The masochist's guide to novel-writing.

Ah, that time of the year seems to be rolling around. That's right (or "write" for those who speak only in puns), it's time for NaNoWriMo! I can't thank Jake enough for suggesting I enter this. It seems to be precisely what I need to get back in the writing thing/start and finish an actual project.

Here's the deal: starting November 1, I have to write on average 1,666 and 2/3 words a day until midnight of the last day of the month for a total of 50,000 words (about the length of a small novel). If I should succeed, I shall receive a nifty web banner to add to my blog as well as a printable certificate. It's not so much about the glory but the fact that I could pull off such a task. I shall start uploading on the NaNoWriMo website to track my progress. Granted, there's no way for them to prevent "cheating" but since it's not a contest in the technical sense, it's an honor code. Even if I'm not exactly an "honorable" woman in the traditional sense (what with the premarital sex and all), I do keep my word (or at least try to).

At the very least, I have a reason to write again (other than as my only ticket out of splitsville, Midwest). So, here are my ideas:

1) In the not so distant future, all "ethnic" foods will be banned in this country to encourage "cultural solidarity." And with them, all "ethnic" restaurants will go the way of the dinosaur: Thai, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, even Greek and Italian food? Forget it. In order to encourage people to eat in a more "family" environment, government sanctioned "Mom and Pop" restaurants will open in their wake serving old people buffet type items. "But isn't spaghetti and pizza Italian? Even hamburgers and hot dogs were German once, right?" Blasphemy. This is America, learn to eat American food. Besides, in order to strengthen the family unit, the bland horrible cafeteria food will only encourage mom to stay at home and cook. After all, a woman's place is in the kitchen.

But of course, like all totalitarian regimes, there shall be a resistance, in the most American way possible: Capitalism. Curry powder will be worth its weight in gold on the black market due to sanctions and bans on imported food. A "pan-Asian" restaurant in some nondescript town in the Midwest will help spark a rebellion by refusing to close its doors despite city council officials throwing the book at the second generation Filipino family living there. A little girl who once grew up ashamed of the "weird, smelly food" her parents lovingly packed for her every day for her school lunch will find pride in who she is, as she discovers what it means to be an American. For you see, once again, I will be yet another author who questions what it means to be American.

Meanwhile, a quirky female detective (the return of Jane Francisco perhaps?) with a taste for the past and a nose for trouble (ah, pulp cliches) will investigate what connects everything from a corpse found by the docks on some East coast port riddled with bullets and clutching a bag of tumeric/saffron/something colorful and exotic to the family restaurant in the Midwest.

* I may actually hold off doing this story until I do more research concerning spices, food and the like. It might not be good, but I at least want it to be delicious.

2) The lifetime of a building. I'm thinking of titling it "312 E Main" or some random address I come across in my wanderings. Here, I will experiment with setting and how a building can be a character in a story. Every chapter will take place in the building over the years from when it opens as a movie theater or restaurant or something and transforms over the years until it finally gets torn down amid protests to preserve it as a historical site. I figure here I could cheat a little as if I was writing a series of short stories as opposed to one continuous story line. Maybe I could play around with it and not write the chapters in chronological order. Either way, I'll need a lot of characters and a lot of dialogue and setting descriptions.

* This one I may go with since it seems more conducive to the spontaneity of NaNoWriMo.

So everyone who's doing this, bona fortuna!

Conversations with My Characters, Take 1

Right now I'm a bit bogged down in trying to complete at least the Alex/Rachel storyline of Variations on a Theme. So, I figured I'd try to have a conversation with Alex Maxwell to try to get to the root of it.

TIME: Night
PLACE: On my apartment balcony.

ME:
So, what do you think?

ALEX:
What do you think? Since when do you give a flying shit about us? We're just your pawns to put in place and make you some bucks.

ME:
...and I can't even do that right. This isn't about me though. This is about you, your story and why it isn't working.


ALEX:
You tell me.

ME:
I really couldn't. Otherwise why would I ask you?

ALEX:
(sighs and takes out a cigarette)

ME:
Since when do you smoke?

ALEX:
(lights and takes a long drag, holds cigarette at the between his index and middle finger at the knuckles) You should have been paying better attention. I know you wrote me to be the "type" who wouldn't smoke, but pushing us all off to the side for almost a year gave us a lot of time to pick up some interesting hobbies. You thought that your little breakup with what's-his-name messed you up? You have no idea what it's like to be completely cast aside and have nothing better to do, nowhere to go. I won't even get started on Rachel's coke addiction.

ME:
(laughs nervously) I'm sure her parents would be proud of that.

ALEX:
Speaking of parents, what the fuck is the deal with mine? You wrote my mother to be the stereotypical first-generation Filipina mom, to be the version of your mom you lived in fear of for years. All I know about my dad is that he's white. Is he even still around? I won't even get started on my brothers...

ME:
Please don't...I wanted to make your storyline as little about family as possible.

ALEX:
Right. And me having to comfort Rachel through the ordeal with her adoptive parents and her biological parents had nothing to do with family. Let me guess, my dad is the stereotypical WASP who keeps a cool distance from his family with a gin and tonic every night and working nights at the office or screwing his secretary.

ME:
I don' t know, I never thought--

ALEX:
Damn straight you never thought. We're not real people. You didn't make us that way. I don't feel real. All you did was make me into the male version of all the insecurities you had growing up, the insecurities you have in relationships. Worse yet, you divided those into both me and Rachel. And trying to put in my "favorite" music professor in at the last chapter as the "voice of reason" who makes me realize how wrong I've been about Rachel, what the fuck? Was this an attempt for me to find a father figure considering my father's rather noticable absence in the story, or what?

ME:
I had no idea--

ALEX:
That's all you ever say, isn't it? "I didn't know." "I had no idea." You really do sound like a broken record. Not to mention the tenuous way you tried to tie music into this story. What the hell sort of composer am I supposed to be anyway? It's amazing that I could get anything done consider all I think about is Rachel.

ME:
But you love her, right?

ALEX:
Damn right I do, and I don't understand why. You did this to me. You made her to be the only woman in the universe for me. You made me to be hers. But here's what I don't get, if we're so good for each other, why can't we be together? (looks at ME in a way halfway between pissed off enough to punch a wall and broken enough to slip up and let out one tear...just the one).

ME:
I don't know. That was the point. No one is supposed to know why some relationships don't work.

ALEX:
Well then, why did you have to fuck with mine for this experiment? You know full well how when someone becomes your everything, how much it can fuck you up when they decide to leave.

ME:
But Rachel didn't leave you. She's right outside your practice room almost every afternoon.

ALEX:
You made damn well sure that things couldn't be the same between us after that proposal-- which should have worked perfectly, I might add.

ME:
You forget that I was the one who wrote it.

ALEX:
And wrote that it failed.

ME:
But she stayed with you. There has to be something there, right?

ALEX:
You tell me.

ME:
I had so much hope for you two, that maybe if I could get it to work with you, I could--

ALEX:
Get things to work with what's-his-name?

ME:
That's really none of your business, but I guess I walked into that one.

ALEX:
(flicks the cigarette off the balcony)
You walked right into that one the minute you thought of me and Rachel. We're not you. You gave us life, or at least tried to, but you didn't give us enough. I know Rachel and I were there for each other for some of the most trying parts of our lives, but there has to be something else that connects us other than that, or the fantastic sex we had in college.

ME:
I guess that's why it's not supposed to work.

ALEX:
But of course, I want more than anything for it to work. It was the only purpose you gave me in this damn story. The music just seems superfluous in comparison, just an empty sensual metaphor to parallel with the main show of this car wreck of a failed relationship. You wanted me to be the type of Asian guy girls of any race could fall for. I just want Rachel no matter how she sees herself. You didn't need to make me hapa just to give me side identity politics-related angst.

ME:
I thought that it would be the main thing driving you two apart, how she's established herself in the Asian-American community where you just couldn't relate to anyone. I thought it would be just another example of how her outgoing nature conflicted with your introspective nature.

ALEX:
You're just making me emo and it's royally pissing me off.

ME:
(looks away toward the bridge)
Fuck.

ALEX:
You've got a lot of re-writing to do before I'd even consider letting you turn this in anywhere. I know that I love Rachel. She loves me. But you are right, sometimes things just don't work out when they're supposed to.

ME:
Well then, why are you making such a big stink about it though?

ALEX:
Because there's a better way of doing it. You wrote us to be so wrapped up in each other that it completely screwed with our realities. Show the reader that. Make them understand that before it was ok that we had our different circles, different ways of doing things. Show them that we have lives outside of each other, but that things will be irrevocably different once we part. Otherwise, who the fuck cares? Why would you write this story? Why would you create us?

ME:
(smirks)
Now who's being emo?

ALEX:
Shut the fuck up.
(lights another cigarette)
This conversation is over. It was your damn idea anyway.

Well...that was helpful?

The Spider Man and I

I fumble in a final search at the bottom of my jumbled purse for one of my lighters. Damn. Oh well, he'll have a light. I also have a matchbook in my leather jacket pocket, but it doesn't have the same allure as the flint flick of a lighter. Leaving my still-unzipped purse on the cluttered kitchen table, I open the front door.

I hang around the outside of my apartment looking down from the front balcony. This is one of the few occasions where I don't bother locking the door. The others are when I go downstairs to take out the recycling or garbage or when I go to do laundry. He'll come soon, the Spider Man. He'll come bearing a pack of Kamel Reds and a lighter so we can get this otherwise mundane weekend evening started.

Sure enough, he comes, always wearing dark clothes. Sometimes I worry that some dumbass drunk speed freak is going to hit him one of these nights as he crosses the street from his place down the alley to mine by the bridge. When we're both in each other's sights, we keep staring. I wonder if I need a new contact lens prescription. He seems blurrier than usual as he makes his way up the brown-painted wood outdoor stairs.

The first thing he asks me is if there are still enormous spiderwebs covering my building. I tell him I don't know since it's so dark. He looks at the lighting fixture above my head and points out the seven or so orb webs surrounding it as moths hover around the light. At some point, he tells me that this is one of the few reasons he's glad that he's short, so his head doesn't run into the webs. The moths seem to have no problem flying around and into the webs.

And this is why I call him the Spider Man. He's no superhero. He's just a guy with a preoccupation with spiders. After a brush with death resulting from a brown recluse bite as a kid, I can hardly blame him. Now as an adult, although he would hardly refer to himself as one, he hunts the wolf spiders around his duplex. 710. A really big one with an egg sac on its back. I vaguely recall the details of his last hunt as chronicled in his online journal. This is why I call him the Spider Man.

The first thing I ask him is for a light. He obliges with a flick of a green lighter similar to one I had for awhile. Maybe I left it at his place during one of my late night visitations, but I don't feel like asking him about it. After all, who knows how many green plastic lighters there are in this town. I tell him that I feel like a character in a film noir with my black leather jacket and pretentious British cigarettes (Dunhill lights, in a package of 20 Class A cigarettes minus the five I smoked earlier this week). I blow a bit of smoke into the light fixture causing the moths to rearrange their well-hidden positions on the brown wall. They pass into and out of the spiderwebs as easily as they pass into light out of shadow and back again.

For awhile, we watch in rapt attention at this live, in-your-face nature documentary of the cruelty of nature. Not so much the cruelty of the spider against the moth, but vice versa. He jokes about how the moths are being teases. I refer to them as the "catholic schoolgirls" of the insect world, flaunting about in their pleated skirts, barely covering their panties but giving enough of a glimpse to know what you're missing. I never went to Catholic school, but I still had the skirt.

From the look of it, the network of orb webs are a family complex. There are two larger spiders and several smaller clones around. The two larger spiders are probably females. The father was probably not so much a deadbeat dad who left the house as soon as the kids were born, but the first meal for the children. With him gone, everyone has to fend for themselves, which is probably what it would have been like even if he was still around. At least this way, they get one meal out of their father. Sometimes the large mama is lucky and hauls in a big catch of dusty wings and a bloated carcass. Even the little ones have to work to survive. In a tiny, nearly-ruined web still barely visible on the edge of the light, one of the little ones has caught a mosquito.

After awhile, my neck starts to creak. He tries to crack his neck and comments that he could possibly break his own neck in the process. I tell him that he shouldn't since I don't think I could dispose of a corpse as easily as the spiders can, that they probably wouldn't like him anyway since he's already been tasted.

I start to think of the brown marks slowly taking over his body since that first bite. I remember all the times I ran my tongue along his ribcage and stomach, all the times I ran my fingertips down his back. I didn't even know it had spread to his back until he turned on the light once after our late night visits before he put his clothes on to leave.

I think about the mark I had willingly had inflicted onto my back in bold blues and yellows. Maybe that was why I did it, to see if I could finally understand him. Then again, we've always been completely different creatures and gotten along fine with our limited understanding of each other.

The moths stop flying about and he and I are long finished with our cigarettes. We go in my apartment and fuck as usual, but this time, I don't lick his markings. I'm sure he's been tasted enough there already.