Tag: nanowrimo

For a long time I was debating whether to write a serial killer / science-fiction hybrid thingie — certain groups of people (I called them Mimics) were dying mysteriously, and this hard-boiled detective and a geeky hacker was going to join forces and hunt down the villain, which was this mysterious man who lived in the slums of Manila and had uploaded a virus onto the net. And then I thought, well maybe the Mimics were actually avatar-type creatures made of code, and therefore they could be infected by a software virus. That whole idea didn’t last very long, so the story’s completely different now. (A friend commented that he could imagine the pitch: “It’s Slumdog Millionaire meets The Matrix meets Blade Runner meets Macho Dancer.”)

Anyway, what used to be called Mimics is now American Idols.

From Chapter Two:

In the morning Brian will be awake before everyone else and will have burnt the pan de sal in the toaster oven and will be watching his Japanese robot cartoons. Delphine remembers watching similar cartoons with her older brothers when she was a little girl. Then President Marcos, in a dictatorial snit, cancels everything. Delphine’s mother tells her it is because the President was worried about children neglecting their homework and that discipline was what was needed for this country to progress upward and onward. Later the President would come for the video games, the arcades shuttered and padlocked. An entire generation of children, robbed of digital pleasure and prowess. Delphine’s brother wailed when he realized his robot cartoon was gone, erased from the airwaves by presidential fiat. Still they sat at 6 p.m. in front of the Radiowealth television set with the sliding wooden cabinet and waited in futility. Commercial after commercial and still no robots. Delphine turns the plastic knob to a different channel to make sure. Still no robots, and then finally their mother calls them to dinner. They have taken advantage of the disappearance of the robot cartoons to eat earlier from now on. She will never know what happened to Koji Kobuto, to the fey villain with the scar, to their lost scientist father. She is mixing up the cartoons now. She remembers that one of the robots had breasts which were also missiles. Delphine smiles in the dark.

So… the original idea was to write posts leading up to my first time to join National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, detailing my ideas for plots, figuring out whether I wanted to write in the first or third person (that process alone took almost a month), or whether the novel was going to be set in the present time or on December 26, 2043 — coincidentally, the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines, but that’s not happening anymore. That subplot about the disembodied talking head gone missing from Utrecht and held for ransom — like Niles Caulder’s head on a bucket of ice, around the end of Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol — well, that’s fallen by the wayside. Maybe next year.

Instead, I’ll be posting a random excerpt once a day or so, just so I’m held accountable to more people, i.e., the few people left reading this blog. If anyone out there is doing NaNoWriMo this year, feel free to add me as a writing buddy. I’m behind on my word count and I need the motivation.

And here it is from Chapter One of American Idols, in all its unedited stinking glory:

Tom Cruise remembers the great flood from the year before: the hungry brown churn devouring everything in its path, LandCruisers and karetelas swallowed alike, houses and furniture and trees and carabaos and god, all those people, sucked in and spat out as useless debris. Tom Cruise remembers how the water recognized no municipalities or borders or class, how it consumed without prejudice. Waters that knew no bank accounts or property holdings until the rescuers arrived, when the boats came first for the wealthy who sat on their roofs and tweeted their locations. But the flood was impartial in its seething roil, implacable and blind. What Tom Cruise now faces is a mere trickle.