Welcome to the Land of the Literarily Insane
NaNoWriMo has begun! I'm off to a nice start, with some big ol' word cusion to save me later, when I either lose interest or some catastrophic event happens, possibly when God and Satan get mad at me for making them... well... characters. And probably kinda OOC. But it's really fun--God's headdesk'd once already, and Satan is twitchy!
Having so many characters is really helpful. I had no idea--I've always been stingy on actual characters, but this time 'round I've got so many that I can just switch whenever I get bored! And it's a story I would never have written without NaNoWriMo, so <3 to Chris Baty.
I grace you with an excerpt! Beware the quickness and unedited-ness of it!
“...where the hell are your pants?”
That was the last thing her mother had said to her, she recalled, staring at the spleen in her hand. It hadn't the gooey, sort of slimy texture of most spleens, no; it was dry and wrinkly and all around gross, but she held it anyway, nostalgic for the person to whom it belonged. Her mother, lying in a grave somewhere anonymous, had once owned this spleen, before she had become utterly terrified that it wasn't working and had to check it.
Unfortunately, she wasn't a doctor. Biopsies weren't an option. She had to take it out and check it, and when she was finished, her mother was dead.
Tragic, really. She couldn't understand it. So, as per her mother's strange love of the berry, she put a strawberry where her spleen used to be, and dumped her body in an alley. It didn't seem terribly necessary to get caught, after all, in what wasn't really a murder, but something which the justice system wouldn't understand.
She had taken the spleen to her oven and hung it in the chimney, and utterly forgot about it until she tried to sweep the darn thing a few months later. Smoked and dried, it was black and crackly and quite a bit like beef jerky, and she decided to keep it.
Her mother's underwear drawer seemed appropriate. It had a lock on it and everything.
Smiling, she put the body part under a particularly frumpy item of clothing, and went back to sweeping the chimney, munching on strawberries as she did so.
Simultaneously, a demon stopped sweeping her floor.
“Fuck this!” she yelled, throwing the broom dramatically to the ground. “I'm better than this! I don't need to clean any rooms; they're my rooms, I can do what I want with them!” She kicked the broom into its closet with a vengence and swore never to touch it again.
This was a very satisfying vow.
Unfortunately, it couldn't last, as her pet turtle Tommy was stuck under the mop, which was hiding right behind and slightly below the broom. In extracting him, she brushed her wrist against the accursed broom.
“Ugh...” she muttered, rubbing the spot on her turtle's back. He, too, was a demon, the spirit of an evil turtle from the Dark Ages who had died before his evil regime had had time to overtake the British regime, and she had been rather fond of his evil tendancies.
Today, though, he wasn't very interesting, and she left him to wander about.
She had a meeting anyway. Her dear accomplice Jenine was to bring her a nice new soul to show around, and she had to look presentable. It could take a rather long time to look presentable, and she figured she ought to start right about now.
It didn't seem right to her, but she didn't have any particular place to do this. She didn't even have a dresser, forced instead to hang all of her clothes up in a closet, and to leave her underwear lying around. It was an alright price to pay, though, for the reward of those dear little fire demons cleaning her clothes for her.
If only they could do other housekeeping...
Humming, she dug a brush out from beneath a pile of socks, and began brushing her curly pink hair. Blonde showed at the roots; she hoped she would remember to fix that soon. All the powers of Hell had nothing on hair color.
This is the beginning of the beginning; I've got snippets from each character, which gave me the idea for just switching off whenever I got bored, and I'm so glad I did. I'd lose if I tried to be structured. I've got no idea what's happening next, in a specific kind of way, and I've never done that before; it's hard!
Ooo, and I've won some dares already. They're pretty sweet. I shall list them with numbers in no particular order for your viewing pleasure.
1) ...start your novel with the line, "Where the hell are your pants?" (traditional--I do this every year, though it's usually "Where the hell are my pants?". It's such a great first line.)
2) ...name a character Mr. Ian Woon. Always refer to him by his full name. (I've always wanted to do this. He's the math teacher, slightly unconventional, and the subject of the next dare)
3) ...include a math genius who is perfectly sane and functional in society.
Bonus if the other math geniuses discriminate against him because of it. (I hope I manage to include a math genius convention or something, so as to win the B.P.)
4) ...have a scene where two characters have a conversation in a tree. (My twins, and there's some awsome foreshadowing to IMMINENT DOOM, a rotten strawberry, and a boy who looks like a tapir. It was an elephant at first, but then I realized that there was no way his nose was that long.)
5) ...have a character tattoo mystic runes on their body with Sharpie. (Tapir-boy.)
6) ...include the phrase "Air Moon N.W." (It's the name of the boarding school. Teehee.)
7) ...use "Hedgehog" as an insult. (Micheal to Daniel--it's a playful kind of insult, but an insult nonetheless.)
8) Name a character Hugh G. Rection. (I've only revealed his last name so far--he's the literature teacher at the twins' school, and a massive bibliophile, so I think I've going to have fun with him.)
Wow. Lots of dares. O.o I had no idea I'd done so many. I've taken a bazillion more, though, along with a HUGE list of line dares, so I'm in no danger of running out.
Go strawberry-spleen serial killers with anxiety disorders!