Cast Out of Eden (Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge)

Comfort means different things to different people in the real world, and it should mean different things to different fictional characters, too.

For Roger Pierce, my protagonist in Roger and the Meteor Mass, nothing is so much a comfort and refuge as a challenging book, with a quiet place to read it. 

Roger is the kind of reader who devoured Dumas in second grade, fell in love with Heinlein and Blish in third grade, and discovered algebra by reading his father's college textbooks when his classmates were struggling with long division and fractions. 

Roger's book-centric comfort zone informs my piece for the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge this week:

November 11, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write about a place of comfort that is a refuge. Have fun with it, like a pillow fight between best friends at a slumber party or newlyweds in search of the perfect mattress. Or you can go dark and write about unusual comforts, like a bad habit or a padded cell. Play with the idea of comfort and refuge.

The flash will go into my NaNovel as a description, a snapshot of why Roger is the "stranger child." 

I have written before about why Roger is such a familiar persona for me. He is based in some part on what I have learned in helping Kenneth Cummings write his memoirs. This fictional flash is rolled together from two incidents in Cummings' real history. In one, he was actually barred from reading in the library during recess at his grade school. The other comes from a separate conversation with a high school counselor about what constituted his "peer group."

Word Count: 1952 Day 16 and 35059 Total

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Cast Out of Eden

Roger was accustomed to sparse selections in school libraries, where "Wind in the Willows" and "Onion John" were considered challenging reads.

In Meteor, donated college textbooks and novels, plus a set of "Great Books of the Western World," filled one whole stack. They could be read in-library, but never checked out. For a month, he was in paradise, reading during every free period.

One day as he lunched with Newton's Principia Mathematica, he was rousted by the principal. "You should spend your time socializing with your peers!"

"But I was!" His protests ignored, he was barred from the library.

Getting Uncomfortable

There they are, your creations. Those folks who reside in your head, whose lives inform the words you are grinding out, 30, 300 or 3000 a day in November. It's natural to dislike taking them somewhere dark or nasty.

Unless you're writing a horror story, of course. Horror writers embrace that sort of thing, I know. I've written several novels in the genre.

The sad truth, though, is that to make an interesting story, you have to willing to make your protagonist uncomfortable at least. Maybe his dog doesn't have to die, so to speak, but it should at least catch a thorn in its paw.

Think about the novels you've read recently. For me, The Martian by Andy Weir is an excellent example of the point. Imagine the protagonist, Mark, left behind alone on Mars, but with full Internet connection, four years worth of food and beverages, functional heaters, all his favorite music and books. In other words, living in total comfort. Would that novel have made the best-seller list? Would you be eager to read it, then go see that movie?

It is the string of problems Mark solves so beautifully, the disasters that overtake him one after the other, the fear that despite his valiant efforts he will still die alone on Mars: that conflict drives the story. That is what makes it compelling.

For another example, consider The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The obvious conflict in that trilogy is the Games. But consider the lives of the people in the Districts. Their suffering at home makes a counterpoint to that of the tributes in the Games, and all are layered against the anguish of the triangle of lovers, Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. The power of these stories is in that suffering.

Does that mean your story must concern global pain or ultimate isolation to succeed? Of course not! Make your characters uncomfortable enough to drive them to take action where they might otherwise want to coast along. Give them the incentive to grow in order to escape or solve their problems.

And a little secret: The problem-setup-and-solution scenes are easy to write. Nothing breaks through a blockage like impending doom. 

Or maybe just a thorn in a paw...

Word Count: 3529 Day 8 and 24435 Total

Handling the Inner Editor

I have a persistent inner editor (PIE). Obnoxious, really loud, nit-picking. Every annoying trait you can think of is waiting in my head to criticize whatever I write.

To be fair, it's not just my own writing that comes under fire. I rarely get through reading a novel any more without my PIE debating the author: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Over the course of several NaNoWriMo Novembers, I have discovered a few tricks that work for me. They don't silence the PIE, but they do serve to distract it so I can get on with the first-draft process of producing words that drive the story onward.

Mark and Go

I'm trying to get my protagonist out the door and on his journey of discovery, but my PIE wants to critique the single sentence that describes this movement:

He called from the door into the garage that opened into the front hall at the bottom of the stairs.

Yes, that sentence is not perfect. If I let it, the PIE will have me swapping words into a different order, maybe even breaking it into two sentences. Arghh! So I mollify the PIE with a note, telling us both I sincerely intend to come back and fix this in revision:

&&AWK:He called from the door into the garage that opened into the front hall at the bottom of the stairs.

Just like that, I can move on.

TBN #Later

I usually don't have a problem with character names, even when I'm pantsing. But once in a while, I know everything about a new actor in the story except a good name for him. When that happens, instead of abandoning the story to hunt around for inspiration, I name him "Tbn #Later" (To Be Named Later). 

I then use this name like any other: 

    Roger Pierce was surprised to see the athlete at the end of the bench, crayon in hand, intently coloring in a kid's book. His tongue projected slightly as he focused. "Who's that?" Roger prodded Joanna with his elbow and pointed as discretely as possible.
   "Oh, that's Tbn #Later," she answered with a little giggle. "Tbn's a good player, but he gets really anxious until he's in the game. He had an amazing fit one time when Coach kept him out most of the first half. Chewed off all his nails, broke out in hives... supposedly the coloring keeps his nerves steady."
   "You're kidding!" Roger said.
   "Yeah, I'm kidding. His dad donated the team uniforms the year he was a freshman, so they put him on the team. #Later plays like a klutz, but they don't have a full bench in Meteor, so they keep him on. He doesn't get into the game very often."

When it's time to revise—even during November if a name just comes to me from the blue—I can Search-and-Replace "Tbn" for the new first name, "#Later" for the last.

Bottom Line

Don't let the editor in your head distract you from churning out that first draft—but do let it do its job a little as you write. You're on the same team, after all.

You're just giving the PIE a coloring book to keep it occupied...

Word Count: 2523 Day 8 and 20906 Total

Antagonists Are Important

Roger and the collected siblings of the Meteor Mass are the main characters of my novel, but they all share a certain oddness. Any story needs conflict, and in Meteor that comes in the shape of a common, garden-variety bully named Darrell Harb.

I've already shared Roger's first glimpse of Harb as the Slurpee thief in Brain Freeze. Now here's their next interaction when Roger heads to Meteor High School for his first day as an incoming freshman:

    Roger was happy to walk onto the high-school grounds with the Mass girls. Perhaps the local protection would help him avoid any oddball behavior for a few days. The Mass twins and Paula May would be freshmen this year too, and might even have classes with him. Gary Mass was already inside; he had AP classes that met at 6 am each day. Roger waved at Jack and Mikey, whose middle school was farther down the street, then ducked through the open gate behind the girls.
    Just inside the school fence, they pulled up short. A folding table had been set up across the sidewalk. Older students flowed around it to either side, but the three boys manning the table stopped the new freshmen. Roger recognized Darrell Harb from the drugstore Slurpee theft. The others were new to him.
    Harb pointed at a sign taped to the front of the table. "Name our band," he proclaimed, "and win a prize!" The wildly-misspelled, hand-lettered banner read 'Howling Cayotees Are No More — $10 prize if You're Name Chosen.'
    In smaller letters across the bottom of the banner, Roger read, '$1 entry fee.' He peeked at the list of names that had been selected, and swiftly counted them. Forty or more were listed on the top page, and it looked like another full page — maybe two — lay beneath that.
    "So you take in the entry fee, and pay out $10 reward to one entrant? Where does the rest of the money go?" 
    Harb's face began to darken, but one of the other boys stepped in between them. "I'm Ernie Ortiz, "E.T." for short, and that's Glen Worrell. We're all in the band, and we want to raise enough to change the graphics on our drum set and buy band jackets. But it's cool, you don't have to enter if you don't want."
    "Wrong, E.T., he's a freshman. They have to enter. The Mormon Mass too. We want a good selection of names to pick from." Darrell Harb was insistent, spreading his arms wide to prevent Julia from passing the table. 
    Her twin laid a dollar down on the table. "How about 'Brain Freeze'?" She smiled sweetly, and Julia laughed when the Ortiz boy and Glen Worrell both said, "Cool!" in chorus. Harb's face got even redder.
    "No, I got it, I got it! The best name ever." Roger dug four quarters out of his back pocket and dropped them on top of Joanna's dollar bill. "You should call the band 'House Of War.' H-O-W for short." He looked at the tight scowl on Darrell's brow, and quickly changed his mind about sharing the whole reason behind his entry. "H-O-W," he said again, "Harb-Ortiz-Worrell. House-Of-War."
    Harb was stunned. The name was perfect — his name was first. Glen's name was last, but 'Worrell' was evoked with 'War', and he knew E.T. wouldn't mind going along with the middle billing. And it sounded way cool.
    "Come on, man, you know that's gotta be our new name!" His band-mates were as enthusiastic as he expected.
    Darrell conceded reluctantly. "Okay, bell's gonna ring in a minute anyway. Although I did kinda like 'Thunder Makers' ..."
    "That's as bad as... What was it?" Ernie flipped the top page up and read with his finger next to an entry, "'Arthurian Legend'." He and Glen clapped out a high-five and chest-bump.
    "Okay! okay!" Darrell counted out ten damply wrinkled ones from his pocket, handing them to Roger. "What's your name, frosh?" His tone was sour and vaguely threatening.
    Roger was rescued by the bell and the Mass girls, who drew him around to the opposite end of the table from Darrell, and onward to the school building.
    The freshmen were directed by signs just inside the door to go to the gym auditorium for first period. Bracketed by the twins, Roger was challenged by Paula May to explain himself. "You thought that name was suitable for more reason than just the boys' initials. I could tell from the way you proposed it."
    "You're right," Roger confessed. "But I had an insight to explain it to them as being from the initials. See, the first time I heard Harb's name, it made me think of 'dar al Harb,' the 'House of War' from Islam. I didn't know he was in a band. And I never heard the other guys' names before this morning."
    The Mass girls and Roger climbed up into the bleachers that had been pulled out to make an 'auditorium' of the gym, and settled next to a small clutch of confused-looking teenagers. "How do you know about Islam?" Paula May was still probing his band-name choice. "Your last school have a class in it?"

    A stout woman in a business suit with a scarf was walking across the gym floor toward the group, her sturdy shoes squeaking on the polished wood. Roger read 'principal' from her clothing, so he whispered his response to Paula May's question. "I read it somewhere, that's all. Now, shhh!"

This sets up the coming conflict between the protagonist, Roger, and the antagonist, Darrell, on several levels, and makes it obvious that Harb's antagonism is not specific to Roger, but is shared widely with anyone he contacts. He's an angry kid, all right.

But it's also important to show the antagonist's internal motivation, remembering that no one sees themselves as the villain of their own story. What makes Harb so angry? How does he see his own behavior? Discovering this, and understanding the bully's behavior in that light, is part of Roger's character development.

Remember the questions Roger must answer: 

Roger has to face his own strange nature and make a momentous decision. Can he become ordinary? Does he even want to try?

I see the antagonist as a warped mirror in which Roger sees one aspect of being "ordinary." At least, that's where I want to take him in this novel.

Word Count: 5481 DoubleUpDay 7 (3034 in Second Session) and 18379 Total

Doubling Up

There are lots of ways to do it. 

You can type on an electronic keyboard, or a manual machine. You can scratch on paper with a mechanical pencil, or generate flowing loops of cursive letters in a notebook with an elegant fountain pen. You can uncap your Bic or sharpen your Staedler or your No. 2 Ticonderoga.

Whatever tool you use, the words must flow from you, or else remain forever unknown. The novel is there, inside you, and its only way into the world is through your writing.

We tell ourselves there are more important things to do right now than write. That we still have three whole weeks before the end of November, but only one Saturday in a weekend. We pet the cat or walk the dog, we study or watch TV or check the Twitter feed or open a book someone else wrote, while the novel remains trapped.

The challenge today is to set aside whatever other thing it is that stands in the way of writing, open the floodgates, and let the words flow from you into the world. Double-up! Don't let yourself stop until you done twice as much as any previous day—or more. You can do it.

My "normal" pace so far has been to write an average of 2500 words a day—not counting the disaster of yesterday's battle with Internet connectivity, which isn't "normal" by any definition of the word. My personal goal today is thus 5000 words. My plan is to double up my writing sessions, ignoring all other uses of my time in favor of letting the words flow.

Word sprints may work for you—the NaNo team has some national sprints set up, and your regional group may have more. There are local write-ins galore. You can challenge your writing buddies to meet goals, or promise publicly to meet a certain mark today, and then post your progress—or triumph—online. You can race someone across the globe, or someone right there in the room, and celebrate your win with a donation to NaNoWriMo in your own name, or as a HaloSpree.

There are lots of ways to do it. Just do it!

Word Count: 2504 Day 7 and 15302 Total

Writing Without a Net

Yesterday, at Day 5 and just over a quarter of the way to 50K words, everything was flowing smoothly. This morning, with WiFi down both here at home and at Chick-fil-A, I find out how much harder—and easier—it is to write without a Net.

The photo shows my writing mascot, a 3D-printed gargoyle, who wasn't doing his job today at Chick-fil-A. I usually have a fall-back there to Xfinity when the CFA WiFi is down. Not today, there was zero connectivity in the restaurant. 

The real boot to the head was getting home after breakfast followed by several hours of running errands (AKA: not writing), and finding the cable truck parked outside the house. When they had finished resolving a "signal leak," I discovered the broken connection. It should be easier to write without distractions (Google+ and Twitter), except for the fact that it is difficult to focus, let alone type, with one hand holding a phone to my ear. 

Yes, I'm doing the tech-support search thing. I've been on the phone today a grand total of 55 waiting minutes and nearly two hours worth of conversations with three different phone-support people. A trip to the brick-and-mortar store was also required to get a replacement modem, and then there was a follow-up support call that left me with the choice of either cable TV or cable Internet connection.

Well, duh! That's a no-brainer choice. Especially since the alternative is waiting until next Tuesday for the scheduled service call.

Meanwhile kudos to Stevie at the Comcast Xfinity shop, and Valerie and Joanna in phone support. (And the less said about the earlier support call, the better, now that I finally managed to get my blood pressure back down out of the rafters.)

Finally, here it is nearly 7 pm, and the only writing I've accomplished all day was the few hundred words written before breakfast. At least I'm still above the line, even if I didn't make my goal yet due to the outage. I believe I will do the start-at-midnight trick I did for November 1st, so I have a chance to double-up my output tomorrow.

Night, all!

Word Count: 371 Day 6 and 12898 Total

Brain Freeze (Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge)

From Slocik Sketchbook, www.zbrushcentral.com

Sharing scenes from my developing NaNovel every few days is part of the accountability I plan to practice during this NaNoWriMo. Plotting instead of pantsing helps with this. I know where Roger and his friends are going in the story, so I can write details of their story, piece-wise.

One of the surprises from my new plotter habit is that the story details are still created pantser-style. There's room for those unexpected characters to appear, well, unexpectedly.

That's what happened when an unanticipated character named Deevie Wilson arrived yesterday:

Forty minutes later, the cart was so full Grace had to perch on her mother's hip while Roger pushed it along. The huge woman behind the cash register threw an assessing look at the full cart, and asked, "New in Diablo? or new in Meteor?"

Ruby paused in the process of unloading the cart onto the traveling belt, although Roger kept working. "What do you mean, Diablo or Meteor?"

Roger answered from the depths of the cart, "She knows we're not tourists, Mom. We're buying too much. No motel room or RV refrigerator has enough room for all the cooler and freezer food in the cart. So we have to be local. If twenty-three miles away is local."

The cashier twitched her voluminous dress at the shoulders, lifting it away from her body slightly, and blousing it under the straps of her canvas store apron. "Yer son's right." She sounded surprised. "So yer new in Meteor then. Our local customers, I know'em. Tourists, they buy a pint of milk, quart at most, not several gallons. They sure don't have a gallon of ice cream, or six packages of ground beef in their carts!"

Ruby smiled at her. "Well, I'm Ruby Pierce, and this is my daughter Grace, and my son Roger. My husband is Peter, and I'm sure you'll meet him eventually. Although you'd be more likely to meet him if you worked at the hardware store." The two women shared a laugh at that. "We just moved to Meteor yesterday, and this..." Ruby waved her arm over the deeply-loaded traveling belt and half-empty cart, "...is supplies for the next couple of weeks."

"Yeah, so we don't have to drive forty-six miles to stock up." Roger muttered under his breath.

"Pleased ta meet'cha!" The cashier rested a beringed hand on her massive chest. "I'm Deevie Wilson, and before anyone tells ya different, it's short for 'Divine'." She said it, "DEE-vine." Roger could guess what other origins had been suggested for her nickname. Briefly, he wondered if she had been teased about her name when she was in school. Certainly so, if she had been as immense then!

For a second, Roger flashed on the idea that others had been as brutally teased and rejected as he had always been at his various schools. It was a mind-blowing concept, and he resolved to mull it over on the long drive back to Meteor.

Deevie serves the story's purpose by giving Roger a reason to move past his self-focus. I don't know if she'll show up again, but I hope so. There's a lot to her!

Being able to write little descriptive pieces doesn't always have to serve the passage of Roger along his character arc. It also helps when I want to write a flash piece for the Carrot Ranch Flash Fiction Challenge, as I do in response to Charli Mill's prompt this week:

November 3, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a frozen story. Is the weather the source of freezing or is a character frozen by emotion or lack of it? It can also be a moment frozen in time. What does it reveal?

In this flash, Roger and two of The Mass "help out" at the local drugstore.

________________________________________

Brain Freeze

Jack Mass threw Roger a swift look, then with a cautionary finger against his lips, pulled him down behind the cashier's counter to crouch at his half-brother's feet. "Watch this," he whispered.

Gary stood behind the drugstore register, doing his job, while Jack and Roger peered through the slats of the counter. Darrell Harb slammed into the store and went straight to the Slurpee machine, triggering it to run into his mouth.

"Harb, you gotta pay...," Gary began, but he was interrupted by a scream of agony from the Slurpee thief.

"Adjusted the temperature down 12 degrees." Jack whispered.


Word Count: 2689 Day 5 and 12527 Total