Inventing Foolishness

In a fit of venturesome inspiration I have done something exceptionally stupid: on the sixth of the month, I have signed up to write fifty thousand words by the end of July. Yes, I am now officially a participant in Camp NaNoWriMo, stowed safely in a cabin with a number of strangers who, at this hour of the night, are sound asleep and shall not be encountered until morning. It is probably a good thing they are occupied by staring at the back of their eyelids, as it may have been rather off-putting to watch me stumble into the cabin lugging my growing file of ideas in one hand and brandishing a partially-drained can of Canada Dry ginger ale in the other. Would have been, that is, had I been tottering into an actual cabin; as is, I merely sit back and await the assigning of cabin mates by morning. While I have no significant expectations regarding other camp members, it shall be amusing to see who exactly is assigned where, and to peruse their novel summaries to see what sort of stories they are venturing to write.

 

Yes, it is pure idiocy to take up a fifty thousand word writing challenge six days into a very strange and synchytic month of life, especially when one must come up with plot and characters approximately twenty-five minutes before delving into the inky act of production. It is certainly one of my more absurd ventures, but I think it will be well worth my while, if only as a fluffy little distraction during a chaotic time in life. The writing quality will suffer from speed and lack of focus, and the plot will be lame, and the characters will fall flat, but hey. When the alternative is doing nothing in particular, why not engage in some form of useful activity? If I am to become a writer I must first develop that curious habit of writing, and what better way to develop it than to do it.

 

In a few short minutes I have scrawled the first two paragraphs into my graph paper notepad, the same one which is functioning as writing journal and scribble sheet in lieu of a proper journal (this I mean to rectify shortly, as I have reason to believe I will be able to pick up a few select items from home). However, instead of proceeding with Marlowe's adventures after finding the notebook I am wandering through WeHeartIt and Google images, looking for a specific cloth-bound journal to use as visual reference beside the prose. The cover is pale blue and a bit tattered, Gallix tells me, and he insists that it must look just so. I ought to banish him from my head for the time being, the scampish imp, and tell him to go scrounge for it himself if he wants to give me such unbending specifications; already we have encountered two blue, cloth-bound journals and both times he has refused them, batting them away without so much as a second glance. In the future I shall suggest that he go searching for pictures before he tells me how the books are supposed to appear; this way, we shall avoid much confusion and delay, as Sir Topham Hat loves to announce.

 

Writing from Marlowe's mind is going to prove most enlightening, as I have never really engaged with such a narrow minded, idiosyncratic character on my own. There is much about her that aligns with ordinary girlhood, but the number of her more exotic characteristics exceeds her normalcy. After all, what sort of girl finishes high school early, skims through college in two years instead of the standard four to five, then completes her graduate thesis in the field of zymology? I am afraid Gallix was not at all impressed, something that did not stand him in good stead with his fellow character; while she did not expect him to be thrilled about her study of the process of fermentation, she rather disliked the mockery he made of her chosen studies.

 

To be quite honest, I side with Gallix in this dispute. While he should not have ridiculed her so relentlessly, she should have thought through the implications of using all her time in the lab to observe the clabbering of milk and the effects of white vinegar on non-acidic edible substances. Her lab partners would have laughed a great deal more had she not been so frugal in her experimentation; almost every new hypothesis resulted in the elements being recycled as ingredients in a batch of peculiarly tasty cookies, which were peddled around to the lab occupants with good will. She never did eat any herself though, and I wonder that they failed to question that, as it has much to do with common sense.