NaNoWriMo, Day Thirty

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

NaNoWriMo is hard. Running a marathon (to which I’ve been comparing NaNoWriMo all month) is hard. Getting ready for it, you may think you know how hard, but you don’t. Even if you’ve tried and fallen short once or twice, you still don’t really know. But if you keep going, you get through it, you meet your goal, you get to the end, then you truly understand how difficult it is.

Then… Then you think that you know, or at least have a better idea, how hard it’s going to be to go from having completed NaNoWriMo (or your 7:30 marathon) to actually having a novel that other people are going to read and enjoy (or your 6:00 marathon). Now you must get through editing, and rewriting, and re-editing, and shuffling, and cutting, and re-re-editing. You think you know now how hard that will be. But then you remember just how ignorant you were before, and before that, and you finally get a glimpse of how ignorant you might still be now.

You have learned to doubt, to question.

But… But wait, there’s hope.

When I trained for the LA Marathon, we started out with a three-mile run. I thought I was going to barf up a lung and die. I was praying I would barf up a lung and die. But I didn’t. The next week we did four miles. Then five the next week. After building up for a few weeks, we would have a “cut back” week where we would run a shorter distance and take it easy. Then we would start building up again.

Towards the end, when we had run twenty miles one Saturday, then twenty-two the next, and then had a cut back week to only run sixteen miles, we were chatting about what was a breeze that sixteen mile day was going to be. We were only running sixteen miles! We could practically do that in our sleep and, no, we were not being sarcastic or snide. We really felt that way.

Our trainers reminded us that four months earlier, we had wanted to barf up a lung and die after three miles. Yet now we were legitimately scoffing at only sixteen miles. How had that happened?

Here’s the really, really big point. It’s the reason that this marathon vs. writing analogy has rung so true for me throughout this adventure.

When we have doubts going forward in the writing process (and we will) we need to keep this example from marathon training in mind. On that first weekend, when we were dying after three miles, of course we would have literally died if we had tried to run twenty-six miles. It would have been even more ridiculous to think we could run a 3:00 marathon on that first day. If we had tried to do that, we would have quit after six or seven or twelve miles. But we would have quit. We would have “failed”.

Similarly, at this point in our writing careers and experience, we can’t simply sit down and have a readable and publishable novel flow from our fingertips on the first draft of the first try. It would be even more ridiculous to expect a flawless masterpiece to be produced. If we try to do that, we will get discouraged. We will quit. We will “fail”.

But if we train, if we are patient, if we put in the work — we can do it. If we write and write, even though we will often write utter crap, we will learn. Most importantly, we will keep trying, even though it’s utter crap. Because the next time, it will be a little better. And a little bit better the time after that.

We’ll learn to edit and re-write and probably hate it at times. Often we’ll wonder why we’re putting ourselves through this, but we’ll do it. We’ll do a lousy job of it. But we’ll keep on doing it, confident that it will be better next time.

We have to trust the system, trust what our mentors are telling us (THANKS, CHUCK!!), trust in our ability to learn, grow, and do better. We have to give ourselves permission to experiment, to fail, to make horrible, hideous mistakes. That will be how we will learn.

Right now I look at what I’ve written this month and posted on this blog and I’m proud of it. I know it’s a long way from perfect and it needs a metric shit ton of work, but there’s a spark in it, a possibility. Even if this particular story never goes anywhere more, I know that I’ve learned so much about characters and plot and dialogue and what my writing strengths and weakness are. I have no doubt that in ten years, or five years, or six months, I may look back on this and wonder how in the hell I could have ever been foolish enough to put this bilge slime out in front of the public. But right now I’m proud of it, and I should be.

NaNoWriMo is hard. Running a marathon is hard.

I’ve now done both.

If they were easy to do, everyone would have done it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (continued)

“I would prefer to let Annie give you those details,” Ellen said. “But as I said earlier, if you’ve just found out about the Disks in the last few days and you’ve had the sense to keep that discovery to yourself, there are things we’ve discovered that you haven’t had time to find out yet. For example, have you wondered at all why the Disks haven’t been all over the news? Why no one has ever reported seeing them before, even if it made them sound like they were insane? No conspiracy theories, no photos on the cover of National Enquirer?”

The questions gave Tom something new to think about. “No, I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. I figured if I took my video to the press or to anyone else, they would figure it was some kind of movie special effects. If I insisted it was real, they would write me off as a crackpot. If I kept it up long enough and loud enough, I would get locked up as a loon. I hadn’t thought about fringe groups.”

“You would have discovered very quickly that you had a much bigger problem on your hands. You see, most people can’t see the Disks. At all. Period.”

“I couldn’t see them either, they were invisible to me. I only saw how the cat was reacting to them since they apparently can see them. I don’t know how that can be, but it is. I could only see it on the video for some reason.”

“What would you expect to happen if you showed that video to someone?” Ellen asked.

“I figure they would freak out just like I did if I could show them one live. Or like I said, if I showed them a recording, they would assume that it was fake, some kind of special effects. These days just about anything you can imagine can be made one hundred percent believable for movies or television. It’s not even that expensive or difficult.”

“That’s not at all what would happen. The person you showed it to would think you were either pulling their leg or psychotic. They would not see the disk. They would see the room or the setting where you made the recording, but it would look completely normal to them. No disk.”

“You’re kidding,” said Tom.

“Not at all, I assure you. Remember the recording of this room I showed a few minutes ago? If we showed it to anyone down in town and asked them to tell us what they saw, they would describe a dark, empty room where the lights came on for some reason, nothing more.”

Tom forced himself to maintain his best poker face. If Ellen was telling him the truth, Tom now had even more reason to not let her know about Jason. Jason could see the Disks in the video.

“Okay, assuming we’re putting our cards on the table and this whole affair just keeps getting weirder by the second, what are these things?”

“We don’t know,” Ellen said. “We have some theories we’re testing. We’re trying to establish a methodology for studying them but it’s tough when you they seem to appear at random times in random places. If you join our team, we’ll bring you up to speed on what we know and what we’re doing. Not before.”

“Why can the cats see them and we can’t?” Tom asked.

“We don’t know.”

“If only some people can see them in the videos and pictures, can only some cats see them in real time?”

“Good question, it took us a while to ask that. No, most cats can’t see them, but the percentage of those which can is much higher in cats than in humans.”

“Dogs? Horses? Dolphins? Ants? Any other critters that can see them?”

“We don’t know. Again, good ideas, but very difficult to test since we can’t create the Disks ourselves and we can’t predict where one will appear for us to experiment with. Personally, since they appear in the air, I would love to know if bats, birds, and insects see them. If they do, what happens when they touch one? We just don’t know.”

“What happens if we touch one? You indicated this was a ‘safe’ house. What is it safe from? The Disks? You showed me a video of one right here. Are the Disks dangerous to us?”

“We don’t know, exactly. We have some information on that, but it’s incomplete. That’s another thing that you should ask Annie about. For the time being, we recommend that you avoid contact with them if possible.”

Tom wanted to send the conversation off in another direction in order to see if he could rattle Ellen the same way she had kept him off balance. “Why did you build this facility out here in the middle of nowhere? Why not put it in an industrial warehouse in Los Angeles or Omaha, hide it in plain sight?”

“There is a very good reason, but Annie will have to show you. This spot was carefully chosen.”

“Are the Disks a recent phenomenon? Are they some kind of attack or invasion from Planet XQ17 or from the Nineteenth Dimension?”

“Again, we don’t know for sure. There are reasons to believe they have occurred in the past.”

“So why aren’t there pictures of them taken by accident from before there existed the kind of special effects technology we have now? If one of these things just happened to pop up in a scene from ‘Gone With the Wind’ most people wouldn’t have seen it according to you, but surely someone would have.”

“Video hasn’t been around that long. The Disks don’t appear on film, and before you ask, we don’t know why.”

“Not visible on film either, just video? Is there any particular kind of video format or equipment that works while others don’t?”

“We’ve tested that, we’re still working on it.”

“Can the Disks be detected by any other method? When one appears are there changes in the magnetic fields? Electrical? Infrared? Gamma rays?”

“We’re working on that,” Ellen said.

“You’re working on a lot of things. Is this your only location? How many people are here?”

“You’ll be told that later if you need to know.”

“Let’s get back to the video thing. Statistically, while video is relatively new, it’s all encompassing now. There are security videos covering a huge chunk of the planet. What you lose in historical terms you should more than overcompensate for with massive coverage. Someone has to have noticed these things.”

“They did, eventually. This group was established when Disks were seen by someone with access to massive amounts of security video data.”

That stopped Tom cold. It sounded like she was describing a security company. If someone prominent in the security industry already knew about these things, it was possible that Jason was vulnerable to being completely blindsided. Tom would have to find a way to warn him.

Tom pointed to the cameras around the room. “You’re looking for them from above. The video I got was from above. Is that the only way they can be seen?”

Ellen shook her head. “Yes and no. We know they appear to be some kind of two-dimensional manifestation in our three-dimension space. We managed once to get lucky and we were able to get pictures of a Disk from a variety of angles in the vertical plane. They’re far more visible from the top, but they can be captured on video from below. From the side, they’re completely invisible, like they were infinitely thin.”

“What are the grey shapes that are swimming around? And what are those rows of teeth?”

Ellen sat very still and stared at Tom. The pause went on long enough to make Tom start to get very nervous all over again.

“What’s going on?” Tom asked. “What did I say?”

“You really need to talk to Annie as soon as possible. It’s time for you to decide how you want to proceed. Do you want to join us and help find some of those answers? Or do you want to go back to your regular old life with memories and souvenirs of a ten-day binge in Las Vegas?”

“Really? Las Vegas? That was the best you could come up with?”

“Time to choose, Tom. No bullshit. Both paths are one-way trips. Make good choices.”

Tom leaned back and closed his eyes so he could focus. He didn’t doubt for a minute that they could make the last week disappear in his memory. The only problem was that they couldn’t make it disappear from Jason’s memory. Ellen had said he would be monitored if they released him, to make sure he didn’t cause future problems. When Jason contacted him, they would find out everything he had so far kept hidden from them.

If he went forward with this, would he be able to still keep in contact with Jason? Would he be able to function outside of the group while keeping those inside the group ignorant of it? Would he even want to after he found out what they knew?

There was only one way to find out. He had gotten this far for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He had to keep moving forward, even if it meant playing someone else’s game.

He opened his eyes, sat up, and looked at Ellen. “Okay, I’m in. What’s next?”