it’s amazing how much cheaper it is than the real thing, and yet with the same ingredients, but that’s a conversation for another day) and get a good night’s sleep, and wake early Tuesday to get cracking on the novel.

Over the next three days, I banged out more words and blew through more tissues than I thought possible in a stretch so short.  I spit 10,137 words on Tuesday to bring me to 16,421.  I was barely thinking -- I was just typing.  And when my mind would wander, or I would want to watch more TV, I would remind myself of what soon became a mantra:  just sit down and type.

And so I typed.  I upped the ante with another 10,714 on Wednesday, to get me to 27,135.  My fingers pecked furiously, bringing forth bursts north of 4,000 words in an hour -- volumes of verbs, piles of prepositions, and shitloads of subjects greater than I ever thought possible.

My wrists and hands began to hurt from all the typing.  I had never been sore from writing before, but now I was.  And while I was over halfway to the goal, and just a few thousand words shy of surpassing my 2004 effort, I still had a long way to go.

I woke early again Thursday, still not over the cold, and sat down to type.  Again I wandered down back alleys of narrative, visiting places I suspected would be wholly irrelevant to the plot, typing dialogue and exposition that increasingly made less and less sense.  Slowly the word count crept upward, but would it be enough?

As I passed my 2004 total, and then 35,000 words, I started feeling like I was nearing the top of the mountain -- and then did some quick math, and realized much climbing still lie ahead.  Each time I paused to catch my breath, I hoped could muster enough energy to get there.

A little after 9:00 that night, in my third writing position in as many hours (desk, with external keyboard; kitchen table, with laptop keyboard; and comfy chair, with lap), my wrists burning and my novel getting more and more ridiculous (How ridiculous, you ask?  How about 340 words about possible color schemes for the Roosevelt Rough Riders minor-league baseball team?), I crossed the 40,000-word threshold.  My production for the day was more than 13,000 words, the best yet -- and yet I still had nearly 10,000 to go, in less than three hours.

I knew that, in theory, I could pull it off -- after all, I’d had that one 4,000-word hour.  I wouldn’t even have to be that productive.  I’d only have to type at 75% of that rate . . . for three consecutive hours . . . with my brain feeling as coherent as runny pudding, and my fingers convinced they had nothing left to say.

Oh, and the Bengals-Ravens game was on the NFL Network.

I’d written 33,961 words in three days -- a pace that, had I begun on November 1 and maintained through the month, would’ve landed me at more than a third of a million words in 30 days -- wasn’t that enough?  After all, while I didn’t hit the magic number, I did have something on Thursday that I didn’t have on Monday, namely, a manuscript that I could actually do something with.  Did I really have anything else to prove?

As I watched the Bengals march down the field, I realized that I wasn’t really typing all those words for a word count, or so I could earn a winner’s certificate, suitable for framing.  I was typing all those words because I like writing.  I was typing all those words because I like making stuff up, having “characters,” who are ultimately the multiple personalities and points of view in my head, argue through an idea on the page.  I was typing because I like the process of creating something that, before I pushed my fingers on the keys, didn’t exist, but that thanks to the miracle of Microsoft Word, my Mac, and some prestidigitation, was a fully formed world, with people and buildings and flaming cow-dung bunker busters.

I was writing for myself.

I also realized that at that moment in time, I was more interested in watching the game than in forcing my weary arms to do any more typing.  I needed a rest, and I needed a beer.

And so, 9,755 words short of my goal but well beyond what I had when I woke up Tuesday morning, I gave myself both.

There’s always next year.