Friday, November 17, 2006

Novel Notes

Every day i wake up at 3 and after getting showered, dressed, and chowing down, i go to work at the warehouse. glamourous, i know. for 8 hours or more i drive around stacking cases on skids to ship to our customers. This job is a relatively mindless activity, giving me plenty of time to think about what to write in my NaNoWriMo Novel. Whenever an idea comes to me, for a scene, character, situation, or bit of dialogue, i jot down a couple quick phrases to remind me of that idea later, so when i sit down to start writing at 1 am when i get home, i have some ideas to work on. Of course, to anyone else, the notes look like complete nonsense. My boss saw the notes the other day where i left them sitting on my pallet jack, and he looked at them with a puzzled expression on his face. "pretty crazy...slap...kiss..." he said, reading aloud, "what are these notes you have written down here?"
i responded with a deadpan bluntness, "I'm writing a novel this month." As he looked at me quizzically, i went on, "i write down ideas when i think of them, driving around the warehouse."
I could see he was trying to make sense of those notes he read. "What is it ABOUT?"
"i don't know." i said- a half-truth- i know what it is about, but until i finish writing it on Nov. 30th and then go through and edit it so it all makes sense, summarizing an unfinished work such as the one i'm working on does it a disservice; for now, just consider it a meandering trip by a cartoonist (me) to hollywood to sell a story for an animated feature, only to find out how ridiculous hollywood is, and go home to do the story my own way. It's much more than that, with little subplots and the story takes sidetracks as i stop to meet all sorts of strange and interesting people along the way; there is satire of many different things, not just hollywood- there is the fast food worker's subculture, a behind-the-scenes look at what probably goes on in Airport security, as well as some personal commentary on different things that are important to me. There is comedy, adventure (a little), and even romance to be found and maybe lost... so come back in a month and i will have the whole thing posted online for you to read- after i edit it and cut out all the boring stuff. For now, see if you can decypher some of my notes!

Here is a compilation of all my notes from this month so far (the numbers are just from keeping track of how fast i was picking pieces for the orders):


These are the notes i wrote down today (er, yesterday? last night? how does that work on 2nd shift?):

have fun guessing! now i gotta go- it's getting... early (5:56 am) and i haven't written any of today's 2,000+ words yet because i've been spending all night watching the new Looney Tunes Golden Collection (volume 4)!

~the Jerk

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