Nanowrimo Winner

[Total word count: 2557]

Welcome, gentle reader. This is the blog of John Faletcher – my blog, though whether I am to be the hero of it… well, I’ll let you be the judge. The subject is my assault on Nanowrimo 2008, and the obvious question is, why bother? Let’s face it, you’re going to spend more time than you ever thought it would take, cranking out 50,000 words during the course of a month, and at the end of it, all you’re going to have – let’s be honest – is 50,000 words of unpublishable crap.

The answer, of course, as always, is sex. I don’t mean some obscure motivation to do with unclean thoughts about your mother, thanks all the same Sigmund. Though for all I know that could be going on down there somewhere in the psyche. No, I mean, like all of human culture, as Stephen Pinker has so acutely pointed out, this is an attempt to impress girls.

Well, not girls, really. Just Julie. She’s a wonderful girl, Julie and I love her to bits, as I’m always saying, but the truth is, she has a problem with commitment. We’ve basically been living together, albeit in two different flats, for over a year now. I want us to take the big step. Yes. Sell one of the flats.

She’s not really averse to the idea: she never says no, exactly, but somehow it never happens. I think she may be partly under the impression that I want her to move in here so that she can wash my socks and shirts, and maybe even cook. No way. Unfortunately, I can never explain this to her in so many words, but to be honest Julie’s washing standards are not mine. She only washed my socks once and they came out two sizes smaller and tinged with pink. I’m very careful about these things: I sort my washing and use three completely different settings on the machine, with an ecologically friendly unperfumed liquid. So no, Julie, thanks: I’ll be washing my own socks for the rest of my life: I’ve accepted that – in fact I insist on it. And cooking? Well, she’s not really a bad cook altogether, but I don’t like the way she uses the kitchen. She doesn’t tidy as she goes, do you know what I mean? So the risotto or the casserole is fine, but when you go into the kitchen afterwards, it’s as if there’s been some kind of explosion. When I’ve finished cooking, there might be one knife to place in the dishwasher, a gentle tightening for the lid on the jar of Madagascan vanilla pods, a quick swipe across the surfaces and voila.

But I couldn’t tell her that, obviously.

“Maybe in a year or two.” she says, “Look, I don’t want to have a row about it. Don’t you like having your own place? Where you can have the odd evening on your own? Where you can sort the mugs according to predominant colour?”

“Actually I no longer sort them by predominant colour. I’m sorting them by date of last use,” I explained, “That way you can circulate them.”

“What, to even out the wear?”

She’s a funny girl.

“No! Come on, that would be completely pointless. The rate of wear on a normal glazed ceramic mug is negligible. The cumulative effect of stresses in the handle region is more significant, though since my collection of mugs varies widely in design and presumably in composition of clay, glaze, and firing practices, it would be a gross over-simplification to assume that equal use would lead to equal life, even supposing equal life were desirable, implying as it does an eventual day when the handles fall off each and every one of your mugs in succession or simultaneously, depending on the number of users on that occasion. No, obviously the reason is simply to bring one’s full range of attractive drinking vessels into regular use…”

Anyway, I think the underlying problem is that she doesn’t think I’m serious enough for her to want to commit herself to me.

“These projects of yours,” she says, “You always start off well. There was the acting. And the golf. And then the killer Internet site. Actually that one didn’t really get very far, did it? I think you were on page three of HTML for Dummies?”

“Hallo, World!” I replied, waving.

“You’re a clever person. And quite creative. But if you don’t stick with something, you just waste your energy.”

So that is where Nanowrimo comes in. And what is that, you ask? You really don’t know? Nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month. Every year, anyone who wants to enters into the project of bashing out an entire novel (a shortish novel, actually – 50,000 words) in the course of a single month. To be honest, the thing isn’t really a literary undertaking at all: it’s more in the spirit of those people who decide they want to run a marathon, except this doesn’t involve your dying of exhaustion or having to pee in the middle of the road in front of thousands of gratified spectators. So far as I know.

So the plan is that, I, your author on this occasion (hello there!), pull off this amazing stunt, blogging my exploits here at the same time, stunning the woman of my dreams with my stamina and fixity of purpose, not to mention my prolix fecundity. I’m sorry, I have to get the long words out my system somehow so that in my actual manuscript I can pump up the word count with a never-failing flow of monosyllables: Ag saw Ug hit the bear with the stick and then Ag saw the bear hit Ug with its paw and see how Ug says Ugh. I told you it wasn’t going to be a literary enterprise.

To be honest, Julie didn’t quite seem to understand the idea at first.

“So, the point of this is to get a novel published?” she asked, “You’re not doing the poetry any more, is that it?”

“No, no.” I exclaimed, “Publication is entirely beside the point. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t consent to let a literary agent look at my work if it turned out to be worthy of their attention, you know, but that’s not what good old ’wrimo is about. It’s more a matter of man measuring himself against the void, pitting his strength and will into hewing some kind of novel out of the vacuum and our simple human condition. No? Alright, look. You’re always saying I never finish anything, aren’t you? Well, here’s a challenge, and I’m going to complete it. Lots of people fall by the wayside every year, but I’m going to finish.”

“OK,” she said, smiling, “Well, good for you. But I don’t really believe you haven’t got some idea of publication at the back of your mind. Why else would anyone try to write a novel? It seems such a sterile achievement. You could just sit down and pound out absolute rubbish, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. You could sit with the television on and just transcribe every word they say. Or is that against the rules somehow?”

“Not really,” I said, “The rules are very loose and flexible. And there are no prizes, so in a way it’s up to you what you want to allow and what you want to count as cheating. No one’s going to throw you out or anything. Well, not unless you do something wrong.”

“When are you going to do all this writing?”

“I plan to knock out 2,000 words every day, rain or shine, hell or high water, till I’m there. Half in the morning and half in the evening. 2,000 is more than I need, but that’ll give me a margin for error. I may squeeze in a few extra words at lunchtime in the office if we’re not too busy.”

“You want to watch that,” she advised, with a frown, “You could get into trouble.”

She’s right about that. Behemoth, my employer, does not take naturally to any form of information technology. If I sat scribbling on a pad of paper for hours, that would be a tolerable eccentricity; but using the severely outdated PCs the company has reluctantly provided for my own purposes would be a matter for instant dismissal.

Actually, she’s partly right about the literary element, too. If I’m completely honest, I do harbour the ambition to produce a proper novel. Julie doesn’t know this, but I actually have a dead one lurking at the bottom of a cardboard box in the cupboard somewhere, written when I was about seventeen. I thought everyone did this – sort of the novel-writing phase of life – but discreet enquiries reveal that this is not so.

Geoff, for example: I’m pretty sure Geoff never wrote an abortive novel, or any other kind. Looking at him as he sat in the subfusc grandeur of the Royal Oak yesterday, it was hard to believe he’d ever really been interested in anything except consultancy. I hope I don’t look like that these days – the finicky haircut, the suit, the beetling brows. He’s still alright once you get him talking, though.

“Writing a novel?” he said, “I mean what? Jeez, have you any idea how many crap novels get sent for landfill every day?”

“It’s more like a sporting thing really – like running a marathon. You jog a bit don’t you? You must have been tempted once or twice to put your name down for a marathon?”

“Not me. I only jog because it’s cheaper than the gym. See, this novel-writing thing isn’t going to be like a marathon really, is it? Not in health terms. It’s going to be more of an anti-marathon. You’ll spend even more time sitting at a computer eating Mars bars. Instead of getting fit, you’ll be piling it on. I bet you won’t get further than half way – and just as well, because that’s about the only thing that’s going to save you from clinical obesity, mate.”

“Ah, you’re jealous.”

“No I’m not.”

“You are. You were always jealous of my achievements, even when we were in school. When I joined the Scouts, you couldn’t bear it until you had joined too, and got more badges than me.”

“Rubbish!” he paused, “You just weren’t any good at knots, that’s all. Never were. I bet if you look down now, your shoelace is undone.”

“Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Come on, bet me. If my shoelaces are done up, you buy the next round? OK?”

“That’s stupid.”

“Aha! Chicken?”

“Oh, very well then. Stick your feet out.”

I knew I’d got him on this one, because it happens to be true that I was not very good at knots when I was small, and in consequence I always knot my laces with a nice secure double knot.

“You see?” I said, swivelling back on the stool and waving my feet triumphantly at him.

“Yes, yes, alright, put them away. What are you drinking then?”

“Pride, mate,” I replied, “Pride. A foaming pint of London Pride.”

“It was a stupid bet though.”

“Ah, just because you lost!”

“No, because it was my turn to get them in anyway. You haven’t actually gained anything, you’ve just made yourself look like some kind of prat, waving your feet about.”

“So what’s this novel going to be about?” he asked, when he got back from the bar.

“I’m going to do a detective story.”

In fact, blog-fanciers, I’m going to revive and continue the plot of that aborted novel in the cardboard box. It won’t be cheating: it’s all in hard copy, so I can’t cut and paste, and I don’t want to copy it word for word anyway.

So, the story begins with this old fellow who is the local Earl or something. He’s living in a run-down stately home, and one day he’s found dead. The cause of death is some hemlock which someone has slipped into his habitual nightcap of a mint julep. His three children duly turn up, and they’re all complete bastards. We see them patronising the servants, and creating havoc in the old village pub. Then Lady Sarah Pimsey turns up; a journalist and amateur sleuth.

Before the investigation proceeds far, Richard, the eldest son, is found dead, apparently as a result of an accident with his shotgun. Then Camilla, the daughter, is discovered one morning drowned in the village pond, apparently the victim of a mishap with a submerged branch during a drunken midnight swim.

Forensic investigation reveals that the water in Camilla’s lungs is actually bathwater, and that for Richard to have shot himself in the way he seemed to have done would have required the arms of a gibbon. Not actual gibbon’s arms. His own arms would have had to have the proportions of a gibbon’s. You know what I mean.

So the local police conclude that a murderer is doing in all the family one by one, but Lady Sarah, with the aid of Charlie her chauffeur, demonstrates various flaws in their argument – I’ll flesh that out a bit when I come to it. Everyone has an alibi, especially Freddie, the remaining heir, who obviously stands to inherit.

Thing is, it turns out there is no money: the old man was pretty much bankrupt. Then Freddie is found: his body has been dumped on a local fox farm, where the ravening beasts have mutilated it almost beyond recognition.

At this point, a successful abstract expressionist artist who lives locally turns out to be the illegitimate son of the old Earl, and he comes forward with a claim that his mother married the Earl in secret, and that he is therefore the legitimate heir. The flatfoots arrest him at once, of course

At this point, Lady Sarah Pimsey reads a book from the Earl’s library which has this story about a Russian in a sleigh being chased by wolves. He has a gun, but only one bullet. He shoots the first wolf, and lo and behold the other all stop chasing him and eat the dead wolf instead.

So now, with unanswerable clues which I’ll sort out later, she reveals the truth: the elderly Earl poisoned himself by accident, having recently dispensed with Oates his faithful butler owing to poverty, and having no idea of the difference between mint and hemlock. Camilla then murdered Richard and administered a slow-acting poison to Freddie. Freddie drowned her in the bath and dumped her body in the pond before the poison reached a fatal dose, but then collapsed while trying to release the foxes so he could show up well at the local hunt .

The artist is proved the heir and turns out to have made a mint from his paintings: he will now give up art (to Lady Sarah’s disgust), restore the old house to its former glory, and bestow a new age of prosperity and happiness on the village. Everyone gathers in the church to sing Old Hundredth or something, but Lady S tells Charlie she will wait for him in the pub. The End. I’m going to call it The Wolves of Wenham.

Good, or what? See, the plot is fine: I just need the words.