Things that were not immediately obvious to me

As you might have deduced from the dearth of updates, NaNoWriMo didn’t go so well for me. Perhaps I’ll try again next year. In any event, it was a nice break from the blog, and I’m now ready to resume regular posting.

What I learned from NaNoWriMo: Fiction is a little intimidating to write. A non-satirical story is supposed to reflect the way that people behave; therefore, a novel is ultimately a window into the author’s beliefs about the world. There are few surer ways to appear crazy than to tell a crazy story with a straight face, so novel-writing gives one a surprising amount of pause.

This is a snippet from the novel I’m writing this month. Here, our protagonist fields the question “what do you do for fun” from a pretty girl:

“I like skiing.” (Tom skied about once a year.) “It can be a little tough to get up to Tahoe, though – the skiing is always best right after a snowfall, and it’s hardest to get there when storms are coming through. Plus there’s the rocks … one time I missed a rockslide by only seconds. The car in front of me ran into, and high-centered itself on, a boulder. It was kind of inspiring, though — me and some other guys who were stuck by the slide got out and cleared a path by hand, before the CHP even got there.” (The essentials of this story were true, but Tom had, in fact, missed the slide by several minutes, and it was pretty small as these things go.) “It was worth it; the skiing was great.” (This was a complete fabrication; this had happened in the fall, there was not yet any snow to speak of, and Tom was in fact going to Tahoe to fight a speeding ticket.)

This is a snippet from the novel I’m writing this month. Here, I editorialize about advertising:

The freeway billboards along 101 are dominated by tech companies. Tom had never quite understood the point of this; how much product could really be moved by this sort of advertising? What about the companies, like the search engines, that hardly had a product at all? Was it an attempt to influence the culture of the Valley, to build “buzz” among the cubicle dwellers who commuted north and south everyday? (And more than drones made that commute; one of the oddities of Valley traffic jams was the quarter-million dollar Bentley stuck in traffic. Why would someone with so much money want to waste his life that way?)