When all else fails, make a chart

Say, you know that book? The one about somniphobia, or perhaps car accidents, or maybe grief, or possibly running, or conceivably palindromes and anadromes and endless loops, or potentially the fluid and invasive nature of memory? 

It has got its very own first draft! Just like a real book. Does it make sense? Is it the "meaningful disarray" I had hoped to create? Ha, I don't know. What do you think this is, a fourth draft? I'll tell you one thing, though: there's a chart. The story is an endless spool. I needed a chart for my sanity- you might be able to tell by looking at it. Can you see?

See, you can.

"Your secret's safe with me, but I'll call you whatever I like."

A bit of Edward-or-Martin for you. I am nearly 3/4 done with the first draft, but the month is catching up to me. Better get some serious work done in the next few days.

In the meantime, meet Millie!

_________________

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the information of a human life can be arranged to mean almost anything.”

This is exactly what I say to Millie when she brings me my small cup of black coffee, even though I had told myself not to speak that way to people. Not so carefully that they can tell I am being careful.

“Oh,” she says, setting down the cup in front of me. “That’s what you were trying to say yesterday.” I don’t know whether she understands the things I say or she thinks she’s playing along with an elaborate game.

So I just say, “Yes. That is what I meant.”

Millie changes her position. She almost never stands up straight, she is not now; her back straightens out and she swings her hips forward at the same time. She is a slope of curiosity. “You’ll have to elaborate on that,” she says during this pause, and then she is walking back to the kitchen to pick up someone else’s order.

I come here because my wondering mind has made mine a wandering body. If I don’t have a place to sit and something to do with myself (drink another cup of coffee, keep me awake), I could end up who knows where and half-asleep, or wholly sleeping. It’s been said that some-call-him-Edward can sometimes be found on a bench with his head back, mouth wide open, hands at his sides palms-up as if in supplication. And maybe he is.

The coffee shop where she works is three miles from my house and one mile from the school. I end up there two or three times a week. The first time that my wandering body brought me here was also the first time I met Millie.

 ***

He strained for a second to remember what her name tag read. "Millie," he called after her.

She had just left a cup of coffee on his table marked with the name Robert. Millie turned on the spot and looked back at him.

"I think this is the wrong one," he told her quietly, holding up the cup so she could see the name written there.

She read it, blinked, and stared vacantly at him.

"I'm Edward," he reminded her.

"No," she corrected him, walking back to his table.

It only took this brief pause for doubtfully-Edward to work up a fairly well-realized dread that he had indeed been completely mistaken all along, and that his name contained neither an Edward nor a Martin. It didn't occur to him that his waitress would have had no way of knowing such a thing.

"You told Tony that your name was Martin," she whispered, nodding toward the barista. A crooked smile interrupted what had been a pretty good play at earnest accusation. She brought it to a full grin, giving up with a playful, "Your secret's safe with me, but I'll call you whatever I like."

"My... secret?" he asked, losing a little of the color in his face. Millie's eyes widened.

"Look at you!" she whispered sharply, sitting herself down across from him. "You even went pale. I couldn't have hoped-!"

For a moment, she was too excited and he too confused to speak.

"I think you're misunderstanding," he said at last.

"Then what is your name?" she asked him directly, folding her arms in front of her and setting her elbows on the table.

"It's Edward," he offered with an utterly guileless smile.

"Of course it is," she replied brightly, her expression at once unconvinced and entertained.

"No, listen- it is. Martin's just... a nickname."

"For Edward?"

He nodded resolutely.

"What's your last name?"

"Martin," he answered too quickly. "Tony calls me by my last name."

"You said it was a nickname.”

"Yes."

"Now you're saying it's your last name.” She lowered her head and locked her eyes on his. “Which is it?"

"Both."

"Then why didn't you just say that to begin with?"

Throughout this conversation, Millie had been demonstrating an almost shocking inability to temper her increasing delight. She now looked him straight in the face with an expression of fascination that anyone else would have been embarrassed to wear. Her lack of subtlety seemed to permit him a relaxed grip on his own social courtesy, and he looked at her with unrestrained confusion.

"Are you enjoying your coffee, Franklin?" she asked him, grinning.

"Very much, thank you," he answered her slowly, his expression unchanging as he took a sip for sake of punctuation.

The olfactory journal

This month's literary adventure, Might as well be Edward, deals with everything  how am I supposed to write this  how could anyone write this a few different aspects of loss and memory. Our hero is greatly concerned with memory, particularly its imperfections and malleability, and one way that he attempts to preserve his memories is through what he calls an olfactory journal. He singles out smells attached to certain people, places, times, etc., and he collects and labels them accordingly. (Technically, it's more of a desk drawer than a journal.)

So, he'll have a half-used bottle of cologne labeled "ninth grade fall semester", a jar full of dirt marked "left in a ditch in the dark", hand lotion representing a girlfriend, a piece of chalk for that math class he barely passed, and so on in that fashion. The reason I'm telling you about all of this, aside from wanting a bit of a break before I get back to writing it, is that I'd like to know what you would put in your olfactory journal.

I'll go first!

-Altoids for Dad. He ate an unfathomable amount of those mints.

-Bag of Starbucks Komodo Dragon Blend for the year 2007, when my occasional cup of coffee took its sudden turn into a daily ritual.

-McCormick Imitation Butter Flavor for my earliest days cake decorating.  Weird, right? I just didn't know how awesome real butter is back then.

-Victoria's Secret Love Potion for the hallways of high school.

Your turn!

Expectation of failure and other thrills

Happy May! Camp NaNoWriMo: April Edition has come to an end, and after a month of writing, rewriting, backtracking, forging ahead, and exercising critical demons through increasingly baffled notes-to-self, I have learned a valuable lesson.

Writing twenty thousand words in a month as opposed to fifty thousand is insanely doable.

So I'm going to keep doing it! Every month until November, when it's back to 50k. Anticipated questions:

Why twenty thousand?
That was roughly the length of The Unremarkable Man, and I found that I adore the format. I would like to play with it a bit more.

How many pages is that?
Ah, jeez, I don't know. Hold on. I will check for you. ...It's in the neighborhood of eighty. There! We both learned something.

Is that even a book?
Sure! It's not a novel (novella is the charming term), but it is a book. Also: that was harsh, bro.

So why not just take more time and expand the story into a proper novel?
Same reason I don't write historical fiction. Don't wanna.

Okay, so why write a novella every month?
Because I'm not at all certain I will succeed, and isn't that fun? When you look at something and think to yourself, "I don't even know how that's possible. There's no way I could ever do something like that. Anyway, better get started." IT IS THE BEST.

Admittedly, I got a little addicted to that feeling the first time I tried NaNoWriMo proper and have been chasing it ever since- so long as it's a personal challenge whose success or failure won't affect anyone else, of course.

But what about the books you were already working on?
Under and Human Shaped are pretty much done; they'll be available for sale before November rolls around. Toy Maker is scheduled as September's novella (I'm just going to rewrite it from the ground up.) Stolen was April's book. Might as well be Edward is my project for this month. See? No worries. I got this.

What about the rest of the months between now and November?
Do I need to repeat myself? I got this.
April- Stolen
May- Might as well be Edward
June- Unnamed book about a woman who wakes up back at the beginning of the worst year of her life.
July- Unnamed book about a sociopath running for class president.
August- Unnamed book about magic! And death. In case you thought it wasn't going to be depressing.
September- Toy Maker
October- Unnamed book about a fictional character (Sam) who keeps waking up in different books by the same author, notices they are all super sad, and is horrified to one day wake up the main character. Yes, I am the author. No, this is not a joke.
November- Sequel to Raised by the Dead.

Didn't you try something like this once and fail miserably?
Why yes, I did! How kind of you to remember. I once set out to write one 50,000 word book every month for a year and only ended up with four. It was both an abject failure and the most productive writing year of my life. I would not mind repeating that at all.