Day 26 #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 4225 (target was 4K)
T-shirt: It’s been a long sleeve top day
Best music vibe: Stone Temple Pilots

Armed with this mud map to the end, it should be a walk in the park, right? Well it’s a good find, to think you know where you are going, until the characters show up and do their own thing. Gah!

This time is was Ramsey turning up at dinner with extra people. Extra people who look like the staff living and working in the house. But who are obviously not the hired help.

Gosh and then there was the moment in the shower when Sally Sparrow moment came to  e… and I now have the opening written (you can read it below in a few minutes) and a half-written ending. With that I can unequivocally say, that despite all that goes on in Dalhousie, I will possibly be able to sell it as a romance book. It is still very much gothic horror, but that sub-genre has a very strong romance element to it.

But before I get ahead of myself, I need to finish the damn book. Then do all the additional research, redefine the characters in accordance to their new arcs, write a second, third, fourth and probably fifth draft.

Gosh – and all those words. I was aiming for 75,000 words. I’m sitting on 71,500 and I believe there are at least another 10,000 words to go. Perhaps a few more. The desire is still strong to finish this by Saturday night.

Bring out your cheer squads. I didn’t expect to be doing 4K days at this end of the game. And while the pom poms gather and the legs are warmed up, skirts pulled discretely down, a few words to open the actual novel.

* * *

The sound of rubber soles, squeaking and pounding behind her; the rhythm of panic mashed with the rumbling trundle of the suitcase wheels on polished floors and the eddy of conversations. Another punter late for a flight.

“Flight DJ424 for Sydney is paging passengers Dr Robert Selvaratnam and Mrs Robert Selvaratnam.” Mish stopped and looked up at the speaker. “Please make your way to gate 32. Your plane is boarded and ready for an immediate departure.”

“Miss Mulholland?” a voice called from behind. “Michelle Mulholland?”

A young man in a Flight Facilities t-shirt, ran toward her, looking between the screen on his phone and then up to her, as if checking a photograph. “Oh shit,” he puffed, stopping where she stood beneath the speaker, bending over to catch his breath. “I spend my whole life waiting for this one minute and I almost fuck it up entirely.”

He handed her an envelope, yellow and brittle, the ink faded by time, but the handwriting she’d know anywhere.

“She says her only regret was you’d never know. The rest would be taken care of.”

“She?”

“I’ve never read it. None of us have, but we were told it explains everything.”

Mish sliced open the envelope. Instead of taking out the letter she withdrew the photographs and flicked through them.

“I don’t understand,” she said. The boy was gone, swallowed by the swell of passengers flooding the concourse from a recent arrival. She glanced the opposite way toward the departures lounge. She’d left only five minutes maybe more given she’d stopped at the ladies.

“Jokes on me, right?” she said aloud, turning slowly waiting for the hidden camera crew to reveal themselves. A minute passed and another, as she stood in the sea of humanity, all moving toward somewhere else while she felt anchored to this one moment in time. Endlessly caught. Buffeted by irrational possibilities.

When the host of the new reality TV show didn’t step forward to announce the joke was one her, she pushed across the tide of travellers and opened the letter in a small enclave between a coke machine and an abandoned luggage trolley.

Day Sixteen #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 8382 (target was reach 50K by the evening)
T-shirt: Fashion was less important that words today
Best music vibe: “Love Me Again” John Newman

I lay in bed half awake contemplating the possiblity of hitting 50K. It wasn’t something I had gone to bed thinking was doable but something in the haze of a 6am Saturday morning skim of consciousness, I thought it was.

I got up. I didn’t bother with a shower (I’m photographed again in my nighty!). I boiled the kettle, made tea and sat down. I checked my word count. I was just shy of 9K from the elusive ‘win’. Even as I typed, I wasn’t sure if I could make it. If I was setting myself up for disaster to even announce my intention publicly. Somewhere along the way I did.

Despite the eddy of arguments in my household and plans that shifted like quick sand, I left with a tissue drenched in ‘focus’ oil and headed to the Write In at Milton. It was my first chance to attend one and Mel did a great job of getting me sorted out with all my paraphenalia. Jon offered to put my catch up stickers on my card, until I told him I was waiting until I hit 50K. That was what I was there to do. And write I did.

If I had have been at home, you know, I would have wandered away and done washing, swept a floor, anything, because it was hard. It hurt. And when I realised that I was going to have to write the scene between Tabitha and the sculptor as my final scene for the day it felt like a cruel irony I would end up here.

It came with a silver lining. That scene in the sculptor’s lair is the only fully fleshed out scene in the entire short story. I copied and pasted it into my manuscript and reworked it to fit the new narrative. And then the end. Oh Christ! I found out exactly why she gave in and let him do what he did. While it’s no explicit about what happens in the end, you don’t need to be Einstein to work it out and perhaps that’s what makes it all the more horrible.

But I won’t leave that as my legacy at 50K.

This is the most I have ever written in two week (actually two weeks and two days). While I’m not writing this on the eve of the 16th day (I came home, sunk into a bath with a beer, tried to eat something and passed out in bed) I feel as though I can do a far better job of capturing it all with a brain that works.

I  know when writing is hard, it often means it is good, but hell…

Speaking of hell, let’s see what happens how Christian comes to sell his soul to the devil we will come to know better as The Sculptor (or John Hardgrave away everyone but Tabitha calls him!)

* * *

Christian knocked the scotch back and felt it curdle with the eggs in his stomach.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He inclined his head to the book and the pages depicting breakfast that morning, sketched in. John would add colour later.

“I’d like to barter with you.” The words sounded ridiculous and he pulled at the place where his suspenders joined his breeches.

“Barter.” John took a slow savouring sip of the scotch.

“You want us all to sit for you. Tabitha refuses. She doesn’t want either of us to sit for you.”

“What do you have to barter, Christian?”

“I’ll sit for you,” Christian said rubbing his damp hands against the top of his trousers.

“And in return.”

“I want one of your sketch books. A blank one and a supply of pencils.” He knocked the rest of the scotch back and sat rotating the glass on the table top waiting for the reply.

“We are friends, are we not comrade. This seems a rather, formal request. I’d be happy to just give you one.”

Christian swallowed hard. “This is the only way it can be and Tabitha can’t know. She doesn’t want either of us in here.”

“Intriguing.” John poured more scotch for them both. “I generally ask that those who come here refrain from talking about what goes on in these four walls. I like to protect my subjects in that way.”

“And what goes on in these four walls?”

“Artistic surrender. On both our parts”

Christian felt a cold sweat break out over his body.

“Honesty. I demand honesty.” He sipped at his scotch. “What I produce is a multi-faceted experience. It is my story, your story and the story of us all reproduced in plaster and clay, in ink and watercolour. Art demands naked expression. It does not abide falseness.”

“I have nothing to hide,” Christian said and slammed the rest of the scotch back. “I’ve… been naked before. For. For Art.”

John poured more scotch and Christian saw the door open on the past, himself peering in: Aliyah passed out on a mattress, her long hair in a snarled halo around her head, hands and arms encrusted with oil paint; Grim plucking funk baselines in stained pair of Y-fronts on a battered couch, his chest gleaming with sweat and come down from the last hit.

“To show the good faith of our deal,” said John and the door shut. Christian was back in the messy studio a world away from that share house and his first and last taste of fame.

He placed the black sketch book on the table, several pencils alongside it and then topped up their glasses.

“For art,” toasted John.

“For art.”

Day Fifteen #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 1487 (target was 2.5K)
T-shirt: It was write in your nighty morning!
Best music vibe: “Stonefield” self-titled album

“…sometimes it starts as a drop in the ocean and you don’t think too much about it. You don’t mean to hurt people.” Tabitha MacLeod

Welcome to the halfway point of the month! It’s hard to believe two entire weeks have passed by in a flurry of words and awesome camaraderie.

Today was one of those weird days where a scene came to me and I went with it, even though it’s from later on in the novel. Writing someone totally unhinged was a of fun, looping the conversation, riddling it with non-sequiturs, unexpected disclosures.

What I got out of the mouth of Lucas Hammond blew my understanding of the band apart. And now as I write (the morning after because my routine is totally shattered) I wonder if it’s the truth. Or if it’s a version of his truth which is so far removed from normality that it doesn’t matter is it’s actually true or not. It certainly makes the trajectory of Tabitha’s madness seem less extreme.

I put a small snippet up on Facebook when I was done yesterday and Lois Spangler commented: “I married him so I didn’t feel like a failure.” There is an entire social treatise wrapped up in this one line. And she is so correct. Only in this instance it comes with the added impetus of marrying someone so incompatible to escape the failure bred into her as a child who didn’t meet her parent’s expectations. Plus, in this paragraph I found out just what Robert does: a patents lawyer. As such they would be rolling in money!

I didn’t get back to the page in the evening. I spent the morning with homeschooling Mum’s at Alexandra Hills and the afternoon with Emily Craven. Both filled my soul so now, topped up with three rounds of awesome conversation (if I add in Thursday with Stacey) I’m word-powered to aim big on day 16!

Here is a little of the bizarre conversation between Tabitha and Lucas (Ham) Hammond.

* * *

“You come here too.” Tabitha startled and when she turned saw the slightly darker shape in the doorway.

“It looks that way.”

Lucas sat on the left hand side of her, the chair scraping through the night.

“I like to sit in the puppet master’s chair too.” Lucas drummed his fingers on the table top in an elaborate beat she struggled to follow. “We’re all his meat marionettes. He plucks the strings and we dance for him. Pinocchio Pinocchio, where art thou, Pinocchio.”

He moved about in his seat, the wooden structure creaking.

“You know where he keeps the booze. Something strong. Fuck, I need a hit of something.”

“I don’t know,” Tabitha said, feeling waves of desperation and something else peeling off Lucas. “I don’t come down here to drink.”

“Why do you come down here then?”

His hand fumbled in the dark and clasped around hers, cold and steely and sweaty.

“To be alone. It’s easier to be alone here than upstairs.”

“Becca and Gordy won’t let me back in there.”

The slow crush of his fingers around hers gave her every reason to think they were sensible in locking him out. But now he was in here. With her. “Are you scared of me? I can smell your fear.”

“How about we raid the kitchen.” The false lightness of her voice made her fear he’d see straight through it. “I’m starving and you know, I owe you for the night you brought me up food to my room.”

“Let’s make shadow puppets.”

He let go of her hand and she heard the scramble and smash of things falling, or pushed, dropped, from the sideboard.

“Fuck it.” More smashing.

Tabitha slowly slid the seat out from beneath the table. If she ran…

“Tabby, ahhh fuck it hurts.”

“Lucas?” She stopped trying to move away from the table.

“Did Christian fix that bath?”

“Yes.”

“I think I want a bath. Will you run me a bath?” Tabitha guessed from the sound he was pacing. “The only thing I remember from MacBeth – Lady MacBeth all fucked up and scrubbing her hands. All of Neptune’s seas and all of that. I need a bath. Fuck it. Bath, yeah a bath. I wanna go swimming. But it’s too cold to go swimming. Yeah. Too cold.”

Tabitha sat afraid to break into his rambling conversation.

Day Fourteen #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 2203 (target was 2.5K)
T-shirt: Another bikini day
Best music vibe: “The Mostly Come At Night, Mostly” Yacht Club DJs (aka the Elyora soundtrack)

My first day of cafe writing but it was underwhelmed by an (unrelated) panic attack on the way there. Once I’d finished writing I felt a little adrift. Having crossed the midway point it is all about things slowly going to shit. And it kinda of smarted to be in the middle of the first of Christian and Tabitha’s arguments.

The drive over to Stacey’s provided the headspace for what comes next. I can see Tabitha not necessarily wandering the halls alone in her madness but perhaps sharing it with Lucas (Ham) Hammond who has his own demons to confront. And then there is the back story of Christian, the one he hides very neatly from Tabitha, and how if he told her, there would be no way she’d ever think Christian was doing anything with Becca. And there is the looming big scene with the sculptor. I need to work out what comes between now and then.

There is still so much to write, but it is the dark twisted stuff. You know, the stuff I sink totally into. I will give Tabitha and Christian one more sweet moment, perhaps seen through the prying eyes of Ramsey (as I haven’t quite worked out how to wind his stuff in here yet?) Then its all about breaking it apart.

So today we meet (and then leave) Tabitha alone in the dining room, wrestling with her thoughts.

* * *

In the same chair Ramsey had held court from hours earlier, she sat shivering in her PJs, presiding over the huge table that yawned like a mortician’s slab before her. Slow moving shadows converged to perform an autopsy on her unreliable heart. To dissect and tsk over machinery made imperfect by doubts and failures and the inability to trust. To always and only ever believe the worst.

Go back upstairs. Stop the slow rot you’ve infected Christian with. Or he will morph into the villain you know too well.

Day Eleven #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 3817 (target was 2.5K)
T-shirt: No t-shirt today, it was write from home in your bikini day
Best music vibe: “War Stories” album UNKLE

My NaNo stats tell me that at this rate I will finish in five days time. On Saturday I will have reached my goal. If only my goal was just 50K.

I joked that I like days like today. Days where writing does not feel like opening a vein that refuses to bleed. Conversation always drives my stories and when you put seven people in a room together, there is going to be plenty to say, thank you very much.

Plus the last 24 hours has had a few good reveals. I know who Marie is now. The boys in the band with Becca revealed themselves in brothers (The Brothers Hammond) and I finally worked out the narrative link that gets Christian down into the basement with Ramsey.

What has been most interesting has been revisiting the midpoint. As the word count midpoint came closer (and I relented and wrote down everything that needed to occur between where I was at and where the midpoint would be) I realised that perhaps I’d got the midpoint wrong. After all it is the pivot. It turns every 180 degrees.

The midpoint is not Tabitha going into the sculptor’s chamber. Something has already happened to make Tabitha rethink going to the sculptor. By that point Christian’s behaviour has taken a weird trajectory away from her and that is the impetus for her to go to the sculptor.

So I now think the midpoint belongs to the scene where Christian goes down into the basement with Ramsey and is lured into service, in what appears at first to be a little innocent tinkering, but becomes Christian’s obsession as he is able to extrapolate the potential the opportunity presents in the long term.

Which brings me to today’s extract. How about some characters we haven’t seen too much of yet?

In Act One Gordo arrives at the Orientation Evening in a 70’s shirt and pinstriped pants. His brother Ham in a tweed jacket and too-tight jeans. Gordo is the younger brother, plays guitar, does the electronic loop, sings a bit. Ham is a 3rd year medical student and plays the drums. And he’s another lurking character with an interesting back story and arc.

* * *

“Is she always such a loud pain in the arse?” Christian said to Gordo.

“She does the whole bad girl, righteous anger thing well. Underneath it all, she’s not so bad. You know Chrissy Amphlett, the whole school-girl get up. The bitch thing is Becca’s costume.”

“It worked great until we come out of it on the wrong side of the street press,” Ham butted in.

“That was once,” Gordo defended.

“And the whole Jayden as Voldemort thing.”

“Let the Jayden thing go, okay. He left because he wanted to.”

“He left because of Becca.”

“You know about the Rolling Stones, yeah?” Christian said slicing into the middle of the brothers’ argument.

“Everyone knows about the Stones.”

“But about the Stones, about being bad boys.” Gordo and Ham looked liked they’d been cut free from the moorings of the conversation. “There couldn’t be another Beatles, right, so management created the Rolling Stones’s image as the anti-Beatles,” Christian explained.

“But over time they became the bad boys of rock and roll; a self-fulfilling prophecy. And they copped it badly. Where the Beatles waltzed from country to country, gig to gig, and were generally the darlings of the press, the Rolling Stones had gigs turn into riots and shut down, they were hounded and misrepresented by the press, harassed coming through customs and that was before Keith and all the shit with drugs. Then there was Ultimo. You want to be careful what you are creating today. It might not be who you want to be tomorrow.”

Day Ten #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 3851 (target was to reach 30K)
T-shirt: Infinity
Best song vibe: More of The Preatures (this is getting a bit ridiculous!)

Hello and welcome to the end of the first third of NaNo. I reached 30K today (30623 if I’m going to be pedantic about numbers). I’m ahead of the word count for 50K and for 75K. That’s a good feeling.

What’s less of a good feeling is the realisation I have a lot to pack into the next 5-7K in order to line the events up for the mid point switch back. After feeling like it was taking forever to get to where I wanted to go now it’s like arriving far too early. So I need to sit down and think hard about what needs to play about between the first dinner party and Tabitha’s visit to the sculptor.

I knew there was something not quite right about the trajectory of Tabitha and Christian’s sexual relationship and I think I fixed that up today. Added an extra scene in and now I think it is a smoother transition.

I’ve ended today with all residents sitting down to their first fancy dinner. Christian and Tabitha are playing a married couple to conform to the protocols of the house, Becca has been running off at the mouth and I’m still unsure how the character of Marie fits in. I keep thinking there needs to be two of her to get through all the work that is required (and that just gave me a brilliant idea).

I’ll leave off with the horizontal folk dancing for a bit and leave you with a sweet and tender moment. I’m intrigued at how all these moments come via Christian and not Tabitha!

* * *

A shiver ran down her back.

“Someone walk on your grave?”

“Just me stepping over my dead thoughts. The bits of me I left behind to come here.” His stroked the side of her hip and moved his hand down to settle on her stomach. “I think the silence might have crushed me if I’d come here alone. I thought I could do it. But I don’t think I would’ve survived.”

“You would have done it. You are stronger than you think you are. The waif of a girl I knew at high school, she grew into an amazing woman.”

“But Robert –”

“You can define your life by your past or by your future.”

“What am I to you? Past or future?”

“You are and have always been my present.” He reached up so his hand nestled on top of her heart, the pound of it an aphrodisiac of a different kind. “You are the gift of life. You made me feel alive when I didn’t even realise I was dead inside.”

“We’re not going to come out of this the same people we went in, are we?”

The rhythm of her heart beneath his hand sped up. “Probably not.”

“You remember how I asked you when we’d know it was the end?”

“And I said when it was the end. I was trying to be all philosophical for you. I thought that was the sort of person you’d be attracted to.”

“I was only ever attracted to you, not some other version of you.” her hand rested over the top of his. “I think it’s only now that it’s starting. Everything else was just prologue.”

“Then let’s just be happy then and not worry that every prologue is bookended with an epilogue.”

“Is that you trying to be philosophical again?”

“No, that’s just me being wanky and thinking shit aloud that was probably best unsaid,” he said, kissing her shoulder.

“Speaking of the unsaid, do you see the light in the walls?” Tabitha asked, rolling away from him so they were looking at each other through the void of the darkness. He felt her fingers on his cheek bones and on his lips.

“I don’t see anything. It’s dark.”

“The light moves through the walls like clouds across the sky,” Tabitha said in a drowsy voice that like the night before, felt like it came from a long way off even though he felt the words on his lips. “I saw one that looked like a rabbit.”

“I only see you.” He moved forward until his lips brushed hers.

“What do I look like in the dark?”

“Perfect,” he said, kissing her harder.

The only protest, when he lifted her leg up over his and he slid slowly into her, was from a body that was two decades too old to keep pace with his desire for her.

“We’re in no rush,” she whispered as if she’d heard his thoughts and he surrendered to the motion of two bodies learning to fit together.

Day Nine #nanowrimo

Words for the day: 1538 (target was 2.5K)
T-shirt: Live to Dance
Best song vibe: “Take A Card” by the Preatures

It was Girls Arvo In today so I knew word would be thin on the ground once the festivities kicked in (I didn’t quite count on the hang over that has decided to grace me with it’s presence before dinner time).

I’m currently wading through the negotiation and and exploring the boundaries within and beyond Tabitha and Christian. And well, you know, there’s kinda a lot of sex, including baiting the servant Marie to watch then through the key hole. In writing that I’ve realised I need to write one scene that connects them taking to the horizontal folk dance floor for the first time and having enough gumption to begin mind game of exhibitionism.

So that’s the fun for tomorrow to find the where and how of that connecting scene.

The best bit about today was getting a chance to sit in the car, during the drive from Stacey’s place to mind and talk about my story. It appears to make sense when I related it and Stacey gave me a great recommendation of an author to read, who combines horror and erotica well.

So what to leave you with this evening?

* * *

“There’s tea,” Christian said, pouring a second cup. “Come on Tabby, don’t ruin the morning with a tantie about the food.”

“I half expect bloody Basil Fawltey to walk through the door.”

“Lets hope he doesn’t. ”Christian sniggered and poured a dash of milk into the tea. “So you reckon they have a house cow sequestered away in the house somewhere?”

“I think you have the wrong class of folk. Isn’t it the poor who live with their animals.”

“I was just thinking,” he said, adding a sugar cube. “If we’re totally cut off from the outside world – where does all the food come from. You know, the fresh food.”

“I couldn’t care less if there was no milk. I take my coffee black.”

“When you’re not drinking lattes.”

“You always just assumed I drank the same as you. I was only being polite.”

“Only being polite,” he parroted and drew her into his lap, nuzzled her neck.

“How many positions did Prince have in that one night stand?” His words caressed her ear, sparking a delicious shiver down her back that chased away her bad mood.  She’d eaten worse as a student. Hell, she’d eaten worse in the 18 years of living with her constantly distracted parents.

“21 or something like that,” Tabitha said, moving from the chaos of the series of houses they’d called home, the smell of oil paint, turpentine and rollies to the gentle creep of his hands under her top.

“And we’re up to how many?”

“I didn’t think we were counting,” she said, arching her back to let him take her nipple in his mouth.