Recap of NaNo ‘06

Last year I won NaNoWriMo with Some Solitude for a Social Species. It was a good NaNo title. Six words without even getting to page one.

The story followed a group of twelve characters in an apartment block called the Valentine Mansions. I used to live in a real flat in a block called the Valentine Mansions. It was above a 24-hour shop and I used to be kept up all night by drunks buying 20 Mayfair and a pack of small blue Rizla.

The climax of Some Solitude for a Social Species is a residents’ meeting in which a mass brawl breaks out. During the fighting one of the characters dies of a heart attack. His name is Sebastian and he’s based loosely on Lennie from Of Mice and Men. He insists throughout the story that he has a heart condition but nobody believes him because he’s so simple-minded. He spends a lot of time frustrated that everyone thinks he’s a liar. His death proves he was telling the truth all along. He shows them!

Nathan is the principle character of the story. In the opening scene, he discovers his neighbour Amy’s dead body in the corner of his room. The key part of that scene goes like this:

It took a while for Nathan to get over the fact she was naked. He approached her cautiously and knelt in front of her. He gently raised her head by the chin. Her eyes were open. He let her head go and it slumped again, to the same position. He repeated the action.

‘Shit,’ he said.

She didn’t respond. She was really quite dead.

Nathan spends most of his time in the story running around trying to hide Amy’s body from the others. In the end he manages to smuggle her back into her own room. She isn’t discovered until the very last scene when the villian of the piece, Viktor, stops by her room hoping for sex, having just been humiliated at the residents’ meeting.

Viktor opened the door to Amy’s room and looked in. She was in bed, asleep. He went over to her and pulled the covers back. His hand brushed against her skin: it was ice cold. Concerned, he felt for a pulse: there was none.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he turned and left. He made his way dazedly down the hallway towards his room. ‘Dead?’ he mumbled. He was as much angry as surprised. How dare she! He wanted so much to kick down a door, to headbutt the wall, to trample on Amy’s corpse, to reduce the entire building to rubble with everyone in it. Of course, he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he arched his back and inhaled deeply. Then, expelling all the air at once, he screamed: ‘This whole fucking place is crazy!’

Viktor opened the door to his room and looked inside. It was just as he’d left it. Perhaps it was all for the best. After all, some peace and quiet might do him good. He stepped forward.

Finally, solitude beckoned.

That’s where the story ends. It’s not the best of endings but I’d written almost 7,000 words that day and I was exhausted. Also, when writing a novel in a month it’s often the case that the quality suffers. Quite a lot.

I wrote a total of 50,110 words between the first and the twenty-sixth of November last year. I hope to do that again this year but it’ll be a lot more difficult this time around.

But more about that tomorrow.

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