FIRE!!

So there are these dumpsters about a hundred paces from my front door, and next to them is a strange fenced off little enclosure where people dump old mattresses or furniture. There are plenty of overhanging trees too.

When we first walked outside, the wind was up and we were getting hit with sparks.

Luckily Rachel is quickest on the cellphone draw and called 911. We found out someone already had. People from the Business and Professional Women’s Club next door were already gathering to take pictures with their cellphones stupidly close. Some other apartment dwellers, slightly more freaked out because, you know, we live here, started gathering and trying to move their cars. Joe immediately accused the guy holding a cigarette of starting the whole thing and returning to the scene of the crime.

Goodbye, unsightly fire hazard dangerously close to my front door

Luckily Carrboro Fire and Rescue showed up speedily

Which is good, since I haven’t had a detailed plan of what to grab while fleeing my house since I was about seven.

From our front porch

The fire was probably started by a tossed cigarette, but since almost everyone in North Carolina smokes, I doubt they’ll find out who is responsible. A policeman did come and talk to us, but of course we didn’t come outside until the fire was huge so we weren’t much help. Personally, I am suspicious of the Business and Professional Women’s Club. They always park in our parking lot and whenever I pass by, it’s just MEN hanging out outside. Where are the Professional Women? Is it just a front for something? I will continue to stare out my window with binoculars until someone is brought to justice or I am fined for being a total creeper.

This morning the air still smells like Smores.

Terrified
I looked around
For the Twilight photoshoot
But there was none

The next morning I woke up at 8
Annoyed about going to work on a Saturday
As I am every Saturday
I got dressed and went downstairs
I looked out the window

WHITE

I was not going to work today.

I ran upstairs and jumped on Steven.
“SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW SNOW!”
“mmrrrhhhmmmgoaway”
“GET UP! LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!”
“mmmrrrhhhdontwanna”
“WE’RE GOING OUTSIDE TO PLAY!”

I dragged Steven outside
He said he would get pneumonia
I told him it was good for him
Then I found a trash can lid and tried to sled.

Our solar panel is sad

The night it began I was at
Harris Teeter
Because Steven had discovered at the last minute
That our milk was bad
and he needed it to make tortillas.

There were so many people
(I parked across the street)
It seemed like everyone was a college student
Buying beer and wine
Or a mom buying cat food.

I stood in line for the self check out
With my one bottle of milk
In the middle of the shampoo aisle
When from the front of the store
We heard someone shout
“It’s snowing!”

And getting home was a bitch.

Food Lion was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it today
though still not in Florida Hurricane Preparedness Proportions.
It’s next to a sad Burger King, the wrong side of a disregarded exit
Off 54
Everyone was buying:
Their weight in cans
Bottled Water
Candles
Bread and Milk.
Children bundled tightly in snow suits, staring at the sky
Waiting

There was only one man ahead of me
In 10 Items Or Less
He was buying:
A container of chicken wings
A case of beer
Eight frozen pizzas.
He looked like a man who knew he was prepared
In a way the Weather Channel would never think to advocate.
I was buying:
AA batteries
Powdered sugar
Chocolate chips (the two things I’d forgotten for baking)
A giant candle in a glass holder with Arch Angel Michael killing some demon.
I know it was somehow Catholic, but they were the only candles left
It was either Michael or a dead Jesus
And I thought defeating demons was marginally more cheerful
Than to have the eyes of a sad Christ look on
As I try in vain to complete the World’s Largest Crossword after the power goes out
By the light of a candle meant for religion
But somehow next to beer and chicken wings and chocolate chips on the conveyor belt
Just the same.

That was my first clue. My second clue was when I looked at the academic calendar (for the first time ever, natch) and saw “JANUARY 11TH: CLASSES BEGIN” highlighted in red.

I can only imagine what would have happened had I decided to make breakfast instead of order textbooks (which I gave up on after discovering the sordid truth, btws). I would have taken the bus to school, complaining about the cold the entire way, wondered vaguely where the hordes of undergraduates were, and sat in an empty classroom for about half an hour before wondering if there was some kind of alphabetizationmergency I had missed the alert on.

I guess I just assumed that if I was going to work I should also be going to class. I’m actually hoping this happens more often because suddenly having another week of sleeping in and not doing boring readings about “What IS information?” is all the more awesome because of its unexpectedness.

So awesome that I decided to update my blog for the first time since being gripped by the ravages of Frozen North-induced flu. Don’t worry, I got better in time for presents. It was a Christmas miracle.

This graphic, the only semi-tangible prize, was SO WORTH IT.

Granted, my main memories of Thanksgiving are of writing 17,000 words in two days, but still! Look at this picture I won!!! In case you were wondering, the novel ends with the three different Patricias plus random historical/alternate time line characters teaming up to USE THEIR IMAGINATIONS to defeat the Plutonians. Apparently illogical thought processes are their one weakness, making Middle School Patricia the ultimate contender.

I can’t be bothered to post the entire novel on here, but here is the wordle art version of it:

I like how PATRICIA dominates. Just like always. Click for larger image (i.e. to read any words that aren’t PATRICIA)

2009
October
Start receiving “reminder” emails from the NaNoWriMo website. Roll my eyes.

October 24th
Read over “novel” from last year while procrastinating writing a paper. Feel bad about the lack of coherency.

October 26th
Decide to do National Novel Writing Month again, this time attempting not to fall back on random free association to meet word limit. I CAN write a 50,000 word novel that sticks to one plot. For varying definitions of “one plot”. And “sticks”. And “novel”.

October 30th
Convince James Fox to write one too in exchange for making him a character in my novel.

November 1st–10pm
Suddenly remember that it’s the first day of National Novel Writing Month. Stay up to begin novel. Decide it should be about Middle School Patricia traveling to the future by accident to meet me now. It can be deep and full of meaning and reveal things about my life and stuff.

November 2nd
Decide to occasionally write from Middle School Patricia’s Point of View to use up more words.
Excerpt:
What. The. Crap. This is the WORST day of my ENTIRE LIFE. First of all, we totally had a quiz in French I didn’t know about and French is like the easiest subject but I didn’t know any of the vocabulary and I know I got a C. I bet I got the worst grade in the class and everyone will make fun of me, even Kurt, because French is so easy and I could’ve passed if I’d remembered about it and studied instead of playing Monopoly with Thomas. I don’t even LIKE Monopoly and he always cries when he doesn’t win. THEN I ended up HERE somehow where it’s way too cold and everyone is super mean, especially this one lady who says she is me. I guess she looks like me so it must be true. But HOW can that be me??? She is WAY too old and weird. And a LIBRARIAN? How boring is that? I want to be a writer. I KNOW I can be a good writer, so she should be able to be a good writer too, right? I don’t know what happened. Maybe my mission is to try to convince her to change the boring awfulness of her life and become a writer like she’s supposed to. It will suck for awhile, she will have to get a less nice apartment and quit her job and never have enough to eat and maybe get some kind of disease like consumption. Also, she will have to break up with this fiancé Steven person. It doesn’t matter what he’s like, to be a writer you have to be lonely and miserable at first. THEN you become rich and famous and can have a nice house by the beach and travel to Europe anytime you want and go to book signings and live in a castle and find your ONE TRUE LOVE. So maybe if he is really her ONE TRUE LOVE he can come back then. I’m not sure if he is yet, I will have to look at him to know.
Okay, this sounds like a good plan. I will convince her that she needs to quit her life and become a writer. For my sake. And FOR ALL OUR SAKES. How can the world survive without the amazing things that we will write? I have already written lots of amazing things that could be published and make us famous and I am only thirteen. Clearly she would not have to try very hard to do the same thing. She’s old.

November 3rd
Decide to add another time traveling Patricia–”Old Patricia”–from the future to spice things up. She is apparently some kind of plaid obsessed alcoholic.

November 6th
Aliens attack. Specifically, Plutonians. Who look like giant dust mites, because those things are freaking scary. Also, they apparently control the Space Time Continuum? And are trying to kill all of me for some reason?

November 7th
James Fox introduced as character since the pipe he monitors apparently contains, among other things, The Space Time Continuum.
Excerpt:
“I was watching the pipe,” he said. “When I noticed a disturbance in the space time continuum.”
“The space time continuum? I thought there was just like hydrogen or something in the pipe.”
“THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS IN THE PIPE,” James shouted. “Obviously the Plutonians were—”
“The PLUTONIANS?”
“Who did you think that was?” James Fox demanded as they reached the door to the stairwell. “I always TELL you the Plutonians are trying to kill you because they hate imagination but when you actually come face to face with them you can’t even jump out of the way! You are SO BAD at saving the world!”
“Yeah… well… your mom,” was my excellent comeback

November 8th
Old Patricia apparently knows ALL ABOUT the Plutonians since she fights them in the future. So they have come to the past to kill her Terminator style? We escape somehow to The Pipe and leap into the space time continuum.

November 10th
Decide the Plutonians are attacking because they are jealous that Pluto is no longer a planet? Or something? Mostly just enjoy messing with Middle School Patricia.
Excerpt:
“WHAT?” Middle School Patricia shouted again. “PLUTO’S NOT A PLANET?”
I patted her on the shoulder. “Sometimes the future’s hard to take.”
“I feel so lied to. And BETRAYED!” Middle School Patricia cried.
“So does Pluto,” Old Patricia said. “I think that’s where the Plutonians are getting most of their power.”
“So we need to somehow find out how to make Pluto not so bitter?” I asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Maybe,” Old Patricia shrugged. “They’ve always been jealous of Earth for our natural resources—like imagination—but declassifying Pluto as Not A Planet was the last straw. That’s when their full on attacks really began, to steal our natural resources. Why I remember back in the twenty second century when they decided to steal Stephen Hawking’s l33t math skillz and my imagination and we teamed up to take them down by dropping Mt. Etna on them and—”
“Twenty second century?” I interrupted.
“A THREE IS NOT A LETTER!” Middle School Patricia shouted at the same time.
“It is in the future,” James Fox told her. “Also, T-E-H has become the correct spelling of ‘The’.”
“NOOOOOOOOO!” shouted Middle School Patricia while James Fox and I high fived ineptly behind her.
“Gotta practice those high fives,” Old Patricia said. “One day, it may save your life.”

November 11th
Trapped in the past, Old Patricia tells us why she began her crusade against the Plutonians in a dramatic flash forward that is overly described to use up space. For effect, I decide to kill off James Fox in it.

November 12th
James Fox (in real life), pissed about his lame death scene, decides to rewrite it involving more explosions, polar bears, and sweet guitar solos. I include it afterwards to use up space.

November 13th
Decide to rewrite the same scene AGAIN from Middle School Patricia point of view.
In its entirety:
I stand in front of the library, looking dramatic and tragic at the same time in my awesome black high heeled boots and black lip stick. Like some kind of pale, ethereal dark elf where all you have to do is look at her to know that her heart has been BROKEN. She waits alone in the shadows. I mean, I wait alone in the shadows, watching the sun slowly rise in the east, watching the trees slowly lighten from foreboding shadows to leafy green.
She felt a shift in the wind, in the earth beneath her feet, in the air and the clouds. Something was coming. Something big.
She stiffened and stared towards the rising sun, drawing the slim sword from her belt she always kept concealed there. If it was orcs, she was ready for them. If it was a wizard or sorcerer, the blade was spelled to block their own charms. But no… it felt different. Alien somehow.
And then that annoying guy in the lame jumpsuit and bad haircut was running at her from down the street. She frowned, lowering her sword slightly. This could not be the threat she sensed. True, a threat to good taste he still was, but he was essentially harmless.
“They’re coming!” he choked out as he came towards her. “They’re coming!” He collapsed at her feet, barely able to breathe from his long run. He was bleeding from an arrow wound in his arm. “Run!”
“NO!” she shouted, and there was power in her words. “A seventh level librarian sorceress warrior princess mage DOES NOT RUN! She STANDS and FIGHTS against all foes! What is chasing you? What is coming?”
“It’s…” But he collapsed onto the Earth and was still before he could breathe another word.
“Fear not, noble plumber,” she said, drawing the mage sign for remembrance and peace in the air. “YOU SHALL BE AVENGED.”
The air began to shimmer and buzz as if the very molecules themselves were excited for the coming fight. The shadows began to move and coalesce until they formed the shape of four hideous monsters, all dripping fangs and pincers reaching out towards her. She felt the air around them heavy with magic, magic which they would not hesitate to use against her. She took a deep breath and reached into the magical wellspring within herself, the power the goddess had given her as her female warrior champion to protect all that was good.
She stepped forward, around the homeless man’s smelly and broken body. “STOP creatures of night!” she said to them in a strong voice that carried farther than it should have. The beasts stayed their advance and proceeded with more caution. “You shall come no further THIS NIGHT!” Totally ignoring the fact that it was dawn.
They tested her defenses tentatively with a small spell but she drew her sword up high and blocked them. They recoiled back with a hiss and began to separate to further encircle her. They wanted to have her surrounded. She grinned ruefully.
“There’s only four of you,” she said. “Hardly a fair fight. Here,” she offered. “I’ll close my eyes. Maybe that will make us more even.”
As if she needed such a petty contrivance as sight anyway. She could sense them with her magical eighth sense—THE OCHO—and reached out to them with the strong coils of her magic, entrapping their legs and causing them to trip and fall on the ground, screeching and squelching for help. The stars themselves saw her fight and rushed to her aid as she was a true daughter of the night and they had watched over her since birth. They fell from the sky in flaming snowballs of fury, striking the earth and smoldering, striking the bodies of the creatures with a vengeance that made them squeal in fright. But they were still not beaten. She lunged and slid her sword into the gaping maw of the nearest. It shrieked and shriveled, shrinking like a rotting plant in fast motion, down and down until it was about the size of a beetle. Then she stepped on it, crushing it into the ground with one black boot.
She whirled as she sensed one coming up behind her while she was thus engaged, parrying its attack with her sword, whose light flared and ebbed with her attack. She blocked another attack from one of its pincers, feeling its magic baring down on her. She raised her sword and held on even as the force of it pushed her backwards, almost into a tree. With one final burst, using all her strength, she pushed against it and then, with a final push, drove her sword into its eye.
It squealed like a stuck pig, limbs flailing and clicking and then lay still on the ground. She lowered her sword, panting, trying to catch her breath. But she had forgotten about the third creature.
It bellowed behind her, rearing. She couldn’t turn in time, the attack came at her twofold, magical and corporeal in the form of a giant, poison covered pincer that ripped her dress and cloak dramatically but not too revealingly but kind of revealingly. She was thrown backward against the ground and felt the poison burning as it went coursing through her veins. She knew she was going to die as the creature loomed over her.
“BACK YOU BEAST!” came a strong, confident voice from behind her. She could barely turn her head to see a dark figure threatening the beast with her fallen sword, picked up off the ground. The creature backed away, and even slipping out of consciousness she could feel the stranger’s strong magical presence. She heard the final squeals of the last creature before Mr. Snape Darcy was at her side.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m a potions master. I will save you if…” and here he paused dramatically. “You agree to reconsider the request I made two years ago.”
“I will never be your wife,” she whispered. “Not after what you said about my family!”
“But don’t you see, it was all a misunderstanding!” he insisted. “I was under a spell placed upon me by the Evil Bitsy Hassel who was jealous of my love for you and your own beauty and power. But when you defeated Bitsy in single combat it broke the spell and I’m free once more. Please. Say you care for me. Even a little bit.”
“Well, okay,” she said grudgingly. “If it means you’ll save my life. I guess you can be my boyfriend.”
With that he magically healed her wounds and helped her to her feet as if she were as light as a feather.
“Come back with me to my magical castle mansion by the sea,” Mr. Snape Darcy implored. “We will put this tragic event behind us.”
“No,” she said, pulling her motorcycle up and adjusting her revealingly ripped cloak around her. “You don’t understand. I ride alone.” With that she started the bike and rode off into the coming dawn, leaving him staring after her in awe.

Bitsy Hassel was my mortal enemy in Middle School, although I’m not sure she knew I existed.

November 13th
James Fox illustrates the above scene rather than working on his novel:

Middle School Patricia's motorcycle would definitely have pentagrams on it

November 15th
Characters randomly pulled into a fight between Robert the Bruce and William Marsh Rice, World’s Most Powerful Cyborg. William Marsh Rice decides not to kill them for his usual reasons of “too short” or “not crunk enough”.
Excerpt:
Meanwhile, Rice and Robert the Bruce were hurling energy beams at each other, and generally destroying all the buildings around the quad leaving each other and the statue unscathed.
“You’re just jealous,” William Marsh Rice shouted. “I have a UNIVERSITY named after me. AND a popular grain.”
“Rice isn’t named after you!” Robert the Bruce shouted. “It’s been around millennia before you were born!”
“TIME TRAVEL, BITCH!” William Marsh Rice punctuated this remark by throwing a chunk of Rayzor Hall at him.

November 16th
Because I can’t resolve subplots without just introducing more problems, Frost Giants attack!!

November 17th-19th
Middle School Patricia writes more fanfiction about Frost Giant attack.

November 20th
In attempting to repair a rift in the Space Time Continuum (while defeating the Plutonians?) the characters get randomly assaulted by people from history. And the future.

So that’s where I’m at now. This year has definitely been more ridic than last year, but I’ve still got about 17,000 words to go and 8 days. So… yeah. We’ll see if I can actually keep my vow to stick with (some form of) plot. For varying definitions of “plot”.

Hopefully this goes a little way towards explaining the various cop out posts I have been doing the past few weeks.

March
See a class called “How To Write a Novel In a Month” while registering. Decide this is the class for me because 1) I like writing novels, 2) I like having no time to revise, and 3) I only needed one more credit hour.

August–First Week of Class
Discover this is a Martel Student Taught Course. Half the people signed up are Serious English Major Novelists, the other half seem to make up Rice’s Anime Club.

August–Second Week of Class
Discover the Serious English Major Novelists have dropped the class en masse. Learn about: how writing is a serious mystical art that puts your mind in tune with the gods; anime.

September–Third Week of Class
Begin bringing laptop and playing Mah Jong during class, which this week consists of watching a youtube fan video about Halo 2 or something. And always the constant hum of Anime in the background.

September–Fourth Week of Class
Listen to a girl’s novel idea about puppies that, when they lick you, they change your gender.

Rest of September
Skip class. See above.

October
Try to think of ideas for 50,000 word novels that I could write way fast. Decide to just write about my summer job at the library in third person, artfully changing everyone’s name. Figure that will give me AT LEAST 50,000 words of ridic stories.

November 1st
Start novel. Decide this is going to be easy.

November 5th
Already 1000 words behind.

November 10th
3000 words behind. Introduce library trolls for variety.

November 12th
Library trolls aren’t working out. Change plot entirely so that it is now Me (Summer Intern) and the elderly assistant director against a horde of zombies and other book characters that have come alive and are attacking the library in the night.

November 13th
We team up with Napoleon. Excerpt:

I saw that Pat was shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Parlez-vous anglais, Monsieur?
“Vous etes anglaises?!? Je deteste les anglais!”
“Non, non, Monsieur, nous sommes americaines!”
This did not seem to assuage the French general’s suspicions. He glared at us with narrowed eyes. “Yes,” he finally said grudgingly in a heavy French accent. “I do speak English. The text in the side bars around my pictures is in English.”
“So you know that you’re a literary character and not the real Napoleon?” Pat asked, narrowing her eyes. Clearly in her experience this had never happened before.
“Bien sur! The real Napoleon died in 1821. It happens in the end of my book. I was just about to fight Waterloo, as I’ve done precisely seven hundred and fourteen times before, when instead of walking out of my quarters into the dewy morning light, here I was in this… this… how do you say in English?”
“Library?” I supplied.
“Library,” Napoleon agreed. “And there was a dead man attacking me. Most unusual. Does that happen often here? This is, as you say, the real world?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “Welcome to reality, Mr. Bonaparte, or at least the library, which is a step in that direction.”
“I do not like it here at all,” Napoleon said, sheathing his saber and folding his arms across his chest. “I demand that you put me back in my literary genre this instant.”
“Easier said than done,” Pat said. “First we have to find the book you came from.”
“Facile! It’s Napoleon Bonaparte. A biography.”
Pat sighed. “Mr. Bonaparte, we own approximately fifty three books on Napoleon. I assume yours was a child’s biography.”
“Yes, I don’t have syphilis,” Napoleon agreed. “As Andrew Jackson once told me the real Napoleon did. I was mis-shelved next to him once,” he added by way of explanation.

November 14th
Still about 4000 words behind. Give up on plot and start writing random, free-association paragraphs about my life. Excerpt:
Pompeii. I first heard about Pompeii in the fourth grade, and it terrified me. Lots of silly things terrified me in the fourth grade—for instance I spent eight years of my life terrified of Immaculate Conception—but Pompeii I found incredibly creepy. I don’t think I understood exactly how it worked—when the town is covered in ash and preserves everything. Now I realize that the bodies rotted away as normal and the holes left in the ash are what are important—though how they excavate the holes intact I’m still unsure. At the time I thought their bodies somehow lasted, locked in ash, and that these were the, in reality, plaster figures I saw in pictures. The thought of scraping off the ash to the body underneath I found scary. Not to mention the thought of being in a room peopled by ash covered zombies. I think it must have been an early manifestation of my eventual zombie fear.

November 25th
With a lame segue, copy in all the notes I had written that year as Secretary to meet word count.

November 30th
Add some bogus ending attempting to tie it all together subtitled “The Library of the Mind”. Upload to NaNoWriMo website. Send verification page to Student Prof (who I have not seen in approximately two months due to skipping class constantly).

December
Get an A/Pass. Awesome. Vow to never think about it again.

Or so I thought.

Last year my novel started out being a set of connected and humorous short stories about the library I used to work at. Then that got boring and I wasn’t working fast enough so zombies attacked the library. Then about a third of the way through I couldn’t take the word limit requirements and it turned into ridiculous stream of consciousness where I talked about everything from what I had dreamed the night before to how I feel about flying squirrels. In hundreds of years they will probably find it and be so confused they will have no choice but to turn it into a holy book and start worshiping its bad syntax.

This year I made a vow that I would hold off stream of consciousness for as long as possible. However, it’s November 10th and I only have 13,868 words. By the end of today I should have 16,670. Yeah, right. Not when I am also trying to write final papers for grad school, thanks.

To say that I have upheld my vow and completely stayed on track would also not be completely accurate. Sure, I have stuck with a story and not started rambling about my personal life yet, but it only took about four days for that story to veer dramatically from semi-serious psychological study of realistic characters to TIME TRAVELING ALIENS ARE ATTACKING; ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND. I assume this switch was inevitable. Also, it is only November 10th. There are 20 more days left. I predict I would be stream of consciousnessing to make Faulkner proud by the end of this week.