Nanowrimo Winner

[Total word count 9,657]

You know there are sort of groups that meet up? I mean Nanowrimo groups. I suppose it’s inevitable. I was looking at all the stuff on the site; there’s sort of forums where they exchange messages and stuff. Most of the London ones seem to be from north of the river, which I suppose is no surprise. I’m quite tempted to go along to one of the write-in events or something.

I’ve made up my mind to go back and take up the SF option after all. It’s not too late. I’ll write a basic opening piece to get the ship up into space, and then I’ll have one of the characters – perhaps I’ll make it one of the Wenham characters in their old age – tell a big chunk of the Wenham story, then break it up with different short pieces told by other passengers, and finish Wenham in two more big chunks. Who should it be that gets the honour of actually telling the Wenham story? I think I’ll make it Charlie as a very old man. It’s going to be a bit odd having lots of short stories in the general framework and one fairly big one, but I think I can kind of weave the thing together by drawing parallels between events in Wenham and events on the ship. There’ll be people dying on both, and Charlie can sort of resurrect the old detective skills from his youth or something. I just don’t think Wenham is going to stretch to 50,000 words on its own.

This new approach is going to require some tricky bits of reconstruction and a fair amount of new writing just to get me back to where I ought to be.

We’re in Julie’s place this week. As a rule, we more or less alternate, though it isn’t as regular as that, and from time to time we have what she calls Unfriendly Weekends when we each stay in our respective places, not necessarily without seeing each other, but generally spending a solitary evening: in fact these weekends are sometimes the result of an irreconcilable difference over television viewing priorities. Weekdays are more improvised, and it probably splits about 60-40 in favour of Julie’s flat. Hers is relatively new: although the kitchen and bathroom are a bit small, her main room is actually a bit bigger than mine. But whereas mine is pretty minimalist, kind of chrome and black leather with just a little bit of really serious wood to lighten things up, she has a lot of furniture that aunts or cousins gave her, shelves covered in ornaments and stuff, so it actually seems more cramped. There isn’t anywhere you can take three straight steps without turning or leaning or squeezing past something. I’ve got the old laptop set up on the table – there is a little desk, but the table’s friendlier – and she’s working on some papers opposite. I think it’s a presentation, though why anyone would create some PowerPoint slides, print them off, and then immediately start writing on them with a pen I can’t really imagine.

“OK.” she says, shuffling them together, “I think I’d better start getting ready.”

“Ready?”

“You remember it’s Steve and Sue’s thing tonight?”

“Oh God! Yes.”

“We can’t miss it. You know, the election and everything?”

“I know, I know. Honestly, though, it’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? You know, I mean God forbid I should show disrespect for the awesome electoral processes of Disneyland, but an actual party? Did they do this for Tony Blair? No, alright, obviously not, that was a stupid thing to say, but you know?”

Sue and Steve are old friends: Sue was sort of a friend of mine and Steve was sort of a friend of Julie’s before Julie and I started going out. So there’s a sort of special relationship, though as it happens it wasn’t actually us that introduced them. Over the years I’ve sort of gone off Sue a bit, to be really honest. She’s got into that phase where mortgages and pregnancy tests are all she really wants to talk about. Steve, on the other hand, is a bit of a laugh, and now that he’s not really allowed to watch the football any more, his conversation has improved quite a bit.

“What time have we got to be over there?” I asked.

“Seven.”

“Seven? That’s a bit early. I really need to get this done.”

“Weren’t you going to gt a bit ahead so you’d have time for this?”

“Well, that was the plan, but you know how it goes. Never mind. I suppose I can leave this for once and catch up later. I’m not far behind.”

She looked at me thoughtfully but not unkindly.

“Well, I need to be there at seven anyway, because I said I’d help with the dinner stuff.”

“Dinner? Don’t we just sort of snarf down hamburgers or something?”

“Well, you know Sue. And why not? I don’t see any harm in her having a bit of fun if she likes. Anyway, look, if you like you could come along later: but you’ve got to be there by eight, because that’s when the pre-dinner canapés are coming out, and it would be rude to miss those.”

“Canapés? Sheesh. OK. Thanks.”

She went away and started getting ready, and I turned back to my spaceship characters.

The project was funded almost entirely by the subscriptions of the passengers. Once the idea was launched, it turned out there were quite a lot of people who, for a range of different motives, were attracted by the idea of leaving Earth. There were idealists who like the idea of setting a new community with a fresh start; there were pessimists who thought the end of Earth’s life was approaching; there were people who wanted to say goodbye to everyone for purely personal reasons; and there were some who assumed that the first settlers on a new world would inevitably become the landed aristocracy of the new world.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was Letitia Durbridge, the world famous opera singer. At the ripe old age of seventy-nine, it was highly unlikely that she would survive the full journey, and if she did, her life on the new planet would be short: but she had decided that this was the way she chose to ring down the curtain on her life on Earth, and the abundant funds with which her sparkling career had endowed her personal coffers made it amply possible for her to provide the subvention required of the subscribers.

The feeling is coming over me that this thing is turning to crap in my hands. ‘Endowed her personal coffers’? There’s something not right here, and I think it’s Letitia. I need to put in something to counter the sort of rich opera singer stereotype.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was Letty Durbridge. Although she was a world famous opera singer, her down-to-earth Newcastle manner dispelled any notion of the haughty diva of legend. Her cheery jokes and friendly manner made her seem younger than her sixty-eight years; too old, you might have thought, for such an adventure, but she had decided in her irrepressible way that ‘an intergalactic beano was the way to go, chuck!’

Beanos? Chuck? Do Geordies talk about beanos? And if they do, do they describe them as ‘the way to go’? Come on, come on: get a grip. A bit more realism, here.

Among the stranger motivations for embarking on the trip was probably that of Ellen Durbridge. A moderately successful singer in a backing group which had done a lot of well-paid session work, sometimes for famous bands but more often for toilet roll and detergent commercials, she was now enjoying an old age of modest comfort in a small flat in Cheltenham. She had decided that although she might not even live to see the end of the trip, she might as well spend her last few years, not taking tea with her friends and patronising the local shopping centre, but in a tiny cabin towards the overheated rear of an interstellar exploration rocket.

Yeah. That’s realism, is it? I’m beginning to remember why I had such problems with this stuff the first time round. There’s something about SF that sort of prevents any of the characters seeming remotely real.

Julie reappeared.

“I’m off then,” she said, “Remember to get there by eight o’clock, OK?”

I very nearly decided to go with her. But if you’re an author yourself, gentle reader – and I feel you may have a couple of sonnets somewhere, for all you deny it – you’ll know that there are places where you can leave a manuscript, and places where you can’t.

On a spaceship like this, the captain is essentially a PR officer. No-one would trust a human being with the fantastically complex task of controlling the trajectory of a ship which was rotating at great speed and constantly accelerating. What the captain had to do was reassure the passengers, boost morale, and listen to complaints about the lack of space and the thoroughly inadequate provision of ladies toilets, which meant there was always a long queue along Deck Three. So Captain Bannister, firm-jawed, blue-eyed, and athletic as he was, was not really equal to the situation when a small asteroid hit the second sector and left a hole the size of a football.
“Steady, everyone.” he said.

No, no.

So Captain Newell was not entirely prepared for the challenge which faced him when a particle of interstellar grit travelling at fantastic velocity struck the control room bulkhead and left a hole the size of a soup plate.

When the first mate explained the situation to him, he knocked out his pipe, stroked the grizzled beard which had done so much to get him the job, and got to his feet.

“Well lad,” he said, “This is a bit of a turn-up.”

A light appeared in the depths of his steely eyes.

“Happen we’ll be alreet, though.” he observed, and began relighting his pipe.

By now I had pretty much decided that the SF stuff wasn’t going to work. I would have to ditch all that, and find some other passages to insert into Wenham to bulk it up instead. I could have a long flash-back, perhaps, in which the expressionist artist tells the story of how his mother was seduced and betrayed by the old Earl. I don’t quite know how this is going to work, to be honest. The Earl has to have married her, but it has to be a secret. Why? Why would the painter wait until his father was murdered before saying anything about it? Perhaps the police investigation uncovers papers which reveal to him, but not to their leaden brains, the sad old story.

I spent some time fleshing this out, and then noticed that it was already 7.30. Switching off quickly, I grabbed my jacket and headed out to the Tube. My mind wasn’t really on where I was going: I descended, found the platform, got on the train and took a seat all running on autopilot, and it was only as I climbed out of the station at the other end that I realised I couldn’t remember Sue and Steve’s address. A check revealed that I had also come out without my mobile.

At point like this, one is faced with a difficult decision, knowing pretty much for certain that whichever decision one makes will seem wrong looking back on it. I thought I might just be able to find the right street without actually having the address. The only alternative was to go all the way back to the flat and start again.

OK, I was pretty happy with going straight ahead and left, then right. There was a house with gnomes in the garden, and I had a shrewd suspicion I’d seen it before. Finally, I turned into a street which might be the right one: but which was the house? The truth is that most of the houses round here look pretty much the same.

I thought it was the one with the yellow door. Plucking up as much courage as possible, I rang the bell. It sort of sounded empty, and there was no response, not even after a second ring. So it couldn’t be that one. But it could be the green one next door… As my finger was heading towards the doorbell of the second house, I saw a shrivelled old lady staring straight at me though the window of the house with the yellow door. She showed no sign of opening the door, or reacting in any way, but her eyes were fixed on me.

At this point, I admit I sort of lost the courage of my convictions a bit. Even if I spotted the right house, I probably wouldn’t be brave enough to ring the door bell. The only real alternative now was to go back to Julie’s flat and start all over again. Or not start again, but I’d be in big trouble if I never turned up – big trouble.

I lost a few more minutes by standing around in a state of denial and then I set off back to the tube station again.

Back at the flat, it took me many increasingly sweary minutes to find my address book and locate Sue and Steve’s entry, and before I did so it occurred to me for the first time that in my hurry to get out of the flat originally, I had shut off the laptop without saving anything. Manfully resisting the urge to reboot and confirm that I had lost the entire day’s work, I went out again and ran down the road back to the tube.

Down into the bowels of the earth again, and this time I had to wait nearly fifteen minutes before a train arrived. I leapt up the escalator at the other end, shooting about five feet into the air at the top. As I stood panting on the station threshold I had a moment of doubt: although I now had the address, could I actually find my way there without also having a map? It only took a moment for the doubt to dissolve in favour of a firm certainty. No, I couldn’t.

“What happened to you?” asked Julie.

“Well… When I eventually got out of the tube I had to ask the way, and then this sweet little boy sent me off in totally the wrong direction until I got to another borough altogether, and actually got the tube back to where I had started from.”

“But it’s half past eleven! We’ve all eaten already.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. It’s sort of a long story.”

“John!” exclaimed Sue, “You made it! Did you get tied up with a cliff-hanger or something? What’s the book all about?”

“Well, it’s basically a traditional detective story, really.”

“I thought there was a spaceship in it?”

I looked at Julie, who raised both eyebrows defiantly.

“Well, I thought about something like that. But I sort of took that bit out. You know how it is. Wasn’t really working.”

“Oh, well come in and have a drink. I’ve saved you some Obama cake.”

“Lovely”, I said absent-mindedly.

Julie was very reasonable about my late arrival, really, once I’d had chance to give her the full version.

“Oh well.” she said, “At least you got all your writing done.”

The thing is, gentle reader, all that time I was wandering around the streets, do you know what was really on my mind? Well, yes, finding my way. But apart from that? I was constantly thinking about how much time I was wasting away from my text. See? I’ve got my priorities straight at last.