NaNoWriMo Tee-Shirt

So Ginny put on her NaNoWriMo tee-shirt and lots of deoderant because writing at such a fast pace makes her sweat. She has been known to write so slowly that choosing one right word consumes her full attention for over an hour, or a day. When she was writing her second published novel, Swindler’s Night, she left a whole chapter unfinished for a month because she was laboring over one word. The right word, she eventually realized, was “cadence.” When she came up with it, she had been shopping at Trader Joe’s and she nearly poked out a fellow shopper’s eye when she whipped out her pen and notebook to write down her idea. She’s never attempted NaNoWriMo, nor has she ever forced herself to write through the un-artful first-thing-that-comes-to-mind kind of writing that others seem good at. But today, she tried it and she enjoyed the speed with which she reached 1667 words. She made it to 1800, in fact. Her characters are on the page, having a significant conversation at a beer garden. Her tale is coming into being on the page, and Ginny feels a sense of relief that it is finally getting out of her head. She is far from satisfied with the klutzy writing. The piece totally lacks cadence, but Myles can’t have gotten as far in his endeavor. His novel is probably some rambling erotica crap, Ginny wonders, but then immediately tells herself to focus on herself. Forget him, already, forget him.

Myles, dear reader, is taking a bubble bath and drinking champagne to celebrate his victory today. He’s written over 4,000 words of his erotic, legal thriller entitled Thanks Be to Godfrey. The protagonist Godfrey, a lawyer and law enforcement officer, chases his financial advisor on I-5 going South and entering Mexico, a car chase scene that rivals what we saw on TV back in June 1994 when OJ Simpson ran from cops on the San Diego Freeway near L.A. Godfrey’s nemesis rides away in a black Ford Bronco, and this inciting incident throws Godfrey to his knees. Myles is so proud of writing this scene because he feels he made it very literary and successfully rendered a thrilling car chase as a metaphor for global financial emergency. If he gives his rival novelist a single thought—which he doesn’t—he’d be thinking, “Ginny, eat my dust!”