An Excerpt: A Story about Stories

Day 6 of NaNoWriMo, and I want to get at least 2000 words in before I have to go to work, because it’s a long day and I need to get started soon. I’m at 17,000 words, up 7.000 words, so if I don’t get all the words in today, I’m okay.

An excerpt (remember this is rough draft time). In effect, what I’m writing is a story about a story:

As I drove down the highway, I thought about Hakeem’s and Bosco’s words — I couldn’t help but laugh at those two young men wanting to — what? Offer themselves up as husbands? Be my protectors? I seldom picked up on those kinds of currents. As role models, my parents gave me the gift of watching their near-perfect relationship, perfect except for my father’s belief that my mother kept a secret he couldn’t crack. However, I didn’t seem to fall for the occasional men who took me out for coffee and complimented me. I literally didn’t understand the process of “I take you out for dinner, you have sex with me.”

From there, I thought about Sonya’s words. “If you’re looking for the Alvar, you’ll have to look in the worst places.” Wasn’t that always the case with fairy tales? The Hobbits had to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom, a raging volcano. Little Red Riding Hood had to go through a dark forest and visit the wolf to pass through menarche, symbolized by the red hood. Would my quest follow the parameters of the Hero’s Quest?

I was not a hero. I was an academic without a job and without any useful skills except the ability to crack Schmidt locks — and other locks, albeit with the help of a lock pick. I was an anthropologist searching for the inevitable, unpublishable study, a study of the origins of a mythical people. If the Alvar actually existed, what would I do if I found them? If they didn’t exist and I found the human origin of the tale as if it was an urban legend, where would I publish my findings?

Did I chase the legend simply because my mother once told it to me in a bedtime story?

I pulled myself back to reality and saw a roadblock up ahead, just before Eau Claire. I slammed on my brakes, nearly skidding as I approached the barricade with three men, all armed with semiautomatic machine guns. When one of them walked up to me, his hand on the strap of the gun slung over his shoulder, I rolled down my window, hands shaking. “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, trying to school my voice into calmness.

“Your papers,” the man, with the hard voice and face of the military, held out his hand.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 14.0px ‘Courier New’}

Of course I had identity papers. My parents had warned me that, if I had to bug out of town, that I needed at least a copy of my birth certificate and my drivers’ license. I had not been asked for them before this moment, and I wondered if I had hit a border to a newly formed country.

*******
May you find wonder in your day.

PS: The Words Are Important

I had just enough words left in my mind for a poem:

Just words,
all I have to offer
in the darkling storm.

You, my stranger,
read the words as rain
from a storm you cannot touch.

To you, the story
is that you found the words
when no one else noticed,

the words only important
when they crawled into you,
and became fluttering birds.

Big Audacious Goal part 2

I told myself I wouldn’t post today until after I got my other 4000 words written for the weekend. It’s 10:40 AM Chicago time, and I’ve completed my word assignment. Yippee! Yahoo! Oh Boy! Time to rest!

As I mentioned yesterday, writing 4000 words was onerous. It felt like crawling down the street with three dead moose tied to my waist and the goal of reaching Pumpkin Center ten miles down the road. Without knee pads. And the moose has been dead for a while.

I don’t know why yesterday was so difficult — except that I had put up a psychological barrier of writing 1000 words a day more than I’d been writing. Today, I woke up knowing that I had written 4000 words the day before, so I didn’t feel the burden.

I am not writing any more today. As it is, I dream nothing but this book for the moment.

Thanks for following me.

Big Audacious Goal reached for today.

Officially at 13,000 words (give or take a few!) One quarter of the way through!

*******

Afterward, I dreamed that my dad yelled that I had written the story all wrong and that the aftermath of the collapse on Duluth, MN would look nothing like I’d written it. I fled to the bathroom, and tried to put makeup on for some high school banquet I was about to be late for. I had put on skin correctors of different colors for different parts of my face, except they were glossy and glittery in patriotic red and blue and would not smooth in.

I walked into my room, and clicked the mouse on my computer, reading the notes I had taken when I interviewed a Texas secessionist for my story. I remembered standing on the loading dock as he stood there, semiautomatic rifle slung across his back, explaining that the patriots needed to get the country back from the foreigners. I wrote down the words, sickened.

I tried to dress as quickly as possible, sensing that I would never arrive at the banquet that I would be honored at.

I woke up, reminding myself that the words are important and wondering if I was ever going to get them out in an order that would compel people to read them.

Update on Big Audacious Goals

First 2000 words today — done.

Second 2000 words — OMG, I’m never going to make it! (*scrolls through map*) Where is she going to cross the Canadian border at, International Falls or Fort Frances? When is she going to start noticing the changes in US culture since the collapse? Why the HELL is she going straight into the Jungle? My brain HURTS!

I guess it’s going ok.

Quick post — Big Audacious Goals

Every now and then, it’s good to have a Big Audacious Goal, but only if you have a Big Audacious Plan to go with it. Goals without plans are called … wishes. And I’d rather fail at a goal and learn from the failure than wish about it for the rest of my life.

Goals should be SMART, according to the planning experts. That stands for Specific, Manageable, Action-oriented, Reasonable, and Time-bound. Writing plans can be as elaborate as an outline that includes every chapter of every scene, or as simple as “I will spend two hours in the morning typing whatever comes out.” Either works, because in their own ways, they’re Specific, Manageable, Action-Oriented, Reasonable, and Time-Based.

Big Audacious Goals have those parameters as well, but also stretch our definition of Reasonable. NaNoWriMo, for example, sets a Big Audacious Goal of 50,000 words in a month. That’s reasonable at 1,667 words a day, or approximately 2-3 hours a day, but it’s more than a new participant has likely ever written in a day, which makes it a BAG.

My Big Audacious Goal for this weekend will be to write 4000-word days today and tomorrow. The amount is very specific, and I’ll know when I reach it. It’s manageable on a weekend for someone like me who hasn’t gotten anything else planned and whose husband will be putting on a big pot of 13-bean-soup on the stove. The goal is action-oriented — write and write and write. Although that’s a lot of words, I have written 3000 words/day for the last three despite having to go to work, so it’s a reasonable stretch goal. And it’s time-based — 4000 words today, 4000 words tomorrow.

I might not make it. It won’t be the end of the world if I do. But I’m motivated by the way this 30-year-old idea is turning out, and an 8000-word weekend will get me 1/3 of the way toward the goal in 5 days!

Wish me luck!

PS: Heart as Large as an Autumn Moon.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m an expert at this. I have not yet found an agent or gotten published. I just consider this blog a way to communicate with people, let people read my stuff, and teach myself by teaching others. That being said, the alternative name for this blog was “The Words are Important”. I chose the name “Words Like Me” because of the pun in English — “Do the words like me or ARE they like me?” (Both, I think).

Words are my way of expressing myself, because my voice has grown rusty, I have pretty noticeable coordination problems at times, and my ability to draw improved till fifth grade and then stopped. I am from a creative family — in fact, I sometimes think I am the least talented. My mother designed embroidery projects that became poster art and painted Easter eggs with flowers. My father designed projects; the china cabinet he made me out of an old wooden crate and panes from our 100-year-old house is my most prized possession. My sister does photography and my mother told me repeatedly that she wrote better than I did. My youngest niece has considerable graphic talent.

I feel the need to express myself. I had a childhood of emotional and sexual abuse and bullying. I once had a classmate try to run my boyfriend and I over with a car. I was an easy victim because I was emotionally sensitive and socially awkward. I survived because I have uncanny emotional strength, not because it wasn’t all that bad. I’m still socially awkward at times and emotionally sensitive, but I get away with it because I’m an adult now. And because it provides the fuel for me to write.

My writing includes themes of overcoming dystopia through human resilience, finding beauty in people around me, and moods, moods, and moods. I want you to read these. If I write these things, I do so because I wear my heart on the outside.

I want to know you. I want to know you if you write; I want to know you if you don’t write. I want to watch your creativity, even if you don’t think you’re creative. I want you to critique me (honestly) or just say “Hi”! I want you to take my words and tuck them into your heart and go out and love one another.

My heart is large enough for new family members. If you want to be family, let me know.

Day 3 Nano — Plantsing Away (with story segment)

I think I remember telling people I’m a Plantser in NaNo parlance — I plan, but only so far, using a set of scene synopses instead of a full outline. This is easy to do in Scrivener, which uses a notecard schema for chapter and scene synopses.

When writing, even at 2000 words a day, I’m restructuring my outline by adding and moving those scenario cards. Yesterday, I realized that NOTHING plotwise was happening between visiting The Jungle, a geographical entity which includes Chicago and Detroit, and Salt Lake City. That’s hundreds of miles, folks. 1400 miles to be exact. I’m sure I could skip over that segment of flyover country, but given that one of the themes of the story is self-discovery (“It’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ meets ‘North by Northwest!’) I easily could give my protagonist a few pertinent experiences there. I’ve added a chapter — actually, two half-chapters — to facilitate some adventures here.

I do minor editing on spelling and grammar in the writing stage, but don’t get too bent out of shape about it, because that’s not the idea of the writing stage. The idea is to get a first draft (or in the case of NaNo, half a first draft in a month).

OOPS — back to writing!

*********
Today’s excerpt, written yesterday:

I considered my options for getting off-campus. There was a riot outside the building and my captors within. I didn’t believe the police, or the Guard who had joined them, would be any more sparing of bullets than my captors had been.

The steam tunnel doors hung open. I had heard about the legendary steam tunnel system — maps of the tunnels existed, handed down and providing adventures to generations of students who could withstand the heat. The cameras that protected students from heatstroke no longer functioned, so the risk was higher than in bygone eras. I taught all of this in Intro to Anthropology each year.

I, however, did not have a map, and imagined myself wandering through the tunnels, some of which were low enough that the explorer had to crawl through. There were rumors of dead ends and caved-in sections — wait. Somewhere in my notes, up in my office, I had documentation of a Charles DeWitt who had, in 2020, painted guide signs in glow-in-the dark paint. All I needed was a flashlight, which I found on a hardhat by the tunnel doors. I flipped the switch; the light functioned.

Now, a destination. I thought about where I was, Hartley Hall, at the north central point of the Quad. My destination was under the Quad to Alfred Wyndham Lab, the science building nearest the east gate. I knew that the tunnel would be anything but straight, given how the tunnels branched out to serve all the buildings.

What I would need besides the light? I took a long drink from the utility sink in the corner and relieved myself in a dank, muddy corner — I didn’t care about anything but being safe. What else — lock picks. I didn’t have lockpicks in case any doors were locked. Lockpicks — I searched for the smallest bladed screwdrivers I could find, precision screwdrivers, which I found in a large drawer on a workbench labeled SHOP. I swiped the two smallest screwdrivers and a diamond file so I could file them thin if needed. My father, the cryptographer, had taught me how to disable locks from simple tumbler locks to advanced cryptobiometric ones.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px; font: 13.0px ‘Courier New’}

Then I charged through the doors into the unknown.

Facing the inevitable plot glitch

I’m a morning person. When I’m in the middle of writing a novel, I must stew over it in my sleep, because I wake up with insights on the plot. This morning, the insight was that I had outlined a major plausibility problem that will have to be fixed.

The problem is as follows: The commune, Hearts are Mountains, faces a major threat on their horizon, the neighboring country of Free White State. FWS was founded during The Fragmentation by idealogues among white supremacist groups and nationalist ultra-conservative Christian groups, who had in commonality a desire to create a “pure” state. Their territory comprises a good portion of what used to be the Pacific Northwest states in the former US and borders the high desert where the commune resides underground (literally).

One of the main characters, William, works as a border guard for Free White State — and a spy for Hearts are Mountains. He appears to be a Native American mix; however, he passes well for white such that living and working in Free White State isn’t a problem for him.

Anna (the protagonist) and Daniel (from Hearts are Mountains) visit William for intel. At least that’s how I wrote the outline. The problem is that Daniel appears as a black/Native American mix. That’s going to get him, maybe the three of them, killed in Free White State. A shortened novel, and not an ending I’d wish to write.

I puzzled over this dilemma this morning and realized: William is an Archetype. Archetypes can teleport! (At least they could over the past four books I’d written about them.) He could teleport to Hearts are Mountains without any of the indoor or outdoor surveillance catching him just by crawling into a shed.

Problem solved!

A good start to my NaNo novel —

“Once upon a time, there were beings who looked like people, only they weren’t the people you see every day. For one, they were stronger than ordinary people, and they lived a lot longer than ordinary people do. They existed to help people understand who they were and where they came from. By the few who knew them, they were called Ancestors, Archetypes, or sometimes Alvar.

“They lived in a realm far away, yet as close as a thought. In this realm, they existed rather than lived, mere vessels for the ancient memories they held. Some of them tired of this passive role, and wanted to go Earthside to see these people they represented. So they jumped to Earthside, which was only a thought away, defying their Oldest. These Alvar occasionally chose to bring children into the world, which defied their Oldest to a degree that could not be forgiven. Of those Alvar were born the Earthed Alvar, who lived among people.

“There was one of the Alvar who was born of the male Kiowa Alvar and a female Alvar of legend, Lilith. They left him (for Alvar were born full-grown) with the Kiowa to learn about them and to help them. All he remembered of his birth was that two people, his parents, told him he was special and that he was never to give it away to anyone.

“The Kiowa shaman named him “Old Man” even though he looked young, and as time passed, he did not age as the others did. Eventually, the band felt frightened of him because of his lack of aging, and he left to join other bands of the First People to hide his true age. He understood that others grew old and died, and he didn’t understand why he didn’t. He also wondered why he had never been young like the babies born to the Kiowa.

“Eventually, he was kidnapped by evil people who put him in chains, people who didn’t realize he was Alvar, but he escaped by jumping – something he had forgotten he could do – back to the place where the Kiowa, his original people, banded. They had gone away, but he became a cowboy, moving from place to place and job to job so that his true nature – which he didn’t understand – wouldn’t be detected.

“He lived like that for years, and finally found himself at a place of learning, so he could discover who he was. He fell in love with a woman named Allie, who looked at him as if she knew him, and asked him lots of questions that tipped close to uncovering his secret. One day, Allie took him to talk to their professor, and she, Mari, told Will that she was different in the way he was. Mari told Will and Allie about the Alvar, and Allie grew to love him even though he was not like her.

“One day, they made a child, born fully grown as children of Alvar and humans were born. All of the pain of Will’s past washed over him at the sign of his offspring, and his mind shattered. He disappeared before Mari or Allie could stop him. Allie never stopped loving him, or the child they had together, and she surrounded that child with all the love she could muster, love enough for two.”

“Mom,” I groused, “that’s not a bedtime story for a child – that’s an anthropological treatise.” I wasn’t joking – My mother, Alice Schmidt, was a preeminent anthropologist who studied Plains cultures at the arrival of white people. The story went that she had been trained by the famed Native American anthropologist MariJo Ettner, who disappeared ten years before and left her research notes to my mother. Alice Schmidt disappeared soon after, when my dad retired, and an anthropologist named Elaine Smith was hired halfway across the country from where Alice and her husband disappeared. I remember the safe house when we were in transition to our new identities, and the day I became Annie Smith.

“What do you expect?” my mother asked, her green eyes laughing. “You ask an anthropologist to tell a bedtime story, and you get anthropology. If you told a bedtime story, it would be a fable about an encrypted ghost that terrorized hackers.” Mom, of course, was right – not only because I had chosen to become a sociologist specializing in urban legends, but because I was my father’s daughter – and my father had been, before his retirement, a key government encryption expert. In other words, his programs were the ghost in the system.

“So that’s the bedtime story you told me?” I chided, hiding the fact that I couldn’t remember my childhood once again.

“It was the best I could do,” Mom shrugged, then looked at me searchingly, as she often did. My dad strolled in – although I was my father’s daughter, I didn’t share his blond hair and blue eyes. My looks came from my mother – dark wavy hair and pale skin and freckles. “I packed up your car,” he sighed. “Could you pack more stuff next time so I actually get a workout?”

“What, and give up my life as a pauper?” I snorted, and hugged my father, who came to just above my chin. I hugged my mother, plump where I was slender. I studied their faces, which looked just a little older, just a bit more worn, than my first memories of them fifteen years before.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 8.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 37.1px; font: 13.0px ‘Courier New’}

It was the last time I would see them. Three months later, they were murdered by assailants unknown.