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My good friend Eric and I participated in this three-day novel writing contest over Labor Day weekend.

holiday!

I would have posted about it sooner, but I’ve more or less just recovered from the rigor of the event.

that’s inaccurate, actually. i may never really recover, but the panic attacks due to post-contest lack of adrenaline/beer in my system have at least smoothed out to a predictable frequency of once per 18.5 hours. that newly low-low frequency may be due to the ativan, though.

At this point I can say the following: Eric and I created some write-based object (with the help of our friend mike, who brought us beers, food and ipod supplies)l the object was about 80 pages long, and we had sufficiently little shame (we have no shame, in fact!) to actually submit it to the contest.

Hey, the entry fee was $100! If you think we’re not going to ram our horrid, foetid offspring down their throat, or at least make _someone_ over there read it and feel our pain, you give us the credit normally attributed to human beings or any other “feeling” object. Inanimate carbon rod, for example.

Eric and I feel like we really created something. Much the same way, I’m sure, that the young child, at age 18 months or so, whenever a child becomes self-aware, feels the pride of creating feces, and must express the pride by flinging it at a wall, or whatever baby does.

Given the “strict” rules surrounding the contest, I can’t post any snippets of text, nor (I think) can I really tell you anything about the “plot” or “characters” contained within… well… I’ll risk this much and tell you the title:

Taketh

Writing a novel, much less one of any discernible quality, in just three days is quite a feat (I guess; this was my first try), and given the lack of preparation Eric and I put into this outing, I think the most apt analogy would be to two lard-asses who decide to enter the Boston Marathon, with no physical training, just to see how they do. You know, for fun.

Of course, said fatties would find out, in one or two kilometers, that it’s better to stop running, get re-acquainted with oxygen, and hit the bar. Or all the bars.

But is the analogy complete? Because, after all, one can drink during a three-day novel contest. There are other things one can do, too. Like watch episodes of Rome and Six Feet Under to decompress from the rigors of the last hours of sweating creation, and forget about the troubles in life for a while.

A runner could probably listen to INXS during the Boston Marathon, but you’d probably wind up dancing instead of, like, running to sweet, sweet victory.

The results come back in December. Let me predict them for you now:

1) We didn’t win.

2) We didn’t come in second.

3) If there is a booby prize for “Most Awful” (think: Pink Flamingos), we won’t win that either.

4) Booby prize for “Filthiest First Outing”… I dunno. It’s all right to dream.

If we’re lucky, our prize will be some sort of note back from the contest telling us that:

a) someone read our entry and

b) it was awful and

c) furthermore un-publishable in any venue, even Penthouse Forum but

d) get in shape, and pay us another $100 next year!

I look forward to engaging in battle again in 2006r. We’ll see how Eric feels about it.

rds

End note - Some Excellent Tunes We Listened To In The iPod of Our Mind During the Writing (2005):

Bob Mould
John Vanderslice
Fiery Furnaces
… and You WIll Know Us By the Trail of Dead
Ween
Motorhead
Coldplay (Eric didn’t like this so much)
Snow Patrol
Elliott Smith
The Hold Steady
Cat Power
Devo Awful web page.
Motley Crue

The Mars Volta
The Advantage
Destroyer
rufus wainwright
many others… and last but not least…
The mighty… mighty… White Stripes

and… Antony and the Johnsons… aka the sweet, sweet love-music of Jaime Gumb aka John Grant.

Which probably explains a thing or two regarding our subject matter.