NaNoWriMo Progress: Day Thirteen

I've just woken up, so no writing just yet. As of last night I was 3 days and 5,000 words ahead of the 50,000 word target and 2 days and 5,000 words behind my 75,000 word target. But yeah, as things stand right now, I am over 25,000 words into NaNoWriMo, aka over the half way mark by day twelve. The past three days I have written about 9,000 words and It's all part of the one chapter. I'm 10,000 words into the ice-popsicle dream sequence and I think it's not going to go on too much further. Maybe another 5,000 words. Then he'll wake up and continue with the story like nothing happened.

But yeah, as things stand right now, I'm 6 chapters in to the novel, which is 28 chapters long. And it's only really this one chapter (and I suppose the chapter before it) that's making the book seem long. A ten thousand word chapter alongside a five thousand word chapter alongside four two-to-three thousand word chapters will feel like stretching the novel out a bit. But hopefully the rest of the novel should be quick writing. The original plan was a chapter a day, making each chapter around 2,500 words, but with three 3,000 word days on the one chapter, maybe longer chapters is just something that's naturally fitting to this book. I mean, realistically, a 10,000 word chapter is not outrageously long. I think it's around the 20-30 page mark. Considering most of my other chapters are around ten pages and under, well, I dunno, I'll just have to get used to it.

I'm thinking maybe, once I'm done with the first draft, the direction I should take with the novel should be to play it up as a novel of short stories, playing up the real world chapters as micro stories in themselves. And maybe if I go all out making the whole thing disturbing and 'bizarro' enough I could pitch it to eraserhead press, maybe. We'll see once I've written this thing. I'm probably going to get in touch with them some time this month anyway, just to see what sort of stuff they're looking for and if I'm eligible at all.

So yeah, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited about this. These past twelve days have been really exciting for me. And I'm a little nervous at the moment as I'm about to hit roadblock number two, aka my final uni assignment for the year. And then all that's stopping me from reaching my goal is a couple of parties. But it should be good, break up the constant novelling, see what this whole 'outside' thing is that people keep telling me about.

And on another note, I got a couple of books in the mail on Thursday: Lost in Cat Brain Land, by Cameron Pierce, and Satan Burger, by Carlton Mellick III. I read Lost in Cat Brain Land in the one day and I'm getting into Satan Burger now.

Lost in Cat Brain Land: Where to start with this, where to start... It's a completely shitting all-consuming mind fuck of a book that is disturbing and brilliant and disturbing and awesome and disturbing and mother fucking Mr-T (that's a Satan Burger reference by the way) and that's pretty much all there is to it. Have I mentioned how disturbing it is? Well basically, it's a collection of short stories, it's not a long collection at 136 pages of large print. So it's easy to read, but the thing I really love about it, is that you have no idea what you're going to read from one page to the next. The blurb on the back gives away a lot, and there was one thing it mentioned that I was wondering where it was in the book and if I somehow glazed over it, but no, it comes down to the very last page. So yeah, it's completely weird and outlandish and full of surprises and quirks that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. But, having said that, Pierce writes this shit like a conventional author. He'll inject human emotion into a slab of meat that is apparently some guy's son, or he'll make the motherless housewife grow desparately affectionate for the thing that crawled up the shower drain. It's stuff you can't really pack into a summary of the book. If you try to describe the book, it'll turn into a clusterfuck of things that make no sense. But it's most certainly not about weird things that happen for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It's about weird things that happen that we find ourselves strangely interested in and attached to. That, and Pierce switches from first person perspective, to third person to second person between stories so effortlessly, it really turns this book from just another random shit-fest into something else. I highly recommend it for people who like random and disturbing. This guy makes Douglas Adams look like a fuzzy white rabbit that does not talk. Sorry, Mr. Adams, I've tried reading the Restaurant at the End of the Universe twice now, but I found myself asking something that I never once asked myself whilst reading Lost in Cat Brain Land. Why do I care? Weird things need to happen for a reason, and I think that making this the cornerstone of bizarro fiction will set the truly great apart from the lackluster.