And so it ends, this experiment in kicking procrastination in the ass. 50,000 words in 29 days. Not a bad thing, considering the fact that I have zero experience in writing fiction and that I started this project with no outline or any real plot. I came up with the one-sentence plot summary only the week before NaNoWriMo began. In that sense it’s not really about procrastination, but simply a way to see if I could actually do it. Guess I’m crossing that off my list now. (I’m also turning 40 in a couple of weeks, and so a novel seemed like a perfect birthday present to myself.)

The story, as it stands, is about a minor catastrophe that occurs in the Philippines: one day, a random bunch of people wake up and discover they are turning into Hollywood celebrities. Something of a disaster, one might argue. The guy I happened to sit next to on a plane a couple of weeks ago said that it reminded him of “The Metamorphosis,” only that this involved “a different kind of grotesque.” The fun thing about this transformation was that it wasn’t exactly a disease; why bother looking for a cure when one could, conceivably, not mind looking like George Clooney?

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So I realized that if I created a one-time character that seemed like he was on, say, amphetamines, and had seen a lot of, say, David Mamet plays, he would talk a lot, and I mean a lot, without having to really engage in dialogue. A great way of increasing your word count, plus he seemed like a good vehicle for some (obviously wrong-headed) ideas to put out there:

— Know what I think? Want to know what I think? I think this is the very… Pol pauses, thinking of the right word in Tagalog. — This is the very fruition of this history, our history. It has all led up to this. You and me, sitting right here. Right here. I think maybe that’s why we were chosen, for the changes, you know? Not happening to anyone else. We were chosen. You were chosen, Pol says, jabbing a finger in Tom Cruise’s direction. — Right? We read in English, we speak English, we write in English. That makes us more adaptable than anyone else. Only learning Tagalog or whatever, that’s what will make us a stunted nation. This is why we get to work all over the world, on cruise ships and ocean liners and restaurants and in Saudi, know what I mean? Because we can speak English. That’s how we got into the Navy in the first place. Because people could give us orders and we could follow them properly. Tagalog doesn’t earn you any money. Tell me of one industry, one profession, anywhere, where speaking Tagalog is an advantage. Just one. Tell me. I can’t think of any. It pulls you down if you ask me. It pulls you down if that’s all you know.

— You have to see the big picture though. What I’m saying is, this may all sound like some horrible disadvantage. Like the Americans and the Japanese and the Spaniards before them came and messed us up. But I can say that we can turn this into some sort of advantage. Advantages and disadvantages again. Turn the disadvantage into an advantage. Pol puts his hands together in a clasp, moves them from left to right. — Turn the disadvantage. Pol moves his hands to the right. — Into an advantage. See what I mean, huh? They may have messed us up, taken our land, polluted our rivers. But you got to think of it this way. It’s not a disadvantage, it’s an advantage. They can’t take our natural resources whatever they do. Our natural resources are our mind. It’s our mind. We must never forget that. It’s inside you, this gift, this gift of the Filipino mind. Forget this sky, forget the trees, all that stuff. Global warming will kill us all eventually, know what I’m saying? Let your kid watch cartoons all day. That will sharpen his mind, teach him better English. It’s our mind, our ingenuity that makes sense, that makes us better people. That capacity to speak English. All these people close their eyes, listen to us speak, and can’t tell us from the real thing. My god, it’s because we speak English in our sleep. We dream in English. We dream in English.

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Also from the same chapter excerpted in the previous post.

You might be wondering what all this is about, come to think of it. The novel, American Idols, is about a call-center employee in the Philippines who wakes up one day and discovers he is turning into Tom Cruise. Here he is at work:

Tom Cruise clears his throat. He is still on mute. Slowly Tom Cruise practices his vowels, stretching them out as long as he can.

Baaaaaseball. In Tom Cruise’s head: Not besbol.

The accents did not come naturally. Tom Cruise had to loosen his tongue, to unlearn years of speech.

Baaaaaaaat. Tom Cruise’s mouth makes a rectangle. Filipinos usually pronounce it closer to But.

He remembers being laughed at by some members of the class when he pronounced the word Salmon with a short A and the letter L, lingering and tucked inside the word.

Peeeeeeetsuh. Not picha like his father used to say. — Tonight we’ll eat some picha pie, Tom Cruise hears his father speak in his head.

Tom Cruise had asked his wife in the morning at the dinner table how Salmon was pronounced and Delphine quickly replied. — With a silent L, she said.

Faaaaaashion. Not pasyon.

Delphine did not know it was a long A either. — Not saaamon? She asked.

Boooooowling. Not balling.

— Salmon, Tom Cruise said properly. — With a long A. It was a fish he had neither tasted nor seen.

Fuhluhpeeeeeenooooow. Not Feeleepeeno.

— Salmon, Tom Cruise tells himself. — Salmon.

— American English is all about exaggerated vowels, he tells himself. AmSpeak is about exaggeration.

You are American, Tom Cruise tells himself to psych himself up. You are American. You are one of them. You are American. Not Fuhluhpeeeeeenooooow.

Tom Cruise logs on and watches the queue fill up with American names.

Time to perform.

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Ahem. Bet you can’t come up with a metaphor as bad as the one in the first sentence!

Night, bringing no relief, spreads across Manila like a washcloth from a Chinese restaurant: hot, damp and redolent of chemicals. This is when the polluted sky boils an angry and beautiful crimson orange, as if to reward the city’s patient and sweltering residents with the generosity of a view at the end of a long day. The chemicals, naturally, flow untrammeled from the buses and cars and jeepneys idling in perpetuity on the highways and streets of the city. The evening displays the lethal beauty of particulates and carcinogens, deceptive in their psychedelic glory as they hang in the twilit sky. The heat and humidity is simply par for the course. It comes with the territory.

The cinematic image of Manila, as far as the few films that have been internationally distributed go, is that of a sense of illicitness, the tempting whiff of corruption: of deals going down in the dark, of alleys and back rooms, of whispers and negotiations, of secret indulgences and pleasures. For Tom Cruise and others like him when the sun goes down it is merely the start of a long, drawn-out day of work: tedium and spreadsheets and admin tools and the constant din of angry and bewildered customers.

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And this is from the fourth chapter (not Chapter Four, because this occurs much later in the story). Note that I used the song’s refrain to cheat a bit.

At the fifty-eighth second of the video for the song “Single Ladies,” Beyoncé Knowles performs a series of pelvic thrusts that have the holy motive power of the Lord God behind them. Her stilettoed feet spread wide apart, Beyoncé Knowles pushes herself aggressively back and forth into the air, but her hips similarly describe circles at the same time. It is a feat that is only a little short of miraculous, since she starts lowering her body closer and closer to the floor while all of this is happening.

It is this particularly complicated dance move that is giving Beyoncé Knowles and the choreographer, Mark, a headache. Tita Mark, as everyone calls him, swipes the blue bandanna off his neck, wipes his forehead with it in frustration and calls a halt to the rehearsal again.

Under the blazing klieg lights, Beyoncé Knowles sweats. Her asymmetrical leotard, borrowed from some dancer in the costume department, is crawling up the cleft of her ass and she pulls at it. She is a natural lefty but Beyoncé Knowles uses her right hand instead to tug at her butt because her left arm is currently encased in an unwieldy gauntlet painted to look like silver. The guys from the props department, generally underused, have also helpfully provided an engagement ring with an enormous fake diamond chipped off a plastic magic wand from a fantasy soap opera filming in the next studio over. The ring is a little too large and threatens to slip off at any moment. Her head hurts because all she hears is

Woah oh oh

Woah oh oh oh oh oh

Woah oh oh

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