Jim, Edith Keeler must die

I finally killed my wife. I mean, I finally killed Frank's wife in my NaNo novel. It took me nearly 4 days to get through all of it, but I finally managed to waste the bitch. Of course, you have no idea what I'm talking about, so allow me to rewind and start at the beginning.

Back in October, when I was planning my NaNo, I decided that I would have to kill off Frank's wife Pam. It would get him and crazy Harlan alone in the house with poor Billie (Frank and Pam's little girl), leaving Billie with no one to protect her. It would also make her more sympathetic to Vangie, my protagonist and Frank's oldest daughter from a previous marriage. I created Pam with a variety of traits that I despise, and I figured when it was time to kill her, it would be an easy--if not an enjoyable--scene to write. Well, somewhere along the line I decided that I didn't hate Pam. So it took me forever to get to the place in the story where I'd have to kill her. I hit the 50K mark on the 15th, just as I'd planned, and everything seemed to be going well. The next step was writing Pam's death, and I just froze. It's just after midnight on the 19th, and I'm only at 54,888 words. I'm so off pace now, I'm not sure I can continue. And to make matters worse, my mother had a horrible day today. The neuropathy is driving her insane. This morning, she called and I went out to the house and sat with her for a few hours. And then she called me tonight all but screaming in agony. I have no idea how to handle this. I'm not a nurturing person. I feel like there's something a normal person would know to say or do to make her feel better, and I just don't know what that is. Yes, that's a completely irrational line of thought, but I can't help feeling it. I hate being so helpless. And why am I talking about this in my writing blog?

Anyway, I've gotten past one of the hard parts of my book. There's another right at the end, and I don't want to think too much about that right now. It's going to kill me to write it, but I'll just have to find a way. It's what I get for having such a twisted imagination.

Well, I have a writing war to wage. Blog at you later!

LxL

She's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead

I love my random blog subjects. It's just one more way that I try (and fail miserably) to be clever.

I just thought I'd dash off a quick post for all of you who (don't) read my blog to update you on my NaNoWriMo progress. I just wrote word number 28,013 a few minutes ago. Instead of going to sleep like a sane person, or watching TV, I've been working on my sad little saga. Despite a serious case of Week Two-itis (i.e., loads of self-doubt, regret, panic, etc.), I'm closing in on 30,000 words. It's quite an accomplishment, especially when I consider how little fun I'm having this year. Last year's NaNo was a blast. Sure, the novel I wrote was shady at best, but it was fun, and what's the point of investing that much time into anything if you're not enjoying it? This year... Well, this year I've made a gross error in my selection of a plot bunny to pursue. If a story idea is nearly 10 years old and you've never managed to commit it to paper, there's probably a good reason for it. I could have better spent the time pursuing my angel comic book idea. Or my steampunk idea. Or pulling a new plot bunny out of my hat. But no, I had to write Gravesend. At least I'm close to having 50,000 words. My original goal was to write 100K this year; now, I only want to reach the 50K target by Wednesday, and if I have any energy left, then I'll try to finish the story. I must admit, things are starting to loosen up for me as I work my way into the middle of the story. Now that my protagonist has (almost) committed herself to resolving the problem, it's getting a little easier to write. I've jotted down a number of plot points for the next stage of the middle, so I have a good idea where I'm going now. I'm still not quite sure how to kill off my evil ghost guy once and for all, but I guess I'll figure it out when I get there.

I can't stop yawning, so I guess that means I should wind up this blog. I'm not saying anything important anyway.

Until later,
LxL

...mark these words on his grave...

There are about 17 minutes between me and the start of something (possibly) big. I have my notes ready. I finally jotted down a tagline for my novel: "Twenty years ago, eleven-year-old Vangie Evers had to do the unthinkable to protect her sister Dawn from the spirit of a long-dead pedophile; now when he threatens her sister Billie, she may have to go even further." Yeah, that's something there. I'm not pleased with it, but it doesn't really matter. It's a starting point. I have my music all cued up. I have a blank Word document anxiously awaiting me. I'm ready. I can do this...

LxL

One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces...

It's 4:24 PM and I thought I'd take a moment to record just how excited I am that in 7 1/2 hours, it will be NaNoWriMo. I'm about to explode! I have never been so thrilled by the prospect of writing before. I don't think I got this worked up last year. Hopefully I will be able to maintain my enthusiasm over the next 30 days. We'll see...

I've put together a massive Rhapsody playlist of songs to carry me through my endeavors. I'll invariably stray from it -- there's no AFI or Slayer here, and Tool and Radiohead aren't available on Rhapsody -- but this is a nice starter set, six hours of spacious and hopefully inspiring stuff. I created it to keep me from playing Frances the Mute on endless repeat.

So tonight, in honor of Halloween (and for inspiration), I'm conducting a Supernatural mini-marathon. I've got 6 or 7 episodes lined up--the last two episodes from last season, and then the entire current run of this season. That should take me right up to midnight, and then I will immediately start writing. Hopefully I'll get the first thousand words under my belt before I go to bed. Somebody's going to be late for work in the morning...

LxL

recall odor

J. R. R. Tolkien once said that "cellar door" is a beautiful phrase when separated from its spelling and meaning. He's right: there's something about the way the syllables roll off the tongue that is extremely satisfying. I've discovered lots of words and names and phrases like that: mellifluous; Pleistocene; Melora (as in Creager, as in Rasputina); parthenogenesis; fleur-de-lis; ruse of metacarpi...

Why am I thinking about this, you ask. A better question is, why do I think about anything? If you know anything at all about me it should be that I have a strange mind. But this morning, I woke up with Mars Volta lyrics in my brain. You should have seen / The curse that flew right by you / Page of concrete / Stained walks crutch in hobbled sway / Auto de fe / A capillary hint of red / Only this manupod / crescent in shape has escaped. They came to me unbidden and in perfect clarity, words that wide awake I can't recall. I had to look them up so I could include them here. Cedric Bixler-Zavala's lyrics are usually described as incomprehensible and cryptic, which suggests that they should mean something. Maybe they're not supposed to. You hear a melody and you don't ask yourself, "What are those notes trying to communicate???" You feel the melody and either love it or hate it; it requires no thought. Maybe Bixler's trying to do the same thing. Maybe his word salads are designed to communicate with us in a far more basic way, to touch our subconscious minds and emotions rather than to stimulate our intellect. Maybe the lyrics are more about how they sound (cellar door) than what they say. Like Archibald MacLeish says in one of my favorite poems, "A poem should not mean, but be."

Speaking of word salad...what was that nonsense I just wrote? That's what passes as deep though in my environs.

Less than 12 hours, and it's NaNoWriMo! I am totally stoked. That probably won't last for long. I imagine this time next week, I'll be regretting getting myself into this mess again, but it's not like I have anything better to do. The high point of the month of October was driving all the way up to Varina last night to look at tacky Halloween lights at my cousin's neighbor's house. Writing this novel is going to be like taking a European vacation for me. What a sad life I live.

Anyway, inventory awaits, and that latte I had for lunch is ready to make a swift exit. (Yeah, I bought another one...venti this time...$4.24!!!)

LxL

Gravesend, or How I Intend to Spend the Month of November

I just realized a few days ago that November is just around the corner. November, as in National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo. The time of year where masochistic writers set aside common sense and strive to churn out 50,000 words in 30 days. Sound crazy? Of course it does. Anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't attempt this. Which is precisely why I'm doing it. I attempted it last year, and succeeded. I was a 50,000 word winner with my sad excuse for a novel, Skin Deep, a story about love, tattoos and mental health. It wasn't very well written, but it was certainly fun to create. I was so proud of myself when I was done, and I made a promise to myself that I would do it again in 2006. So now I'm staring down the barrel of November and I need to get cracking. Last year, I did NaNoWriMo for fun and out of curiosity. Could I, who have never managed to type the words "The End," cast aside my self-doubts and actually put together an entire near novel-length story in 30 days? Part of me--well, most of me--didn't think so, but I went for it anyway, figuring I'd enjoy the challenge. Not only did I enjoy it; I succeeded. This year, I go into this more soberly. Everything is different now. The novel I'm writing, it isn't going to be any fun. It's dark and twisted and difficult. I also know what to expect from NaNoWriMo. I know how hard it's going to be to stay focused. And this year, I'm a different person. My mother is very ill and it's turned me into a bitter, God-hating, hopeless wretch. If I've ever looked on the bright side, if I ever believed in happy endings, I don't anymore. I'm tired of answering people's questions and listening to their trite best wishes and promises of prayers. It's all bullshit and I don't want to hear it. I've retreated from the company of others, and NaNoWriMo is a perfect opportunity for me to hide.

LxL

Desperately seeking a plot

For the last 24 hours or so, I've been wrestling with "Skin Deep," the novel I began last year for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). In my previous post, I explained how I planned to re-envision the story, seriously concentrate on outlining the plot, work with Dramatica, etc. Since I had the day off today, I planned to get a lot of work done. Well, you know how things go with the best laid plans of mice and men...

I have totally hit the wall on this project. I can't seem to get started. The more I think about "Skin Deep," the more I'm convinced that it's not going to work. My big problem is I can't figure out what the conflict of the story is. Who is the villain of the piece? What is my protagonist really fighting against? Why won't my cat stop snoring??? Okay, that last question doesn't have anything at all to do with my work here, except it is distracting and annoying me at the moment. Anyway, I guess I'll just ramble on here about the story and see if I can figure anything out. You'll indulge me, right? Of course you will.

So my protagonist, Grier Bowman, is a software developer for an international mental health provider. They've taken over the state mental hospital where she worked for several years. When the story opens, Grier is coasting through her days at the Lock (that's what the patients and employees call the hospital), doing what's expected of her, but little more. She's not thrilled with the job. Since the hospital was taken over by Mental Hygienics, the work environment has changed. There's a dress code in place. The development staff has tripled in size and the private offices the employees once enjoyed have been replaced by a warren of cubicles. New managers have been brought in, and all the fun has been sucked out of the work day. Grier finds that she hardly recognizes her own reflection when she gets ready for work everyday: she's had to change her image to fit in. She's miserable, and she wishes that the State's contract with Men Hy would just go away and things would go back to the way they were before. So I guess I've figured out Grier's problem: she wants to get rid of Mental Hygienics. So, Men Hy Corp is the bad guy.

So now I need an inciting incident, or the initial disturbance that kicks things off. What is going to make Grier take on a big corporation? I mean, a normal person who was unhappy with her job would just look for another one. But not Grier. The Lock is the only place she's ever worked. She has a lot of friends there and she'd miss them if she left. And she knows she'd face the same problems--perhaps even worse problems--if she went to work somewhere else. So she figures she might as well stay. So why fight? What pushes her over the edge? Well, the first thing would be getting passed over for a promotion she doesn't want, but figures she deserves. Her department gets restructured and a new software architecting division is formed. Grier has been at the Lock longer than any other developer, has worked on most of its existing systems, knows the way things work on site better than just about anyone. She's a decent coder, but her true strength lies in analysis and eliciting requirements. Everyone says this. It's documented in her performance evaluations. So when Anya Martel, her least favorite person, the person she thinks is the least qualified to breathe air, let alone get promoted to Software Architect, gets the job, Grier is pissed.

But's that's not what makes her go after Men Hy Corp with guns blazing. She gets angry and broods, fantasizes about doing bad things to Anya and Kate Hoffman-Pearce, the new VP of software development, but she'd never actually act on it. She's not a normal person, but she's not a total psycho either. Eventually she'd get over it. Something else will have to happen to push her over the edge. And I guess that something else is Jamey Madden. He's a tattoo artist whose mother is a patient at the Lock. Grier literally bumps into him in the lobby of her building when he comes to demand to see his mother. You see, the doctors have not permitted Jamey or his sister to see their mother in weeks. They claim that she is in a fragile state and their presence could worsen her condition, but Jamey suspects there's more to the story. He's in the lobby, talking to his sister on his cell phone about the latest roadblock in his attempt to get information on his mother's condition when Grier slams into him and knocks him down. She's immediately taken by him--he's a handsome guy despite his long hair, tattoos and piercings--but he's less than impressed by her. She hears him refer to her as a "corporate clone" to his sister. This insults Grier deeply, cuts her almost as deeply as getting passed over for the promotion. Jamey's words remind her of how much of her self she's sacrificed for her job, which is to say for nothing. His opinion of her echoes her own growing dislike of herself. Jamey reminds her of old friends from high school and college, of herself when she first came to work at the Lock. He makes her examine herself, and she hates what she sees.

So her initial encounter with Jamey is enough to make her want to change herself, but it still isn't enough to make her charge at Men Hy Corp like Don Quixote. It does make her walk into his tattoo shop and get a tattoo. How she finds out he's a tattoo artist and where he works, I don't know. That I can figure out later. Maybe it's a coincidence. Whatever, that's not important now. Anyway, she ends up getting a tattoo by Jamey and during their session he finds out where she works and she finds out about his mother. She thinks about what he says and it reminds her of some reports she put together a few weeks earlier and some rumors she's heard. She decides that Men Hy Corp is up to no good and she commits herself to exposing them.

Something about this still doesn't seem quite right. It's taking too long for Grier to commit to solving the story problem. So I ask...am I wasting my time here? Should I just scrap this idea and move on to something else? I ran across some recent work I'd done on an old idea featuring my old friend Jinx Crawford, and I am tempted to take it back up. I wish I knew what to do. I guess I'll press on with "Skin Deep" for now, give it a few more days, and if things don't feel any better, Jinx Crawford it is. Why does writing have to be so hard???

Getting down to business...

At work on Thursday, instead of working on SharePoint deployment or database administration or any of the other 5,004 things I should have been doing, I spent the day reading the novel I wrote for National Novel Writing Month last year. Allow me to sum it up in two words: PEEE-EEEWWW.

Okay, it wasn't a total stinker. For what it was--a novel written in 30 days without an outline or any true idea of where I was going--it's not half bad. It turned out exactly as you'd expect it to. The first 80 pages or so are full of false starts, but it finishes fairly well. I learned a lot while writing it, and I've learned even more while reading it. The most important lesson is this: Don't ever, EVER try to write a story without an outline again!

Because I really like the characters, the theme, and the nugget of a plot that I introduced, I can't just throw this story away. I have no intention of trying to get this or anything else I write published, but I still want to have a story I'm proud of sitting on my hard drive, you know? So, I've decided to go back to work on it. Tonight, I'm getting serious. I've actually started developing an outline for the book. I'm playing around in Dramatica, trying to make sense of all the theory and terms, so I can build Skin Deep from the ground up, and once I'm done, then I'll start writing. I've turned off the TV, turned on some music (right now, I'm listening to a little Velvet Acid Christ, but I feel a little Tool in my future), and I'm getting down to business. Wish me luck!

bijou

Main Entry: bi·jou
Pronunciation: 'bE-"zhü
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural bijous or bi·joux /-"zhü(z)/
Etymology: French, from Breton bizou ring, from biz finger
1 : a small dainty usually ornamental piece of delicate workmanship : JEWEL
2 : something delicate, elegant, or highly prized
- bijou adjective

---

bling-bling don't do nothing for me.
i don't need to glitter and flash to show you who i am.
jewels and gold you won't find on my wrist:
only the heart i wear on my sleeve,
uncut and rare as the most precious stone.

Skin Deep: An excerpt

This is a chapter from the novel I did for National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org) last year. I actually wrote the required 50,000, but I'm not so sure of their quality. Think of "Fight Club" and "Office Space" falling in love and having an illegitimate child. It's called "Skin Deep," and it's the story of a young woman who tries to make someone love her and loses herself in the process. That description makes it sound like it's good, which it isn't. But I did like the first chapter, which follows.

Skin Deep
© Elle Lassiter, 2005

It all comes down to the choices you make. What time you get out of bed, what tie you wear, what color you paint your nails. It's all significant. Even the little things affect the course of your life. Especially the little things.

A soy latte could be the difference between you becoming the president of the United States and you asking, Would you like fries with that?

The problem is free will.

Right now, I'm second guessing some of the choices I've been making lately. Specifically, I'm thinking that letting all the assorted nuts out of their cages was maybe not such a great idea. Right now as I'm hiding under my desk, I'm thinking maybe I screwed up.

Until a couple hours ago, the former Lockwood State Mental Hospital and Training Center--now officially known as the Mental Hygienics Corporation's Lockwood Campus (or the Lock to the people who live and work here)--housed one thousand seventy two clients. Now, most of them are roaming free.

The Lock's Training and Rehabilitation Division provided services to the facility's four hundred and twenty six severely and profoundly mentally retarded clients, eighty percent of whom are not ambulatory. Most of them are still in the dayrooms and living areas, unable to leave even if they knew they were free to go. They are not a problem.

Just this morning, three hundred and fifty six mentally ill patients wandered the halls of the Mental Health Unit. Right now, the schizophrenics and schizoaffectives twitch and shudder out on the manicured lawns. They grimace and bug their eyes. They stick out their tongues and pluck at their ears from the tardive dyskinesia brought on from too many years of typical antipsychotic medications. The borderlines and the bipolars, they're crying and screaming from up in the trees. The sudden freedom has left them lost and confused. The sociopaths--you won't see the sociopaths. This is the moment they've been waiting for, and they're making the most of it. The sociopaths, they are long gone.

That would constitute a problem.

When the doors of the Lock's Forensic Unit opened as if of their own volition, two hundred and fifty eight NGRIs--that's not guilty by reason of insanity if you're not hip to the lingo--sprang from their cages. They're free, along with the twenty nine men and three women of the Sexually Violent Predator Unit, the rapists and pedophiles who were sent to the Lock after completing their prison sentences thanks to a liberal interpretation of the state's mental hygiene laws.

Now that is a problem wrapped in a complication inside a dilemma.

This morning, all one thousand and seventy two assorted nuts were safely locked inside the Lock's twenty thousand square feet of bedrooms, dayrooms, and cellblocks. Now, thanks to me, they are all free.

The reason I'm thinking maybe this wasn't such a good idea is, with all of them out there prowling the grounds, hiding behind the bushes and swinging from the trees, it's not safe to go outside. With them on the loose, there's no way for me to get home.

It's another case of those pesky choices jumping up and biting you in the ass.

From where I'm hiding I can't see anything, but I'm willing to bet that outside it looks like a scene from Night of the Living Dead. The wackos are out there screaming and yelling. You can hear windows shattering and car alarms blaring. In the parking lot, somebody's sports car just got its windshield smashed in. Somebody's SUV just got rolled over. You can hear metal crashing and scraping as it tumbles down the hill. The crazies are jumping up and down on roofs and hoods. Outside, they are climbing the walls.

I'm up on the fourth floor of the Central Administration Building, and for the time being the steel and Lexan doors are holding so I probably don't need to be hiding under the J-shaped desk of my cubicle. I probably should be calling Jamey to tell him that it's done, his mother is free, and to come and get me, instead of dialing up the local newspaper on my cell phone. I probably shouldn't have done ninety percent of the stupid things I've been doing for the last few months in a pathetic attempt to win Jamey's affection, but that's all water under the bridge at this point.

Right now I'm realizing how stupid I was to flip the switch from here at work. I could have unleashed the virus from any of a thousand places instead of here, and any of them would have meant I wouldn't be trapped under my desk, inside my office building, with a thousand maniacs outside. I guess maybe I didn't think things would get so out of hand so quickly. I thought I'd have time to survey my handiwork and sashay out the door hours before the shit ever hit the fan. I figured someone from Security would discover that all the locking systems had failed and that the screws would find a way to secure the buildings long before the psychos discovered that the doors were open.

And I thought that launching the virus from my manager's workstation would be a nice way to kill two birds with one stone.

Once the company sorts out this mess, she is so fired.

In the shadows beneath my desk, I'm whispering to the reporter who answered my call. I'm telling him how there are one thousand and seventy two retards and wackos out on the front lawn, beating up cars and tearing out the windows and how I think my boss is maybe responsible for it. I'm not too sure, I whisper, but she's been acting weird lately. She's been very hostile for the past few weeks. On more than one occasion, I tell him, I've heard her mumbling something about "teaching them a lesson they'll never forget."

All of this is improvised. I worry I've maybe gone too far, but I remind myself that I passed too far when I hit the Enter key on the keyboard of my boss' computer a couple hours ago.

"Her name is Annette," I whisper into my cell phone. "Annette Tabon." I take the time to spell it for him.

I whisper, "You might want to check on Mary Beth Grainger as well. The Grainger Industries heiress, yes, that's her."

The reporter thanks me profusely, and I can tell he's just arrived on the Lockwood campus by the shriek that precedes the abrupt termination of our call. It seems that the living dead have claimed him.

Housekeeping has been falling down on the job. Under my desk, two paper clips and a broken rubber band lie forgotten and dejected. An M&M has been crushed into the carpet. Stuck under the thick plastic chair mat I find the long lost back of an earring. A nickel and four pennies. Under my desk is the shrapnel of my days here at the Lock. Had I not released the virus and freed the chickens from the coop, this would have been my legacy. If I quit tomorrow, if tomorrow I am hit by a bus or today the crazies find me and drag me away, if I leave this place and never come back, this is what they'll have to remember me by.

Even though I'm feeling more than a little afraid right now, I'm also feeling powerful. In the days and weeks that will follow, after all the nut jobs have been rounded up and safely returned to the booby hatch, once all the investigations have been concluded and the blame has been properly assessed, the State will terminate its contract with the Mental Hygienics Corporation and once again take responsibility for its mentally ill and mentally retarded citizens. The great privatization experiment will end in disaster and once proud politicians will wipe egg from their faces. The media will be flooded with stories of unauthorized psychological and medical experiments conducted on Lockwood's helpless patients, and even their staff. Around the world, shareholders will suffer substantial losses and the Mental Hygienics Corporation will issue a public apology to the victims and their families. They will be hit by a class action law suit and will pay out millions in damages. The Mental Hygienics Corporation will file bankruptcy, and the doors of their corporate headquarters will close forever.

For once, the little guy will win.

But right now, I'm hiding under my desk, trapped on the fourth floor of a building surrounded by a thousand maniacs. Now that the fire alarm is going off, I'm thinking maybe my boss had it right on my last performance evaluation. Maybe, despite all my technical knowledge and problem solving abilities, in spite of all my ingenuity, maybe I really do consistently demonstrate a lack of planning and foresight.

I don't know if there's an actual fire in the building or if somehow the fruitcakes have found a way inside and pulled the alarm. Either way, the future looks pretty bleak at the moment. I keep reminding myself that I am here by choice and that it's the little decisions you make that kill you.

Somewhere in the cubicle farm, someone is groaning. If it's one of my coworkers or one of the crazies, I don't know. The shuffling, shambling sound that accompanies the moans tells me it's probably the latter. The sound is getting closer, and I'm hoping the zombie stumbling towards me isn't smart enough to look under the desk. I'm hoping the labyrinth of laminate and fabric will send him off in another direction.

I'm hoping he'll make the wrong choice.

I start praying to that dubious deity we atheists turn to when reason won't save our asses. The god that isn't there, I'm asking her to keep the living dead from finding me. And that dubious deity just laughs back at me. Take this, non-believer, she says as synthesized punk rock beeps out of the cell phone I've forgotten is in my hand. It's playing Jamey's song.

Jamey. The reason I did all this. Even with the George Romero wannabe shuffling back in my direction, my heart does a weird triple beat in my chest, you know the one you get when the guy you love takes you in his arms and tells you that's it. You're the one for him.

I quickly flip open the phone and press it to my ear.

When I don't say anything, Jamey says my name.

"Farah," he says, "Farah, are you there?"

My whispered "Yes" sounds like a serpent's hiss.

"Did you do it? Did you load the virus?"

With the balding, sweating, salivating creature standing in the opening that the designers of the cubicle farm euphemistically call a door, chest heaving, fingers playing an invisible piano to the tune of tardive dyskinesia, there's no longer any need to whisper.

"They're out," I say, but the oddly calm voice doesn't seem to belong to me.

The zombie reaches for me, and suddenly my life is flashing before my eyes. I'm retracing my steps, rethinking all the choices that brought me here. I'm turning left instead of right. I'm not letting the word of a stranger affect me. I'm not walking into the tattoo shop, and I'm not getting myself carved and molded and remade into someone I'm not just so I can make some guy love me.

This time through, I'm making all the right choices.

The last thing I hear before the zombie rips the cell phone out of my grip is Jamey's voice.

"That's my girl," Jamey says, and hearing his voice I know if given the choice to do this all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.