The Mimosa Effect 2

Day 2 of Writing Foolishly, For No Particular Reason Except That It’s Fun.  Here is today’s sentence, and what it turned into.

A man was walking down the street, and a turtle fell down at his feet.

This wasn’t just any turtle; it was as big as an old fashioned Volkswagen beetle and just as colourful as if it had been attacked by Hippies armed with paint and organic horse-hair brushes.  It was also on its back, its great thick legs flailing forlornly against the backdrop of grey skyscrapers drooping in the thick summer heat.

The man, whose name was Gerald, wondered if perhaps the turtle had time-tunneled out of the sixties, in one of those spooky, tornado-esque clouds of improbability, like what happened to the airplane in Donnie Darko.

(Actually, Gerald spent the first few seconds yelling and jumping backwards in sheer fright – and only considered the peculiarities of the situation once it no longer felt like his heart was going to leap up into his throat and strangle him.)

His next thought – after pondering the nature of the universe – was to wonder if the turtle was all right.  A fall like that was enough to put a crack in anyone’s shell, but the turtle did not appear to be damaged.

“Excuse me kind sir, but do you think perhaps you could help me to right myself?” asked the turtle, in a surprisingly polite, soft voice that Gerald thought sounded vaguely British.  “You see, I’m supposed to be carrying a world on my back.  I expect it’s probably right behind me.”

Gerald knew he could not possibly budge the massive turtle on his own, so he quickly recruited the help of several passers-by.  While he managed to grab hold of several people willing to render assistance, he began to realize that until he had drawn their attention to the turtle’s plight, they had all been completely unaware of its existence.

“I’m only partially existing in this dimension,” the turtle explained, while the crowd rocked him back and forth until they managed to roll him over.  “The rest of me is somewhere else entirely.  But no matter – here comes the world now.”

“Clear!” Gerald shouted, and the crowd scattered. 

Out of the smog-tinged blue sky, something was falling fast – something very big.  The shadow it was casting below itself began to grow alarmingly.  All Gerald could see was something that looked like a great cloud of dirt with roots sticking out of it.  When it landed on the turtle, the ground shook as if in the throws of an earthquake; the skyscrapers shuddered, the watching crowd screamed, and a great puff of brown dust flew out in all directions.  The screams petered out almost instantly as the crowd began sneezing and coughing.

On top of the turtle, as if it had been there all along – indeed, as if it belonged there, more surely than anything belonged anywhere – was an entire world.  It was rounded up in a kind of dome, islands and mountains and tiny floating clouds, all surrounded by a shimmering sea.  The sea did not empty out, or pour off the back of the turtle; it merely came to a certain point and stopped, as if held in by an invisible glass wall.

“Thank you,” the turtle said.  “That was a close one.  Right.  I’d best be off now.  Good luck with this place; you’re going to need it.”

And with that, the turtle vanished, as logic and reality caught up with it.  The dust-covered crowd stood blinking and looking at each other in bewilderment.  Then, one by one, they shrugged, or gave a nervous giggle, or laughed outright in amazement; and then, one by one, they went back to their everyday regular lives.  By the time they reached the next intersection, they’d forgotten about the incident completely.

All except Gerald.  Which, we think, might be why Gerald seemed a little strange to his friends after that.  You see, for the rest of his life after that day, Gerald could see things that no one else could; he could hear things no one else had the ears to hear.  It made his life more than a little tricky, he had to admit; but all in all, he wouldn’t have traded that day for any other.  Not in a million worlds.

- T.H. Nov. 29 ‘07

For more writerly walkabouts, check out Sunday Scribblings.

Odd, how it doesn’t feel like nearly as much of a big deal the second time around. Reached the 50k mark yesterday, which means a NaNoWriMo victory for the second year in a row. In paper terms, it added up to roughly 97 pages (11 point, single spaced) written in 28 days. While it was fun to pull out an old idea, dust it off and breathe new life into it – and while it spawned a whole flock of new, fledgling ideas – it didn’t demand to be continued, immediately and without question, the way Sleeping and the John Dresden story have. So, it’ll go and sit snuggly in a binder for a while, and may yet get pulled blinking back into the light at some point, to see yet another rebirth.

In the meantime, I’m still aiming to set my own personal record of having written every single day for one month straight. On days when I don’t feel novel-ish (like today), I have to remind myself: Write One Sentence. That’s one better than none. And so I give you, the one sentence, and what it turned into:

There is a dragon in my swimming pool, red and blue and firecracker green;
He has no hands, and so I feed him oranges and tea.

There is a dragon in my swimming pool.
You might think he would rather be
flying high above the trees
spitting fire and black smoke when he sneezes;

But he likes it in my swimming pool,
Floating, drifting on the gentle breeze.
His head is stuffed with paper, and he speaks in Cantonese,

This dragon in my swimming pool.
I’ll think we’ll go down to the Quays,
and he can ride the waves all day, all the way out to sea.

Oh, but I’ll miss him if he leaves,
my dripping, sipping, pool-chair-tipping, swimming pool dragon.

(Can you tell I grew up reading Shel Silverstein?)

(Thanks to M. for the inspiration)

Thought maybe I should pop in here occasionally to announce that yes, I am still alive and kicking, although there might not be much of interest to non-writers posted here between now and December 1st.  Fell slightly behind today for the first time, which was annoying, but since I know I don’t have the energy left to crank out enough words to push it over the 20k line, I can feel relatively free of guilt for dropping a few words here before I crash.  Will aim to give a report on how our PeterPatch NaNoWriMo Mid-Month Meeting and Marathon goes on Saturday (couldn’t resist the alliteration). Update Nov. 14: Back on track as of last night; as long as I write the minimum today, I’ll stay ahead of the game.  Also downloaded a new funky wordcount widget, which you can see on the right (under the “books, writers & writing” links). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to update right away; at the moment it’s still showing yesterday’s total, for some reason.  I’ll check back in the later and see if I can determine the average lag time between me updating my wc and the widget registering it.

Until then, keep your pen on the page (or your fingers on the keys). There is light at the end of the tunnel! (Or at least, that’s what they tell me.)

I think it’s still sinking in.  While part of me is feeling kind of dazed and bothered by the mundanities of paying bills and thinking about fall chores, another part of me is giving a belated “hurray!” for having reached my yearly writing goal almost two months early. 

Back in January, I joined up with a bunch of other far-thinking mad writers and set a goal for 2007 of 250,000 words.  That adds up to about 500 single-spaced pages, give or take a few.  Yesterday I quietly slipped over the 250k mark, for a 309-day total of 251,905 words.  The bulk of that is novel writing, chiefly working on my magnum opus, Sleeping Underwater, and the upstart new novel (as yet unnamed).  Along the way there has also been copious note-scribbling, and the occasional side-trip into short story land, not to mention a few random rambles here and there.  

I must say it’s been a fascinating and highly educational experience, working on two different long stories, using two radically different approaches.  Sleeping Underwater, which follows seven main characters through the land of what-if, was meticulously plotted out (although I always leave room for my characters to do something unexpected, which they seem to do annoyingly often), and my Sleeping binder contains at least an inch or two of character and plot notes.  It would serve very nicely as a boat anchor until the pages started to disintegrate. 

The John Dresden story, on the other hand, has been one long freefall from the beginning.  It quite literally starts off running – with no memory of its past and no knowledge of its future, for either the poor beleaguered main character or the writer.  As it went along, it gathered a context and a history and a handful of other characters, rather like a sticky tumbleweed.  I did, finally, jot down a few “what happens next?” notes and a bit of a family history, but I’m having so much fun seeing where it will take me that I don’t want to overdo it in the pre-planning department.  I’m considering it a grand experiment – take two opposing approaches to novel writing, and see which works best. 

Now that November is here, I’ve added a third approach into the mix: take one story idea that’s been percolating for more than a decade, re-write a few opening chapters to get back into the world that has been sitting waiting patiently for me all this time, and then write like mad for a month and watch it come alive again.  A bit like re-animating Frankenstein’s monster; exciting and a little bit scary, guaranteed unpredictable results (what could possibly go wrong? our heroes ask innocently – and then everything goes to hell).

Colour me insane, what can I say.  Now, if I could just figure out a way to get people to pay me to do this (preferably before I hit middle-age), life would be pretty sweet.