Last Man in Tower

                                                                                                                                    West Bengal

I keep running out of books.

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be writing a book, not reading them, and I am.

I will be.

I'm just getting my thoughts together.

But there must be time for, ahh, inspiration and refueling. And I keep running out of material with all this constant train travel.

This is how I allowed myself to be sucked into AravindAdiga's latest vortex of despair, which I bought because a) its cover made it look like a fun adventure story, b) there was no description of the plot on the back, just review quotes, and c) I thought I should read more Indian authors while I'm in India.

Last Man in Tower is about how a bunch of ordinary people work themselves up to the decision to throw one of their neighbors off an upper-story balcony for a bunch of money.

I don't care if I just gave away the ending. If you are now discouraged from reading it, good. I have saved you untold grief.

Sister, you backside—here!

Stuffing sixteen people into a car is a little more complicated when they don't all speak the same language.

Mimi the Dragon Slayer

Calcutta, India

So I decided the dragons have got to go.

I don't remember precisely why I decided that the Awful Space Opera would be infested with flying reptiles, or what pseudo-scientific excuse I used to justify their existence, but they gotta go. Most likely, they made their first appearance on a day when I couldn't think of anything else to put down on paper. Of course, that is the basic backstory for the entire novel, but I think maybe in this case the problem was a lack of action for several pages, and I thought readers might start to notice how awful my prose is. Or that I lifted at least two characters from Firefly. (Not on purpose—it's just something that happens when you quit writing and devote an entire week to your DVD-boxed set collection instead.) If you want to kill boredom, you can't go wrong with a dragon attack, right?

Wrong.

The Most Boring Monsters In Pulp Fiction are dead weight, and my first task in this month's mammoth rewrite was to cut them out.

That means replacing several scenes with, ummm, some other kind of death-defying crisis? Something less likely to induce hysterical laughter at all the wrong moments?

I'm thinking quicksand. With flesh-eating worms.

Editor's note: The frightened J-school student in me demands that I admit to backdating this post. Internet access has been iffy on the rails, and I am marking the date according to when this was written, rather than posted.

What we have here ...

I don't care much for foreign languages.

I love English so much that I can happily waste hours each day playing scrambled word games on my Kindle, just for the joy of the words themselves—and because I get to pat myself on the back each time I remember I can spell “prise” with an “s.”

Reaching that level of smug self-satisfaction in a foreign language takes decades of intensive study. And my ego just doesn't have that kind of time.

Danae signed up for private Hindi lessons almost as soon as we arrived. She dutifully records her teenage tutor's every word (excepting the ones that deal primarily with her complicated personal life), so as to perfect her pronunciation. 

And she has gamely embraced the infantilization that is an inescapable side effect of attempting to communicate in an unknown tongue: She sounds like a two-year old with a speech impediment, and native speakers treat her like one.

Granted, there are times when relying on a combination of English spoken very loud and extravagant hand gestures fails, but in my experience, you're just as likely to suffer a total communication breakdown with a few half-learned phrases of the local language as you are with none.

At least in English, left and right don't rhyme.

Consider the following exchange with Danae's tutor, concerning the Muslim festival popularly known as Bakra Eid, because it features the sacrifice of a goat:

“Next week am festival—Bakra Eid.”

“Bakra Eid?”

“Ha. Bakra is God.”

(Eyes become unfocused, attempting to remember the lesson when the word “bakra” last came up. God?)

“Bakra?”

“Ha. Hindi-'Bakra.' English-'God.'”

(With deepening confusion—)

“God?”

“Ha.”

“'Bakra' is 'God?'”

“Ha.”

“Uh, 'Allah?'”

“Nehi, nehi! God! God!”

“Oh, goat.”

You see? Replace all those words with wild hand gestures, and you still have no idea why so many neighborhoods are suddenly full of extra livestock, but at least you could avoid suggesting to a devout Muslim that she worships goats.

. . .

So, undoubtedly you want to know about how the novel's coming. It's, well, today is the first day during the official Month in which my computer has worked, so so far, it's not coming. Tricky, trying to keep up with these deadlines on the old Inspiron 600m. (Why the “m?” That named sounded dated the moment I bought it, and this was a state-of-the-art machine once.)

So, if you figure there are twenty-six days left in the month, divided into 50,000 words, that equals—a whole bunch of words a day. I'll try to put in a fair bit on the train to Calcutta tomorrow.

NaNoNeeNeeNaWaNawWah (or something)

So, I've decided I'm in. In spite of 20-hour train rides, inevitable bouts of illness, and the myriad volunteer commitments that Danae has signed us up for, I'm going to attempt National Novel Writing Month.

To my intense annoyance, Danae insisted on signing me up at the official NeeNerNoVaWaHoHooRah website, although I haven't taken the time to fill out all the profile info, etc.

I might submit to all this we-can-do-it enthusiasm in theory, but I'm still cheating: I'm just going to do a second draft of the Awful Space Opera.

But, in the hope that the act of putting things on paper is somehow inspiring, I'm going to re-type the whole thing, rather than going through and editing the first draft in Word.

So I'm committing to type 50,000 words in November. I'm not saying they'll all be original, but I will physically write them before the month is out.

'Just make sure someone gets killed with a chainsaw.'

You must, you must, you MUST follow Story Notes From Hell.

All about meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ...

Why are writers supposed to keep a journal? Does it actually achieve anything?

I know you need to find time to write every day, and a journal entry is the easiest place to start. Practice is always important, but is it the right kind of practice? Is talking about myself actually going to help me get better at channeling other people?

Frightening thought: What if this religious devotion to journaling—and, yeah, well, blogging—actually saps one's ability to write fiction? They say that runners have to choose between distance and speed, that you can't hone your sprinting and marathoning muscles at the same time. Maybe you can't keep a detailed journal and write a novel at the same time.

Debunked fake memoirs are in the news every year, and I think the obsession with journaling is part of the problem. Everyone gets really good at talking about themselves, but they find their lives lack the necessary zing for the big time. So they stick with the journaling medium and just make stuff up.

Hmmmm.

Wait a sec, I need to go edit my Blogger profile.

There, that's better.