Novel Excerpt, Chapter 2

From Drunkard's Leap, Chapter 2. Lena has had an unsettling encounter in a bar that took the pleasure out of last night. Today, she has to go to work.

This time of year, on the mornings when I woke alone at 6:30, the light was crisp, inviting me into the unfolding day. Not today. I felt roughed up, dirty in yesterday’s clothes, hung over, befuddled, cranky and unsatisfied. A hot shower improved my outlook a couple of degrees, enough so I would only commit mayhem on the streets, not manslaughter. Breakfast moved me a few steps closer to human. In my clean work outfit, I might pass for relatively harmless.

I walked the blocks to the train station briskly. No Warden came in sight, nor any train, so I ducked in to the coffee outlet to grab a go-cup. I clipped on my pass, barely slowed for the turnstile, and reached the platform just as a train pulled in half-empty. I grabbed the scenic seat and thought about all the opportunities I’d had to turn last night into something different. But no great ideas came to mind. Thoughts of awesomeness, briefly glimpsed, were creeping up, so instead I paid attention to the grandeur outside. Mt. Hood and the plume of its growing neighbor were steady on the horizon as the nearby scenery flew by. By the time the train reached Beaverton, the coffee and the view had dissipated much of my funk.

Something from last night must have showed on my face, though, because Stan the Man pulled me over after the morning stand-up. “Lena,” he said, “do you want to invoke the contract?”

“Etiquette by night, contract by day,” I replied. “Actually, I’m trying to figure out who broke etiquette last night. This morning I wasn’t the Lena you know, but it’s okay now. But let the contract be for now.”

“Well, nevertheless, I’m assigning you the girly leather stuff today so you won’t break anything.”

I started to protest, but thought better of it. Stan the Man had a nose for my moods, not to mention everybody else’s, so I’d use the assignment to come back to my normal, charming self at my own speed.

I said, “Okay, Stan, you’re the boss-man.”

He grinned and took my assignment sheet, handing me a new one. For all the claims of general uprightness in today’s society, I knew better. Those kinky mail-order catalogs were barely touched by the Watch and Ward; their wrappers just got a more opaque white when the upright crowd was in charge. The orders came to people like me. Inside what looked like a big truck terminal, we did “order fulfillment” for any number of outfits. We were the back end of the slick catalog operation; whatever the return address, the goods all shipped out from Beaverton.

Today I got Cowboy Intimates orders. All the items were unbreakable – thanks, Stan – though definitely not my kind of fashion. I cruised the aisles at 10 over quota, loading travel bins with leather garter belts, rawhide-trimmed corsets, lace-trimmed chaps and less obvious useful gear. Some sort of weird harness with a pommel seemed to be a favorite today. I lost myself in the rhythm of work. It was easy to fill a bin, bring it to the drop, pull the next order sheet, work out the best route in my head, fill a bin, and repeat. At this rate I would push 20 over quota, enough that Stan would make me relax the rhythm.

But the steady pace helped burn off all the residue of last night, and by noon I was only 18 over. After lunch I felt almost relaxed. Another hour of steady stock-picking reduced the Cowboy queue to its last few orders. I plotted my next run to veer off toward Stan’s post so he could get a fill-in assignment ready for the last couple hours of the day.

Oh, No, Get Me Rewrite!

Your Brico has sinned. He has broken at least two of his own commandments: don't edit if it's scrolled off the screen; and don't tweak until December.

Namely, at a key point in Chapter 4, the main character, Lena, accomplishes something important to her future. Her examiner, so to speak, rushes over to hug her for being so quick to catch on, and Lena feels aroused by the other woman. Except Lena has already demonstrated she's very much into men. Two days and two chapters later, it stuck out as false, just like a second thumb on YT's hand.

So, what to do? Remain true to the ideal of low expectations? Or sleep at night without wrong things running through Brico's aging head. Heh. I wimped out.

Ten minutes of word surgery makes Lena accept the hug, then flash on her latest man embracing her with lust in his heart, then pulling back to the realization it's a woman, a near-stranger, hugging her. Much better. That is, the general level of the writing meets YT's low expectations, but the sore thumb no longer throbs. YT will now repent at leisure.

Did your humble author not mention that the act of teleporting is only possible when the perpetrator has been drinking, and that completing the act fills the perpetrator with an impossible mix of awe and lust? So they do and it does, and this scene is along the lines of "the first hit is free, honey."

Word count after 9 days: 16, 449

NaNos at the Kickoff

Sunday, October 30, was the kickoff party for Detroit area NaNo novelists. We walked in - we being Tiffany, Gary, Kim and your Brico - to Woody's here in Royal Oak not knowing what to expect. Well, noveling must be a big deal this year because there were 32, count 'em, 32 people sitting at a long table talking, gesticulating, laughing, and most of all, enthusiastically anticipating. That's at least three times as many as attended the kickoff last year.

YT felt like an old man amongst a crowd heavily salted with college students. No matter. Plenty of familiar faces showed up, including Amy, penultimate Municipal Liason and veteran WriMo, and the redoubtable MontiLee, more determined than ever to finish. Last year was a roundtable conversation among newfound friends; this year was a party.

Looks like the Brico will be keeping company with a lively bunch.

Word count after 3 days: 3,855

Noveling Month Starts

Well, YT stayed up late and wrote his first sentence, the one he'd been itching to set down for at least two weeks. "Two guys walked into a bar." Or something like that.

One thing led to another, so a few more sentences got written, until your Brico's eyelids were drooping. So, off to bed, off to work, and after supper, back to the novel. By the end of the evening, the Brico lids were rather leaden, but the first day yielded 1,869 words and all but a few paragraphs of the first chapter.

All right! We're off and running!

Countdown: 7 days until the start

So. In the week since his last pre-novel posting, YT has written several pages of notes fleshing out the SF novel he intends to write. Your friendly Brico would much rather be writing the novel itself. New this year, a vague outline of a plot with some ideas about pacing. Wow, take that, reader C.! A plot! There are also various notes about characters, world-building, motivation and clever lines.

The main character, Lena, was and will be misled by curiosity. One trick this year will be emphasizing that trait as an underlying reason for Lena's actions. It strikes the Bricoleur just now that one theme that demands inclusion in the novel is the role of free will versus compulsion, whether the compulsion be external rules or internal desire. Curiosity, of course, is on the side of free will.

YT filled out a character sheet for Lena, a multipage questionnaire found through the Helpful Orgs and Sites forum at NaNoWriMo.org. Doing this exercise revealed, first, how Lena wasn't going to fit into anyone else's preconceived notions of her. Second, thinking about different external facets of the character shed some light on her internal dynamics. YT does not advocate slavishly following this method or filling out that form, but doing this kind of exercise fleshes out the character. Now, if she would only start speaking in her own voice...

In the real world, just yesterday YT had oral surgery. It was either that or lose a tooth, not a hard decision. Now, 24 hours later, this man of the world is reduced to eating macaroni and cheese, and floating on pain pills. Floating is the word, all right. YT is enjoying a bout of chemically-assisted free association. Driving is definitely out of the question today.

So it's off with the notebook to fill a couple of pages with the connections that are floating into view, in the hopes some will still make sense a few days from now. The author hopes this feeling will also suggest something about the moods of his characters after they exercise their special talent. Every experience is grist for the novel-making mill. Everything!

Comment spam: Ugh...

Since returning to the blogosphere after a break of many months, one surprise was "comment spam," anonymous comments tacked onto a post that advertise some get-rich-quick blog. The careful reader will notice some energetic policing going on here in Free Range Novelist. Getting totally unrelated comments, then taking the time to remove them, is annoying... Ugh.

Your Brico has no intention of removing or even filtering legitimate replies, so long as they meet some modest standard of civility, so we'll see if cleaning up bl-spam (sblam??) after the fact is good enough. Bet some junk comment gets tacked onto this post within minutes of its publication, though.

2005 Novel Title

This year's novel will be called Drunkard's Leap. As mentioned a couple of entries back, it is a science fiction adventure.

In slightly more detail, the main character learns a trick, as do the people around her, that lets mankind take a shortcut from the Moon to settling Mars and a handful of asteroids. With the power she learns comes... well, actually, limitations and reaction, and finally a few things done right. Stay tuned for snippets starting in a couple of weeks.

Obligatory Political Musing

Since there's no election this year, YT supposes it can't be a political rant. Looks like the "values" crowd has overreached, so any digs at them in the novel might soon be passe. Looks like a lot of the crowd in power has overreached, and have been caught up short by a couple of the reasons Americans traditionally prefer clean, competent government.

Now the triangle trade of corporate cash for lopsided majorities for favors to cronies is coming unraveled. The ol' Brico predicts one of three things will happen in the next half year.

1. Massive indifference by the public.
2. Gov't officials going to jail in Reaganesque numbers.
3. Greek tragedy.

Or maybe the country is already working its way down the list, item by item. In any event, with a quiet November coming up, except for Mayor and City Council in Detroit, there will not be the distractions from noveling like last year's.

Thinking back over the last three years, though, and all the people who've had the public ear, YT finds it easy to tweak their extremism lightly to form a societal backdrop for Drunkard's Leap.

Countdown: 18 days until the start

This year your sophomore novelista has decided to get somewhat more organized. So, no more deciding what we're gonna write today just as the laptop is booting up. No, this year There Will Be Preparation. So far it's paid off.

To wit, the first idea to take root in YT's active imagination was a travel novel: five California techies go on a wild holiday trip. Okay, each of the five men was taking shape in profiles in the notebook, the six women they meet were starting to emerge from the dazzling sunlight, and each act had a name. Five men, six women, must be a plot twist in there. Then YT realized that he's never been to Mardi Gras, Carnival, or Spring Break, doesn't know the requisite foreign language, and would have to study really, really hard to give the culture clash any plausibility. Sounds like too much work for NaNoWriMo, frankly.

So, out came the list of 20 plot ideas. It should be easy to choose some one-liner to hang a novel on. Then that old devil imagination got going again and suggested a plot that combines threads from several. Starting two days ago, out poured the details: a science fiction adventure, sort of an anti-time-travel novel, where the protagonist gets plucked from a party-party lifestyle, takes risks and rewards stiff discipline with stiff drinks. Or perhaps that last bit goes the other way around.

YT now has three pages of notes on plot developments, pacing, culture and some good questions to ask about the pocket world he's created. There's still time to let the characters start speaking for themselves. Let's see where this one goes.

Some plot ideas to avoid

Here are a few plot ideas that won't get used for NaNoWriMo, at least not by YT.

Everything's a romance novel these days. The latest twist: time travel romances! These plots came to mind.

• A man can travel through time, but only if he is naked. When he arrives at a new when and where, he must find his pack full of supplies that travels separately.
• A man meets a woman who he makes happy. He finds out her mother was made miserable by a mysterious stranger. He travels back in time and finds the story repeats itself earlier and earlier in time. Finally he gives a miserable woman lasting happiness, but realizes he is the one who made all the other women, her descendants, miserable. He must decide whether to erase the misery of later generations, but at the cost of the one woman's happiness.
• Seven of Nine (of Star Trek) returns to the early 21st century to bond with Martha Stewart.

Okay. Not cheesy enough for you? Let's sink lower into the depths of utter... uh, creativity.

• A woman thinks that by emulating Seven of Nine's rigid personality, she can become friends with Martha Stewart.
• A fan fiction writer gets hired to work on the television show he idolizes.
• A man wakes up one day to discover and old flame has moved in next door. She insists on being part of his life, but he is never sure about which part.

These were inspired by the Query Letters I Love blog, with a tip o' the hat to Penda for linking to it from her Diner.