NaNoWriMo Excerpt: Claw & Eye

The following is an excerpt from the novella I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. This is a pretty rough draft and already I can see where certain things need to change, sentences need tightening, bigger and bolder descriptions necessary, etc. In the interests of sharing and seeing how 1,667 words a day looks like (at least for me), however...well, here you go then:

Claw & Eye

By Dustin Monk

Worship of the ascendant eels begins beneath the city, in the Temple’s underground pools. Here is this man, Baldahlbrus, wearer of bowler hats, long coats, various beards (tonight is matted gray), with a limp he got fighting, and who dreams most every night of hiding in the thick, oily stalks of burningroot while around him the sounds of dying and short blasts of rifle fire carry on the wind, feeding an addict to the ascendant eels’ babies. The phosphorescent baby eels—who look like cold, white leaves and are sometimes called drifters because of the way they seem to float in the water when not eating: aimlessly, causeless—now nibble at the body like an angry mob, floating over him, illuminating his yellowy hair and knobby fingers and open, dead eyes with their phosphorescence. Their tiny, sharp teeth are stained ruby red.

            The addict must’ve died in the morning. Already his body stinks. Or maybe the stink is from the luminescent nerves twisted and knotted and thick as tree roots pulsing, clinging to the walls. The nerves smell like curdled milk.

Baldahlbrus stinks too—he smells of gasoline and vomit—but he will not bathe in this pool. The drifters will eat the living as heartily as they eat the dead. He watches. After a time the baby eels drift away from the addict’s carcass. What is left—shreds of meat and gristle and bone—sinks beneath the muddy green waters. He does not want to think about the amount of bones littering the bottom of the pool or what sort of monster they have formed.

He has knelt throughout the feeding. Now, he stands, feels out the limp in his leg, pulls his bowler hat closer to his eyebrows, straightens his long coat. The nerves along the walls pulse messages in bluish-gray but he cannot decipher what is said. Perhaps the message is: not so long ago we left and we are not coming back because we are dead. It might say that.

            His boots echo loudly on the stone tiles of the cavern dumb priests built to worship the ascendant eels in the bellies of their home. No one worships them anymore. He walks up the winding steps, click-clatter-clatter-click-clatter. Part of the roof of the grand chamber of the Temple has caved in. Large chunks of ceramic tiles lay scattered across the floor. Half-dead nerves—their ends the color of charred bodies, which Baldahlbrus has seen enough of—snap and fizzle like blown-out fireworks. Sister moonlight shines upon the gaping mouth of an ascendant eel painted on the floor. Once there were great sermons held in this chamber; a great many people knelt on the mouth of the eel. Now it glistens, lonely, as if mocking Baldahlbrus. I will devour what I please. Whatever was once treasured in this place is gone: chalices, painted windows, golden and gray curtains, the holy bowl.

            He pushes open the large wooden doors of the grand chamber, exits into the inner chamber and washes his face and hands in cracked clay bowls he’s found abandoned in alleys and filled with river water, and limps through the Temple’s smaller entrance into—

*

Nerve City. Night. Argana a pinkish pearl in the sky, looking down upon her thrumming, bleeding city, the cruel crater of her heart shimmering in streetlamps and in the eyes of addicts. Her twin Argala hangs behind a cloud in the shape of a frown. You were always the forlorn moon. Baldahlbrus gets out in it. Buildings rise like stark, bluish-gray tendrils—like thickened, widened mirror-others of the same nerves that cling to their facades—almost as if they too long for the ascendant eels’ return. The cobbled streets bustle in the dark.  Baldahlbrus steps around horse-pulled carriages, shit, and broken bottles. He averts his eyes from passersby: it is not good to know too many. Yet, he is not oblivious. Shadows stalk alleyways: half-illumined dealers form question marks against corners of buildings. Do you? Do you? Do you? Addicts get cold in the night too. In front of the brothel is Carakhi playing viola. Bevendraj’s eyes bulge as she looks at a huge clump of dirt in her hands. On the other side of the street, accosting passersby like the idiot he is is Galat, showing off his new silver tooth. A spiky-haired addict Baldahlbrus doesn’t recognize, shuffling back and forth in front of an abandoned grocery store, asks if he’s got it. He doesn’t.

In all the books he has read—and he hasn’t read that many—this is exactly what the end of the world looks like. It isn’t the end of the world, it is the beginning. It is the beginning of the world. That is a loop he gets easily caught in. The world spins as it sometimes does when he limps too fast and Baldahlbrus wishes Maj was here. He liked to lean on her and she let him sometimes. She hadn’t minded his limp either. Yes, I am in love with her. Almost as much as I am in love with getting so high the drifters talk to me. This isn’t how I find her. This isn’t my pining. She was a girl and I was a boy, once, and we were both soldiers and, hiding in the burningroot, we sometimes held each other. That is the kind of love I know.

It's NaNoWriMo Time, NaNoWriMo Time - NaNoWriMoWithABaseballBat

November nears and, for me at least, this means it's time for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I will be participating again this year (here, here, here, and here are my posts from last year), though my goal this time around isn't to hit 50K words (though that'd be nice) but simply to get through my long story/short novel, which I've tentatively titled Claw & Eye. (Uhh...yeah it's the same title as last year's story, but totally different, I swear.)

The problem with last year's event was that, though I managed to make the 50K goal, I didn't really like anything I wrote - the prose was sloppy, the characters not-so-well thought out, and overall just plain limp as far as story goes. This was in part because I had made a conscious decision not to plan any detail out before I began the challenge. Well. That might work for some people but, what I discovered in the process, is that it doesn't really work for me.

Instead, over the last couple of months, I've been jotting notes, chiefly concerning world-building, characterization and action in larger scenes, as well as writing different entry points - a piece of advice I picked up from author Jeff Vandermeer during Clarion - to the story. I've also completed a short page-and-a-half synopsis of events.

I will be uploading the story here two or three times a week throughout November (and into December or later - basically, until it's finished) for your perusal, should you wish to read this thing I'm writing.

NaNoWriMo - Week Four: I'm Finished

Four weeks writing 50,000 words is kind of like when, in the film There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview bludgeons his rival to death with a bowling pin and then declares, "I'm finished!"  That's how I feel after having completed this project:  51,180 words, which is about halfway through the actual story, give or take a few thousand.  I'm tired, I'm thirsty, my legs have the jimmy-jams, my beard fell off, and I have a gray hair.  Was all of this worth 50,000 words in 30 days?  In a word: sure.  Because NaNoWriMo did teach me a few things about writing and about writing novels, sepcifically.

When I started the novel, tentatively titled Claw & Eye, on November 1st, I had only an inkling of what I wanted to do.  I knew that I wanted one of the main characters to be in an a cappella group; I knew I wanted the setting to be something like 25,000 years in the future; I knew I didn't want typical faster-than-light travel or spaceships, even; and I knew I wanted the tone of the novel to be noirish.  Beyond that, I knew nothing of my story: no plot, no secondary characters, no understanding of the world(s) I was building.  This, of course, wasn't a particularly thoughtful way to start a novel.  You run into a lot of contradictions and unknowns writing a novel from scratch; however, many of these problems can be taken care of in later revisions and if I hadn't allowed myself the opportunity to "just write" - if I'd had it all planned out - many of the exciting turn-of-events that did occur within the story may not have seen the light. 

Writing without a net, so to speak, also allowed me see the glaring mistakes I was making firsthand.  If on page 120, Nyanna Ogadevu says something about the manikin warehouses that makes more sense than what Yqe said about them on page 68, I'll go back and change it or rewrite Yqe's lines or write it out completely.  I was aware of the threading of the novel more because I was making it up as I went along.  Whenever I've completely world-built a novel in the past, the story, at least, becomes kind of boring and I'd lose the threads because I knew what was happening and I didn't care anymore. 

However, writing completely without that net, as I did for NaNoWriMo, won't help me finish my novel either.  What works best for me is to build the world around me, mold its shape, find a story worth telling in there, thread the plot here and there, write down a few big scenes for the main characters but not how you get them to it, and then begin writing.  I've already started revising the first half of Claw & Eye and I'm doing this completely different too: I'm writing longhand, something I rarely do, and I'm loving it.  Part of what bugged me about the initial draft of the novel was that the voice was too loose; around thirty-five thousand words I began writing in the narrative style that I think suits the story better: more plainspoken with an occasional embellishment in the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Writing longhand, for reasons I'm not sure of yet, helps me keep this voice, perhaps because I write slower than I do with a keyboard, so I have to think harder.  Once I get a few thousand words written in my notebook (the real kind, with lined paper!) I revise it in the Word document on my laptop.  It's a hell of a lot of fun seeing what words are kept and which are lost from original printed draft to notebook to laptop.

I finished NaNoWriMo on November 23rd, a few days early, and began worldbuilding and revising in earnest: five hours a day, every day.  By doing this, I discovered the futuristic setting didn't really make sense and was even a little cliched for the story I wanted to tell; so I've revised the world into the near-present.  Immediately, I steered away from post-apocalyptic settings: more cliches will abound.  Instead, I settled on an isolated State, cut off voluntarily from the rest of the world (some might see resemblances to North Korea, but I'm working very hard at disspelling any sort of mirroring; in no way is this story a metaphor for the troubles with Pyongyang).  Because I had to change the setting, I also had to change many of the characters' names.  Knowing the world I've created better and understanding the narrative voice with which to tell these characters' stories has already helped me invariably with the revision process.

NaNoWriMo got me started on the first novel I've started that I think is worth finishing in a long time.  Along the way I hit some bumps - particularly plotwise - but the experience of writing 50,000 words in a month was certainly worth it, especially because I got to know these characters so intimately.  You don't know want to know how many fake conversations I had with Moo or Daniel Yu: you'd have to keep a light on at night, you'd be frightened so badly.

The burning question: will I do it again next year?  The answer: probably, but I hope I won't have to - I don't want any more gray hairs.

NaNoWriMo - Week 3: Writing Out Loud

Week 3 of NaNoWriMo almost killed me.  I've hit the middle of the story, which for me, has always been the hardest part.  The middle, and I suspect a lot of writers feel the same way, is the place where I get stuck.  There's a simple explanation for it: the middle of a novel, when you're writing it, is like that place in a relationship where you get used to each other, where you don't have to tell your partner you miss them every time they're away, the part where you don't always go to bed at the same time: you know, the part where the excitement and that shiny new smell have worn off a little bit.  The enthusiasm of the beginning is over, you've built up these characters...and now what?  How do you keep what you're writing interesting not only to your potential readers, but most importantly, to yourself?

I don't really have an answer to that question, except to continue to be spontaneous.  During Week 3 of NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), I tried to keep the writing fresh by letting the characters speak for themselves.  That is to say, all those plots and tangles I was creating in Weeks 1 and 2, I let go of.  I didn't want the story to become static and I certainly didn't want it to become predictable.  So, I let the characters start writing out loud.  This experiment allowed me to add another viewpoint - one I didn't think would be important in the first half of the book but, as it turns out, is very important to the middle and will continue to be important in the last part.  If I'd stayed on the course I set in the first weeks, this character, Tok Willow, would not have had his time to speak and I'm very grateful he did: his voice is one of the more interesting ones in the novel.

Having the characters essentially writing their own parts has also allowed me to better understand what it is I'm writing about.  As it happens, there's a lot going on in this story: the doom of mathematics, the multiverse, faster than light travel, and a couple of lowlife criminals getting involved in things far too complex to be getting into; but at the heart of this story, I hope, are these characters' everyday lives, their flaws and perfections brought to light by strange circumstances.

The word count is down this week again, though I'm still ahead of the curve and expect to reach the 50,000 goal just before Thanksgiving.  But the word count is down for a good reason: the characters are talking to me and to each other and taking each other out to dinner and buying each other flowers...and I'm not really sure how far I'm willing to take this metaphor...

Though, as I said, I'll more than likely hit the word count goal, I don't expect the novel to be finished by November 30th.  I'm not entirely sure how long the novel will end up being, but I definitely feel as though I'm in the middle of the middle and the end is still a long way away.  This next week will show me if I can keep the threads (however spontaneous they may have been at the time) in the first weeks and the true spontaneity of character back-and-forth this week from falling apart.

NEXT WEEK: Analogical Accountability and the Necessity of Banging One's Head Against a Wall

Words to Date - 39,702

(SIDENOTE: The artwork for this post was done by Mandy Monk.)

NaNoWriMo - Week 2: Recalibrating

I am a linear writer by - I was going to say "nature," but I think it's more "habit."  That is, I like to write from Chapter One to Chapter Twenty in order.  However, during the second week of NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), I wanted to try something different.  The NaNoWriMo idea is an experiment, in my opinion, of how much you can write in a month, and, signing up for this project, I knew I also wanted to experiment in the ways I write, partly to see if how I write is what's working best and partly to see how interesting my story could get.

There are four parts and an epilogue to my novel.  During the first week, I wrote halfway between the first part, Levee Camp Moan, and, though I finished Part One during the second, I found the words did not come as easy for me as those first 12,000 in Week One.  Part of this was because I began writing scenes out of order, in Parts Two and Three and Four and a section of the Epilogue.  I call this type of writing "scatterbrain," because that's exactly what it feels like to me.

It was interesting to see where my characters have ended up and I'm excited to see just how I get there with them, but finding the words this week was much harder for me and I wonder if I haven't inadvertently created several problems in the text.  These may be easy fixes as I write more and more sections and get closer to the end of the story or they may not be fixable until revision.  The enthusiasm for the novel hasn't died down even a little, for which I'm glad because I really didn't know what would happen if I left the very safe confines of linear writing.

That said, I think writing in a linear fashion is what, for the most part, works best for me.  There are times, however, when scatterbrain writing is useful because, in a sort of roundabout way, it requires thinking ahead.  I think, for instance, if I'd had a particular scene in my head and knew it came later in the story, it would be good to write it out, get it down, even if it's just notes on what happens.  I've also found scatterbraining to be a highly effective tool for my imagination, putting characters in wildly different situations from the point they are in the linear story. 

Part of the experience of NaNoWriMo, of course, is not knowing what happens, not planning this story out, seeing where it goes on its own, and that, I think is a somewhat linear process of writing, letting these characters end up where they will in a faux-natural fashion*, without any forethought on my part.

NEXT WEEK: Novel Notes on Napkins (and the annoyance of alliteration)

Words to Date: 27,139


*I say faux-natural because when writing a novel not under the pressure of 50,000 words in 30 days, I hope to flesh out more of the storyline and the characters, to be able to scatterbrain write freely, knowing full well most of what's going to happen, but to make it all seem as though it's happening naturally.  There's nothing really "natural" writing for NaNoWriMo, but it is a lot of fun.