The Beginning Of The End Of The World Novel

Each year I've tried to choose a song to guide my muse. In 2004 with "Why Sleep When I'll Only Dream" it was really easy. "Hallelujah" was kind of the theme song of my novel like it has been so many other creative endeavors. But, you know, just to be original I decided to use the original Leonard Cohen version.

And there was a self-referential moment in the story where the female MC, Emily, comes to the realization of why the male MC, Scott, used to sing to her like a lullabye that version and not the Jeff Buckley version.

Sure it was just a tretise of mine both padding my word count and measuring the comparative merits of the two but isn't NANOWRIMO about vanity paragraphs and soapboxing?

Last year was a little more complicated as it was an alternate historical fiction. To say that any song would have ended up word-for-word in a different history as it did in this one would be stretching things. But last year's song was "The Big Fella" by Black 47.

Actually it was pretty much the whole Black 47 catalog as I tried to write from an American perspective what the struggle for Irish freedom (which Black 47 writes about so often) might have felt like.

The first two years the tone of the song fit very well with the tenor of the story. The down nature of the Leonard Cohen and the hopeful fighting spirit of the Black 47 guided my fingers across the keyboard.

As far as this year's selection goes, it remains to be seen if the spirit of the song and the spirit of the story ends up corrrelating.

This years song is "The Story Of Willy" by New York City (choosing two NYC bands in a row, pish, next year it will have to be a Chicago one) spoken word and musical collective King Missile:

"On the morning of the day of the Apocalypse, Willy woke up and made himself bacon and eggs and rye toast
He did usually eat bacon, but since today was such a special day, he figured why not,
Like most people these days, he had a hard time keeping his food down,
But that didn't stop Willy from eating, he enjoyed food to much.
Willy went outside, he loved to breathe fresh air, but he went outside anyway
He decided to head across the street and visit his good friend Bob.
When Willy got to Bob's house, he found that Bob, in utter despair,
Had shot himself in the head,
"Some people have no patience whatsoever" Willy proclaimed,
Well, I'm not going to kill myself, I'm sticking it out,
Today's a special day, the last day of planet Earth and I'm going to enjoy myself
Maybe today I won't go to the health spa,
Maybe I'll just stay here and drink all of Bob's beer
Or maybe when Bob's wife comes home, I'll take her out dancing
Yeah, that's it, dancing I'm going home to get changed
Willy raced out the door into the street, not noticing the runaway steamroller, that flattened him into a pancake in less that one second
The World would have to end without Willy."

Based on the first 1025 words of my novel that I wrote yesterday night, the song making light of the end of the world is pretty fitting. I wouldn't say that the four characters that I've written brief introduction vignettes about so far make light of the situation they're in so much as they're jaded about it.

After all, they are New Yorkers.

A flood turning 14th street that runs past their midrise apartment building in Manhattan into a canal isn't so much a sign of impending doom as an inconvenience. One of the characters even wonders how long it's going to take for the situation to be fixed by streets and sanitation because New York City can't possibly have shut down. It's just not conceivable.

He even jokes to himself that the only city along the eastern seaboard that the government will restore before New York City is Washington D.C.

This character lives highest up in the apartment building that the characters start out in so I guess in less than three pages, I've put in my first metaphor - the closer the characters live to the level the water is at, the more they grasp the significance. The two characters closest can actually think about the death and destruction that the flood must have caused, the one highest up can't. These are where the satire comes in so far.

I guess I could carry this further to the penthouse but I think that's going a bit too much into archetypes to have them be distant.

I'll post the first couple of paragraphs (they're pretty morbid) tonight as it's time to get back to work. But I'm uplifted by the fact that I want to get back to writing.

That's something that I hadn't expected out of this year's novel. At least without musical assistance.