Plot Ninja!

I opened my "plot ninja" today. It's a plot idea written by a stranger. We exchanged these at the kick-off meeting with instructions to open only in case of emergency.

I was quite tempted, and so I opened it, knowing it wouldn't help, but hoping it would. Of course I've been tempted to do anything but write. Get some chocolate chips. Play a game of solitaire. Do the "medium" sudoku in today's student paper. So I opened the plot ninja, thinking that at least this distraction might be productive.

Have I built enough suspense yet? Here it is: "A major character wakens at 3:16 a.m. certain that someone very important to them has just died." This was donated by Silver. That's a good one, applicable to novels in any genre.

I'm not using it of course. Not that I have any better ideas, because I have no ideas! But I already know who the dead people are, and I'm not in the mood to add another one now.

One could argue at this point that the reason I am participating in nanowrimo is to see if I can write fiction and that now I know.

However, one could also argue that I haven't properly tried. It's like if you don't dance, so you take a dance class, then during the first lesson you feel awkward and stupid, so you decide it's not for you. I've seen people who were a complete embarrassment to themselves and to ballroom dancing, and also a danger to their partners and to others, but even they, after one to two years of lessons, were able to become competent dancers. So it is in that spirit that I am continuing. In order to get through a month of this, I am going to have to come up with new things to try and I'm going to get a lot of practice.

Meanwhile I have avoided writing fiction by making this journal entry.

Web Site of the Day: I also avoided writing by checking out "Backstreet Boys, Mandarin-style" by llcoolvad. Click on the first link when you're someplace where you can listen to it when you are in the mood to witness some youthful exuberance.

Career Setback

Today I got an e-mail saying that the conference I signed up for in the area I want to be working in sometime has been canceled due to not enough people signing up. It looked like only about twenty people had registered, and based on the e-mail addresses, none of them are from UT or even Austin, so I can't even set up a local contact with some sort of condolence letter.

However, we are invited to attend the Board meeting which will take place Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. Thursday was the one day of the conference that I didn't take off (I have a meeting I'm supposed to be helping to host). So, I RSVP'd that I'd just go to the Wednesday part of the meeting. Probably boring and useless, but who knows?

Meanwhile, I goodnaturedly wished a co-worker good luck in the last installment (it's Friday) of hell week. We've been having an unprecedented number of technical (and human) difficulties.

Nanowrimo Update

Tired. Chikuru is kicking my butt. Awesome job, Chikuru!

1541 words in 3.57 hours (not counting the head banging and the brainstorming) = 432 words/hour. I am now behind schedule, though not significantly. 13% complete.

After doing some brainstorming and even lowering myself to looking into one of my how-to-write books, I finally decided to use the gimmick I'd thought of earlier of starting each chapter with a trip to a tourist attraction.

Now the gimmick has expanded. Each tourist attraction description takes up its own chapter, and these will occur every other chapter (or less). And these chapters will be in the form of a letter to the main character's best friend, so I have a new character, too.

Oh, and it gets cheesier. The character will yank some theme out of each visit, and then she will be stuck living that theme in the following chapter(s). This is just the kind of BS I learned I was good at in the Parageography class. I do think I can totally pull off coming up with some theme that will advance the plot.

One might say this is cheating because up to half my novel will be nonfiction. However, it will be written from an extremely biased viewpoint of a fictional character. So there!

I did two letters and a straight chapter. I enjoyed doing them, too, especially the letters. I enjoyed re-reading it to edit it into better writing and just for the fun of it. None of it is fabulous, but the quality is generally decent.

Dear Marjorie,

Once upon a time there was a grove of fourteen mighty oak trees in a dry land of mostly scrub. The area was regarded as sacred and used for ceremonies. The grove was known as "Council Oaks."

Then the white man moved in and did what he does best. Chop. Chop. Chop. Until one lonely tree was left. That tree was known as "Treaty Oak."

At this point citizen outcry led to what the white man does second best. Bureaucracy. The American Forestry Association added the tree to its Hall of Fame as "The most perfect specimen of a North American tree." The City of Austin bought the lot containing the tree in order to preserve the tree. The area was regarded as special and used for picnics and weddings.

Then one horrible day, a crazed lunatic suffering from unrequited love poured a drum of enough hardwood herbicide to kill a hundred trees around Treaty Oak as part of a spell-casting ritual.

The End.

Sort of.

Other crazed lunatics were ready to lynch the perpetrator, convicted on circumstantial evidence. He is serving a nine-year prison term, though he could have received life imprisonment for felony criminal mischief.

Meanwhile, the tree was in critical condition. The lunatic mob did everything in their power to save that tree. Ross Perot wrote a blank check to cover the costs. School children wrote get-well cards. Supporters piled flowers, candles, and crystals around the foot of the tree. Someone alerted by communications from two other trees performed a pipe-healing ceremony.

An international team of foresters was called in. Some of the poisoned soil was removed and replaced. The rest was treated and neutralized. Anguished experts aggressively sacrificed over two-thirds of the tree, trying to save the rest (now you can buy pens made from this wood).

Texas live oaks like this one don't shed their leaves voluntarily; the new leaves that grow in the spring force them out. But Treaty Oak shed most of its leaves from the shock.

A clone of the tree was planted nearby.

Eight years later, Treaty Oak produced its first acorns since the poisoning.

Love,
Heather

Note: the guy is no longer in prison (or at least the 9 years is up) and you can no longer buy pens from that wood because they have sold out. But my novel is set pre-9/11.