nanowrimo madness

How can you experience a slump and a crisis at the same time? No, this is not a stupid joke snatched from an email forward. I’m serious!
We’re still less than half way finished producing a 50,000 word novel in less than a month. Remember we started late because we didn’t know about nanowrimo until Nov. 5.
In case you’re interested our personal word count at midnight last night was 18,650. I’ve grown to hate the countdown clock on the nanowrimo website which this morning cheerfully reminded me there are 13 days, 14 hours, 55 minutes and 49 seconds left in the month. Even though we’re producing at a pretty good rate I'm worried our late start may doom us.
I clicked about on nanowrimo forums last night after I couldn’t write any more. In some ways it made me feel better. There are lots of people already gracefully accepting defeat. Others are hovering about where we are, somewhat less than halfway done. I noted a few already topping 50,000, but one of them admitted he’s on sick leave from work and has basically done nothing else all month.
Does any of this make me feel better? No. Obsessive to the end, when I take on a task nothing less than the finish line will do. Nor can I allow any other single thing to fall by the wayside. I still need to keep the woodstove going as it’s our only source of heat; do laundry; run the dishwasher; walk the dog; cook; and delete a thousand emails and spybots a day because my spam and spybot programs either quit working or the game has gone to the next level. Oh yeah I still need to attend to my clients so we can make it through December, you know, the month AFTER nanowrimo.
We need an obsessive-compulsive dissociative behavior support group but we don’t have time.
ARG!
Sometimes I wonder if we’re cheating because we can swap ops and continue working long after singletons crash and burn, but we can’t expand the hours in the month. Not even Oprah can do that.
I decided at about 1 a.m. last night that nanowrimo is really an economic plot to increase coffee and booze sales thereby surreptitiously lifting the country out of the depression it’s not in before enough of us get wise and try to do something about it.
Or maybe it’s one of those university-sponsored studies to see how far people will go to achieve a stated goal. You know, like the ones Erich Fromm wrote about in his book “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.” These were normal everyday people who demonstrated varying degrees of willingness to press a button delivering a potent electric shock to another person.
In the experiment few people refused to keep pressing the button even when it delivered a shock big enough to cause pain. Some were upset but followed directives after pressure to do so was applied. Most were disturbed by their own actions, sweating, becoming restless, trying to talk their way out of it, but in the end most pushed the button (which by the way was a fake, no electric shocks were actually delivered, the screaming was pre-recorded). The ones that really scared me, and probably scared the people who’d set up the experiment, were those who never questioned it. They just pushed the button because they’d contracted to do so, no sweat. They scared me more than the psychopaths who enjoyed pushing the button. Psychopaths you can identify of you watch their behaviors. Ordinary people capable of becoming Nazis are harder to pin down without extenuating circumstances.
Becoming multiple meant being on the receiving end of some of those extenuating circumstances. Fromm’s book, although published in 1973, provides amazing insight into today’s world situation. It also gave me insight into what formed the people who abused me into fragmenting.
So, enough about the writing slump. Which isn’t really a slump because we’re writing at a good pace; it just doesn’t appear to be fast enough to meet the deadline.
On to the crisis.
Does this novel have a plot? I asked el.
He growled, “Plot this,” and made a universal gesture.
If he’s that cranky we’re in trouble. He's generally a swet, even tempered guy. Kind of like Henry after the brain injury in the movie "Regarding Henry." He looks kinda like Harrison Ford too.
I know he’s upset because we have a project due for a client very soon and we haven’t even started it. Lillie is also upset because we need to gather materials in the woods to make Christmas wreaths.
It’s a sign of our worsening economic condition that we need to do this. In good years we don’t make wreaths to sell. In moderate years we need to do so to afford Christmas gifts. In really bad years we need to sell wreaths to eat. This year we’re sort of between gifts and food. If we’re really lucky we’ll get paid for writing a grant that should be awarded soon. When that happens the organization we wrote it for owes us three percent of their award.
Our income is like a roller coaster. It’s the unexpected stuff that always kills us.This month we had to pay over $150 toward Thunder’s needs at college. Yesterday we found out we had to pay $160 to finalize Sarah’s semester so she can begin the process of transferring to a closer school. Sarah announced a few days ago her car needed to be inspected this month. Who did she think was going to do that, elves? She and Thunder have both been having car trouble too. And we need to order wood or we’ll be running out probably in the middle of the first snowstorm of the season. Do you sense a growing pessimism here? What would Oprah do?
Owl and Eyvonne both have part time jobs they are hoping will develop into full time work. That can take years in our rural county. Usually it only occurs when someone retires or dies. Jobs are pretty scarce here.
The school system is the county’s biggest employer, followed by banks and saw mills. The bankers have the county’s economy figured out. It’s simple, if you work for the school system or a bank you qualify for a mortgage, if you work for a sawmill you don’t.
We have a mortgage because I can out talk anyone. I convinced them I’d pay the mortgage even if I didn’t have money for food. Which has happened.
In case you now believe the crisis of the slump and crisis routine is economic you’re wrong. We’re so used to economic idiocy it’s just part of the background noise.
The crisis is whoever is lurking around outside the system. They know I know they’re there. But they won’t step forward. I get only the smallest hints of their existence and none of their motivations or mindset.
Last night I told Eyvonne someone unknown to the system had ripped off an entire day.
She knows better than believing we just forgot a day, or we were so busy we can’t remember what we did that day. She’s forewarned and watchful. She's also on the alert now. I’m not quite worried but I am uneasy. I’m keeping a closer eye on Keeper who has been known to place his personal agenda higher than that of the collective view.
He justified it because in his opinion, it was the best thing for all of us: integration into a single person. It was like a religion for him. He sang it like a mantra, touted it like a snake oil salesman. In the end I think it was our steadfast rejection that crushed him. Ironoically the answer to his growing instability was integration with me. It made me crazy for a few days. I was kind of a born again integrationist. But it waned and all was well.
until a few weeks ago Keeper stepped out on his own again. That has never happened to me, having someone I integrated with just walk away. It happens to el all the time. So much we sometimes refer to him and anyone he’s integrated with as ‘the els.”
It puzzles me why Keeper left. He seems different too. Angry. He can cop an attitude about things in a blink. I don’t feel much different. Maybe a bit less prone to hostility, which makes sense if part of what I was feeling was his attitude developing.
You have to wonder, if we fragment as a survival strategy, why did Keeper step out now? And who is lurking just beyond the reach of my mindtouch?
Have we achieved plot trajectory yet?
Oprah, please be listening.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot