A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
– William Faulkner (interview, Writers at Work: First Series)
12.04.07: Victory is Mine!
Well strike up the band and shell out for a stripper, ’cause I done finished my NaNovel with seven words to spare! That’s 30 days and 50,007 words worth of carnage, terror, gunplay, and flesh-munching. Let the own-horn-tooting begin:
Of course, in grand NaNoWriMo tradition, I am being absolutely insufferable about my victory. If it were not so cold out today, I would slap on a beret and go sit at an outdoor cafe and spend the afternoon smoking cheroots and observing humanity pass by with the all-seeing eye of an authah. The temperature being what it is, I will have to settle for pontificating to the cat about narrative styles, character arcs, and the necessity of a good opening sentence. (She listens attentively enough, but I think she disagrees with my views on POV, to judge from her occasional tail-flicking.)
Speaking of cold, we are having a spell of it here. Also, the snow, to which I say FINALLY. Winter shuffles in a little bit later every year, like that one moronic little kid in a school play who doesn’t hear their cue and is busy picking their nose or playing with the scenery in the wings, and finally the teacher has to give up on hissing their name at them and actually push them out onto the stage, where they stand and stare blankly at the audience until one of the other kids nudges them offstage again. And you’re sitting in the audience thinking Not that I was expecting Laurence fucking Olivier here, but seriously, how can you be wearing the damn costume and not understand that you’re in a friggin’ play? This is ninth grade, for crying out loud. And then you hear later that the kid has Down Syndrome or autism or something, and for the rest of the evening there’s a little voice in your head singing BASTARD, BASTARD, YOU ARE A BASTARD. Anyway: winter = retarded. In the strictly literal sense, of course.
This year, as part of my birthday vow to overcome my procrastination gene (I’ll explain later), I finished my Christmas shopping early — before mid-November, in fact. For those awestruck mortals who wonder how I accomplished this magnificent feat, I have one word: catalogues. Glossy, tree-killing, landfill-clogging catalogues, filled with riches and goodies that can all be yours for a low low price + shipping and handling. In all honesty, though, I must confess to a certain nagging feeling of guilt at having become one of Those People — the kind who look forward with eager anticipation to the latest multi-paged goody-rag stuffed into their mailbox; the kind who spends hours poring over glossy pages with a handful of multi-colored highlighters (one for each relative) within easy reach; the kind who buys things from catalogues that also sell wooden geese with bows and bracelets with Bible verses on them. I think I may need to get one of these, just to wash the yuppie aftertaste out of my mouth.
Oh my God it is snowing again. It’s like someone shoved that school-play dimbulb back onto the stage for an encore, and now he’s standing there drooling and no one can get him offstage again and BASTARD, BASTARD, YOU ARE A BASTARD.
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