The Plaid Pladd

You probably remember that I do National Novel Writing Month ever year! This year I completed it with far less drama and heart break than usual, except towards the end when I realized Open Office, Microsoft Word, and the NaNoWriMo website apparently all count words differently.

Here is a pictorial representation of my novel, from Wordle:

NaNoWriMo 2011!

The word Percy is really big because she’s the main character! It’s short for Persephone. Crazy hippie parents, what are you going to do? I had a hard time deciding what part would best showcase its awesomeness in a random excerpt, but decided on this piece on the basis that it features my best idea ever:

“You’re disgusting,” she said to him as she pushed through the revolving doors. They were like normal revolving doors, but with a disco ball in the middle and a lot of flashing colored lights on the floor. Inside there was a reception desk made out of a giant stack of cookies and some stairs that were made of piano keys. Beside the stairs was a slide and a water slide, both apparently leading from some upper level. Before she could look around further a puppy ran up to her from a corral of them near the door where many others of different kinds and sizes were playing and wrestling. When she’d walked through, a motion censor had opened the automatic door to the puppy corral, allowing one to go greet her. Puppies as greeters were the newest thing, and also the best. The best ever.
Siegfried looked on jealously as she ecstatically rubbed the puppy’s belly and scratched behind its ears. “I’m puppy size!” Siegfried insisted. “But a giraffe!!!!” Percy ignored him.
“Welcome to Awesomesauce Publications Ltd, how can I help you?” the man behind the cookie reception desk asked. He was dressed like a roller disco version of Nicola Tesla, complete with roller skates that occasionally discharged badass currents of electrical energy between the wheels.

Puppy greeters, America! Make it happen!

Also, if you’re interested, here’s a look back at some past NaNoWriMo awesomeness:

2010

NaNoWriMo 2010

I didn’t officially win last year because I had to quit around November 10th because of grad school stuff. I did end up finishing the novel I started by writing a new 50,000 words adding on to my unfinished 10,000 or so in December. So it was still a 50,000 word novel in a month, just not the official month!

“Anyway.” Oglaf drained his tankard again and slammed it down on the counter. “The librarian didn’t beat me at a drinking contest, and as it’s Drinking Contest Wednesday I don’t have to help her.”
“Yeah, but you did feed her bat pee,” Amos pointed out.
“Among other things,” Oglaf corrected.
“Bat pee, among other things,” Amos amended. “So you do sort of owe her.”
“She’s not upset about the bat pee,” Oglaf protested. “Look at her, she’s fine. Believe me, a lot better now than before you turned up, you should’ve seen her. Aren’t you fine, Talwyn?”
“Why are there colors?” she responded somewhat distantly. She was still looking at that same spot on the counter, which was white.
“I’m assuming you don’t mean that in a philosophical way,” Amos said, tilting his head down to try to look into her face. “Talwyn?”
“Is she high?” Althea asked Oglaf. “What else was in that pee drink?”
“Why are you all so uppity about the pee?” Oglaf demanded. “It’s an ancient folk cure for alcohol poisoning! Works wonders! And the pee is just one ingredient. Some of the others may be magical hallucinogens, but that side effect only comes out in humans.”
“Talwyn is human!” Amos snapped, pulling her up onto the stool besides Althea’s.
“Really?” Oglaf seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought she was some kind of library demon. Or a demon of annoyance or something.”

2009

NaNoWriMo 2009

James Fox, Middle School Patricia, and I save the world from aliens and rips in the space time continuum with the help(?) of Robert the Bruce and William Marsh Rice. This was also the year I invented the narrative device of including scenes in both “regular” and “middle school fanfiction” form to add extra words. And I never looked back. You get two excerpts from this one because I couldn’t decide!!! The first is sponsored by the True History of William Marsh Rice Campaign:

So it wasn’t the first time I’d met William Marsh Rice, but he was still a commanding presence. For one thing, he was so freaking huge. All the cybernetics weren’t the cause of his giant stature. Some say he was fed Gaston-like proportions of eggs as a child every morning to help him get large. Some say he stopped the Spanish Civil War by glaring at the opposing sides for a few minutes. Some say he is fueled entirely by the academic spirit and grain whisky. Whatever the cause, his reputation as an American folk hero is justly deserved.
He was sitting, leaning against the statue of him, although the statue cannot really be said to be anything but an “artist’s impression”. If the artist were near sighted and working from a drunken memory through a thick fog. The statue was staid and elderly, while Rice himself was a half-machine with the fiendish smile possessed only by someone who owns his own volcano lair. The night was quiet except for his drinking and the slight clicking noises his cybernetics made every so often.
He nodded to James Fox and I. We’d met before and had once been students at his school. These circumstances made him slightly less likely to kill us on sight for little reasons like “too short” or “not crunk enough”, but you never wanted to let your guard down with him.

The second is possibly only a slightly exaggerated version of an actual argument I once had with James Fox:

I took a step away from Alternate Time Line Mr. Snape Darcy James Fox, grabbing Middle School Patricia and taking her with me. “I mean, I wasn’t going to be his BFF or anything,” I said. “I just think he’s nice.”
“He’s an IMPOSTER, Patricia, he’s not NICE,” Current Time Line James Fox insisted. “I don’t expect you to understand. You are blinded by Victorian fashion. AS USUAL.”
“OH MY GOD ONE TIME!” I shouted back. “ONE TIME I almost let you drown in the Thames after Jack the Ripper pushed you off the Tower bridge because I was flirting with H. G. Wells.”
“I was DROWNING!” James Fox repeated. “Like ABOUT TO DIE. In the disgusting sewagey depths of the Thames! All because you have a stupid THING for guys who look like girls!”
“But you DIDN’T DROWN!” I replied. I was sick of getting flack about that H. G. Wells thing. AND he never called me back. Lame. “I saved you!”
“Yeah, eventually!” James Fox said. “My point is, one near death experience because of your weird obsessions is all it takes.”
“So you get complaining rights forever?” I asked. “What about the time you left me to find my way home from SIBERIA all ALONE because you were too busy watching nineties TV on YouTube to come pick me up in your helicopter!”
“Those are only for PIPEMERGENCIES, PATRICIA! I’ve told you!”
“It WAS an emergency!” I pointed out. “I was FREEZING TO DEATH!”
“Whatever, you had a jacket,” he said.
“IT WAS LIKE A MILLION DEGREES BELOW ZERO! Also, BEARS!” I glared at him, the memories of the intense cold and almost complete darkness being brought back by the cold New Hampshirean tundra. Also, bears.
“Okay, maybe that one was my bad,” Current Time Line James Fox admitted.

2008

NaNoWriMo 2008

This was my first year and probably also the hardest to complete! I started with an interesting story about helping Napoleon defend the library from zombies, but it quickly turned into stream of consciousness ramblings. I also may have copied in some cabinet minutes I’d written on very little pretext to up the word count.

I first heard about Pompeii in the fourth grade, and it terrified me. Lots of silly things terrified me in the fourth grade—for instance I spent eight years of my life terrified of Immaculate Conception—but Pompeii I found incredibly creepy. I don’t think I understood exactly how it worked—when the town is covered in ash and preserves everything. Now I realize that the bodies rotted away as normal and the holes left in the ash are what are important—though how they excavate the holes intact I’m still unsure. At the time I thought their bodies somehow lasted, locked in ash, and that these were the, in reality, plaster figures I saw in pictures. The thought of scraping off the ash to the body underneath I found scary. Not to mention the thought of being in a room peopled by ash covered zombies. I think it must have been an early manifestation of my eventual zombie fear.

Yay NaNoWriMo!!!!