It's official! I won the 2007 NaNoWriMo competition. I entered my document into their website before the end of November and their army of robots counted and certified my novel as being over 50,000 words. In reality, all I won was a stupid internet badge, but I post it here proudly. It's a soul crushing experience to push out 50,000 words in a month, especially for me who managed to reach it by November 15th. In 2005 I calculated the stats for the month but this year, because my novel has a more serious tone (in contrast to 2005's effort which was just absurd), I will now attempt to humorously summarize my novel in less words than it took to write.
Imagine you live in the future. Everything is perfect. It's truly a utopia on Earth. Now imagine it's because everything is run by a super-intelligent computer called the Singularity that has wrestled control of earth from humans by predicting, controlling, and harnessing human behaviour and bending the laws of physics itself. Now imagine that instead of the author taking the opportunity to create original characters or develop any sort of plot, nor attempt to penatrate the enigmatic philosophical properties of such a system or the implications of such a omnipotent, benevolent controller, he uses the book as a platform to describe the structure the Singularity is housed in. Nearly 40,000 words dedicated to describing a fictional building. Then, the author, upon realizing he is going to run out of things to write about before reaching the goal, changes course and decides to put a second Singularity in space. What a stroke of genius on the part of the author, Luanching a second Singularity into space easily allows another 10,000 words in the course of describing the ship--christened the Hamlet. The transition is handled flawlessly with stock characters called by such inventive names as Dr. Matthew and Dr. Morgan and a ninja attack at the 41,000 word mark. The spaceship Hamlet is launched just as an earthquake strikes the original Singularity, collapsing what had been previously described as a very strong building, returning the population of earth to a pre-historic way of life. Ultimately, the book argues a real utopia is impossible and life tragic; another paradise lost. Reviewers suggest alternatively that perhaps the author came up with this idea when he was having a bad Monday; perhaps having stubbed his toe getting out of bed or upon realizing he forgot to buy orange juice for breakfast. Publishers are quick to comment that in several places the author outright stole plot devices from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones's Dairy and that the manuscript is only fit to be burned. By way of closing, the author wishes to delare his intent to keep writing the little known genre of sci-fi architectural fiction.
2 comments:
Blair, i could only read half of this entery, as i would prefer to read the whole novel without ruining it hear.
and also the 2005 novel you wrote,
They're both dastardly! They both deserve a good rewrite, espeically this year's as it had a very strong consistant narrative voice throughout that I liked. There is definitely a story in there somewhere. All I can say is people do NaNoWriMo for many different reasons.
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