This morning you may have heard the starting gun for NaNoWriMo or the erroneously named National Novel Writing Month. It really should be GloNoWriMo, substituting Global for National. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world try to write at least 1,666 words each day for 30 consecutive days at the end of which (theoretically) they will have completed a 50,000 word short novel. Since I’m in the middle of another writing project, my participation will be spotty. However, I intend to be a hanger-on, a leach, a general parasite. At the very least, I’ll be borrowing the discipline of writing every day, the accountability of posting my word count in a public place, and the energy of dabbling with a community of like-minded writers.
My project is a long novel which I expect will run to 250,000 words and take half a lifetime to finish. During the NaNoWriMo stint, I’ll focus on a novella length episode that will appear as a digression in the larger novel. The episode is a fictional adaptation of a real event which I first reported here—the bizarre discovery of a body in the basement of a church in Glasgow and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the deceased. I can’t help myself. I just have to write something about this. More details to follow in my next post.
For now, here’s the larger novel’s premise:
An angel of the Lord appears to an atheist and commands him to write a novel about a young Catholic woman. This is shocking to the atheist, not only because he doesn’t believe in angels, but also because he was born a Protestant man and therefore knows nothing about what it’s like to be a Catholic woman. Not to worry, says the angel. For the next forty nights (a nice round Biblical number), another angel of the Lord shall visit our atheist in his dreams and dictate the novel to him. Each morning when he wakes up, he must write all that he has been told. If he does so faithfully, then at the end of forty days, he will have the forty chapters of a completed novel.
For your reading pleasure, here is the first draft of the first two pages which introduce the premise:
I am Protestant by birth and atheist by inclination, which explains why I raised such an unholy ruckus when an Angel of the Lord appeared before me and issued a divine fiat. What bothered me was not the discovery that God does, in fact, exist. Why should it bother me? The creator of the universe, the Lord and Ruler of all that is was and ever shall be, the purveyor of all things bright and beautiful, etc., etc. is sufficiently remote from human concerns and so utterly disinterested in this vile little hellhole we have fashioned for ourselves that I find it unlikely our paths will ever cross—a variation on Pascal’s wager, I confess, but valid even for believers: given that there is a God, behave as if He gives a shit, and if it proves that He doesn’t, where’s the harm in having lived a chaste life? Nor was it the discovery that his Divine Bigshot and Phallic Omnipotentate uses angelic lackeys, as if heaven were a banana republic dominated by a Western superpower. Since I am blissfully ignominious when it comes to politics and even moreso when it comes to corporate systems, what the hell do I care how God organizes his operations? FedEx, UPS, Purolator, the angel Gabriel? When it comes to delivering messages, one system is as good as the next. Nor did it bother me that when, at last, the celestial clarion blurted its call, the message arrived as a command: imperative mood, non-negotiable, un-undoable, not-take-backable. Given that, statistically speaking, as one of seven billion inhabitants of the shit-fucked planet Earth, I am more likely to be on the receiving rather than giving end of commands, and given that the facts of my circumstances confirm this statistical likelihood (I receive generously from wife, children, mother, ghost of dead father, government, solicitor, bank manager, collection agencies, AA mentor, librarian, paper boy, and so on), I am amply inoculated against the terror-inducing effects of commands from higher authorities.
No. If there is anything about the angel’s message that scalds my keister, it lies in the message itself and not in the manner of its delivery. For an Angel of the Lord said unto me: Thou shalt write a novel and its protagonist shall be a Roman Catholic, and a young woman to boot. To which I answered that, while I did not wish to appear ungrateful nor disobedient, nevertheless it is a fact that I was born Protestant and subsequently developed atheistic tendencies. How could I write convincingly about a Roman Catholic woman? And why would I want to? The Angel of the Lord answered my second question first, proclaiming that I would want to write such a novel because it would afford me the unsurpassed honour of serving the Lord God Most High (hereinafter the LGMH). When I suggested that the LGMH would not care one way or the other, the Angel of the Lord bowed its head, scuffed a foot in the dirt, and grudgingly agreed. Nevertheless, the aforementioned Angel promised that over the course of the next forty days (or nights, to be precise) there would appear to me in my sleep heavenly dreams which, should I record them each subsequent morning, would furnish me with the chapters of a novel.
In effect, this novel was dictated to me by God. I offer this account as an explanation for the occasional error which pops up in the text. Also its sometimes prolixity. And the odd inconsistency. I mean, anybody even nominally familiar with the Bible will recognize that, while God was a marvelous writer, his editorial staff sucked. If Irenaeus and his merry crew of fascists had slashed the canon in half, more people would have bothered to read the damned book and would have been spared countless inconsistencies (and all the pointless disputes they spawned).
If my novel has suffered similar defects, I blame God. Go to Him for your refund.