As you may have noticed, weird things happen to me all the time. All the time. Hell, something weird is probably happening right now and I’m not even noticing. Nevertheless, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) seems to be a time of heightened weirdness. I won’t go through all of the weird coincidences that have happened over the years, you can get the gist by reading about how I once burned down Gatorland – with my mind.
When I walked into the kitchen the other day and said to Husband, “You know how it’s National Novel Writing Month?” his automatic response was, “What did you do this time?”
I didn’t do anything. But one of my ninety-something year old characters has been keeping the ghosts of three of her siblings trapped in her home. I’m not sure how or why, so for right now she’s just got their bodies stashed in the attic. For this reason the headline, “Police: 90-year-old living with 3 siblings’ bodies” caught my eye.
Yes, I’m aware that there’s not any sort of human action you can dream up to write about that someone, somewhere hasn’t done. But she’s had them for years, and it hits the news now? I think that’s weird.
As for the novel itself? It’s not going well at all. I generally end up writing 75,000 – 100,000 words in November. This year, for the first time ever in my life, the words are just not pouring forth as easily as usual. Having to sleep more than 12 hours a day isn’t helping things. Friday was a pretty good day, one of my characters from last year showed up and killed one of this year’s characters. I’m not certain why yet, but I’ll let you know when I find out.
Keeping ghosts requires keeping the bodies lying about, too? Who knew?!?!? I was leaning in the direction of canning the ghosts, ala Ghostbusters…less smell, mess, etc….
Based on your brilliant suggestion – I’ve instead chosen to can the corpses. You’re a genius!
HA! When I read this sentence: “But one of my ninety-something year old characters has been keeping the ghosts of three of her siblings trapped in her home. ” I thought, “hey! I just saw an article about that old lady in Chicago who had the bodies of her three dead siblings in her house. I’ll have to send it to Rebecca.” Then I saw you’d already sent it to yourself.
I’m not having a good Nanowrimo year either. I’ve always made it, squeaking under the wire, but I’m stuck at around 7K, and I haven’t worked a day under 11 hours since the start of the month… except for election day, when I was out all day driving peeps to the polls. And I’m on travel this and next week. I’m thinking this may not be a banner year. Maybe I should invite one of last year’s characters to come kill someone. Maybe one of yours…. of I’ll just send them to Dinosaurland.