NaNoWriMo 2008

It’s official.

Edit: 25/11/2008

And so is this:

Word-count at end of story – 80,887 words. Scary.

I’m not going to upload the lame cover art I came up with, as it is lame. Love the photo but having uninstalled my photo-messing-with program a few weeks back, it doesn’t look as good as it could, so if I get a chance to fiddle with it over the next week (and thus make it all bright and shiny)  I’ll post it then.

End edit: 25/11/08

Here’s a nifty little thingy that shows my current word-count:

If it doesn’t show, it’s because the nano-wrimo site is borked, not because I’m trying to hide anything!

And below will be – once I’ve started writing it – an extract from this year’s pile o’crap which is flying under the working title of “City on a Hill” until my imagination comes up with (a) an actual plot to generate an alternate title that “fits” the story or (b) something a bit more interesting and attention-grabbing.

This page is very much in the spirit of the one I created for last year, all posts relating to NaNoWrMo and the insanity it engenders will be on the front page of the site as they are produced.

Slinking off now to try to think of a plot, I have ten hours to come up with something so I can at least make a start come midnight tonight…

Edit 04/11/08

Here are the first few paragraphs, replete with clunkiness, typos and sundry other nano no-nos:

Prologue

Joel sat alone, gazing into the embers of a campfire, on the edge of what he was desperately trying to consider as his very own city on a hill.
Never mind the fact that it was far from shining, and was millenia old, crumbling, dust-ridden and nestled shyly into a cliff face rather than standing proudly atop a hill, displaying itself as a glowing beacon of hope for all good men.
He told himself that it was the concept that counted. He had reclaimed this place that had been an emblem of sin for so long. It had been bathed in the blood of his soldiers, along with that of the unbelievers who had fought so bitterly to hold onto it, and cleansed in the fire of a holy war. It had been reborn, made anew, even if it did not appear so.
To the naked eye it looked more like what it was, the remains of an ancient cliff-top settlement that had been patched up and made habitable years before in rag-tag fashion, and then subjected to the depredations of a protracted battle. In short, a mess.
He sighed and kicked at the circle of stones surrounding the fire-pit, glad that none of his men were awake to bear witness to his discontent. He couldn’t quite understand how he had ended up living here, in the place the darklings had once called home. It had seemed like a good idea once, to marshall all his men together in one place and have tighter control over their day-to-day workings. Daily training, overseen by him. A large force mobilised in a single position, not to mention the strategic advantage of a base that was nigh on impossible to attack (he should know, he had lost enough men taking it).
Only thing was, there didn’t seem to be anyone out there who was interested in taking on the Rapture Riders, whether they were based up a cliff or somewhere more open – and the base was proving to be more trouble than it was worth. His men had been used to a very spartan lifestyle, living in the open air, sleeping in shelters they built themselves, lying on ancient ground mats that were almost worn paper-thin. Here there was furniture, there were blankets, there were walls and screened-off areas. There was some semblance of privacy, and some comforts. He didn’t hold with either. His men were getting soft. They were bickering over bedding and squabbling over territory, in-fighting and bristling at being assigned chores where they never had before. Not just soft, he amended, lazy too. Sure, they had initially worked hard to build the access ramp for the quad bikes, but once that massive (and irrevocably archaeologically damaging) project had ended they had quickly settled into their new lodgings and new lifestyle as though both were some sort of reward for work done.
Joel mentally kicked himself for having let them take a few days rest after the ramp was constructed, it wasn’t any kind of softness that had led him to do so, he was exhausted himself (did that count as softness?), stunned by the defection of his lieutenant (admittedly there was softness there, the boy obviously had not been leadership material, but Joel had been blind to the extent of his unsuitability and had been shaken more than he liked to admit by Robert leaving the Riders), and really had had nothing to offer in terms of future plans. In truth, he still did not, but that would not stop him from being irritated at the slackness evident around him. His highly-trained, once terrifying blood-warriors were now all curled up and no doubt dreaming about another day spent doing nothing much at all. And for the life of him, Joel could not think of a mission he could send them on to get them back in fighting shape again.
He knew he needed to come up with something, and quickly. The question was what? They had driven out the darklings – no, not just driven them out, they had all but obliterated them. They couldn’t attack EPOW! which was their nearest target out in the valley below them as they had been spectacularly warned off on their first foray in that direction. They needed a few small targets to hit in rapid succession to get them back in fighting form, and then they could start thinking about recruitment and training in order to achieve his aim of sacking their first city. That, Joel believed, would really set the ball rolling. Once a city fell to the Riders, he believed it would start a domino effect, with people coming out of the woodwork to support them, join up with them, and ultimately help set the end-times back on the course they had been on before all the liberal do-gooders and wrong-religion types derailed them.
Small targets first, he reminded himself. Only trouble was, Joel was a parochial boy, and couldn’t think of any. He had fixated on EPOW! for a long time, and then obsessed over the darklings, and now he was left with a distinct paucity of targets. He sighed again and scratched his neck thoughtfully. He would have to take a bike out in the morning and go on a scouting expedition. It would do him good to be away from him men for a while, he could come back with some targets and usher in a new era of discipline, along with a renewed sense of purpose for them all. Yes, that was a good plan. He nodded to himself and curled up beside the dying fire, a smile on his face, and took one last look at the stars beyond the fire-pit before closing his eyes and falling into a contented sleep.

Chapter one

A few short miles away across the valley, in a small enclave hidden from easy sight by a centuries old rock formation, Joel’s former lieutenant – now going by the plainer “Rob” – was sitting at the foot of Beth’s wheelchair in the radio hut, listening in to Cam’s regular calls to base and watching Amitosh playing with the crayons and paper he hoarded like they were gold. Which they may as well have been, given the rarity and cost of both. He was in Beth’s way, but she didn’t mind, the boy was good company and both he and Amitosh had been through more than most of the strays that found their way to the camp she and Cam ran together. It helped that he hadn’t known her before she wound up “in the damn chair” and so didn’t wince every time he saw her as some around these parts tended to. It was unconscious, she knew, they didn’t mean to, and would be mortified if she ever pointed it out to them, but all the same it was nice to know there were some who didn’t measure her by “before”. Even if it was simply because they had nothing of “before” to refer to.
Life here at the camp was starting to settle back into some sort of normality, they had managed to integrate the now-homeless darklings (including Cam’s twin, Jas, which was working out better than Beth could ever have imagined) both into the camp and into their salvage business. One of them, the girl Julie, had a contact in the city who had proved extremely useful in keeping them supplied with a constant stream of locations where good salvage might be found. Or more strictly speaking, places that were ripe for the picking. She didn’t ask for much in return, nothing unreasonable at any rate, and while Beth was sure they were due to have a big favour called in sometime soon, she couldn’t see a problem with that either, now they had the extra hands (and skills) the former darklings had brought with them. It wasn’t like they didn’t owe the woman a lot. Personally speaking, she owed her her life. And if that life was somewhat limited by her being confined to her wheels of steel? Well, Joy had even managed to provide the chair, which was a damn sight better that what they had tried to palm off on her at the hospital in the city. It wouldn’t be completely true to say that Beth never resented being stuck in the chair, she often did, but she had adjusted to it more rapidly than people expected, simply because she was well aware that if it was a choice between being in it and being around the people she loved every day, or not being around anymore, the choice wasn’t even a choice. At least not for her.
Jas in particular had been taken aback by how quickly she had adjusted, but then she had fallen way too readily for Beth’s surface predeliction towards vanity – it was a running joke between Jas and Cam, who, in contrast, hadn’t been taken in by it for a second. It was the major difference between the twins as far as Beth could tell, one of them always ready to take things as they seemed to be and the other tending to peer beneath the surface while wondering what was really going on. It was one of the reasons the twins had always had such a volatile relationship, they loved one another to pieces but they just didn’t see things the same way. Age had allowed them to accept their differences more, and Jas had finally stopped seeing Beth as some sort of interloper in their twinship, both of which facts meant that life with Jas in camp was far from the living nightmare Beth would have anticipated had the idea been mooted months previously.
She shifted in her chair and squinted down at Amitosh’s drawing, he seemed to be working on a variation of the same theme, the raid by the Rapture Riders on his old home. A lot of yellow, brown, black and red. It was worrying, but she hoped that he could somehow colour it out of his system. She made a mental note to see if Joy could get her hands on replacement crayons for the most-used colours. No doubt the cost would be high, but they’d pay it, anything to help Amitosh out of the nightmare he’d been reliving on a loop since the Rapture Riders raided his home.