Seven is a Really Big Number

Doris Rose has thrown down the gauntlet, dang it. You see, she, Moi and I fancy ourselves to be writers. Well, Moi actually is a writer; that's how she puts food on the table (and by food I mean chocolate cake with raspberry icing and vanilla cupcakes with sprinkles on top. Mmm!). Doris Rose and I are simply aspiring, although we do indulge ourselves in fantasies of literary fame and fortune that are not in the least bit based in reality. Well, hers may be.

Anyway, to inspire us, or perhaps to kick our butts into gear, Moi politely invited us two years ago to participate in a little neurosis-inducing exercise called NaNoWriMo. The goal of this rapidly growing international project is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The point--the one and only point of this endeavor--is to spew forth verbage in massive daily amounts. No loving contemplation of phraseology or massaging of one's words into a novel that even Satan would adore. Mm-mm. It's all about breaking through that flippin' writer's block that plagues us by using sheer, brute force. Quantity, baby, not quality. And I have embraced this concept. For the past two years, I have created a masterpiece of boredom. The other night I read some of it aloud to friends and I almost fell asleep. I'm sure that many people have reasonably well-developed novellas for their efforts. Not me, man. I've got a big ol' honkin' mess on my hands.

And now Doris Rose has asked us to list seven things from our novel--and I use that word loosely--that nobody else knows. My first reaction to this fun and perfectly reasonable exercise? "Crap. I dunno. Crap." But because DR asked, I'm going to pull seven things out of my a--, er, novel that I don't think she knows. Here goes:

1. Tess lived with an architect named Brad for two years.
2. The setting for the story is in a nameless town in Missouri. Why Missouri? I don't know. It seemed bland and innocuous. I didn't think anybody would do any fact-checking about Missouri, which reduced my research load considerably.
3. Tess's real father is Alan Arkin. Ha ha!! Just kidding! Her father is Mr. Walton. Not the Wal-mart Mr. Walton, just Mr. Walton. From Washington state. That Mr. Walton.
4. There is a scene between Tess and a guy she's dating that I wrote purely because I was pissed off at the guy I was dating. It was in that moment that I felt the full, thrilling power of authoring.
5. I used a different font for the second 50,000 words than I did for the first 50,000.
6. One of the doctors in the clinic where Tess works was modeled off of a former boss of mine. With great delight, I took him to a whole...nubba...lebbel and turned him into a completely different kind of maniac than he actually was. (Note: if you're not a MAD TV fan, then that bit about a nubba lebbel won't mean a darn thing to you. Sorry.)
7. Tess realizes in the novel that a knuckle can be an erogenous zone.

Moi has written a much better piece about this on her blog. Please go read it if you haven't already. She obviously puts waaaay more thought into her characters and plot than I do, and it shows. In the literary world, I'm an ambler, which is why I hang on to my day job.