Becoming Kringle

I need to start planning my NaNoWriMo book — well, as much as I plan these things. This is what I know so far:

Name: Becoming Kringle

Genre: Romance/cozy suspense

Main Characters: Brent Oberhauser, History grad student/barista. Tall, pale with black-framed glasses; shaved bald because of premature balding; tall and thin.  Looks like a young Moby.
Sunshine Walker, accountant for the philanthropic organization which hides the Secret Society of Santas. Tall, medium dark skin and braids pulled back into a neat knot at the back of her neck. Dresses neatly — professional dress on the job; slacks and shirts off duty. Seldom wears jeans.

Basic plot: There’s the A plot, which is Brent and Sunshine try to uncover blackmail against the SSS which the philanthropic organization covers. There’s a developing romance between Sunshine and Brent. The B plot is that Brent gets drawn into the SSS through having to take over some of Kris Kriegel’s (protagonist of The Kringle Conspiracy) duties.

Outline — I have three chapters but there’s no A plot there, just the romance. Big mistake.

So I have a lot of work to do here.

Plantsing

It’s less than two weeks till NaNoWriMo, and I’m working on motivating myself for another year. I don’t have any new ideas for books, but I’m writing a book I tried to write for NaNo in 2016. It’s light and fluffy — it’s a romantic mystery that involves Santas, and I’m going to have to find time to outline it before I start.

There are, according to NaNos, pantsers and planners. Pantsers are those who write freestyle, by the seat of their pants. Planners are those who come in with a complete outline and follow it carefully.

I’m a plantser. Plantsers have a bare sketch of topics and fill them in freeform, and later edit for sense. We have not so much an outline as a list of chapter headings and a bare idea of what those prompts mean.

It’s a fun way to write for someone who trusts their imagination and trusts they can pick up all the plot holes in the edit.

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For all my Maryville MO readers, NaNoWriMo starts November 1st. You can sign up — you know you want to write a novel! — at nanowrimo.org And if you decide to write a novel, please come drop in to the Board Game Cafe Thursday nights in November (November 1st, 8th, 15th, 29th) from 6-10 PM for a writing space with other writers! 

Interrogating Daniel

I finally got an hour of writing yesterday. Not a good hour — I really need to get a feel for my characters again, because it’s been so long since I visited Whose Hearts are Mountains, given my editing forays …

I sit in the cafe with its bright light, tables and chairs from some old diner, and shelves of board games against the wall. Inspiration fails me; I stare at the letters I typed into my story. I’m bored with the story, bored with the process of writing.

A tall, lightly muscled man with black braided hair and dark skin strolls into the cafe. He is not like anyone else in the cafe; his presence washes the atmosphere with a certain surreality. I watch him order coffee, trade banter with the owner, and amble toward me.

“I’m Daniel,” he says in a resonant baritone. “You must be Lauren.” He reaches his hand out to shake mine. His grip is firm, his hand dwarfs mine.

“I am,” I respond, “but how did you know that?”

His speech is easy, slow like honey. “Because you’re my writer. You wanted to get to know me.” He leans back in his chair as if settling back to tell a story.

“Tell me a little about yourself.”

He chuckles. “You sound like my mother, the anthropologist. She can always get a story out of someone that way.” He pauses, large hand wrapped around the coffee cup. Black coffee, of course. “I’m an Archetype, an immortal, but unauthorized. Earthbound, we call it.” He takes a long sip of coffee. “My mother is the Kiowa Archetype, my father Valor Burris, the Archetype engendered to hold the cultural DNA of the African diaspora. I was born as an experiment, I guess, to create an Archetype Earthside, as it were. We didn’t know about Lilith at the time. She’s been around far longer than I have.”

“An experiment?” I ask. “I thought Archetypes weren’t good at creating new things.”

“Those of us who are Earthbound, whether unauthorized or drawn Earthside like my mother, have spent a lot of time around humans. We’ve picked up a lot of things from them including, I have to admit, coffee and cozy spaces.” He studied the coffee mug, then raised his eyes to mine. “We are babes in the wood compared to humans, who have shorter lives but more extensive folklore, more skills handed down from generation to generation, more identity as part of a whole. Except for the Earthbound, our generations do not interact, and each of us have to earn our limited experience anew. Thus we do not create — but we among the Earthbound are developing abilities to synthesize information, to create. This is frightening to other Archetypes, which is why we’re prohibited from entering InterSpace, the Archetypes’ dwelling place.”

“You’re not allowed in InterSpace?”

“No,” Daniel sighed. “We are Prometheus. We carry fire to our people, and we are punished for it.”

Crazy

I hate the word “crazy”.

When we call someone “crazy”, we are assigning the label to someone’s entire identity,  as if a mental disorder is the entirety of who they are. Their behavior may be crazy, but they themselves are a complex human being who happens to have a disorder.

I am one of those people. I have bipolar 2, and I have to do a careful balancing act to keep episodes of depression and anger/impractical elation at bay. I’m functional, although sometimes I get stressed enough that the symptoms don’t break through.

When people think about the fact that I’m bipolar, I also want them to remember my sense of humor, my drive, my intelligence, my alluring beauty (just kidding), my love of cats, my relationship with words.

If someone uses the word “crazy” around me, I fear that they forget everything but this label. If you’re trying to describe someone who is not functioning well with their disorder, use the word “dysfunctional”.

Using the word “crazy” is a hard habit to break, but a bad habit to keep.

Recovery

“Here, this won’t hurt a bit.”

This is my favorite picture from Missouri Hope’s moulage headquarters. Here I’m demonstrating various techniques on one of our moulage artists who was kind enough to let me bruise and cut her up pretty badly.

I estimated from yesterday’s stats — 180 roleplayers in three shifts, 4-6 moulage artists per shift — that boils down to 7-10 roleplayer moulages per person per hour.

I haven’t totally recovered yet. I feel like I have jet lag although I haven’t gone anywhere — except to the mythical country of Atlantica, torn by tensions between north and south, crippled by an earthquake and its aftermath. A country I helped create.

Life will be back to normal, back to writing, in a day or so, when I find my feet on firm ground and arrive home again.

Another year of Missouri Hope in the books.

Role players: 185

Amateur moulage artists: 6

Scenarios: Earthquake, car bomb, refugee camp, water rescue, beatings by marauding gangs.
Injuries: impalements, burns, disembowelments, cuts, scrapes, plucked out eye, bruises, lacerations, broken bones, drowning, cholera, old injuries badly treated.

Real world emergencies at the moulage headquarters: 0

I’d say we had a successful Missouri Hope at the moulage building.

Moulage mode

I can’t talk about writing today, because my brain is completely into Moulage Mode.

I walk around the house looking for random objects that look like they’d make good impalements.

I have a gallon and a half of fresh fake blood by the basement door and I wonder if it’s enough.

I have gone through two and a half pounds of powdered plain gelatin and I wish I had more.

I was told to prepare for lots of impalements. I have prepared 28 impalement prosthetics thus far.

Unflavored gelatin smells like burnt hair. My house smells like burnt hair.

I am dreaming third-degree burns.

I love this.

I’ll write when I get time. It’s going to be an intense couple of days moulaging for the biggest exercise that Consortium for Humanitarian Service in Education holds.

Naptime

What I could use right now is a good nap.

I think it’s the change in the seasons, even though it’s supposed to get up to 85 degrees today. Or maybe it’s because midterms are coming up, or Missouri Hope is coming up, or …

I am falling asleep at the computer while I type.

I miss my morning naps from kindergarten, when we put rugs on the floor. I didn’t nap back then, instead staring up at the bare bulb in the hallway outside the door, and imagining conversations with it. If I had known that my future would be bereft of morning naps, I would have taken advantage of the time and slept.

Napping, especially in the middle of the day, is oddly satisfying, Thoughts of what needs to be done retreat temporarily and comfort seeps into my bones. My mind wanders into dreams of sorts, and then shuts off. Then I wake up 20 minutes later with my mind less cluttered and my body rested, and it’s time to enter the fray again.

I really need a nap right now.