Nanowrimo Winner

[Total word count: 4807]

I’m really excited. Yesterday I sat down and banged out not one, not two, but three thousand words. There were long evocative passages about the beauty of the fenland countryside, there were acute character sketches, there was subtle plot development.

I think Julie, my beloved – she’s raven-haired, sultry, with heavy-lidded eyes and a junior retail manager, incidentally – is yielding to the appeal of the whole idea. She smiled at me a lot yesterday, and I’m almost sure it was affection rather than hilarity. She’s definitely pleased. It’s the romantic appeal of that whole ‘man pitting himself against the cosmos through literature’ thing, I reckon – do you think? Or is it just that writing stops me talking quite so much? It’s OK, by the way, we can talk freely here. Julie never reads anything on the Internet unless it has a strictly work-related value. The idea of using the Internet for fun is sort of bizarre in her eyes, about the same as amusing yourself by running up spreadsheets; and let’s face it, she gets enough of me live anyway. The more I talk about the blog, the less likely she is to read it.

It was quite the tranquil domestic scene, actually. Normally of an evening we’d be out somewhere or slumped in an amiable heap on the sofa in one or other of our residences, but instead, there I was beavering away, clutching my brow momentarily in the anguish of the creative act, while Julie sat drinking coffee and watching a makeover show.

“You’re doing really well,” she said, fondly, “Why don’t I take you out tomorrow to celebrate?”

But never mind that. There’s great and most amazing news. The best possible and the most unbelievable. What do you think? After spending the whole evening denouncing an ridiculing Nanowrimo, questioning my motives, ability and sanity, Geoff has decided at the last minute that he too – Geoff himself this is – is going to take on Nanowrimo! Can you believe that? I think it’s going to guarantee us some subsidiary amusement, gentle reader. He says it’s because he thinks it would be something to add to his CV, but actually I believe it’s because one of the partners at his place who he met in the lift told him he’d love to have a go at something like that. Reading between the lines, I think Geoff was desperate to make sycophantic conversation, and decided he could use me as a suitable example of unbusiness-like behaviour, someone they could join in deprecating.

But when he began describing Nanowrimo, the rheumy eyes of the old shyster began to come alive: new energy seemed to surge into his flaccid, port-encrusted veins at the idea of this splendid challenge, and suddenly, with a shake of his jowls, he vouchsafed that it sounded a jolly good idea, and that he would have loved to have a crack at something of that sort. So Geoff found himself obliged to drop all the sneering material he had ready to go, and instead start saying earnestly how he too, loved the idea.

Heh. Geoff could no more write a novel than ride a woolly mammoth down Lombard Street.

Anyway, I had to find out about this, so Julie and I met him in a place of his near Fenchurch Street. A sort of leftover wine bar, by which of course, I don’t mean a bar where they serve leftover wine, but a place that somehow got left behind when all the wine bars of the nineties disappeared or turned into restaurants. And when I say a place of his, I don’t mean one he owns, but… oh well, you get the idea. Geoff’s Significant Other was also there – Maureen. Maureen is the quiet, thoughtful type. She rarely says anything, but she often looks as if she might. That said, gentle reader, she isn’t bad: I mean like they say I wouldn’t climb over her to get to you. Then again, I don’t really know you, do I? Let me run the tape measure over you. Hmm. I think we’re going to have to go interactive here. There are two sentences below, from me to you: I must ask you to be honest and only read the one which applies.

A. Sorry, dear reader, many people find your physical type/gender/age group/orientation attractive: sadly I’m just not one of them.
B. Wow. I underestimated you, dear reader. You’re quite something. And gosh, I must stop underestimating your intelligence, too, nicht wahr?

“So what’s it going to be about?” I asked, and at once realised that I had made a false move, because now there was a good chance I would have to divulge what my own effort was going to be about, something I sort of didn’t want to do in front of Julie.

“It’s going to be a classic novel.” Geoff explained.

“Classical? What, like in Greek or Latin? Lars Porsena of Clusium? That sort of thing?”

“No, a classic novel. You know.”

Reader, I won’t weary you with the prolonged series of questions which followed, but the upshot was that Geoff, bless his heart, believed that there was a genre of novel known as ‘classic’.”

“Come on, you know what I mean,” he protested, “Ladies in… wimples. Vicars. Masked balls.”

“Wimples? It’s medieval?”

“No, you know. Maybe I’ve got the wrong word. Those things that make their skirts stand out.”

At this point, Maureen leaned forward and raised her eyebrows. The conversation faltered and fell silent as we waited to see what it was she was about to say. A slight surprise that it should have been the subject of wimples, of all others, that suddenly moved her to communicate, but there you go. She bit her lower lip with her front teeth, shook her head irresolutely and sat back again.

“Geoffrey, Geoffrey.” I remonstrated, “Wimples go on the head. What you have in mind is – well, let’s see. There was the cul postiche, known in more homely terms as the bum roll, a kind of bolster which women tied round their waists at the back. Then in a later century, we had the farthingale, a sort of framework which stuck out to both sides, but not, strangely, at the back. Also sticking out sideways but not fore and aft, we had panniers, beloved of Marie Antoinette. They too yielded to the ever-changing dictates of fashion, but in due course there arose the crinoline, a different kind of framework which stuck out all round, but less abruptly than the farthingale. Last but not least, in another age, we had the bustle, a kind of pad which made the bum stick out at the back. Now each of these distinctive mechanisms for making skirts stand out flourished in an entirely different era: which are you on about?”

“John!” said Julie, tugging my sleeve.

“Okay, okay, so I don’t know about clothes,” said Geoff, a little testily, “I mean my novel is set in the era of, well, Jane Austen.”

“Well I can tell you that in the era of Jane Austen, under the supposed influence of ancient Greece, skirts went straight down without any kind of sticking-out nonsense.”

“Thank you.”

“What about your story, then?” demanded Julie, rounding on me, “You haven’t told me what that’s going to be about.”

I sighed, and gave them a quick outline of The Wolves of Wenham.

“Why wolves?” demanded Geoff.

“Well, it’s based on the story that Lady Jane Pimsey reads about the wolves chasing the sleigh. They actually killed each other, you see.”

“I don’t really see the analogy,” said Geoff, frowning. “The first wolf was killed by the man in the sleigh, and then the others all ate it. You didn’t get wolf 2 killed by wolf 3, and all that. And the first wolf was shot, so if you wanted the story to be the same, you’d have to have the old Earl genuinely killed off while he was chasing a man in a sleigh.”

“That’s a bit over-literal, don’t you think? Alright, well, I’ll change the story about the sleigh a bit. I’ll have the man sitting around his camp fire, and the wolves will go into a kind of feeding frenzy. Or perhaps I’ll make it a raft, and sharks.”

“Oh, I thought the wolf bit was actually a true story you’d got from somewhere.” said Geoff naively.

“You can’t make it sharks,” said Julie, “Or you’ll have to change the title and make it The Sharks of Suckham.”

When we got back, much later, I sat down and started a bit of desultory typing.

“Do you have to do that now?” asked Julie, “ I thought you were well ahead?”

“I am a bit ahead, reckoning on 2,000 words a day, with odd days off,” I said, “But you have to assume that at some stage writer’s block is going to strike, so it’s as well to get as far ahead as possible now, while the going’s good.”

“You were a bit rude to Geoff,” she said, “You know you are a bit of a pedant at times. All that stuff about farthingales. You could just have said: you mean crinolines, and left it at that.”

“Yes, OK.” I conceded, “But you know, I meant to be helpful.”

“The first bit wasn’t so bad,” she agreed, “It was really later on in the evening, when you kind of brought it up again and went on about wimples and the history of, like, female headgear.”

“Oh yes,” I agreed, “I’d forgotten about that. Sorry.”

“And then, later on again, when you started to talk about curly shoes and, what, Krakow? I don’t think Geoff even knew what you were talking about, but I sort of pieced together eventually that you were still basically going on about historical costume.”

“Christ, I’m sorry.” I said, “Interesting, though? No? I just can’t believe… I mean Geoff doesn’t even read books, let alone write them.”

“I hope the two of you aren’t going to get stupid over this.” she said, “You kept telling me it wasn’t competitive.”

“No, no. Of course. No, good luck to him. But, you know: if you’re going to write about medieval costume, you’d bloody well better know something about it. Sorry, no you know what I mean. Anyway, let’s go to bed.”

Reader, we did. Later, lying in the dark, Julie cautiously returned to the constructive criticism.

“You do know, “ she said, holding my hand, “I don’t like it when you do the pedant stuff.”

“Me? Pedant?”

“You know, you hold somebody up about the literal meaning of a word, or you kind of force them to admit they used some phrase without actually knowing the full Greek derivation or something. You don’t sound like a particularly nice person when you’re doing that.”

“ I don’t do that much, do I? Alright, I won’t criticise Geoff’s novel any more.”

I was up early the next morning and pounding further into Wenham. It’s going so well. In the past, whenever I tried to write some fiction, I would look at it the next day and sort of disown it. The words I had laboriously put into people’s mouths would seem so appallingly stilted I could hardly bear to read them myself. Either I would give up there and then, or I would go back and essentially rewrite the whole passage from scratch.

This time is different. The discipline of Nanowrimo means I cannot afford to revise, I just have to keep pounding on: and what I’m finding is that the stuff isn’t so bad after all. You go through a phase of thinking it’s atrocious, but after 48 hours, you get a more mature perspective.

Then I saw the wine bottle.

This is one of those things that just drives me mental. In my flat, it’s not so bad, but in Julie’s, where she is normally the one to clear the table, she habitually makes an exception for the wine bottle. I mean, she takes away the plates, the cutlery, the glasses, but she leaves the bottle with maybe a few dregs, sitting on the table. It’s not that she doesn’t clear the table properly: it’s specifically the empty bottle. It’s more as if she believed there was some social rule which said you mustn’t take empty wine bottles off the table. This particular one, the one that caught my eye, had been sitting proudly on the centre mat since the day before yesterday. Maybe she thinks it’s bohemian in some way, but I ask you, reader, isn’t it just weird?

Unfortunately, the way the wine bottle is singled out for this treatment, as though it were an ornament, just makes my blood pressure surge. I can’t help it. I couldn’t write any more while that thing was on the table, but equally I couldn’t remove it myself; that would have been giving in. I’d end up with removal of the wine bottle as my own little personal job, wherever we were: I’d probably end up habituated, you know, fighting with waiters in restaurants over who got to take it out. So when Julie emerged, gentle reader, I had to discreetly mention the wine bottle. I knew it was a mistake, you know it was a mistake, you know that I know it was a mistake, I know that you know that I know.

It was a mistake. But what was I supposed to do?