NaNoWriMo: The End
I have a confession to make. I didn’t write a novel this month. You’re certain to be shocked and angered, so I’m going to put an ellipse or two in here to give you some time alone to grieve.
…, …
The really despicable thing isn’t that I did not write the novel but that I never really tried to. It is not a goal that I have set in time and it is not a priority, not even relative to figuring out how to make recordings with my new iRiver MP3 player.
I did, though, sign up for NaNoWriMo and clear my mental desk of the clutter of other writing projects that I’m not particularly serious about, like a cookbook and a plan to save Social Security. I gave myself the leeway to think about a novel during November and I came up with some stuff that did not exist in October.
I do not know how the bones I came up with make a novel, and I am not likely to make one even if I do hang 50,000 words on it as flesh and skin. Here they are:
What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? (Standard, familiar stuff.)
What if you took that question literally, and not as an exercise in self-determination? Rather than finding direction and priorities in that question, what if you came away with action items, and the feeling that perhaps you alone were responsible for curing cancer and feeding the hungry?
What if the thing stopping you from actually feeding the hungry and curing cancer was not something outside of you but your own false belief in your own failure?
What would you do to convince yourself that you could not fail?
What if your own ability to consider future failure could be localized to a pea sized geography of neurological hyperactivity in your brain. A physical 6 lane autobahn between your centers of imagination and fear.
What if no neurosurgeon would consent to severing that neural highway? What if much of the research you read looking for the physical address of failure indicates that the small number of survivors of nail-gun accidents regained their health but suffered various mental and personality changes dependant upon the location of the nail?
I also had a number of ideas while my brain was open to anything that might serve as a plot element for the story of a man who eventually puts a nail through his own skull in hopes of lobotomizing himself and free himself from irrational fear and self sabotage in order to feed the world.
There are more than 20 of these ideas, mostly mashups of current or emerging technologies that our failure-proofed protagonist comes up with to finance his mission or to further convince himself of his own invinciliblity. Here is one:
Pay at the pump, exists. Futures contracts for fuel, exist. Mashup: Let buyers at the gas pump select “Lock in this price per gallon for when I fill-up next week, month, year.” The gas station chain takes micro-investments at the pump and aggregates them into a profile of larger futures contracts in the commodities market. They get a profit, risk-sharing with their customers, and customer loyalty because the price guarantee coupon is only good at their particular chain. The gas buyer gets relief from gas price fear and gets gas price certainty, the gas buyer might also make money in the deal by buying a lock on a rising price. Smaller fleets would be able to hedge their exposure to price fluctuations.
As novel-filler goes this is not all that exciting, it’s a bit dry, it’s economics. You can’t clone dinosaurs out of economics.
I’m more interested in the real life application of that idea than I am in writing fiction about it.
My apologies to anyone that was even curious about the fictional man who drove a nail into his own skull, I don’t know if he went on to infect himself with the e.coli genetically modified to contain the flea’s springy jumping resilin, I don’t even know if he survived the nail. Someday, maybe.
