Novel Excerpt, Chapter 2

From Grand Theft Cambridge, Chapter 2. The new company is staffing up through networking and word-of-mouth. Tamara takes the opposite tack. She seeks out a startup company she can go to work for under false pretenses. On her first attempt, she sells herself for a job that doesn't exist yet.

The plan came together like clockwork. It all came down to framing the story. Tamara knew there were plenty of dot-com companies starting up on a shoestring, hoping for an easy way to find low-level employees who could take care of themselves. All she had to do was invent herself as competent but not competition, good at some job that didn't come with the description of "engineering discipline" or "business specialty." So Tamara Lamppinen became a college dropout with brisk organizing skills.

Her friend Rebecca, hearing her plan, had jumped into the conspiracy immediately. Four years in Boston turned into a clerk's job at Mass Bay Insurance, where Rebecca answered all the employment checking calls. Tam had grown in competence beyond her job, and Mass Bay had a long-term hiring freeze, so they were sorry to see her move on.

Kennealy was slightly harder to bring in line. Tamara held the title of Research Assistant, putting together information folders from portfolio lists. She was good, too. She knew by now where to look for the best research reports for different kinds of stocks, funds and bonds. Roger Miskin, her boss, knew exactly how well her work freed up his time to hand-hold more customers. The problem with her career at Kennealy Asset Management, though, boiled down to what Miskin politely called her "testosterone deficit." Her career path was determined at birth, or at least until old Mr. Kennealy finally gave up control to his son.

Miskin appreciated her perhaps too much, realizing his own ethical opposition to "office hijinks" with subordinates was stronger than his attraction to tall women. He'd said as much directly to Tamara's face. So, he volunteered to take reference calls dumbing down her job and expressing regret over a vague office reorganization. He repeatedly mentioned that helping Tamara bluff her way into a dot-com job would "solve both our problems." Tamara took this to mean removing temptation from his life, since Roger trusted her with these potentially explosive truths, and thought her double life would make for a great adventure. Poor Roger, a romantic soul without the will to be romantic himself!

When one of her Wednesday night group mentioned the "lost boys" inhabiting one of the buildings on the barely gentrified streets behind Lotus, Tamara printed out a fresh, one-page resume and practiced her Gal Friday character in front of the mirror. The next day, a quick trip across the Charles made her grab for the brass ring.

E-Style was a group of twenty people figuring out how to inhabit the third floor of an old brick industrial building. Voices echoed off the high ceiling of the large, open space, desks seemed placed almost at random around the floor, and the back of the place was a jumble of boxes, computers and trash. Tamara spend a few minutes trying to get anyone's attention. A harried computer geek passed her off to a suit named Carter, who was mildly flummoxed by her appearing out of nowhere, asking about jobs. He made her wait 20 minutes until another well-dressed man walked out. Paul Madrowski listened politely to her introduction, then admitted they wouldn't have a personnel manager for another couple of weeks. He wasn't sure he could help at the moment, though he appreciated her initiative.

Tamara said, "But I already know what I can do for you."

Madrowski demurred, "Then you already have a better idea than me."

"Look," Tamara pressed, "just look around you! This whole place is disorganized. I'll bet nobody here knows how to set up office space."

"Well, we'll get to that eventually," admitted Madrowski.

"That probably goes for even the office supplies. Are you buying them on credit cards and paying from petty cash?"

"About half, yes."

"How about coffee and cola? How far do these guys have to walk to get a cup of coffee? Closest place I saw was two blocks away. Meetings. I'll bet you just stand wherever you find empty whiteboards. Schedules. You're an executive here, right?"

"Yes, we have three executives, including me."

"Bet you have a hard time getting together unless you all happen to have free time. Visitors. I wandered around for five minutes before anyone even recognized I was an outsider. What if it's someone important?"

Madrowski was subdued. "I won't say you're right about everything, but I'll admit the things you say happen a lot around here." He sighed. "So this is the point where you tell me you can fix everything."

Tamara leaned forward. "No."

Pausing to let this sink in, she continued, "I can't make everything always go smoothly, but I can organize you. That's my talent, that's what I want to do. Let me be blunt: how many people do you have here who are not on salary?"

Let 100,000 WriMos Bloom

This year there seems to be a grassroots flavor to NaNoWriMo. Browsing around, YT found the usual spate of newspaper articles on the contest, but the top Google hits were from smaller newspapers. The Worcester Telegram ran a nice article, which will no doubt disappear into paid archives a week or two after this blog entry is written. No matter: here's the key piece of information.




NaNoWriMo is growing by about 20,000 writers per year, pretty impressive, and the novel completion rate is hanging in at just under 20%. Of course, the chances of getting a NaNo novel published are still tiny.

But this year feels different. The NaNo official web site has been slow, slow, slow this year. ML Tiffany is taking a more laissez-faire attitude, so there's a lot of buzz about setting up meetings here, there and everywhere around Detroit. Last night at Z's we got six writers in total. Today in Royal Oak and tomorrow night in Waterford, YT would not be surprised if the numbers are similar. What's different is there might be some informal gathering going every day of the week.

So the atmosphere is one of creative ferment.

Oh! The Outpouring!

Two days, 8,701 words. As they say on the day of the Michigan-Michigan State game, holy cow! Where did that geyser come from? YT must really have been ready to let it all hang out this year.

Some of the reason must be the planning. YT made about 8 pages of notes over the course of several lunch hours and evenings, full of ideas about the characters and some of the scenes. There was even a kind of bullet-point business plan for E-Style, a frame for all the stuff that will happen inside the company. Not to be too historically accurate, the idea here is that the dot-com company is sniffing around the beginnings of what we see now on Amazon or Netflix: "People who bought this book also bought..."

With all this background, the first two chapters - yes, all these words in two chapters! - were about the dealmaking to fund the company, and then how it got going as a real concern. With all the detail, some if it is dull and didactic. Well, most of it. But a steady tap-tap-tap did the trick. There will be an excerpt or two down-blog soon.

Given the planning and outlining starting this year, much of the credit for the huge word count has to go to yWriter 3. Past entries here have noted how writing goes quickly when YT gets "in the zone," or "the characters start speaking for themselves." This is Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow, where a person becomes fully immersed in his task, and the outer world falls away. It's easier to experience than to describe, but trust your friendly blogger here. Good tools can help a person enter the state of flow, and yWriter definitely has that character of "tool-ness." Other people have praised it online in fairly purple prose. YT hasn't used half the features, which look like they're aimed at someone far more organized, but he will say that it just works. After two days this writer is sold.

Of course, latent talent, or sheer perverse wordiness, perhaps, has a lot to do with this early success. So does taking a couple of vacation days just to write.

Word count after 2 days: 8,701

Liftoff

First sentence: "Isosceles triangle, elongated rectangle: Ron wondered why, moments before his first venture consulting gig began, he was reduced to guessing the size of the dancer's G-string."

10.. 9.. 8..

Just under 24 hours to the start of NaNoWriMo. Today, YT had to remind himself just to make notes, and save the real writing for November 1. Fleshed out a couple of characters today, figured out some relationship scenes... Time to climb back up on the high wire: GCT might just work out okay!

Just A Few Days More...

Well. YT has a semi-generic story outline and a list of 40 scenes. PlotMo turned out to be a lunchtime's worth of brainstorming, leading to short descriptions like:

• Silvio begins to suspect company will succeed.
• Russo gets interested in writer
• Russo gives career advice to stripper

This turned out to be a useful exercise: a new character needs to be added to set the company on the right track, leading to more complications for everyone. And Ron Russo will set the stripper on quite a career path, quite successfully.

* * *

Having blown the weekend for doing the scutwork to set up all of these points in yWriter, YT went to the Detroit area kickoff party, where 24 or 25 people showed up. A good time was definitely had by all. As Tiffany pointed out, a few had come in tentative and left enthusiastic. Oh, this time around things are going to start on a good note.