National Novel Writing Month: An Introduction

Ciao, Tutti!

Lots of good stuff to talk about today. Here's the agenda:

1) Flaming Fire is a Haloweenie.

2) Writing, writing, writing. Nano is here!

3) Another submission?

4) The start of the 2009-2010 NBA season is going just as crappily as I expected.

It turns out that 1) Flaming Fire is a Haloweenie band. We played two shows, one on October 29 and one on October 30, that reeked of costumes and candy. The October 29th show featured, just before us, a reenactment of an Aztec virgin sacrifice, complete with the nudity and eating of her heart. Then we played music.



Last night we agreed to forget all about it. I, obviously, haven't been able to keep that promise.

Yesterday we played for a much better crowd at a venue whose name I don't know if I'm allowed to divulge publicly like this. They like being "underground." It was in a warehouse in Brooklyn and had a divebomb audience. I'm not sure what that means, but they loved the music, so it was all good. Then I got claustrophobic and left.

Then I slept for a few hours. Then I taught constitutional law. Ah, life!

In other Flaming Fire news, the band has acquired a piece of property for a long amount of time (nearly 2 months, I think) with which we will create an installation project. Don't ask me what that means; I'll find out on Monday, hopefully. The theme? You might want to take a deep breath before reading this: Christmas Forever.

Yeah, I know. But other than that it should be pretty cool. More information when I know more!

Please direct your attention to the image on your left, as in the left side of the blog. That is one of my winner's certificates for last year's National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo). It is, as of tomorrow, 11 months old, meaning that this coming month, which starts tomorrow, will be the next Nanowrimo! Soon enough I will be 2) writing, writing, writing. Nano is here! In 31 days at the latest I will be replacing the 2008 winner's certificate with the 2009. Or maybe I'll have a gallery of 2006, 2008, and 2009 (my computer crashed in 2007 and I lost 25,000 words). Whatever happens, you'll see soon enough!

I've been waiting for tomorrow for the past month and a half. I am pumped up!

I had really hoped to have a new piece of writing for the blog before November 1st, because who knows when I'll be writing short fiction again? I have a new story I'm fond of, "Perfection in Five Acts with Prelude," but I have to edit it at least once more before sharing it, so hold your horses, folks. But, in the spirit of Nanowrimo, I will post for you all the prologue to the novel I wrote last year, in its pure Nano unedited goodness! And hopefully I'll write some chapters this year that I feel good enough about to share as well.



Check out the site for Nanowrimo at http://www.nanowrimo.org 50,000 words in 30 days!

"Prologue to "The Antiock Mission," working title

Alaer heard wind blowing through the leaves and all around him. Pollen drifted lazily up to his nose and he tried not to sneeze. The sun was out. He could feel the rays poking into his skin, warming him up as if he had just been frozen in a block of ice. There were clouds, though, and rain droplets too. It wasn’t raining very hard, but the wind picked up the tiny examples of H20 molecules and threw them into Alaer’s face. Rain blew unceremoniously into a river beside him, the droplets sounding like little faucet drops here and there.

Alaer clicked his tongue against the back of his mouth, listening for vibrations to bounce wildly around him. He could sense the rain closest to him, but he could not tell anything beyond that. For all he could tell the rainy field stretched out for eternity. He knelt down and began to probe the wet grass with his hands, feeling the mud and blades near the bank of the brook. He picked up a hard, jagged object. He threw the rock into the river. It wasn’t what he was looking for. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth again, but still he could not hear anything nearby, anything despite the growing storm and the irritated grass.

He dove his hands into the river, his muddy hands grappling under the water. Another rock. It splashed into the river. Alaer combed the riverside as if he were looking for gold. There was no sense of urgency. He had all the time in the world.

His hand wrapped around something strange in the water. He grabbed it with both hands, feeling it all around to determine what it was he had found. It was a boot. And the boot was attached to a person. It wasn’t what he had been looking for, but he dragged the person out of the water effortlessly, the wind pelting the body with warm droplets. Alaer knelt over the body, a small body, the body of a young boy of about his age, maybe younger. The boy coughed. Alaer heard splashes in the mud as he rolled over and threw up. He panted heavily, his hands and boots splashing in the mud, as he tried to sit up.

Alaer retreated to the riverside and spread his fingers through the mud, ignoring the waking boy. Another rock. Another splash. A twig sent to float down the river.

“Alaer?”

Alaer turned around at the familiarity of the voice. He heard wind and rain rushing against the boy who had made the sound, that sweet, recognizable sound he knew oh so well from dreams and nightmares.

“Benji?” he asked. “Is that you?”

Footsteps splashed in the mud and the boy jumped into an embrace with Alaer. The two slipped in the mud and splashed into the river.

“I knew you’d come!” exclaimed Benji. “I just knew if I waited long enough you’d come!”

“You were waiting for me at the bottom of the brook?” asked Alaer.

“I knew they wouldn’t be able to find me there,” he said smugly.

“This is wonderful!” proclaimed Alaer, taking his friend under his arm. “Now I don’t have to look for you anymore! We can play tag and Sorcerers and make fun of old Mr. Winstock all day long!”

The pair ran arm in arm through the field, their feet splashing enthusiastically in the soaked soil, the wind blowing rain into their faces, the sun’s rays jumping above them and warming the tops of their heads. They ran for hours in the field. It didn’t matter where they were going. It was just time to run. It was time to run from everything that had just happened. There was no need for it anymore. Now they had found each other and they could just run. And run they did.

The rain stopped.

Alaer stopped.

“Wait!” he called as his friend splashed on ahead. “I forgot to get my glasses!”

“Don’t be jealous!” teased Benji.

“I’m not jealous!” retorted Alaer.

“Then don’t be!” retorted Benji.

“I’m not!” retorted Alaer.

“Good!” retorted Benji. His feet began to splash again, the sounds growing more distant.

Alaer cried out and bounded after him, trying not to slip in the mud, his feet splashing cold water onto his legs. “Benji, wait up! I need my glasses!”

“Things are back to normal now,” Benji called back. “You can go back to school and I can have a girlfriend and there will be no war ever again!”

“But I need my glasses!” Alaer screamed.

“Put a carburetor in it!”

Benji’s feet stopped splashing. Alaer’s feet stopped splashing. They both stood still, listening to a mixture of water trickling over rocks and young boys trying to control their breathing. Alaer clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The wind blew all around them. The grass by his feet danced and whispered. Alaer kneeled down at the brook and began to fan his fingers through the muddy water again.

“Why do you have to do this?” asked Benji callously.

“You know I need to find my glasses,” snapped Alaer. Another rock. Another splash.

“Look, you’ve found me,” he said exasperatedly. “It’s what you’ve wanted all this time. Do you really think things are better after you got those glasses or before?”

Alaer continued to fan his fingers through the water. He breathed in deeply with his nose, the smells of stale fish and wet reeds rushing in. The wind pressed into his face, occasionally splashing water onto his eyelids.

“Things will never be the same,” he said. He said it so softly that he knew Benji couldn’t hear it. The wind carried the soft voice right to Benji’s ears.

“You were always so pessimistic,” said Benji. “You’ve always worked hard to get everything you’ve ever had and it’s never been enough for you. So what if things are never the same again. I’m back. We should go before things turn bad again.”

Alaer flopped back, the cold mud splashing onto his sun-warmed body.

“I miss, you Benji.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I miss Mum, too.”

“I miss my family.”

“I didn’t like the way things were before,” said Alaer, the sun pressing into his eyelids and cheeks. “But it’s so much better than the way things are now.”
Alaer heard footsteps and a wet thud beside him. Benji rubbed Alaer’s scalp.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” his friend reassured him.

“Don’t touch me there,” cautioned Alaer. “It still stings.”

“Sorry.”

“I guess this means I should go now.”

“I guess so. I hope that muddy water helped your wrist.”

Alaer stroked his wrist, instantly triggering the pain again. He winced. “I guess not.”
He stood up and bowed to his friend, his hands pressed together.

“I’ll be waiting in the river,” said Benji, the sound of splashing coming from the river again, sounds like large rocks being discarded but Alaer knew that they were really boots. “Let me know when you come to find me again.”

Alaer turned to go, trudging through the soaked field, the sun burning the back of his neck. He walked slowly, dragging his feet through the water. The water sloshed. The wind blew some onto Alaer’s legs. The wind blew dissonances through the grass below. Alaer wished for the clouds and the rain to come back.

Finally he returned to the trap door in the ground. He clicked his tongue and felt around for the handle and opened it. The sound was jarring. He tried his best to cover both ears with one hand. He decided to open it with hit foot so as to cover his ears, the pressure from his left wrist causing it to scream out in agony. Alaer’s head began to throb. He sank to his knees.

After regaining composure he descended down the ladder and into the cold metal room. He clicked his tongue and vibrations echoed off the four walls, ceiling, and ground. There was a strange rounded object in one of the corners. There was a small section of the room where the vibrations were muted. That’s where the blanket was. Alaer shivered. It was cold. There was a body on the ground. Alaer knew where it was instinctually because it was his body. He heard the trap door close silently behind him as he lay down on top of his body.

His wrist throbbed unbearably. The veins in his head felt like they were cascading out of his body, pulling his brains with them like a stubborn boulder. He opened his eyes, sending searing light through his retinas and into his brain, enveloping him in a world of whiteness. He screamed with a voice hoarse from screaming, clamping his eyes shut and covering them with his hands as water flowed involuntarily from them. He bumped his head against the floor and threw up from the dizziness, screaming and panting, anything to drive the pain from his mind.

From the cell next to Alaer’s, Marcus Max said to himself, “You know, this is getting old.”

To be continued...

On the subject of writing, is it really possible that I'll be sending in 3) another submission? Actually, I hoped to have a few out before November 1, but the one that might actually get done is "History Does This," a two paragraph short I recently posted. I haven't submitted yet, so you can still read it on the site, but soon enough it will be gone, and hopefully admitted into a magazine.

Sidenote: If you ever need to look for something specific in the Sam goldsmith blog, like "History Does This," there is now a Google search bar in the upper left-hand corner (above the Nanowrimo certificate from 2008) which will search ONLY my blog. Just to make things easier for ya'll.

Speaking of things I'm excited about, this time for no particular reason, 4) The start of the 2009-2010 NBA season is going just as crappily as I expected. The Pistons look like a rotten banana, the Warriors like an unripe banana, and the Celtics like banana crisp. And don't even mention the Knicks. It sucks. Plus they won't show anyone on TV except the same old teams I can't stand. It's just like the World Series, actually, except I don't loathe the Phillies with all my sports being.



I don't want to talk about basketball anymore.

Good luck with your novels, everyone, and I wish the best for all of you and your friends.

-Sam goldsmith