Fast Fiction

I took off from work about 30 minutes early and headed over to Sabor y Cultura for my final session.

I had very little clue how I was goign to bring this thing to a close within 5,000 words, but I think part of the lesson of NaNoWriMo is giving up on those plans that one might have at the beginning of the month. I might have though that I was going to write a road trip, a dark comedy about a poor downtrodden fellow who never gets a break.

What I ended up writing is a novel that never quite gets there. I throw a lot of crap at Daniel and he seems to bear it well, but not as well as I thought he would (what do I know?). But that’s okay, it provides drama.

So, what was supposed to be a story of Daniel, who loses his family in a series of terrible tragedies that he seems unable to prevent or mitigate yet he maintains a sort of loose life affirming demeanor. He works as a sort of character/production assistant on a wee-hours-of-the-morning TV show. The morning that he loses his latest apartment in a house fire (and manages to save the landlady from certain death) he ends up getting the assignment that will promote him to the next level. He’s going to be the remote producer for a “road trip” where he is to pick up a family (brother from St. Louis and parents from South Carolina), document their trip and then return them to Pittsburgh for a reunion/re-enactment for a Christmas tree cutting.

What ends up happening is that Daniel hasn’t borne these tragedies as well as I thought he would. He’s much moodier than I’d thought he’d be, but luckily the cameraman I sent him on this trip with also happens to have gotten copious therapy for his traumas during the first Gulf war. He guides Daniel through accepting his inability to move past his inability to change anything. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I abandoned the road trip when they got to St. Louis, had them turn around and come back. Happy ending.

time…...running tally….words…words/minute
6:00 PM…....45,101….......0…....0
6:15 PM…....45,772….....671…...44.73
6:30 PM…....46,427….....655…...43.67
6:45 PM…....47,069….....642…...42.80
7:00 PM…....47,634….....565…...37.67
7:15 PM…....48,224….....590…...39.33
7:30 PM…....48,835….....611…...40.73
7:45 PM…....49,516….....681…...45.40
8:00 PM…....50,137….....621…...41.40
8:15 PM…....50,758….....621…...41.40
8:27 PM…....51,178….....420…...35.00

25 hours 29 minutes of writing
33.47 words per minute average
5,118 words per session
51,178 words total

Anyway, it’s all done. My worst novel to date.