Not the Mid-twenties: a nano update

Burning out a bit on the story. Past 127,000 words, which for me isn't a burn-out point at all this month but I have taken no day actually off from writing and this story is turning from a half-joke into wanting to be serious. Which I didn't expect at all. So I am plotting out the current story, the novel in the story that the narrator describes, building his family life and adding other scenes and such, at least some of which I know won't survive the draft.I'm almost at the point of ditching the narrator's family as fleshed out characters, as the point is more his descent into his own story and subsequent madness.

His unrelenting hatred of nanowrimo also does not help the writing. It is a fun story to do, but I think it would probably be better if it wasn't being done this month, or at least not on the tail end of the other two stories.

Best line from Thursday's writing at Chapters....
"Christopher is a first-year student whose nanowrimo novel is going to look like a five year old trying to write Lolita.”

Fragment of a scene

Kate was waiting for me when I left the lecture hall. I’d had worse T.A.s, seldom better ones: she was efficient, punctual and probably cared more about my job than I did. The worst people could say about her is that she has a nice personality. It was often also the best they said about her as well.

“You probably crushed some spirits in there,” she said, handing me a stack of papers that were messages from the university. They’d given me an email address even though I never checked it.

“A little crushing never hurt anyone. Anything interesting?”

She shook her head. “There’s a new writer in residence this week. Ronald Forbes, author of the Declare! series –.”

“I know who he is.” I kept walking.

“He sent an email about wanting to get together for coffee this afternoon; should I pencil him in?”
I wanted to say no. I knew Ronald of old, when he wrote for newspapers as Ronnie Forbes, before he created a story mill under his own name. Over a dozen novels come out a year by ‘him’, sometimes with the co-authors listed, often without. Declare! was your basic bare-bones plot: a unit of ex-something or others banded together by a mysterious leader who solved problems all over the world with extreme violence. The world of the thriller became an uglier place when communism died: the communists had standards. Terrorists didn’t. And Ronald and his cadre of authors had leapt into that, having torture scenes by all parties, shallow discussions on whether torture was a legitimate method of information extraction – often with the victim, while doing it. Some called it post-ironic. I didn’t think Ronald was capable of irony.

The lowest point in the series came after the spate of archaeological-thrillers that were all based around religious motifs led him to see an opening in that market. Ronald casually shoehorned Declare! into that by making it a ten-person unit and turning the mysterious leader – often widely held to be a younger John McCain – into Jesus reincarnated. Sales didn’t suffer. The series branched off into other genres after that under some shared-universe umbrella scheme that the best critics called a cheap parasol at best.

And we were to meet for coffee. He would probably ask if I wanted to write some of the series. The worst part was it would be a serious offer without malice in it. And I would say no. No, I don’t want to ghost write for you, Ronald. I would say no because it was all I had left.

And a third novel for the month.....

WAR & PIECES

Jacob Sinclair barely achieved midlist fame as ‘a poor man’s Clancy’ in the 1980s with thriller novels about the CIA assassin Jeremy Burke. The collapse of communism took all his plots with it and his series died the kind of death that sees them mostly lingering unbought at used book stores. A bitter ex- author now teaching English at college and inadvertently destroying the authorial ambitions of his students, he finds his daughter doing National Novel Writing Month and declares the quest to write a 50,000 word ‘novel’ in one month to be an insult to real authors and an affront to Literature itself.

Jacob’s desperate quest to get his novels back in print culminates with a trip to San Francisco that will see him attempt to murder the entire nanowrimo board of directors – who might turn out to be ninjas – in a desperate attempt to defend the art of the written word against the modern insults intent on destroying it.

He may, or may not, be having a mental breakdown.