Ghost Whipping the Ride

November 5, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 2 Comments

Since this is the 5^th of November, there is only one thing to say: ”The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.” Or something like that. Get the bonfires ready: it’s time to celebrate those Catholic terrorists.

Speaking of ghosts . . .

Really, I said I was going to set a goal of two thousand words a day for NaNoWriMo. I said, yeah, that’s all I gotta do, just two thousand a day, and I’ll have my goal by the end of the month. Sure, no problem. And I’ve been hitting that sucker.

And more.

Four days in, and I’m already close to fifteen thousand words. I probably could have hit it last night, but that would have meant writing about five thousand words in a day, and who wants to be a show off? Not this girl. So I held up just short of that total, mostly because my mind was running out of steam, and I knew if I started writing the following scene in the chapter, I’d have cranked off another thousand words before bumping my head against the desk.

After putting my characters through a little mental hardship, I put them in a van so they could chase a ghost ride. I mean that last: at the moment, they’re zipping along the streets of Makassar following another van that is being driven by . . . no one. Oooooh, spooky. Then again, maybe Jamie and Adam are in Asia, and they’re trying out a new radio control unit on suckers.

I did have one of those moments when I realized I screwed up. Yep, even with research, I find that I can, and do, make mistakes. Anyway, I finished Chapter Six–which is also the end of Part One–with a taxi van coming at the main character, and doing a bootlegger turn in the middle of the road. ’Cause, hey: ghosts gotta get your attention, you know?

Problem was, in the next chapter I was writing about the main characters chasing said ghost van, and I noticed something: the road they were on was a one-way street. Which means, if my ghost van was coming at the character so it could pull a cool bootlegger, that means it was driving against traffic. If you’re ever been on any main highway in a city in Asia, you’d know driving against traffic is pretty much an accident magnet–but then, what isn’t there?

Then again, I could always use the old fallback: ”Sure, it’s a one-way street, but the van was only going one way!” *chirp, chirp, chirp* Damn, tough crowd.

So I need to fix this before I forget all about the goof. Then, I’ll finish off Chapter Seven, and then . . . I should rest. I should do something else. Actually, I do have other things to do, but this writing thing has my attention. Because, you know, this is what writers do, remember? We write.

I had someone ask me the following yesterday: ”What do you plan on getting out of this?” This being NaNo. I told them I’ll have a first draft that won’t be perfect, but it’ll be good, and then I edit it, and edit it, and edit it, so that a few months down the time line I’ll have a novel I can either submit or self-publish. They were impressed, because I’ve known this person for about six years, and for about four of those years they saw how I tended to fall apart whenever anything bad happened, with “bad” being very much like the lyrics from Temporary Beauty:

The world is full of little people like you
They have to read a book to learn what to do
They hang around in second hand stores for clothes
And every kind of pressure steps on their toes

Now they’re happy that I’m doing something I love. I’ve got my issues, and pressure still steps on my toes, but I deal with it better. Much better.

At least I’m writing during NaNo. Not to point fingers–because moi would never do that–but it seems like there’s more than a few people in the NaNo threads who are using November as an excuse to hang with people and call themselves “writers”, and this thing called “writing” is to be done in little chunks where you can shout “Go!”, then hang with your peeps twenty minutes later, talking about the four hundred words you just scribbled down, and hey! We should do this again in four hours! Yay!

Or they might do this: