Killing Off NANOWRIMO The Right Way

While I take pride in being on the first page of the Chicago authors on NANOWRIMO, I do it with reserve. The reason for this is that I know how many people reach 50,000 and then just stop. I'm sure many of them could get to 60 or 70 thousand or even more if they kept going.

And there are also those who got to 55,000 and actually finished their novel (*cough* novella) and they're the ones I'm really jealous of because they keep more in the spirit of the competition than I do.

But this year, as I've mentioned before, is going to be different. I'm going to write "the end" during this month because I'm killing off all of my main characters. In fact, I've grown so enamored with the idea that I've proposed it to the boards in the thread "Kill Off Your Characters Day (November 30)."

I even made some pretty simple rules:

Every one of your main characters must die.

They should die as close to 11:59:59 local time as you feel comfortable with.

You can delete the whole thing on December 1 and have them come back to life.

It's part of NANOWRIMO so you can pretty much disregard rules #1, #2, and #3.

I figured people would just love the idea but I can't believe how many people have said, "I can't kill of my characters, I want to use them for the sequel, to finish the novel in January, etc."

I have to keep explaining to them that the delete key (or well the highlight text and delete function) can be your friend after December 1. I don't think it's anyone's fault. I think NANO has hardwired everyone into thinking that when it goes on the page, it stays on the page, inner editor be damned. But that all goes out the window tomorrow.

Thank goodness.

---

Though I do have to say that I've been writing a lot slower since I hit 50,000. Yesterday I actually only wrote about 1,500 words. Now that seems like a lot (it's almost daily pace, after all) but that was in 3.5 hours. I wrote more on the train this morning I think (well at least pace-wise).

During my mini-write-in (is that too many hyphens?) with rosemilk, I spent more time jibber-jabbering than actually writing.

The problem was that I have two characters trying to break into separate buildings (one into a warehouse in Chelsea and one into a doctor's brownstone in Gramercy Park) and not being a thief myself, I was having a hard time figuring out how either thing would be accomplished. One of the characters is a thief so he's figured out what to do but the other one is just shaking a fence trying to force a lock to come off.

I actually ended up writing "STUPID FENCE! STUPID FENCE! STUPID FENCE!" in my novel in frustration.

Which gave me an idea. I've often wrote a bit post-modern in that events from my personal life make it into the novel as they happen. For example, a reader could always tell which sections I wrote on an airplane because it will be a character using either a flight metaphor or actually discussing being on an airplane or just flat out being on an airplane.

Next year I'm taking it a step further. I'm going to go flat out post-modern and write in my frustrations, wonderments, etc. right into the novel as a narrator. It will be like NANOWRIMO meets RETENTIVEWRIMO.

Of course I'll have to figure out what the real plot is so I don't just write some sort of literary free rant for 50,000 words. That's what my LiveJournal is for. :)

Speaking of which, one of my favorite topics from the forums is this one: Comparing previous novel(s) to this year's: Better or worse?.

Take a guess what I said.

---

Remember a few entries back I talked about wanting to get on the forums more? Well maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Almost immediately I got into a bit of a spat in the Polling Booth about using quotes from your own novel in your signature.

Now I've been in the middle (and caused) some nice wars on the forums in my day but this is the first one that ever got the attention of Cybele. It wasn't for comments I made, it was a battle between two of the super-posters.

Well I did say that I wanted to get the attention of the NANOWRIMO staff, right?

Mission, I guess, accomplished.

Two Weights Off My Back In One Day

There's one song that I didn't mention that's in constant rotation on my Rhapsody because; 1) it's embarassing and 2) it has nothing to do with New York City. "Maneater" by Nelly Furtado has had its fair share of spins in this ending days on NANOWRIMO. I should have just made it my end of the dare had I lost to Greensong in our 1 v. 1 30-day word war. It's not like it would have been a punishment.

As it stood though, I won the challenge by about 40 minutes.

She verified her novel at about 10:30 Eastern and I mentally gave her the win. I got basically to the same point she verified at (50009 words) at 10:10 p.m. Central (I think 10:06 p.m. was the exact time). Being a total idiot, I calculated that somehow our possible writing times evened out at the end of the month. Of course she was able to start an hour earlier so I had an hour more to write to win.

And so I won.



It's such a hollow victory since she's such a nice girl that I just don't want to gloat. Now that doesn't apply to the whole of Team Toronto who I know Chicago has lost to badly but I still want to write on and beat more members of.

---

The funny thing is that I got to word 49,000 by writing one last anti-Toronto screed. To set the scene, all of the MCs have contracted a water borne virus and are having flu-like symptoms. Two of the characters have made their way to Madison Square Garden where there's a shelter. Standing outside of the arena, they have the following exchange:

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Anthony said, grasping at his stomach, I feel like I just took a vacation in Toronto.”

“I know,” Allison said, isn’t it the worst feeling you’ve ever had in your life? It’s like you want to throw up but you’re too bored from the malaise to do it. Well, like Toronto you have to get it out of your system as soon as possible. Just think of Niagara Falls and maybe it will come again. Or stick Moonshine’s paw down your throat. Don’t worry, he’s declawed and his neutered. I did that a little too late though, I’m afraid and he produced some mutant offspring. They weren’t fit to live in New York City so me and the ex-boyfriend I bought Moonshine with shipped the litter off to Toronto. Last I heard they were letting the cats roam the streets.

They say if you listen really closely, you can hear the mewing of the packs of cats that roam the streets of Toronto looking for scraps of food. It’s been said that they’ve mated with the rats and cockroaches up there to produce a breed of not quite mammal and not quite insect horrible beast. Though the last I heard, the Canadians were considering replacing the maple leaf on their flag with this horrible freak of nature.”

“Wow,” Anthony said, “your cat must be pretty famous up in Canada.”

Allison nodded. “Well it’s not like there’s anyone else famous up there. I mean look at who they consider a celebrity. Rick Moranis? What’s up with that? I mean that guy’s about as funny as Moonshine’s cat pies, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Anthony nodded, “Toronto’s pretty much worthless. I mean, they couldn’t even handle the power that is Madison Square Garden.”

“I don’t even think they could handle the Meadowlands. And when you’re city’s not even as good as New Jersey, you’ve got a lot to answer for.”

And then I set off to write one of the best chapters that I have so far and one that might even give the story some direction. It involves the insane survivalist Brian and his illegal activities. It will give the other characters a lot of choices to make and maybe even a final confrontation.

Hopefully they'll accomplish this by midnight in two days because I plan on killing them all off of the water borne disease at that time and writing "the end."

I'll resurrect them in December and write the real ending but I just want to, for once, finish the novel in November.

---

The reason that I don't know the exact time I finished this year is that I really obsessed over my 50,000th word. Last year I let it go freeform and came up with "respect" in the middle of a paragraph about a well known underground leader walking into a bar (along with a rabbi and a priest but not really). This year I was talking about the scheme to rob a doctor's brownstone and 50,000 was in the middle of the pre-planning of the theft.

I was lucky enough to come across "night" vision binoculars. But, well it wasn't luck since I kind of restructured the paragraph to list the binoculars at an appropriate place.



This probably took more time than any other distraction since I had to turn on my inner editor to hit the right word. But I hope to forget that I cheated long before I forget what the word was.

---

Not that I didn't have other distractions today.

Today was the day that I had to go back to the dermatologist and get the "interesting" mole on my back excised. That went flawlessly (the dermatologist described me as a perfect patient who didn't even twitch during the surgery) and I even had about 45 minutes to write in the waiting room. Of course what I didn't do right was eat breakfast and apparently the local anasthetic lowers blood sugar.

The nurse actually had to give me some pretzels on the way out.

After grabbing Taco Bell, I came home and basically collapsed with exhaustion. I was surprised how little the spot hurt for the first few hours (even after the numbness wore off) but now it's starting to get a bit sore. Once I woke up it was off to the races with Greensong.

There was one other distraction. I picked up my broken laptop at Best Buy yesterday and today I hooked it up to a monitor and copied my first 7,500 or so words onto the memory stick I got over Thanksgiving.

I had a pleasant surprise. I had been going on the assumption that I had written 7,751 words before the crash. Turns out I had written 7,951 words. The problem is that I basically duplicated a bunch of the same prose in the first few paragraphs of the restart.

It took some time to work the stuff together and I only ended up with a few extra words but it beat the alternative.

I seriously thought I was going to have to "redrum" the thing and write "I had 7,751 words here but now they're gone" a bunch of times to make up the words. Or I guess I could have just written 57,751 words by the 30th. But I'm glad I'm now over 50,000 so the pressure off and I don't have to compose my second highest NANOWRIMO title ever.

Thank goodness I can now concentrate on just finishing the thing! I've got a writing meetup with rosemilk tomorrow so I know I'll write at least once more.

The weight off my back is a lot more than the chunk of skin they took out, let me tell you. :)

It's The Memories More Than The Words

Today I finally went back and listened to all of the back podcasts of Wrimo Radio. For those who haven't listened to Episode Number Three, I highly recommend it. In fact, I wish various chapters of the podcast were available on mp3 because the episode contained the greatest few minutes of Wrimo Radio in the two years it's been going. The part that I'm referring to is where the woman gives the pep talk.

In it she talks about Team 2006 as a whole. And while I've often referred to Team Chicago in regards to the city v. city word wars, I've never really thought about all of NANOWRIMO as a team before. Sure we all want to see each other succeed (though I do have to admit there are a few people I wanted to see fail, I'm not going to lie or name names) but to think of all of us united by a year is an amazing concept.

She talks about WRIMOs past and WRIMOs future and how each year is a little different and each person who participates, for one year or those who have competed in all seven (like the woman interviewed on the front page of nanowrimo.org today), leaves a mark on the entity that is NANOWRIMO.

Being as I've been doing this for three solid years now (and four total), I have actually seen people come and go and it's sad. And now there are the retirement threads starting all over the site since the month is drawing to a close. I wish I could find the actual thread to link it but there's one in particular that even in its depressing nature is uplifting.

I found it in all places the Ontario::Toronto lounge (see it's a sort of friendly competition so I actually care about them as people) under the topic, "Retiring from Nano next year... ?"

One of the members of team Toronto starts the thread out like this:

"This has been my sixth year doing NaNoWriMo. I won the first year, lost the second, and I've won every year since then. And each win has always been a struggle, but I've always seemed to manage it.

And now, I'm thinking of retiring from NaNo.

This story that I've written this year is one that finally feels like I could mold it into an *actual* piece of coherant fiction. It took me six years to push through the garbage in my brain to get to a story worth telling. And I guess, that is what Nano is for?

Anyway, I'm sure I'll change my mind next year when November 1 arrives and I start itching to write, but for now, I think I will retire."

It's always sad to see anyone go (even if they are contributing to a word count total that's kicking your city's butt) but I think if there's any reason to go, she's found it. If you've accomplished all of your NANOWRIMO dreams, the only reason to go on is for the comraderie, the fun, and the memories.

I know of people who just hang around the forums and the chat room with no intention of finishing their novels (some don't even bother getting word count) just to be a sort of watchful alumni guardian angel. And these people are every bit as much of the community as those of us who are striving for 50,000. It's one of the things that makes NANOWRIMO great. Only the most hermit Wrimos among us don't feel something about the group that attaches them for life.

Once a Wrimo, always a Wrimo whether you're writing in November or not!

Personally I have no desire to retire after this year despite the fact that I accomplished everything I wanted to do in 2004 (write a novel from beginning to end in 30 writing days even if that stretched into December a bit) and that this year's novel had been a serial adventure in pulling teeth (I still don't know what the final obstacle is going to be and right now the characters are just fighting with each other). I don't do NANOWRIMO any more for some sort of 50,000 word challenge. I do it for the people and for the fact that nothing brings my thoughts of where I am in a given year in my life together more than NANOWRIMO.

For that reason, I'll be doing NANOWRIMOs until the site no longer exists or until I'm no longer alive in a November (or at least too feeble to have the energy to write). One day, I picture someone going through my things and finding 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 Lulu bound completed and unedited or half-completed speed novels written in November.

NANOWRIMO is my macro journal. I keep all of my thoughts on LiveJournal throughout the year (though most years better than this) but it takes NANO for me to get every one of them on paper.

And for that, if nothing else, I'm thankful to November and all of the people who I come in contact with that month, I'm grateful to NANOWRIMO and I'm not going to retire no matter how many times I'm beat.

---

Speaking of Teams, I really did choose the right 1 v. 1 partner for the Chicago v. Toronto challenge. I know I said this before but Greensong is awesome.

She actually NANOmailed me to make sure I was still writing when I went through that big break last week. And today we've been battling nearly number for number on our way to 50,000.

Right now, we're both in the 44,000s. Though I have one more hour tonight where I can beat her word count for today (I will have a one hour advantage at the very end if you want to talk about sprinting for victory if we're in shouting distance). And when I put 1,000 words between us, I will actually be entirely back on track with the 45,000 recommended words by midnight tonight.

See, it's this sort of thing that makes NANO great. When else would that last paragraph ever be written? Anywhere?

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Oh and before I forget, congratulations to my one and only first year participant buddy Svenny (well he's Michael like me but that's his name on LiveJournal) who beat 50,000 in his first year today!

Now I'm proud of most of my buddies when they cross the line but especially him. I feel like the proud papa of a newbie even if I didn't necessarily inspire him to participate (though I think the first time he expressed interest in doing NANO this year was in my LJ last November).

Only four people and me left to cross the finish line on my writing buddy list. And the next one looks big as well. COME ON SHANU (who wrote 38,000 words last year but just gave out)!

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TOTAL CURRENT WORD COUNT: 44,783

Those 10,000 Words Just Sort Of Vanished

One of the least known or most forgotten facts about Tupac Shakur, besides the fact that he was a huge Kate Bush fan (not shitting anyone, watch "Tupac: Resurrection") is that he was born in New York City (112th Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem). He's so associated with the west coast (mostly due to his role in the fued with Bad Boy Records on behalf of Death Row Records) that nearly no one considers him a New York City artist.

But the saddest irony of his death is that he never abandoned the East Coast despite being killed over being said to do so.

Why on Earth do I mention this? What on Earth does this have to do with my novel? Just about everything.

Tupac Shakur has provided the theme song to my novel. It only took 26 days to establish what song best fit the mood of the story and oddly enough it turns out that it's Tupac's "My Block". The lyrics to the song itself had nothing to do with five white twenty and thirty somethings trying to survive after a storm surge floods New York City but the theme of block identification is so crucial to my novel this year that it fits too perfectly.

It only took almost 40,000 words, but I finally came up with the equivalent of a title song for the novel in the following passages:

"The entire trip out of Greenwich Village had been a trip down memory lane for Beth. Sloggin away from the river on 10th Street, she took a look at the buildings where she and her boyfriend had strolled on many a sunny summer night, including just a few month prior. Turning up Hudson Street, she remembered the smells of pies and fresh baked bread coming out of the bakeries. When that piece of her neighborhood turned into Ninth Avenue and continued to head uptown, she thought about the times she had rode her bicycle to work when she had come in late intentionally just to watch the families play on the sidewalks or the artists and philosophers chatting away under umbrellas with mid-morning beer and wine in front of them and their hands gesticulating widely.

Greenwich Village had given way gently to Chelsea north of 14th Street as it had so many times in the past as Beth’s cohorts argued away. That had been why she had been so preoccupied and hadn’t bothered to stop them. She knew the borderline was not as well defined as most people would think it would be between the bohemian West Village and the ritzier Chelsea. Beth knew that despite the difference in the clientele at the restaurants and bars, there was one thing that remained the same – the people who had not been driven out for decades.

No matter where you looked in New York City there were always two New Yorks, the new New York with its gentrification and the old New York with the three generations descended from immigrants. She had a jealousy of this fact because it was something she would never be a part of in New York City. It was something she had left behind in Boston, walking the same streets that her grandparents had played in the 1930s. She had played with the same people’s grandchildren. It was like the generations were united by the same buildings and the same roads and the same families and the same memories. Nothing seemed like it could ever sever this connection. Some families moved away and some new ones moved in to be taken into the living, breathing block. People died but the block lived on, the city couldn’t be killed.

But what was the most depressing about the past few hours was that it had become obvious that the city could be killed. If you took out all of the people at once, the city was no longer the city. The neighborhood were no longer the neighborhood. The blocks were no longer the blocks. New York was nothing more than a lost city. It might as well have been Atlantis despite only being buried under feet of water and not miles. It hadn’t taken a volcano burying it in yards of ash to turn New York City into Pompeii. And while New York City had the advantage of having been evacuated by-and-large before its death knell could have been sounded and the people could return, it would never be the same again.

The people who had stayed behind had already begun to reshape the city in their own way and it hadn’t always been for the best. But they had begun to stake claims to their new surroundings even if it was just temporary. Or those who hadn’t relocated had begun to re-establish their old social orders like they had in the building that had provided temporary shelter. Maybe it was harder to break down the real New York City than just a little disaster. Maybe the real city would be resilient despite how many people from the new city left after losing the place they had chose to temporarily hang their hat. Maybe the city would start breathing and pulsing again once the system had the water removed from its lungs and maybe it would be a stronger city without all of the hangers on – herself included."

There's nothing about lullabyes in there but that's the whole title theme of the lost city in a nutshell.

---

I actually almost established the complete sountrack for my novel this year. I'm sure that there's a thread on nanowrimo.org to list this but I haven't run across it yet.

Most of the tracks are by New York City artists or are about New York City. This is partially for inspiration and partially because I feel guilty about destroying that piece of the United States for word count in a novel that almost no one will ever read.

These aren't in a good order or anything but here they are:

"Emerge" by Fischerspooner

"My Block" by Tupac Shakur

"Points Of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer" by Linkin Park & Jay-Z

"Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)" by Jay-Z

"I Run Shit" by DMX

"He Got Game" by Public Enemy

"La Vie Boheme" by Johnathan Larson (a track actually demographically correct?)

"New York" by Ja Rule

"New York City" by They Might Be Giants (way too upbeat to be influential)

"New York City Boy" by Pet Shop Boys (another demographically correct song?)

"New York Minute" by Don Henley (definitely fitting)

"Perfect Day" by Lou Reed

"Sleep Tight In New York City" by Black 47

"Super Bon Bon" by Soul Coughing

"Beth" by Kiss

"Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler

"Lullabye" by Ben Folds Five

"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" by Billy Joel

"Lullabye" by Concrete Blonde

"My List" by The Killers

"Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" was actually the song I heard on the radio that inspired the whole novel this year. It was the line at the end that goes, "someday we'll all be gone...but lullabyes go on and on...they never die...that's how you...
and I...live on and on," that inspired the immortal neighborhood idea. Anything can kill off humans but a city takes more to take down.

I'm sure that there's some Interpol or something that I could listen to in order to inspire me as well but I'm too busy trying to frantically write currently to really put much thought into the theme music for the novel - hence my google-esque search of Rhapsody for New York songs (though I got rid of many of the ones that came up).

That list is as much of a mish-mash as the novel itself. No wonder the writing process has been such a mess this year. Priority number one for next year needs to be getting my musical acoompaniment house in order before starting.

---

I guess it's better late than never on the soundtrack since it has helped me to write 4,390 words today after I was ready to give up the ghost yesterday. That sentiment is how "My List" by The Killers ended up on the soundtrack with its chorus mantra - "don't give the ghost up, just clench your fists!"

That and I'm taking off any rules that I had as far as when I wrote. I used to only write when I had time to get a good flow going (crap, I am listening to too much rap) which was usually about an hour. But since I haven't seemed to be able to get any chunks that large except for the evening, I'm now writing in as little as 15 or 30 minute blocks.

Whenever I have time to boot up my laptop, it's getting a workout. Today I had six separate writing sessions including three sprints during the drive home from Detroit this afternoon.

For anyone else reading this who needs a last push, there's a thread called, "4 Days. What Are You Doing To Help Yourself Finish" in the NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul forum.

Hopefully they'll be more helpful.

Ordinarily at this point in the month, I'm about 6,000 words ahead of where I am now ready to finish around the 28th. This year, I'm trying to urge myself on so I don't how much encouragement I have for everyone else.

Remember how I said that I was going to reach 50,000 over the long Thanksgiving weekend? What I meant to say was 40,000. :)

What I Did To Procrastinate The Last Two Days

I think my excuse that I didn't have my laptop and that was why I was going slower (or well stopped) was not a very good one. Early this morning, I went to Office Depot and bought a new HP Pavillion dv6000 at a Black Friday sale and yet today I've wrote 854 words (all the introduction to a chapter). While I'm going to write more tonight after this entry and get to 1,667 (like that will help), I don't think I'm going to get to 50,000 this weekend (but congratulations to squirrelgirl22 who became the second one of my friends to do so when she did it today).

Truth be told it was my own fault that I didn't write more yesterday night. Originally grabbing the sales papers I had planned to go to the 9 to midnight sales at CompUSA and so after Thanksgiving dinner my little brother and I set off for the Novi Town Center (next to the Borders I used to work at) to wait for their deal - a $399.99 Compaq Presario.

The only problem with this strategy was that it was $629.00 before a rebate. That was something at that time at night that I didn't want to put on my debit card.

So when it came time to get the voucher that would let me get the laptop, I started to get cold feet. The final apprehension was when I realized that the system they were selling at CompUSA had nothing but Windows XP built in. At this point, adding up the cost of all of the free software that the other places stuck on there (like Quicken) I decided it wasn't a high priority to get that laptop.

So when they ran out two people before me, I almost felt let off the hook. Though when the person two people ahead of me decided they didn't want it as well I almost still went to grab it. A couple of Indian dudes who had jumped ahead of me in line grabbed the final voucher instead.

I still went into CompUSA because they had great deals on memory (and because I was supposed to pick up a $4.99 router for my brother that ended up selling out before I got to it) and decided to look online for a similar Compaq Presario I had seen on circuitcity.com for $399.99 OTD (which I could have picked up the next day).

But when I got home, Circuit City had stopped selling their yearly laptop special online. Headdesking a few times for basically passing up my chance at the Presario, I finally decided that head out and brave the elements for the second year in a row.

I drove by the Circuit City first and saw at least 50 people and knew I wouldn't get the computer there. So then I drove to Best Buy where they had a secret Toshiba Sattlelite (the computer I was running on for the last few years) that they didn't advertise. Each store had 18 of them so I figured if there were 50 people there as well that I'd get one for sure. There were closer to 300.

Earlier in the day I had checked out every sales paper with a computer and remembered that Office Depot had a couple of good deals. I recalled that there was an Office Depot on Haggerty Road in Northville Township (about five miles southeast of my parent's house and the home of Michigan's governor Jennifer Granholm). I passed right by it at about midnight because the lights weren't on.

I tried to continue southeast to Livonia Mall and didn't see any Office Depot (or anything else) and then couldn't even find Wonderland Mall (also in Livonia). Finally I went back to West Oaks back in Novi (where the Circuit City is) thinking there was an Office Depot - turns out it was an Office Max.

Finally I broke out my cell phone and using T-Mobile Web looked up where some Metro Detroit Office Depots actually were. Turns out my instincts were correct and the Office Depot was where I thought. Driving back down there I pulled up and was ecstatic when there were only 11 people in line. Of course the problem was only three of the $249.99 computers were guaranteed to be there. But I was so tired I threw down my sleeping bag at about 1:15 a.m. and just hoped when I woke up, it would all be okay - or else I don't know what I would have done.

I woke up to the sound of an employee saying they were going to pass out vouchers shortly (at 5:15 a.m.) and stood up with my fingers crossed.

Turns out the $249.99 computer sold out far before me (they had five or six) and I would have had to get there at about 11:00 p.m. just like any other place. But I did get one of the eight of this computer they had.

So here I am finally back on a laptop and ready, I guess, to write.

Well except for one small problem or two. The first is that I have to go back to Office Depot tomorrow and get my rebate form (I paid $629.00 right now instead of the $429.99 final price) and to some other stores to get refunds on some impulse purchases that I shouldn't have made (like an off-brand DVD recorder at CompUSA that just happened to be sitting by the register).

And then I'll come home and write.

Yeah, that's the ticket. I'll write tomorrow. I have no excuses anymore since I just spent a bunch of money on this word processor for the last seven days of NANOWRIMO and then an internet toy for the rest of the year after all.

---

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 35,491 words

The Days Of NANOWRIMO Keep Disappearing Like Magic

The moment of NANOWRIMO that I hate happened yesterday - the first of my writing buddies crossed the finish line. Now it's one that's writing 100,000 words this month so she's still in the grind of things for long haul (of nine more days) but I still have a "green bar" on my list!

Congratulations Kim (it's always her or Mary that gets to 50,000 first).

But there's an accomplishment that I'm sort of proud of as well. Today the last person who doesn't write their entire novel in the last 48 hours or didn't start crossed the 30,000 mark. This was accomplished when Greensong crossed the line this evening (putting the pressure on me to write more).

I think, and this would be awesome if it happens, that every one of my contacts is going to cross the 50,000 finish line this year!

That's a screenshot for the ages if it happens. It's not that I've given any of them any extra support (hades, I keep forgetting to even listen to Derusha's podcast) or anything but I guess I like being surrounded by people who didn't quit and who I know are doing the same thing at many of the same times trying to write.

---

Or, more the case in the last two days, trying to not write.

Tonight I only bet one game so I didn't watch basketball. Tonight's distraction came from flickr. And in-between staring at other people's pictures (taking photographs is so much less intense at times than speed writing) and actually posting a couple of my own for only the third time this month I only wrote 1,559 words this evening.

But that does put me over the 2/3rds mark...one day behind schedule.

Now long time readers will know that I don't always agree with Chris Baty but here's one thing that I do agree with him on. Get out of the 20,000s if you're still there. You might run out of plot when you just get over the 30,000 line but at least you're on the downhill plane and can hopefully cruise toward the end.

Me, I'm just trying to end the scene I've been writing for two days that was supposed to end about 1,000 words ago at the 2/3rds mark. This scene marks a change in focus and intensity and so hopefully I'll have lots of time not to get interrupted.

I seriously lost my train of thought on the novel by stopping where I did yesterday. I should have chugged on through no matter what the cost. Staying up until 4:00 a.m. - PISH! I did it all the time two years ago.

---

I've been thinking a lot about my novel from two years ago and how I'd probably like to revisit it. Not that I think there's anything that can make a brilliant piece of writing in there but I think tonally it's something I would enjoy reading right now.

For those people who read the novel back then and cried through the last 20 pages or so, you'll be "happy" to know that I thought about those pages tonight and nearly broke down in tears myself.

It frustrates me to no end that I can't write anything that poignant or whatever now.

Actually I just wish I had some dramatic events to cause the sort of rising action that both of my previous attempts have had. I'm still just meandering on the same level of danger in the story and for a story about a flood, there's been surprisingly little peril.

But I just saw "The Prestige" tonight and remembered what escalating danger and tragedy look like in art so I've been a bit inspired. Though I could never in a million years write anything like that movie. The technical knowledge alone would throw me into a state of pedantic babble.

And then I probably wouldn't even make 30,000 as I wouldn't have the heart to write about half of the horrible things that the author of that movie did. I keep saying that next year I'll be crueler but it never happens.

Maybe next year I should just go totally fluffy and then I'll accidentally stumble into tons of scenes with tragedy - the opposite of the usual.

---

CURRENT TOTAL WORD COUNT: 33,816 (I guess only 1,200 behind)

NANOWRIMO Is Not My Only November Gamble

Anyone or any city that I'm word warring with can thank one thing for how far ahead you are going to get with my dilly-dallying tonight - basketball. Now I know it's Monday night and I know as a male in the United States between 18 and 49, I should be watching Monday Night Football (and I do have money on the Giants) but NCAA basketball is capturing my interest completely.

As I may have mentioned, I like to gamble a bit. Well, today is a big day for college basketball - the first day of Feast Week. Feast Week is a coin ESPN termed to describe the fact that there are a number of Thanksgiving week college basketball games. Since some of them start early in the morning in Hawaii, it was like a day of footcer except with college basketball so I figured I'd actually win money instead of just breaking even (I lose at football big time).

So I said I'd play until I lost. Right after lunch, Memphis played Oklahoma and I figured Memphis would win with ease - they did (+$5.45). With this win, and to spite this Purdue fan who I talk sports with all day, I took that bet into a hopeful Georgia Tech victory over Purdue - it came through (+$10.45). Duke was somehow (maybe crack in Las Vegas) favored over Air Force by only six. I figured that was silly and put $10.00 on that to win $9.09. That paid off pretty easily - though there were a few scary moments (+19.54). And then we got into the real distractions. I played a parlay where if Kentucky and Marquette both covered, I would win $15.47 (on a $5.95 bet). So I was constantly checking the score. It was only when Kentucky lost (on a last second DePaul shot in garbage time) that I wished I had been spending that time writing my NANO.

I did pull over the 30,000 mark right as Kentucky pulled into an 11 point lead I though they could keep (I needed them to win by 8) before I went to sit down in front of the T.V. full time.

Well now thankfully all of that is over and hopefully in most post blog writing session, I'll be able to actually write 1,200 words an hour or so (my average) rather than the 500 I average when I'm half attentive to the television.

---

On the previous mentioned word wars, I didn't mention what was happening in the Chicago v. Toronto one last week because it was too depressing. Well, the news isn't much better this week.

The score as of this morning was: Toronto 916,771, Chicago 753,203.

We wrote a ton this week and somehow lost ground. Not as much ground as before but still a good amount. The only good news out of it all was that all of our writers who are hovering around the 10,000 word mark are still writing. And that's the point of the word war, after all - to give those who are struggling extra incentive to succeed.

Though I do wonder if I can get a good over/under for the last 10 days of writing - the NANOWRIMO equivalent of a hockey third period on how much ground we can actually make up. Or at least place a bet on Toronto to cover. :)

Oops, mixing up my two obsessions here.

I do want to bet that I will reach 50,000 though and hopefully there are no doubters. Even though my laptop is now officially toast (to repair the monitor is somehow magically more than the computer originally cost) - though it can be hooked up to a monitor and used as a better version of my desktop.

Still I will lock myself in my room over Thanksgiving and will come out, hopefully, with at least 45,000 words. Or in a final push maybe even go over the top. I've never failed to hit 50,000 over Thanksgiving and even though this year it's earlier I hope to keep that streak alive.

Though don't bet on it.

Another Few Hundred Words Wasted

Back from the hinterlands of northeast Michigan (another one of God's great creations and they sing no end of it/he/she/their praises for making it let me tell you) and back to writing.

The wedding I was the best man in was interesting to say the least. I related the whole story this morning in my LiveJournal entry, "Back In Chicago After My Little Crazy Vacation" so I won't relate the whole thing again here. Needless to say, there wasn't very much time to write. I had 0 word count the two days I was in Michigan plus the night before I left as I had to see my weekly movie (I've seen a movie at one of my two neighborhood theaters for 47 weeks straight) and pick up my rental car.

So all of that being ahead of pace, that's out the window.

By the way, for those who read that LiveJournal entry and wondered how many words that was, it was 2,027 words. If you combined those with the words I actually wrote in my NANO novel today, I'm back on word count pace and over 30,000.

It's just too bad there's no way to work that into the novel.

---

I did work a wedding anecdote (though it was actually at a bat mitzvah the story happened) in my NANO to finally get the wheels rolling again. It a story about the last time I saw my grandfather (dad's side) alive. He was nearing 85 years old and it was right before the Altzheimer's really started to take hold. There was a bat mitzvah in Michigan of one of my father's cousin's kids and my grandfather flew up for it.

Even though not everyone in the room was related to him, they all knew who he was. And the reverence everyone showed him was amazing. For most of the wedding he sat by himself in a corner surveying a room full of people of all ages he had seen growing up and just smiled. It was like the culmination of his entire life and I would have to think it was one of the last great moments.

Over the weekend I met my friend who I was best man for's grandfather - an old Ukrainian man who came over in the middle of the century - and it was a similar situation with him (though not as much since the bride's side dominated the attendees) and it occured to me a theme that I wanted to touch on in the story - the respect people have for people who survive to old ages.

I guess no matter what else we aspire to, most people aspire to one day be in that position - to be able to look back on our lives and just smile at all of those around us of all ages who we touched in some way (even if it was second hand).

Which pretty much brought me back to the first few words of the novel and MC Anthony reflecting on his own mortality. And getting back to square one seems to have been just what the novel needed.

Even if I didn't even hit the 2,000 word mark today.

---

TOTAL CURRENT WORD COUNT: 28,896 words

You're My NANOspiration Bonnie Tyler

As much as it seems to be relaxing today to have my characters reflect on everything that just happened in Chapter Ten (including the first event that almost deserves to be under my title "Lullabye For A Lost City" - a title which I feel I'm cybersquatting on until someone who's actually writing a tragedy for NANOWRIMO takes), it does feel like I'm kind of treading water (pardon the pun).

Pretty soon every character will atrophy into the internal monologue of the first few chapters and that can't happen.

The problem is that I don't have time to breathe myself and figure out what the characters should be doing instead of breathing. I think I want to put something mafia related into the book and it would definitely be possible to have Brian (the psychopathic survivalist) being chased down by the mafia now that there is absolutely no law and order in New York City. It would be something, right?

---

The reason that I don't have any time is that I got a phone call today saying the wedding in Michigan (and we're not talking southwest Michigan where they still get Chicago radio and television but way up in the pointer finger portion of the mitten) that I'm the best man for is on Saturday and not Sunday.

Yes, I am the best man ever. But I warned my friend John that he'd be better served getting someone who didn't live 6.5 hours away to do that duty. :)

The point of mentioning this is that I thought the rehearsal dinner was on Saturday and that I wouldn't have to leave Chicago until Saturday moring.

And that's a not so fast.

I have to leave Chicago on Friday early in the morning (before rush hour on the Kennedy, Dan Ryan, and Skyway make life difficult) to get to West Branch, MI (you can do the Yahoo Maps, it's not going to be a fun drive) by 3:00 p.m. to check into my hotel room and then go to the rehearsal dinner.

Then I have to get the groom really drunk and then get him to the wedding on time.

That doesn't leave too much time for dilly dallying or NANOWRIMOing.

I did postpone my minor surgery that was scheduled for tomorrow to the twenty-eighth so that does leave the time I get home from work until when I have to go pick up the rental car at O'Hare (my car won't make the Indiana border, that's almost a guarantee) to write but after that, it's probably Saturday evening after the wedding and even then the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and such will be trashing the happy newlywed's house.

I think the reason my friend made me the best man is that he knows I'm on Wellbutrin and can't drink (he's a pharmacist). That doesn't mean I can protect their house. :)

But, hey, I missed NAWRIDRUNI this year so what better way to make up for it?

Long story short though, whatever word count I reach tonight will be very near to my word count through most of the weekend. I was going to press for 30,000 tonight but sleep would probably be a good idea.

---

Damn ABC for taking away my inspiration tonight!

I make no secret that my NANOWRIMO this year is very heavily influenced by "Jericho" and "The Nine" (though in no way steals any storylines from either). And CBS brought me my post-apocalyptic survivalist inspiration with a very good episode of "Jericho" tonight.

ABC let me down by showing the 2-hour premiere of that new Taye Diggs show.

I needed my character driven post-traumatic event story inspiration and I didn't get it! Damn ABC!

Though on the way home from work today I remembered what one of my pre-NANO inspirations was when it played on my MP3 player (I broke my iPod Nano from last year during the summer when I stepped on it) - "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" by Bonnie Tyler.

I seriously almost named my novel this year, "Turn Around Bright Eyes." But I think I need to save that for some dude lit. :)

I've been playing it on repeat trying to get into that mood of hope and pathos that song invokes. It's not working but at least MP3 didn't let me down like ABC.

---

Just some of my favorite threads from the board for some levity if you're looking for a break (and so I have them somewhat bookmarked):

"The Let's Praise Ourselves for Excessively Minor (or Major) Accomplishments Thread!" - a thread to celebrate the littlest uplifting parts of writing.

"There comes a time in the life of every bad LitFic novel..." - a thread describing how in a multitude of different NANOWRIMO novels in the Lit Fic categories, characters somehow end up in Paris. This actually happened to me two years ago!

"How often do you check your word count?" - like a Kinsey poll on masturbation, looks like we all do it more often than we admit to.

"Teh 50K Green Bar" - adventures with everybody's favorite 13-year old. This thread is one of many when her own Toronto teammates tell her to shove it.

But this one wins the internets...

"Do Your Characters Ever Pee?" - really self explanatory.

And remember, we're all just living in a powder keg and kicking off sparks!

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 26,421 words

Okay, I'm Almost At 25,000, And Still Not Sure What To Do In NYC

I'm just about to make the final push to 25,000 which will actually put me ahead of the game by a significant margin for the first time this NANOWRIMO - I'll actually be a day ahead of pace (which makes sense since I'll be missing an entire day this weekend since I'm the best man in a wedding in Michigan). The recommended word count for the end of the day today is 23,333.

Though there is a small problem. The reason I've stopped writing right now is that I just finished Chapter Nine and the group is out of the building.

I know that now they'll have to deal with being homeless for a brief time and that the people from the building across the street are going to help them but then I face the big question, "now what?"

Of course I know the characters from different world will interact with each other, complex societal issues will be discussed, and taboos will be broken. But they can't just sit around on a fire escape and kill time for the rest of the novel.

I mean they could as I could have them internal monologue and I could pontificate in the third person for 25,000 more words (though I'm hoping for more) but that would be boring.

Not to sound too fantasy here, but fantasy thinking is needed. I need to think of a quest for this group of five intrepid strangers to accomplish that only they can do. And it's not like these people are the Mayor of New York City or anything so it's got to be something that an ordinary group of people can do.

I'm thinking they should just try to get to Brooklyn somehow to try and find one of the character's parents. But that's kind of a boring thing. But at least it gets them started in some direction other than sitting.

Kind of what I'm doing right now. Sitting waiting for something to happen to my characters in my mind that I can put on paper.

---

NANOWRIMO has finally hit the big time this year it would seem. It used to be that I would talk about my NANO and people wouldn't want to hear about it. This year, as I'm not that proud of the dreck I'm writing, I don't initiate a conversation with anyone about it.

But the weird thing is that people at work are asking me about it.

In fact, I went to dinner with my friend Maggie who works in our Washington D.C. office and she actually pried information out of me about what I was writing. She also brought in a cover story from the entertainment section of the Washington Post on NANOWRIMO. Of course, like every year it was published after November 1 so I don't know how much good it did in getting people from the D.C. Metroplex to sign up for NANO but it is a paper of record running a story in a prominent place.

Then, of course, you had Yahoo making NANOWRIMO a news headline on November 1 (which was a big thing since it was just before the election) and a bunch of people coming in for that.

Each year NANOWRIMO is getting bigger and bigger and it's now something that's almost part of the national vocabulary. I don't think it will ever be something Paris Hilton thinks is hawt or anything but it definitely feels good when four years ago it felt like no knew what this speed writing contest was all about.

Now when I'm not the only person in my office doing NANOWRIMO (my office, being an real estate appraisal education company has actual editors for our text books and such) or when I see people frantically typing away on laptops on the train, that's when I know NANOWRIMO has made it.

But, I actually kind of like the fact that in some circles it's still the butt of people's jokes (mostly because I myself don't take it that seriously, I just do it for the thrill of writing a novel once a year).

So when I saw this in Busy's blog, I kept meaning to link it, but I didn't.

Home On The Strange's So, What Are You Writing For NANOWRIMO.

Maybe if I write Groundhog's Day slash next year the process will go smoother than this one.

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 23,375 words

Writer's Blocks Are Like Asymetrical Moles, They've Got To Come Off

When you're a crochity old fart at NANOWRIMO like I am, eventually you start to notice things (and if you're the retentivewrimo, as soon as you notice them you have to blog about them). A magical cure for writer's block seems to have happened to me yesterday.

This hint of the ages that I can offer to everyone is this: DELETE WHAT SUCKS AND IS HOLDING YOU BACK!

I know this is counterintuitive since the whole goal of NANOWRIMO is trudging ahead at all costs. But not if what you're leaving behind is doing nothing but adding an albatross around the neck of your novel.

For example, I changed an entire passage from characters walking down the stairs of a building calmly and running into a man with a gun to them ducking smoke and then running into a man with a gun. Sure it seems like a subtle difference but in reality, it's huge. It's created a sense of urgency that up until I rewrote those 2,000 words or so the novel was lacking.

Sure I could have just had the building start collapsing around the people at the point in the story I was at, but I would still have been left with the boring, no drama portion that preceeded it with questions like, "boy that fire spread really suddenly, didn't it?" haunting me the rest of the way.

The scary thing is that I've gotten so into this scene that it's already run to five pages and it's just getting started. Talk about pacing problems. The characters have all been going through things pretty quickly and now as they have to jump out a window it slows down to the speed I should have been writing at all along.

One thing I obviously haven't learned yet is that I can't merely outline some chapters and in others go so in depth they take up half the novel.

Guess crochity old me still has a lot to learn in his fourth year.

---

Another odd post-modern thing happened in my story today (like the plane incident). While my characters in the story are battling with a window, apparently my landlord decided to have new windows intalled in my apartment today. It's too bad because they actually had to break through an old storm window in the novel and now I've got brand new ones that are much different to describe.

One thing I think that's not going to sneak into my novel is that I'm going under the knife on Thursday.

It's nothing serious, hopefully.

I went to the dermitologist today to get a mole at my chest which seems to have grown over a chicken pox scar looked at. Well, that mole is absolutely harmless it turns out and I was, of course, lectured by the skin doc as though I was wasting her time.

Luckily or unluckily, it turns out there's a mole on my back by the shoulder blade that's apparently become assymetrical and needs to come off before it possibly turns into melanoma.

Since I waited six weeks for the original dermitologist appointment, it's pretty obvious that the mole surgeon isn't someone to be asked, "is there a better day for that?"

So the good news is that now I have Thursday afternoon to write. The bad news is that after the half hour procedure, I'll have a bunch of stitches in my back and maybe even be on painkillers (though apparently this excise and biopsy is relatively painless).

As if I needed just one more thing to distract me from writing.

At least since my laptop is still broken, I'm forced to type sitting up anyhow so thank goodness for small blessings.

Then again, with how much better my word rate has gotten since I switched from laptop to desktop, maybe it's an extremely large blessing.

---

CURRENT WORD COUNT: 20,089 words

Taking A Break From Writing My Script For Jerry

Just taking a break from "Seinfeld Under Water" (though that was the Upper East Side and I'm writing about the Lower West Side) to check in and express my nightly frustration with the crap progress of my novel.

I'm not sure if I remember correctly from last year's Wrimo Radio what the second week was supposed to be but apparently it's the week where novels start writing themselves as people have become familiar with the characters.

Well I'm very familiar with my characters in the same way that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were familiar with theirs. If the five main characters in my novel were sitting at a diner in New York City, I could definitely have them discussing things with Beth, who has emerged as the main character (but who still has no last name) going, "did you ever notice?" and the other four, completely fleshed out, nodding their heads and saying the things that they should say based on the personalities I gave them.

Or maybe I can just be Jerry Seinfeld. "Did you ever notice how slightly bossy women with Napoleon complexes are actually really good at taking control in dangerous situations?"

I think everything is going according to plan because I never planned on having Beth become the leader of the group, it just made sense. Anthony is too neurotic and would be afraid of sticking his neck out. Allison is too shy. William is too much of a pretty boy and Brian is just not sane. Though I think Brian will redeem himself at some point by proving that he too can be helpful to get out of jams (after all, he is a survivalist).

Though I think the difference between me and seemingly everyone else who is past the halfway point is that they actually know how people will prove themselves.

Me, I'm just writing an episode of "Seinfeld" where the gang finds themselves in a burning building and Elaine develops organizational skills as opposed to just having a silly dance.

The irony? I never even liked "Seinfeld"!

---

One of my favorite lines in "Thank You For Smoking" is the one where the lobbyist is pitching the idea of more cigarette branding in movies. The movie producer thinks it's a great idea and says to him that he likes the idea of having cigarettes in space.

The lobbyist says, "but wouldn't cigarettes blow up in an all gravity environment."

The producer looks him square in the eye and says, "we can fix that with a few words of dialog, thank goodness we invented the..."

I had one of those moments tonight though I haven't yet gone back to correct it. I have my main characters plus about fifteen other people jumping out of Anthony's window to where the water is (it's less than a story down). Part of the way I increased the word count of this endeavor is that I made it so there were going to be people who couldn't swim who would need to be rescued. Where would they get put? Oh, on the fire escape of the building across the street.

This of course begs the question...

WHY THE HADES DIDN'T THE PEOPLE IN THE MC BUILDING JUST USE THE FIRE ESCAPE?

Well because that would have only taken six words of dialog to explain: "they climbed down the fire escape."

No, that would be far too simple and logical. I have to have them jumping out a third story window into almost three stories of water below. But now I do have to go back and insert the bits of dialog as to why the fire escape isn't there.

And you're damn skippy that will be more than three words.

---

I've come to the conclusion that I'm hoping that everyone over 25,000 words (with a few exceptions of course) have written nothing but crap.

Though really there's only one person that I wish this on truly. There's this one person on Team Toronto 2006 who's over 50,000 words. Ordinarily, even if they are on the opposing team, I'd have nothing but huzzahs for them. Except, this person has apparently wrote 39,000 of those words in the last two days.

And they're 13.

Now that seems a bit suspicious to me. Not that 13-year old can't write (I bet a lot of them are writing better novels than I am this year) but 13-year olds who write that fast have got to be kicking out just a bunch of crap.

I trust no one who writes more than 5,000 words a day. Doesn't matter the day. Any day of the 30 if you write more than 5,000, I don't trust you. Unless it's the last day and then I don't trust you either, but I do admire you.

How can I say this? Because I used to be one of "you people" and I don't trust myself. :)

Though maybe that's just the jealous talking.

I can't believe that two years ago I wrote 93,000 words in 30 days. Where the hades did that me go to? And they were 93,000 pretty good words to boot. This year, I'm on pace for 44,280 of the worst words I've ever written.

Unless I pull a rabbit out of my ass and come up with something interesting.

---

Though I do have to say that I found some bit of relief in an unlikely place, on the This Is Going Better Than I'd Hoped forum.

Yes, on that soul crusher of a group of discussions was one called, "How Many Words Did It Take You To Set Up Your Story? Or Will It Take You ...."

Some of the answers are downright shocking. There are people who have almost 30k of exposition. 30k or exposition! I thought 14.5k was bad. I bored myself with the characters all living in their own heads for that long (which is really only 40 pages in reality but it seems like a lot in NANOWRIMO time), I can only imagine what those people went through.

They must be really big "Seinfeld" fans.

Maybe I can convince them to read "Seinfeld Under Water."

Just Your Average Novel All The Way Around

This is certainly an odd sensation. Ordinarily I want to hop right off of writing to write about it over here. Tonight since I'm finally at the point where the building catches on fire setting the protagonists (that's what I need, I need an antagonist, no wonder my story sucks this year - person v. nature just ain't working when nature isn't that fierce so far) "free" into the streets of New York City.

It's not like I know what's going to happen once they get there or anything but at least now something is happening that will keep the fingers flying for somewhere between 3k-5k.

Well if the fingers have ever really flown this year.

---

I did a calculation of the veterans on Team Chicago (sadly there are only 10 of us) and their word counts last year trying to discern some sort of pattern and there definitely is one.

Those of us at the bottom of our city's word count were toward the bottom of last year's final count as well (though we all reached our 50k).

Currently those involved in our inter-city word war for the second year running shake out as follows:

1. Dieundonne - 35,500 words (2005 total: 67,086)
2. Peter S - 24,897 words (2005 total: 58,356)
3. Squirrelgirl22 - 22,611 words (2005 total: 61,767)
4. Dawaterrat - 20,005 words (2005 total: 65,204)
5. Bre - 19,555 words (2005 total: 54,742)
6. Panstygia - 16,668 words (2005 total: 70,282)
7. Dispalacedbeatnik - 15,071 words (2005 total: 53,229)
8. Vegas658 - 11,269 words (2005 total: 53,726)
9. Jlizak - 8,980 words (2005 total: 50,094)
10. Scud-O - 8,425 words (2005 total: 50,079)

So it looks like almost everyone propping up the table of the experienced writers (except for Panstygia) are those people who just try to pace themselves out to the 50,000. This maybe isn't the best of news as we're still quite a bit behind Toronto (60,000 at last count) but are gaining rapidly.

I chose a Toronto one v. one buddy recently and it looks like I made the right choice.

Greensong from the "city to the north" (though Toronto isn't north of us so much as Winnepeg is) did a calculation on the Ontario::Toronto board and she came up with the following:

"Subtracting last Sunday's numbers, we've written 132,053 words this week so far, but Chicago has written 183,360, and that's 28% more than us. We're still leading, but we've got to keep that energy up :)"

So it doesn't look like a 750,000 word demolition like it was last year (and it is fun that it's this close at the one-third point) but it looks like Chicago may pull this out after all - even with those at the top of our city word count list not participating in the competition.

It will be interesting to see tomorrow night once the official week two count is in how each person matches up with their direct counterpart. I'll laugh if Greensong is in 20th place or so like I am. Right now, we're within 1,000 words of each other.

---

Speaking of Chicago, there's another member of Team Chicago named Axmxz who is right around me in the word count.

There's a thread on the Literary Fiction forum called, "No dialogue" in which a fourth year named jedisquid posted that he had written 8,500 words without using any dialogue and that he might write the entire novel not using any.

AxmxZ had the following to say about that:

"To be honest, it sounds dreadfully dull. Okay, James Joyce could write hundreds of pages without dialogue - but you aren't James Joyce. I'm kind of guilty of writing the same way, and as dream-like or whatever that may be, a whole novel of that would put anyone to sleep."

Methinks he's taking NANOWRIMO a bit too seriously (though to be fair the original poster did ask for feedback on the writing style).

Here's my response to the OP:

"I have to part ways with my fellow member of Team Chicago 2006, Axmxz. I think the way he's writing it sounds absolutely fascinating.

Certainly the end result might be boring but as has been said before, if he pulls it off it's going to completing a very difficult challenge. And it's going to be the kind of unique challenge that NANOWRIMO is all about.

This month isn't about writing great novels unless that's what you set the month out to be. This month is about pushing yourself to whatever limits you see fit. For most people just writing 50,000 words is that challenge but for others it's more - especially since I notice jedisquid is a fourth year participant.

I think his novel is going to be special out of the whole bunch that we all turn out because it doesn't follow conventions and I think he should actually try to write all 50,000 words, or even complete the novel, without a single word of dialog for that reason alone.

This is the kind of thing that is special enough to end up in the Q&A section for sure."

I actually wish I had thought of a challenge like that. After last year's genre busting, I didn't set a very high bar for myself. It was like I stepped backward into my comfort zone (though the action-adventure part could prove to stretch my boundaries for sure) and now it's costing me word count in boredom.

A no dialog challenge might have been just the kick in the pants I needed.

Or maybe more to the point a no inner monologue challenge. I'll have to put that on the back burner. I definitely want to come up with something unique for 2007.

I realize that my experience of NANO-ing has always been just about average (besides retentivewrimo of course as very few people blog their every NANOWRIMO emotion) these past two plus year (well, three plus if you count my 2003 mis-start). Next year, I want to do something different.

There's my goal. To end up in the Q&A section!

Now that's some challenge!

The Day I Get My Yearly Novel Case Study

It seems like once a year while I'm writing my novel, there's an incident that happens in my actual life that is seminal to the year's topic. Or if not influencing the topic while I'm writing the topic at least has something to do with the topic.

As I've mentioned a few times in not so pleasant ways, this year's novel so far has been about the boredom that happens at first being stuck somewhere with no escape possible but with no immediate danger - or at least very little.

Well today on the way home from Dallas I got stuck at Milwaukee General Mitchell Airport after my plane was deverted from O'Hare due to weather conditions.

The entire plane ride home was a bit of a nightmare. We were supposed to get out of DFW (because Dallas DFW would be redundant) almost 45 minutes behind schedule as the weather conditions in Chicago were planned for by air traffic control. But we actually ended up taking off from Texas quite a bit early and before I knew it (as I was writing some NANOWRIMO stuff of course time went too quickly) the captain had made an announcement that we were less than an hour from O'Hare and were about to start our initial descent.

Then over Des Moines, Iowa the reality of the situation set in as we were put in a holding pattern. We held and held and held and were warned it could take up to an hour before we were given clearence to proceed into Chicago from the southwest. However, 20 minutes later we were told by the captain (I love a captain who gives constant updates as to why things aren't going right rather than letting my mind race) that we were being brought out of the pattern and were going to be approaching Chicago from the northwest instead over southeastern Wisconsin.

As we descended into O'Hare I was scared out of my wits because the plane was being wind sheared left and right in a way that I'd never been through that low to the ground (I mean we could already see cars moving on the streets) and all around us thunder was crashing loudly and we could see lightning.

Still the pilot was doing his best to put us down safely close to home (though with how the wind was blowing I wouldn't have been surprised if we got blown so far off course I landed on my roof). Though at the last minute even his will gave out and probably 300 feet off the ground he pulled back up.

As soon as we were at a safe altitude, he came back on the speaker and let us know that we didn't have enough fuel to go into a holding pattern around O'Hare (since we had used it all making crop circles) and that we were going to land in Milwaukee.

While it wasn't preferrable to do this, I had all sorts of contingency plans like taking the Amtrack home the 1.25 hours between Chicago and its giant northern suburb or even sharing a rental car home with my seat neighbors (everyone had escape on their mind right from the start).

That was until we all found out that we had no gate in Milwaukee and we were going absolutely nowhere - not even inside the airport. We sat there on the tarmac in heavy rain in Milwaukee (though not nearly as bad as in Chicago) with no fuel and with no chance of escape. But at least we were safe on the ground.

Though the pilot did decide to put a hint of danger into the equation by letting us know that we couldn't refuel until the lighting storm stopped because, "the last thing [we] wanted was to be in a big metal object with gas being poured into it if we were struck by lightning."

We kept getting updates every few minutes and they were never good. It seemed like there was always another hour to go before we could get fueled and get off the ground. Who I felt bad for were the people who had a connector flight to Milwaukee who had to be flown back to Chicago and then try to get a flight back to Wisconsin (of which the last one of the night had probably already left). There was one guy on the plane who needed to catch the last flight of the night to London out so he could get on another plane to India for an important business meeting.

I could only imagine his stress levels as mine were going through the roof and I had nowhere to be. The confined space, the lack of food (the poor woman two seats over from me hadn't even ate before she got on the plane because it was a really short flight), and the boredom were really getting to me.

Still, everyone on the flight managed to keep a pretty good disposition considering. People were cracking all sorts of jokes about pretending to be flight attendants and breaking into the liquor stashes or hijacking the fire engine that accompanied the fuel truck and driving it back to the terminal (where they'd take a bus to Chicago under similar dastardly means).

But the one thing that I noticed was that like in the novel I'm writing people of all different walks of life began to talk to each other like they were long time friends even though most of us had never met before. The two women next to me were swapping stories about their children, people were talking about their jobs. Hades, I even got into a conversation about New York City (speak of the devil) though I didn't let on why that was central to my mind right now.

Finally we took off and within 20 minutes (it really is a piddly flight) we had touched down in Chicago. The captain joked, "it's another on-time arrival at what appears to be O'Hare...the connecting flight information is...good luck with that." Sure enough, we were four hours late, on the dot.

While I expected people to be really angry at the captain (despite the fact that it was the weather's fault) everyone took the whole thing really well (though I didn't hear the people at the airline desk trying to negotiate the rest of their trips).

I guess what the night showed was that people really do resort to humor when the situation looks bleak but isn't dangerous. It's not just some sort of Hollywood created mechanism. This case study made me feel somewhat better about my novel (though not as much so as writing over 2,000 words today during the flight and the El ride home).

Though I wish the study hadn't been such a pain in the behind!

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 13,997 words

Not Where I Wanted To Be At The End Of Day Nine

I have to apologize to NANOWRIMO this year because I'm really not that into it. I think the only reason that I keep going is that I don't want to let the rest of Team Chicago 2006 down and I hope to mine something out of the current novel for use in future years when I have more energy to put in the effort that a good NANOWRIMO experience deserves.

I don't know what exactly I'll mine out of this current novel since there isn't much of a plot to take out. There's a bit of characterization and maybe a few lines but there is nothing happening. There isn't even any interpersonal conflict to make the thing interesting yet. And I guess that was fine in the first couple of thousand words but now almost 12,000 words in and at the one-third point in the month, I should at least have some idea how to make the book exciting.

I've never had this problem before. Even with "Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream?" which consisted of two people traveling around Europe, I knew exactly how the characters were going to get from Point A to Point B and what needed to happen to them to come to the realizations they needed to come to. Here, the best I can think of is having the homophobic character come in contact with the homosexual character and have the two need to depend on each other in some way.

Sure it's not a bad plot but I've always prided myself in being in no way that derivirtive.

I came to the realization that I hate my novel when I was writing the meeting between Anthony and Beth and Allison and the best conversation I could come up with is Anthony and Allison singing Cub's "New York City" (made popular by They Might Be Giants) and having Beth get jealous.

Yeah, that's interpersonal drama and people overcoming the odds like I had planned at the start of the month.

I think it's time to give the novel the jolt it needs and have the building catch fire already. It feels as though I should have gotten to this point in the rising action a long time ago so I wouldn't be this bored with my novel.

Oh how I long for the days when I had likeable (or more to the point interesting) characters, funny scenes, and ideas on how to make the plot twist and turn. This year I planned none of this and now with only 20 days left, this lack of forethought is really coming home to roost on my psyche.

It's really no plot, big problem this year.

I'm not the kind of person who can just keep writing about random misadventures until I reach 50,000. Something's going to have to happen soon or I'm going to get so bored I'm going to stop writing.

Or maybe I just need a good night's sleep to think about it. The problem is the last two years my dreams helped me out because I knew the characters and my subconscious did what my conscious mind couldn't. This year's there's nothing.

And nothing when you're trying to write 50,000 words about it actually turns out to be less than nothing - it's a discouragement.

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 11,967 words

Trying To Bring The Funny Back

So it would appear as though I have taken to writing in uncomfortable places since my laptop decided it needed a bit of a spa vacation. And I don't mean the back of a Volkswagon ("Mallrats" forever!).

No, yesterday night after taking a flier to watch the election results (the silent majority of left leaning independents have spoken!) and to see "Marie Antoinette" (which convinced me that no matter how much my NANOWRIMO sucks, it will never be as bad as most anything by Sophia Coppola), I started writing again just after midnight yesterday at 24-Hour Laundromat in Bucktown.

I was hoping that I would at least hear some interesting (albeit scary) dialog from other people who regularly do their laundry in the wee hours on a weeknight. But it was more me sitting in a hard-floored corner with my laptop actually plugged in (something I can't do during the day at the same laundromat) and enjoying the fact that there were no screaming children. The discomfort came in the fact that the place was quiet except for some "700 Club" ripoff blasting on the television instead of the election results I'd rather be seeing.

If the constant thought of getting mugged in the parking lot wasn't disconcerting, I think I might do my laundry when all good people are asleep and dreaming more often.

Today is even less comfortable than that as I'm at a sleezy extended stay motel in Dallas on the ground floor watching people walk right outside the window. Hey, I guess getting mugged at gunpoint will make for interesting writing, right?

But at least I'm writing again. Not that it was anything good. I really need to have things actually start happening now that I'm 10,000 words in or so. I think I've introduced the characters through introspection enough now and it's time to have them start battling zombies in the streets of New York City.

That one was for Kim. ;)

I did slip back into a little bit of the comedy novel I was supposed to be writing from the beginning:

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“You’re bad, Muriel” Beth said again punching him in the arm. That motion was really starting to bother Anthony as did the movie that Beth had just quoted. I mean sure he was a gay man but there were certain limits that he didn’t cross and Abba was one of them. He thought it had something to do with the last girlfriend he had before he came out who dragged him to see “Mamma Mia” on Broadway. The headache still lingered when he thought about it. Muriel’s Wedding made all the pain and agony come rushing back.

Beth didn’t wait for any further response before she pushed open the fire door that led to the stairway and walked into the darkened hallway. The stairwell had been dark enough only being lit by a combination of small flashlights but all the flashlights had to do was light the next step up. The hallway proved a very daunting task for the souvenier flashlights shaped like the Statue Of Liberty. Beth had been quite glad that she had found a use for such a kitschy item a couple of years after she and Steven had picked them up for their very kitsch value.

The problem with kitsch is that once the novelty wore off all they were left with was a pair of crappy, useless flashlights with small pen light beams. The odd thing was that she didn’t even like kitschy objects – unless you counted Barbra Streisand.

Though the flashlights were coming in a lot more handy in climbing the stairs that Barbra Streissand. Beth chuckled a bit, she thought softly, at the thought of “Babs” providing accompaniment on their climb to the top. But she chuckled loud enough for Anthony to hear.

Anthony asked her, “what’s so funny?”

“Oh nothing,” she said, “I was just thinking about how useless Barbra Streissand would be in this situation. She’s be freaking out if she broke a nail or something.”

“Yeah,” Anthony agreed, “she’d probably have that millionaire ex-husband of hers buy her some slaves to carry her up the stairs or something. But you know who’d be really useless in this situation?” Anthony asked.

“Who?” Beth responded.

“Abba,” Anthony smirked.

“You are the absolute gayest gay man that I’ve ever met,” she quipped, punching him in the arm again, “because only a gay man could think about Abba at a time like this.”

---

Sure it doesn't really advance the story and it's slightly offensive (though I'm not going to write p.c. characters since that can be seen as a weakeness of mine) but at least it made the writing enjoyable again to get into the "The Breakfast Club" aspect of my novel - where the people who are going to be depending on each other for survival also can't understand each other - and made me want to write again.

And write I have to because Toronto is talking more crap than ever in the Word War. I kind of liked St. Louis better because we were the aggressors of taunt. Now we're like the victim.

I did write something over the past couple of days. In the Literary Fiction forum, there's a thread called "You know you're writing Literary Fiction..." in which I came up with the following:

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YOU KNOW YOU'RE WRITING LITERARY FICTION WHEN:

When in your story a gunshot is not the signal for the beginning of an action filled chase scene but instead is the prompt for two character to discuss city noises in New York City in a post-9/11 context; as well as why people in cities always say, "it was probably a firework" when they know full well that it was a gunshot.

When a character has spent every time she has the P.O.V. examining the movements of her cat looking for a deeper meaning.

When which floor of an apartment building your characters inhabit has a direct relationship to how detached they are from the events around them.

When you've come up with two or three of your central metaphors before you've come up with even one subplot.

When you ignore descriptive paragraphs because they just distract from the conversation taking place in the novel at a given point.

When your characters live inside of their own heads more than even you do in your real life.

When you think you may have discovered the meaning of life on page 16 but by page 25 realized your theory was b.s. and have a character knock it back down to size. And the counter theory takes up two or three pages.

When you say to yourself, "it's not that my novel is too dense, it's that people are too dense," because you already know you're going to get upset when no one understands your metaphors.

When you find yourself grabbing your old Philosophy 101 text book more than you find yourself grabbing the dictionary or thesaurus.

When your reference books weigh more than your CPU because you worry any deviation from reality might take you into a different genre.

When you get into arguments with your fantasy writing friends about why a sword to them is just a sword and in no way Freudian.

When the first time you used a quotation mark was word 3,500 and you're actually a bit proud of that fact.

When you start incorporating the family back story of all of your characters that might or might not have anything to do with the plot just so the reader can figure out each character's psychoses by name.

When all of your characters are dead on the first page and have yet to find out the whole story is told in flashback.

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The last one isn't actually the plot of my novel. Because giving away a twist if that was a twist, that wouldn't be funny.

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 10,686 words

The Difference Between You And Me Is That Your Laptop Is Alive

Yesterday night life conspired against me to keep me from writing. I got home from work and set down to typing almost immediately. I think I even added a couple of hundred words before the inevitable happened - my laptop's monitor finally gave way.

I tried to revive it by opening it and closing it fast as had worked before but that only made it worse. Finally I gave up and took my laptop to Best Buy to get it fixed.

After having to go to Customer Service to get my receipt from the day after Thanksgiving last year reprinted, I found out that even though I bought the laptop less than a year ago it was no longer under warranty. The manufacutrers warranty from Toshiba was for 90 days parts and labor. The person working at the Geek Squad desk was shocked since he had never seen such a limited warranty before.

Long and short of it, I had to spend $79.00 to ship it off to Best Buy's repair vendor (they only do software and hardware installation and trouble shooting) and will know in about a week what is wrong with it.

The Geek Squad member seemed to think it was a loose connection (after joking that the blue lines that were all the screen showed were his favorite movie) and if it is, hopefully the $79.00 from the initial consultation will cover the repairs as well (if the parts and labor add up to under $79.00, I won't have to pay any more).

While listening to the sound of dollars flying out of my pocket, the hazy proclaimation I made last year flashed through my head, "I don't need the Best Buy warranty, I'm only going to have the computer for a year or two."

The next time I buy a major piece of electronics, I'm going to get the warranty.

That's not the big problem though. The big problem is that my laptop is probably going to be in service for over a week. And I've gotten very set on doing things on my laptop. I *could* have resorted to writing out the novel or I *could* have went to work on my desktop. But the thought of getting out of the laptop groove and trying to write any other way just made me not want to write.

So instead I just watched the pre-election coverage on MSNBC.

The good news is that I'm leaving for Dallas for work tomorrow morning and will be on the business trip until Friday. This means that I'm allowed to check out a loaner laptop which can't be returned on Friday (as my plane lands at 2:30 p.m. and there's no way I can get back to work by 4:00 p.m.) so I have it over the weekend.

And then I guess Mr. Spoiled is going to have to work on his desktop after that.

Tonight I should get a lot written, however, as I have to do laundry while watching the election results and there's nothing that makes laundry go faster than trying to squeeze out NANOWRIMO words (which always makes the time go way too fast).

And then the plane tomorrow and then seven hours of boredom between checking in students and giving them their certificates (if you don't know, I'm an adult educational - licensing courses and continuing education - administrator for real estate appraisers) and then another plane and waiting in the airport.

There's no reason why I couldn't write 10,000 words before the weekend.

Well except that I'm lazy and will probably be looking for some excuse not to write like my lucky laptop being broken.

NANOWRIMO Somewhat By The Numbers

If you want to know what I personally think is the best NANOblog on the web (which I'm sure everyone is waiting on with baited breath), it's Writing Sya.

What I love about her blog is that I think she's the only NANOer out there who both blogs and is a bigger stat geek than I am. Whenever I'm trying to put off writing, I like to do various searches under the Authors tab on the site. And in the past I've published some of that research on here. But Sya, she takes it to an art form.

Today she compiled a list of how many average words there are per genre.

Erotic Fiction leads the way with a 4403 word mean amongst all people who noted this as their genre of course.

Chick Lit is last with 3345.

The odd thing about that descrepency is that the ML in the Chicago region joked at the Kickoff Party that she's labeled her story as Chick Lit because she didn't want parents to see she was writing Erotic Fiction. I'm wondering if that's actually a common experience.

The labeling of genre is always an interesting thing in NANOWRIMO. There is a discussion every year on the Literary Fiction boards asking what can be classified in the king of all genres. :) And really it's not an exclusive club.

The only thing that separates it from general fiction is that we're all full of ourselves (and of course focusing more on the internal emotion rather than external action). ;)

Well a lot of people are full of themselves this year as Lit Fic is the fourth most chosen genre behind Other, None Listed, and, of course, Fantasy (with 9545 people classifying it as their genre). This may be the first year, however, that Literary Fiction outpulls Science Fiction.

Preach on my internal monologue heavy, plot light brothers and sisters!

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Speaking of stats, the first week's numbers came out in the Chicago v. Toronto city word war and they're not good.

As of the official count this morning, Toronto is ahead 303,841 to 190,693.

Well at least that's what one of our two captains posted. Thankfully I kept a spreadsheet of my own. We're actually only behind 303,841 to 256,536. Still that's about 1,500 words (or basically one day) per member of the team.

What's killing us is that Toronto has four writers over 20,000 already and we have one. Our 10,000+ people are even (13) and we only have one more 0 person than they do. So I guess I'm part of the problem as I'm still at 7,500 or so.

I'll have to remedy that tonight.

The Novel Begins To Take A Shape That I Haven't Written Down

Last year in this blog, I usually made it a point to compare where I was word-wise in my 2005 novel with where I was with my benchmark 2004 novel (the benchmark for so many things including actually finishing in 30 days combining the days I wrote in November and the days I wrote in December).

While I can still do that this year by looking at my LiveJournal entries from last November, I inadvertantly deleted my spreadsheet. It's probably for the best as I would just be anal about beating last year's totals. Then again that does go with the theme since I am the retentivewrimo after all. :)

There are a couple of comparisons I want to make though.

The first is that last year on November 5, I was staying in Brooklyn which visiting New York City. Totally forgetting this and somewhat randomly, I mentioned Brooklyn in the part of the story I was writing. Though I did it with knowledge of Brooklyn that I wouldn't have had last year.

While I was visiting the ancestral borough (my grandmother on my father's side was born there though the other three sides stayed in New York for about the amount of time it took to process them through Ellis Island and one of the four sides even came in through Canada) last month, my friend Lynn got into a discussion with the cook at the bar where one of her friends bartends while I was visiting both of them at the bar in question (whose name I don't remember but it's in Carroll Gardens).

Lynn grew up in Williamsburg before it became a yuppie community. She's a mixture of races (white, black, and Asian) which, if I remember correctly, wasn't that unusual for Williamsburg. But she used to cross over into Carroll Gardens back in the day and she related the dirty looks that she got in the neighborhood because it was all Italian at the time.

I took this and made it into part of Anthony's story.

His parents as I wrote them still live in one of the sections of Brooklyn that's mostly Italian and he relates part of the reason that he left home (that his parents are basically racist and can't handle blacks and Hispanics moving into the neighborhood). Though I think when he reveals more of the reason he left Brooklyn for Greenwich Village (I think it would only take one guess for anyone who knows New York City to figure out what reason a young man would have for moving to "The Village" to be around other people) I'll actually relay more of the actual story as opposed to eluding to it.

This also let me explore a bit of Beth's past. I made it so she comes from an Irish-American family in Boston with a strong, uncompromising yet free spirited (probably a hippie I haven't decided yet) mother figure. And I got to contrast this with the patriarchy that Anthony grew up in.

Which brings up the other big difference from last year to this one that I want to mention.

Last year I did a ton of research into Detroit's history as well as the War Of 1812. Two years ago, I did the same for Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague (it helped that I had been to four of the five) as well as looking up other things like security measures at Charles DeGaulle Airport.

This year I'm in similarly new territory for myself as I'm dealing with a flood. I really need to look up elevations of various places in New York City because eventually the five main characters in the story are going to leave the apartment building the story starts out in and I need to know which parts of the city will suffer from the soup bowl effect as happened in New Orleans.

The funny thing, well not so funny as it will kind of ruin the story, will be if Greenwich Village is actually one of the highest places in Manhattan so it would be dry as the water collected elsewhere. Memory serves that the borough is lowest at the bottom and highest at the top but that could be wrong.

Anyhow, beyond the scientific portion of the novel, what's really a more important difference is how I was keeping track of the details. I had little maps of Detroit with pencilled in landmarks and everything last year. This year, nothing. I don't even have last names for my five main characters.

Anthony has a last name, Trablisi, but Beth doesn't yet - though I'm thinking maybe Fitzpatrick and neither do the other main characters, William, Allison, or Brian.

Though as the novel is progressing, they are developing personality traits and stories. What I should really do tomorrow is stop for a second and write down what I've created about the characters so far.

But I probably won't as I'm pretty happy that I'm now a few hundred words ahead of pace and don't want to get behind again.

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CURRENT WORD COUNT: 7715 words.

Blowing Toronto To Timbits In My Own Way

It's entirely possible I'm taking the "Blame Canada" city v. city challenge too seriously. But it's much more fun battling Toronto this year because I think they smack talk more than even we do in Chicago. They're pretty scary since they already have a handful of writers over 10k and we're struggling to get off the ground.

But I did my part this afternoon by writing an entire portion of a chapter doing nothing but bashing Toronto.

---

This afternoon I had a bit of writers block as to what to do with one of my characters and so I had them go off on an anti-Toronto screed. The character, named William, is basically a really proud New Yorker. Not just proud but downright disdainful of other cities (in the first chapter he compains that Washington D.C. will probably be helped in evacuation before his New York City). Well who else would be more natural to just go off on Toronto than that character?

The scene is that he's come to the conclusion that New York City is going to be isolated for a long time from the flood that was caused by a storm surge from a hurricane that hit New Jersey. After he concludes that there are no sirens, no noise, no anything that would give him and others trapped in various midrises around the city hope, he examines his situation (I'm a lit fic writer, right?) in the following way:

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"Maybe they weren’t coming after all, William thought. He figured there had to be support services all over the city still up and running but he hadn’t heard any sirens. He looked out his window and felt a slight feeling of vertigo looking down toward the street. All he could see was a strip of blue running down the middle of the street where it used to be a strip of black with a white broken stripe down the middle.

The street was so desolate and so, he hated to think it, dead that he figured he had been transported from New York City to somewhere small and insignificant like Toronto. One of those cities that pretended to be a real city but was somehow lacking anything that could make it worthwhile except for some Indian restaurants downtown. He thought, "you could pretty much burn that whole city except for a few blocks of Yonge Street to the ground and the world might actually be a better place."

He had never seen such a boring city with so little to offer in the way of architecture or nightlife or attractions. He only wished he had a northern view out of his apartment so he could stare up toward Midtown Manhattan and see the gleaming skyscrapers to get the dirty, dirty thought of Toronto out of his head.

His thoughts turned back to the police and then by the obvious logical chain, to donuts.

"And screw timbits," he said aloud to no one in particular, "why would anyone want to eat something that sounded like some guy’s unmentionables."

For William, it was all about the Krispy Kreme deep fried donut holes.

"Oh Krispy Kreme," he said hoping that there was one left standing in the area when New York City recovered from the flood. "Hell," he said again out loud, "I would fly to Chicago for some Krispy Kreme right now." A city with no Krispy Kremes, that was a joke to William. There were more good donut places in Syracuse than there were in Toronto.

Now depressed he navigated his way back to his apartment in darkness as deep as the blue of Lake Ontario that he wished had washed over Toronto instead. He wondered why his beloved city had been the one washed away and not that craphole to the northwest.

How he wished the city had been burned to the ground during the War Of 1812 while it was still a fort and they had chose not to rebuild it abandoning the land to packs of wild dogs.

"Go Rangers," he said to himself angrily under his breath. Sure Madison Square Garden might be gone but it would still have a better hockey team than the Maple Leafs. Even the Chicago Blackhawks are better than the Maple Leafs and they were terrible.

And it disgusted him that they didn't know how to pluralize leaf. It was one thing that Boston, he thought, another waste of civic planning time and energy couldn’t pluralize sock (and neither could Chicago he thought but he couldn’t blame the whole city for the south side) but leaf, come on, that was one of the first words a kid could learn.

The only thing that bothered him more than this grammatical error in judgment was that they spelled colors with a "u." While part of him could admit that was the more classic spelling, he appreciated that the United States had dropped the "u" long ago. It’s "ko-lor" he said aloud, not "col-o-ur."

And he didn’t even want to get started on a mental path about the Blue Jays or Raptors. Why did Toronto even bother?

All these thoughts about Toronto were making him want to throw himself out the window onto the flooded patch of West Sixth Street that ran below his window.

Death would be better than living in Toronto, he concluded."

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Of course that won't make any post-NANOWRIMO edits but it was really fun to write. And, hey, it was almost 1k. ;)