Tuesday, October 31
Zero days to go
It feels like Christmas eve and New Year's eve all wrapped into one. Well, it is All Hallow's eve, after all, so there's plenty of excitement around, but I'm talking about the big crazy/ambitious NaNoWriMo, which starts in less than four hours here on The Edge of Nowhere time zone.
We happen to be dog-sitting my in-laws's two canines as they (the in-laws, not their dogs) have just jetted off to Europe for a two-week river cruise, so it's a madhouse here trying to answer the door for the trick-or-treaters with five dogs (ages 1 to 14, weights 32 to 80 pounds) barking their fool heads off. Plus, our boy C is living-room-couch-bound recovering from oral surgery yesterday to remove his wisdom teeth, so we're trying and failing to keep things kind of calm around here. We've put a candy bowl outside by the pumpkins with a note. A very straightfoward note: please take one piece. And yet, nearly every kid in his excitement to get candy walks right past the candy bowl and jabs the door bell, which sets off the fool-headed dogs barking like banshees again. We're tempted to change to the note to say, "If you can read this, please take one piece of candy... and stay away from the freakin' door bell" but instead we've just blown out the candles, turned off the lights and are now hiding in the back half of the house, listening to creepy organ music on the local public radio station.
So you'll find posts below where I've pasted a couple of background pieces for my NaNo novel, which is going to have a working title of "TLA Corp." or maybe "TLA Inc." or maybe just "TLA." It revolves around TLA, a privately held firm. Remember? An unhinged workplace comedy? Over-the-top satire? Etc. etc. Last night at Margie's I set up the text file on my laptop, and wrote two sentences, about 25 words, which I'll delete tomorrow night and retype so I can count them for real.
I'm still not sure where this story is going, besides it featuring a reclusive dot-com billionaire who hires a failed novelist (who had one hit 20 years ago, which the dot-com billionaire read and loves and which changed his life) but who for the last couple of decades as been sinking in failed screenplays out in LA. So the billionaire will offer the failed novelist a job at his company, TLA, to come write its history, or to write stories about it, or to do something I haven't quite settled on and, more importantly, to act as his spy inside the company walls. See, the billionaire is so reclusive, he hasn't and won't publicly admit he owns the company. Sure, there are rumors he's associated with it somehow, but it's all mysterious and shrouded in rumor and innuendo.
So the failed novelist takes the job, and finds himself working on some sort of special projects team, who have their own work, but also are hot on the trail of the reclusive billionaire. This is where it all gets a little murky, so I suppose as usual I'll have to write ten or twelve thousand words to see where its headed. But I see this team of smart, wacky, weird and dedicated people as the core of the novel, with the story spinning around these six or eight or ten people.
Which all begins tomorrow: Zero days to go.
We happen to be dog-sitting my in-laws's two canines as they (the in-laws, not their dogs) have just jetted off to Europe for a two-week river cruise, so it's a madhouse here trying to answer the door for the trick-or-treaters with five dogs (ages 1 to 14, weights 32 to 80 pounds) barking their fool heads off. Plus, our boy C is living-room-couch-bound recovering from oral surgery yesterday to remove his wisdom teeth, so we're trying and failing to keep things kind of calm around here. We've put a candy bowl outside by the pumpkins with a note. A very straightfoward note: please take one piece. And yet, nearly every kid in his excitement to get candy walks right past the candy bowl and jabs the door bell, which sets off the fool-headed dogs barking like banshees again. We're tempted to change to the note to say, "If you can read this, please take one piece of candy... and stay away from the freakin' door bell" but instead we've just blown out the candles, turned off the lights and are now hiding in the back half of the house, listening to creepy organ music on the local public radio station.
So you'll find posts below where I've pasted a couple of background pieces for my NaNo novel, which is going to have a working title of "TLA Corp." or maybe "TLA Inc." or maybe just "TLA." It revolves around TLA, a privately held firm. Remember? An unhinged workplace comedy? Over-the-top satire? Etc. etc. Last night at Margie's I set up the text file on my laptop, and wrote two sentences, about 25 words, which I'll delete tomorrow night and retype so I can count them for real.
I'm still not sure where this story is going, besides it featuring a reclusive dot-com billionaire who hires a failed novelist (who had one hit 20 years ago, which the dot-com billionaire read and loves and which changed his life) but who for the last couple of decades as been sinking in failed screenplays out in LA. So the billionaire will offer the failed novelist a job at his company, TLA, to come write its history, or to write stories about it, or to do something I haven't quite settled on and, more importantly, to act as his spy inside the company walls. See, the billionaire is so reclusive, he hasn't and won't publicly admit he owns the company. Sure, there are rumors he's associated with it somehow, but it's all mysterious and shrouded in rumor and innuendo.
So the failed novelist takes the job, and finds himself working on some sort of special projects team, who have their own work, but also are hot on the trail of the reclusive billionaire. This is where it all gets a little murky, so I suppose as usual I'll have to write ten or twelve thousand words to see where its headed. But I see this team of smart, wacky, weird and dedicated people as the core of the novel, with the story spinning around these six or eight or ten people.
Which all begins tomorrow: Zero days to go.
