November Confessions

Everyone has a great story hiding inside them, but this is not it.

I confess, I decided to try NANOWRIMO this year.

To meet the ambitious goal of writing a novel in a month I cast aside any great story I had brewing in my mind. There are those family stories that need telling. There's the epic novel that takes us from an older, more dangerous South where Hodoun Shamen hide and wander the backwoods teaching us to treasure nature and love each other, and then leads us North to my adopted home town of NYC, and eventually West to California and ends in the shining obvious truth that we must all immediately become vegan. There's the love story that takes us from revolutionary Iran to San Francisco, bridging cultural and age differences, and leaves us all weeping into our soy ice cream.

But such things cannot be speed written in a month. So instead I gave free reign to the purplest of prose, adverbs blazing, glaring plot holes left in plain sight.

There's something for everyone in my story, something to offend everyone that is. Vegans will hate the early chapters where the main characters eat every possible animal and animal product under the sun. Non-vegans will think I'm way too heavy handed with the vegan messages, and the animal rights crowd will think I send no message clearly and leave everything muddy and ambiguous. My characters and plot are just saccharine-sweet enough to piss off any realist. In fact realists will hate my use of the supernatural as a plot device and my deus ex machina resolution. Those who like saccharine plots and happy endings will be put off by my liberal tossing in of horrible suffering and death, both human and animal. Anyone with any morals will be turned off by my hints of a grown man becoming unhealthily obsessed with a female high school student. And the eventual violent and criminal acts of my anti-hero, and the fact that he gets away with them, will demonstrate the complete ethical bankruptcy of my story.

November is not shaping up that well for me so far, but at least I have this, possibly the worst story ever to keep me company.