KanataQuest - Tamia's NaNo

[Rikku]

^_____^! Awesome! =DDDD That's a serious case of some last-minute writing there! Congrats!

Pah. Plot. I laugh in the face of plot.

[Amneiger]

xD Yes, Tamia. You won. xD And if your last 25,000 words were simply parts of your story that simply aren't joined together right now, then they still count as plot, right? Right? =D

[Deleted]

I am definitely reading this later, judging by the small excerpts I've seen.
Congrats, Tamia! ^^

[Tam]

Dear sweet Fyora, putting this all in order is going to be fun.

SPOILER: Click to show

"Let's talk about fedoras."

"Oh god, Charlie," I groaned. "Not this again."

"That's right, fool. The pinecones gave us a few extra hundred words to fill in dead space with, but this sucker is still only sitting at about 44 443 words and things are going nowhere, fast. So. Tell me about fedoras."

"I don't know why I'm friends with you."

"I thought we had determined that this was because of my good looks and winning personality."

"If I recall correctly, it had more to do with kidnapping Skim's laptop and bribing me to watch Doctor Who with you."

"Well, whatever it is, it's entirely irrelevant to the point at hand."

"No it's not," I said. "Look at how many words it just wasted."

"You can do better," she said brusquely. "So. Fedoras. I notice you're wearing one."

"That's right."

"I also notice that it goes wonderfully with that black stripe in your hair."

"I wonder whose fault that is."

"Hey, you're your own person. Succumb to peer pressure and it's all on your shoulders. Anyway. Tell me where you got that wonderful fedora."

"Elément gave it to me."

"How nice."

"You already know all of this."

"Me? I'm just the audience. I'm a backdrop. I'm just here to provide paragraph variety as you tell your story."

"Are you trying to be funny?"

"I don't need to try, my friend. Where did Element get that hat?"

"Er," I said, "he got it from work. When we were at La Rélance in the City. There was this guy who started coming in once or twice a week in the month leading up to Christmas."

"Oh?" asked Charlie, leaning her elbows on the table, steepling her fingers and watching me keenly over the top of them. "Describe said man."

"We called him Jesus. He had this long brown hair and beard, and he was always smiling benevolently. It helped that we were working in a church basement, so there were dusty portraits on the walls all around us that we could compare him to."

"And Jesus brought this fedora to your workplace?" Charlie said.

"Yes, and it's getting rather creepy how you keep bringing up the next step of my thought process before I even reach it myself."

"That's what I'm here for," she said happily. "It's so much better than a block of uninterrupted lecture that goes on for pages. I hate long speeches in novels."

"It worked for J.R.R. Tolkein. And J.K. Rowling."

"Sketch," said Charlie severely, "please stop and listen to yourself. You are comparing two of the most respected authors of the 21st century, with countless awards and legions of overenthusiastic fanpeople to their names, to this NaNo."

"Good point."

"And also, Tolkein got away with it because they were elves. Now, anyway. Tell me about Jesus."

"I think you might want a priest for that sort of thing," I said.

"Clever. I'm going to get my pinecone if you say that again."

"So anyway, Jesus had been bringing in these big flat boxes for the past few weeks, and finally, Elément and I were curious enough to go see what was inside them. They were full of, you guessed it, hats. Only about three or four different kinds, all brand new and nested inside one another."

"How quaint," said Charlie. "So why was Jesus supplying the church with hats?"

"You know, I actually never found out. I couldn't understand a word they were saying, and I never asked."

"Poor you," she yawned.

At that moment, a plot hole opened up in the ceiling above her and knocked several anachronisms and inconsistent character traits down on top of her, then showered her with a fine dust of inaccurate translations.

Coughing, she brushed the debris off of herself and glared. "You. You did that on purpose."

"To be honest, I only just figured out I could," I said brightly.

"Fine. Get on with your story, you."

"So anyway, we spent the next couple of weeks enthusing about the hats and trying them on. Some were fedoras, yes, but there were also some bowlers and at least one variety of cowboy hat. We mostly just liked two of them, though -- a brown fedora, and a black one. I was pretty excited to find someone who appreciated fedoras as much as I did."

"So you liked fedoras even before KanataQuest, then."

"Yep."

"Why fedoras?"

"I suspect it was a combination of Indiana Jones and Carmen San Diego, with one in-joke too many thrown into the mix."

"Understandable."

"Right. So, there were two kinds of fedoras. Thanks to Indiana Jones, I had always been more of a fan of brown fedoras, but this brown fedora in the box was kind of gimpy and altogether too respectable-looking. Its brim was too narrow. It was too fashionable. It had none of the sweeping roguishness of the black one, with its flat, wide brim and elegant felt texture."

"I can't wait until you start writing romance."

"The black one was just more appealing altogether. And I had to admit, Elément looked quite dashing in it. He spent weeks with his eye on that fedora. He asked me whether I thought they'd let him take one of them. I reminded him that I did not speak the same language as Jesus."

"A shortcoming of yours," remarked Charlie.

"Clearly. In the end -- literally, he waited until the end of the semester -- he summed up the courage to ask Jesus about it. I think Jesus was fond of Elément, because he agreed to let him take one. Apparently, whoever the hats were going to wouldn't notice one missing black fedora."

"And why didn't you get one too?"

"Well, he already took the one I liked."

"That's either incredibly selfless or incredibly spineless of you. I can't decide which."

"I was also afraid to ask because I'd already gotten something for free from La Rélance."

"Other than pride in your community and skill at serving potatoes? Do tell. What did you take?"

"Er. It was a little stuffed skunk with a flower on its head."

"A little stuffed skunk with a flower on its head."

"It was adorable. And La Rélance couldn't use it, because it had this tiny little stain on its nose."

"I don't believe you."

"I named it Flower Kanataskunk."

"You make me sick. And you thought that this was an appropriate alternative to a fedora?"

"I had no idea I would have to choose between the two!" I said defensively. "Besides, I liked the little skunk. And I ended up with The Hat anyway."

"Wait, why did you capitalize "the hat"?"

"Because it's referring to one hat in particular. It's a convention for making a proper noun out of something that doesn't have a formal name. And also, it looks cool in writing."

"Right. But I still think you ended up with the hat by pure luck."

"It was my birthday and he wanted to give it to me. That's more than luck. That's friendship."

"It was not your birthday."

"Well, it was close enough."

"You're right, it was only slightly more than two months off."

"That's easy for you to say, you got to have your birthday in the program."

"And it did me wonders, let me assure you."

I snickered. "That's right, you got a hat of your own to wear, didn't you? Only it was big and stuffed and shaped like a birthday cake--"

"I will end you."

"No wonder you're bitter."

"I'm not bitter. I'm quite happy not looking like a cross between some sort of confused hybrid emo kid and a junior Mafia boss."

"Thanks, you're pretty too."

"In all honesty though," she said, "I'm still not really quite sure why you're so obsessed with fedoras."

"Well," I replied slowly, "I need something to obsess about."

"Why can't you just obsess about Zeffron or Naruto like normal people?"

"Because that's what normal people do."

"Right. Sketch against the world."

"No, that's not it. I'm just bored of the ordinary. And fedoras are interesting -- hats can be used for so many purposes. And I don't care who you are or what your head looks like, plunk a fedora on it and you're guaranteed to look ten times edgier and more mysterious. It's like the ultimate modern-day adventure garb."

"I notice people stare at you on the Metro, now," she said.

"But they're not staring because I'm some freaky-looking kid who clearly has psychological issues," I pointed out. "That's the point. The Hat catches people's eyes because they honestly don't know what to make of a person who wears one. Do I have something to hide? Am I shy? Or do I simply have a strange sense of fashion?"

"You're wearing one pink and one yellow Converse at the same time," Charlie observed.

"That's not what I mean. I mean that it makes people curious. I like curiosity. Not enough people hold onto it into adulthood."

"And the world's cat population thanks them for it."

"I like to think that I'm reintroducing the world to the concepts of imagination and curiosity, things that they may have forgotten about since they were a kid. The Hat lets me do that."

"You capitalized it again."

"I'm pretty sure it looks better as 'The Hat.' The way the right angles stand out is quite aesthetically pleasing. The Hat."

"Stop doing that."

"I'm done."

Note: Slight irreverence ensues. Viewer discretion is advised.

[Rikku]

That there excerpt makes me go beyond mere amusement and enter a strange realm of banana peels and one-liners, in which that very same excerpt reigns supreme. It sits on a golden throne, and all the other inhabitants of Humourland bow to it and make horribly bad puns in its honour.

... Sorry. >.>; I feel the need to get descriptive when faced with something as awesome and fourth-wall-breaking as that.

[Deleted]

It's hard to make me laugh out loud (literally, of course) over reading, but that right there did it. Awesome, Tamia. XD

[Tam]

^___^;

High praise for something that I wrote in about forty-five minutes for no other reason than to boost my word-count. Thanks. I'm blushing.

And also, important note: Someone (can't remember who offhand) was kind enough to inadvertently remind me that this board may just up and lock sometime soon, so I figured I'd better get this out now, even if the story's not finished.

If, for some odd reason or another, you would be interested in reading the final story once I put everything in order and finish writing the actually important scenes, please send me a PM with your email. I don't really want to post it online, so chances are it'll never appear on the NTWF or dA or anything. Please tell me whether you would prefer the original version, which will probably make a lot more sense, or the censored version, which will have nothing above PG-rating in it, unless you consider keyboard babble more severe than PG. I also feel the need to point out that none of the scenes are particularly explicit, at least graphically (ie. no sex scenes, no gratuitous violence). About the only thing I'd be censoring is the language, which gets a bit rough as the story progresses.

There are also a couple of scenes that deal with drug use -- they're pretty tame, but you'd have to tell me whether you want me to cut them out or leave them in. Just to be safe.

For reading that, here. Have some more drivel.

SPOILER: Click to show

"So guess what," said Charlie.

"I'm not even sure I want to know."

"I calculated the most overused word in this story."

"You didn't calculate anything, you just used that Wordle thing--"

"It's 'Elément'."

"Whoa," I said, impressed. "You included an accent. You've learned how to pronounce his name?"

"Actually no. I just put it there for clarity's sake. I still can't pronounce his name."

"No worries. It's only been, what, nine months that you've had to learn it--"

"Dude," she said, very patiently, in that voice that reminded me she was repeating herself for the millionth time, "I. Don't. Speak. French."

"N'importe quoi."

"Don't make me do something I'll regret, Sketch. I'll walk out of this story and you'll be stuck all on your lonesome as you try to figure out conversations you can have with yourself to take you to 50 000. Anyway, it's true. The most frequently word is Elément."

"Is it."

"Yes. Well, technically, he tied with Skim. But taking into consideration the fact that Skim practically narrated the entire first half of this novel and Element acted mostly as the comic relief punctuated by sporadic moments of emo angst, whereas I, as your first and bestest friend, come in somewhere after 'just', 'like', and 'one'. I'd say that's a pretty impressive statistic."

"Certainly."

"So what happened?"

"What do you mean, what happened?"

"I mean what happened. Come on, you wrote it."

"What?"

"Or at least, you will. Your future self."

"You're confused."

"Yeah, I kind of am," said Charlie, tapping her chin. "So you're not just a self-insertion of the author?"

"Not anymore."

"What do you mean, not anymore?"

"I mean no, I'm not. What was your first clue? Was it when I threw a firecracker through the bathroom window of our upstairs neighbour, or maybe when I broke into KanataQuest's evil laboratory?"

"Still though. You gotta admit. You started off as an author avatar."

"Except more interesting."

"Whatever. So, then, with the understanding that the storyline is now no longer under your control, what do you think happened to shunt Element up to main character status?"

"Well," I said. "He seems to be very good at taking over things."

"That sounds about right."

"Plus, there's scenes like this, that he doesn't even show up in, but characters just babble randomly about him throughout--"

"What, you mean like this? Element Element Element Element Element--"

"Stop that."

"--Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element Element--"

"You're not even putting the accent on it. That's not even going to count when it gets plugged into Wordle."

"--Element Element Element Element Element--"

"Alright, well, you've probably turned that version into an overused word now too. You can knock it off whenever you'd like now."

"Wow," panted Charlie. "Look at your word count!"

"Three thousand left."

"Let's see what Wordle says." She frowned. "By the way, this process isn't instantaneous, it just seems like it because you don't get a sense of when the author takes a break to play with word collage generators. Aha. There we go. The unaccented form of Element is now a frequently used word. I wonder if I can make it bigger."

"Better not try. I'm not entirely sure what you just did isn't considered cheating."

"Hmm," she mused, reading the results. "It's now on about the same level of overuse as 'Trailer'."

"Poor Trailer," I said sadly.

"Yeah. Man, when this story gets rewritten, there had better be some more scenes with him in them."

"He's a hard-to-write character, though," I said.

"I don't know why, he's adorable, and such a funny guy."

"I guess Elément keeps stealing those scenes from him."

"Good god. Why is Crevette's name so tiny?"

"Probably because she's only had about a half-page's worth of lines so far."

"That's just mean."

"Hey. Translation takes time."

"Yeah, well, that was well-planned out, wasn't it?"

"Planning things out is for losers and economists. I can't believe 'room' is so high up on the list," I added, looking over her shoulder.

"You know, for a story that's about travelling and adventure and exploring personal boundaries, a rather disconcerting portion of the story takes place inside. More often than not in some tiny bedroom or another."

"That makes this story sound particularly bad, and perhaps a little bit immoral."

"I must be on the right track, then."

"It's funny, I think that if the plot for this story had come any where near to being complete, it might have been cruising towards two hundred thousand words."

"Yeah, again, well-planned."

"Well, I don't think the story is bad so far," I said. "On the contrary, I'm pretty happy with it -- well, at least, the first 28 000 words or so. All the stuff before the plot turned to crack and the only intelligible pieces of writing became random excerpts snipped from the unwritten remainder of the story."

"You're not doing a very good job of selling yourself."

"Those 28 000 words are interesting. They're not perfect, but there's some decent character development. For the ten-plus characters that the development had to be spread over, it's not bad."

"Did you notice how the chapter about Element is twenty-eight pages long?"

"Stop bringing him up! You're just determined to make 'Element' an even more overused word than it already is, aren't you?"

"With subtlety."

"I'm sure there must be a rule against this sort of scene somewhere on the NaNo site."

"I doubt it, because then they'd have to hire someone to check. Hey, you know what's funny?"

"I have no idea. Certainly not this scene, anymore."

"When I started this scene by talking about Wordle, I had originally intended this to just be a long, drawn-out discussion about Element as a plot device, because I thought he would be easy to ramble about."

"Wow," I said dully. "Even our crackfic scene got off-track."

"Pretty disheartening, I know. HEY. I've got a great idea."

"I keep watching your hands to see if a pinecone shows up."

"No, no pinecones for now. My great idea is that we just start a new scene. We can set it in the beach shack so that it's almost based on a true story, and go from there."

"I've gotta admit," I said, grinning and rolling up my sleeves. "I'm rather partial to this idea already."

[Tam]

Sorry to keep bumping this to the front so persistently. xD; I was going to put this one in the same post as the last, but I ran out of time to format it before class.

Anyway, this will probably be the last excerpt, unless anyone wants to see my artful insertion of, erm, two essays and a short story I wrote in November. xD; Shh. It's a technique I learned from some of the NaNoers in my city.

SPOILER: Click to show

"Well," said Charlie.

"Well what?" I asked.

"I see you're down to the last sprint."

"Something like that."

"And now you're just desperate for some inane filler to use up that last thousand words."

"As is evidenced by the fact that you are talking to me in that voice again."

"Of course."

"I still have a couple of hours. Maybe I should actually try writing something serious for once. I miss when my plot made sense."

"I miss when there was a plot. You've been compiling out-of-order excerpts for five days now."

"Some of them are quite good."

"Says the person who's been averaging four hours of sleep per night, living on nothing but Pepsi, celery, and rock candy from a Christmas festival."

"You used to be funny," I said. "Come on. Show some of that creativity. Say something interesting. This scene needs saving."

Charlie rubbed her temples thoughtfully.

"Alright," she said. "I've been thinking--"

"I'm pretty sure someone's used that opener already today."

"--if you could choose any animal, what do you think everyone in the group would be?"

"Please tell me you're not serious."

"I think Element might be either some kind of monkey or a wolf-creature of some sort -- 'cause he's hairy and likes to run in the forest--"

"I can't believe this is the best you can come up with."

"--Ink would be a tiger. Easygoing and lazy most of the time, except when he has a grudge. Then he goes psycho on yo' butt."

"Charlie, this isn't working."

"And I wasn't sure about Crevette--"

"I remember back when we used to watch Miyazaki movies when we hung out together."

"--But I eventually settled on a shrimp for her -- you know, because she's so little--"

"Charlie, we, uh--"

"--Skim is an owl, because she knows everything--"

"Charlie."

"I don't know about Soleil, maybe some kind of flower -- wait, no, flowers aren't animals--"

"CHARLIE!" I yelled, and blew a plot hole in the wall beside her for good measure.

She yelped and leapt out of the way as various incongruities from Chapter 5 spewed out at her. Shooting me a very dirty look, she said, "that was completely uncalled for."

"I'm sorry," I said. "But it's not my fault. Once you start blowing holes in plots, it's hard to stop."

"My heart bleeds for you."

"But really, isn't there something more interesting to talk about? Something that actually has anything to do with the story?"

"Careful, those two criteria almost cancel each other out."

"Your positive attitude is staggering."

"Alright, then, we can talk about something else. Like. Food."

"Are you sure this isn't just the result of NaNoing on an empty stomach?"

"I guarantee nothing. So how 'bout that Kanatafood, huh."

"How 'bout it?"

"Did you like it?"

"That's like asking me how I'm liking life so far."

"Well?"

"Well, the food in the City was pretty good," I said. "I mean, I liked that we got fresh fruit all the time and drank juice at every supper."

"Ah yes," said Charlie wistfully. "I remember juice at supper."

"That was before Toes decided to cut apart our food budget."

"That was also before we landed in Newfoundland, roughly translated as, "land without tomatoes".

"Actually, um, 'Newfoundland' is English--"

"Quiet, you. I'm making a point about the lack of tomatoes."

"Your points are getting rather out-of-hand and I'm not sure they're contributing positively to my readers' experience."

"312 words left. Keep this in your mind before you decide to blow up any more walls. So anyway, I don't like tomatoes. But Newfoundland didn't really have any fresh vegetables or fruit at all, and what they did have was pretty banged up and only available for a few days every two weeks or so."

"A tragedy."

"That's easy for you to say, you're not a vegetarian."

"Did I ever tell you how good that Moroccan rabbit stew we cooked was?"

"The fact that you are not walking around with one black eye suggests not."

"Well, there were some vegetables in there, anyway. Newfoundlanders are pretty good at stocking up on turnips, carrots and potatoes, if nothing else."

"And also meat. I think every family had at least one dried carcass hanging in their basement and at least two dead deer jammed inside their deep-freeze."

"I think Trailer and Twiggy liked this rotation."

"They still found room to complain."

"Of course. You have to realize that sometimes, their steaks even sharing the same table with a meatless dish can be highly insulting to certain peop.e."

"Good god, you just misspelled 'people'."

"I'm tired, and so are you, give me a break."

"110 words," said Charlie. "Isn't it funny how all traces of inspiration seemed to evaporate about 2k from the end?"

"I suspect that was partially because I wasn't looking forward to writing another crack scene with alter-Charlie."

"Lies. You depended on me today. You'll have written eight thousand words in just over twelve hours, and that's with classes. You know you couldn't have done that without me."

"Alright, I admit it, I appreciate your help." I nodded in acknowledgement. "Although I do think the pinecone and fedora sequences were much better pieces than this one, from a critical perspective."

"Your critical perspective has no place here. This is where critical perspectives go to die."

"As well as descriptive prose, apparently."

"Ooh, yeah, you're right... I don't think the readers even know whether we're outside or inside right now. It would also appear that we are being suspended in a sort of omniscient timeframe, because if you look back on this scene, we're talking about KanataQuest in past-tense for some strange reason, and I can't figure out when the heck you and I would ever have had the opportunity to have this conversation."

"That was a nice paragraph," I said, and then jumped. "Whoa! We're over 50 000!"

"Keep talking. The word count validator always knocks a good hundred words off of Pages' estimate."