Slightly more subtle word padding.

Word count: 9697

This is the kind of stuff that makes me grin as I write it. And those are the best moments. I remember while writing The As Yet Untitled Baywatch Novel several moments that just made me smile and say, "Wow, I can't believe I'm writing this just to extend my word count and it's actually kinda funny...." Well, I had one of those moments today.

---

As I sit at my desk, twirling a pen across my fingers wondering what to do, my email application indicates that I have a new message.
"I've got mail!" I chime happily, as I do with each incoming missive. But then I pause. According to the clock in the upper-right hand portion of my screen (which is synched to Apple's time server, which is undoubtedly synched to an atomic clock buried deep within the mountains at NORAD, making it undoubtedly the most accurate timepiece in the world) it's somewhere around 4 AM. Who on Earth would be emailing me at this hour?
With fear and trepidation, I click on the icon of my email client, causing the window containing my inbox to expand beautifully from the dock at the bottom of the screen. Once it is done (and I finish contemplating just how much I enjoy the animation each and every time) I hesitantly scroll to find the new message. It's an email from someone identified only as "Wilkerson." I try to remember if that name has come up before but nothing immediately comes to mind. I make a mental note to Google the name and check my personal files later.
The subject of the message is somewhat perplexing: "urgently to you 112.5% increase all-important." What could that possibly mean? I spend several moments trying to figure it out before I decide that I may as well just open the email.
Oh. It's spam. Yeah, it's all about how I can be better in bed if I just increase the size of my.... Dammit, this is the last thing I need right now.

Blog angry!

(this is an attempt to recreate this morning's post which apparently happened during a period of angry time for el bloggo)(update: after a bit of detective work -- charlie bonnet would be proud -- i've found the missing blog post. it will remain hidden forever.)

Word count: ~9000
Words ahead of this time last year: ~4000
Health: poorish

---

I turn the picture over. Written on the back, in the same hand that wrote the note on the door back in that loft (albeit much smaller and not with blood -- I'm guessing it was a Papermate Flexigrip Elite. Not my first choice in writing instruments, but not terrible by any means) is written the date and the now familiar words, "Her blood is on your hands."
"I knew that already," I say to the photo. "It's all over my clothes, too. Tell me something new, god dammit. Tell me something I don't know already."
I shake the picture for good measure. It's a technique that sometimes works with humans, occasionally with cats, but rarely, if ever, with inanimate objects such as the photograph in my hand. Oh well. I return it to my wallet for later examination.
"Who you talking to, Bonnet?" asks a voice from the darkness. I turn to find Sal approaching warily. His face registers shock when he sees me. "Holy shit! What happened to you?"
"What do you mean?" I ask innocently.
"You don't look so good," Sal says.
"Well, I'm sorry I woke you up," I reply. "But that's no reason to be insulting."
"Okay, okay," Sal says, reaching for his keys. He actually keeps what looks like a hundred different keys on one of those retractable keyrings janitors always have. I don't know what else Sal does, but I know he only manages this one building. What could those other keys be for? His heart? His dreams? "I get it, top secret private dick stuff, right?"
"Sal, please, I've asked you not to call me that."
"Oh yeah. Sorry. You prefer public dick?" Sal laughs at his own joke. I am certain nobody else will. Remember when I mentioned that Chicago has its fair share of assholes? Sal here is one of them. Remember when I said that Sal was a swell guy? Well, I was fucking kidding.

A lesson in word padding

Word count: 5545
Health: poor. This has turned into a full-blown cold. Yippie yay!

A list of things is a Nano writer's best friend. Two years ago, I listed out, in one page, 52 random objects that one of my characters was dreaming about. Look for it again soon....

---

Good old Sal. He's always ready to help out his fellow man. I feel inside my jacket to find that I actually do have my wallet. Opening it reveals several $100 bills and the other usual items (driver's license, four credit cards, fortune cookie fortunes, Scrabble tiles of my favorite letters -- R, S, T, L, N, E, free delivery coupons from my favorite restaurants, three receipts from three different ATMs, preferred customer cards from six different grocery stores, two different shoe stores, five different gas stations and a laundromat, three different video store membership cards, free sandwich punch cards for several different delis and Vienna Beef joints, another driver's license, a photo of my lovely wife, a photo of my lovely cat and a photo of a not-so-lovely corpse.)

Let's just back up here a second and take a look at that last photo, right? I'd love to play it off and say, "Hey hey, that's right. I'm a detective and I carry around a picture of a corpse in my wallet. For...uh...you know, good luck." But I don't. I don't like corpses. I mean I really, really, really don't like corpses. I've turned green, puked, fainted or done some other things of which I will spare you the details around just about every corpse I've come near. There is no way I would keep a picture of a corpse as a souvenir and I would do almost anything to avoid taking a picture of a corpse for any reason, business related or not. You've seen those cops on television who can have these light and witty conversations while standing over a dead body. One guy's saying crap like, "Well, he just went out for a haircut." And the other guy pulls the sheet off the body and you see he's been decapitated and he says, "Looks like they took a little too much off the top." And they both laugh. Or the first guy says, "Come on, Louie, let's find the bastard who did this." Or some shit like that. Maybe there are cops like that out there, and maybe it's just their way of avoiding the really seriously disgusting and disturbing fact that the bag of blood and meat they're looking at once was a living, breathing individual. Not every death is a huge loss, mind you, but every death is, at the very least, a death.

"Can you hear me now?" Continued

Word count: 4530
Percent complete: 9
Projected completion date: November 23, 2006

---

I pull the phone from its nest, squint to read the name on the caller ID -- it is my wife, God bless her. I open the phone.
"Hi, honey," I say as breezily as possible.
"Oh, Charlie, thank God," she says, worry and concern evident in her voice. One of the great things about her is her understanding of the strange hours I tend to keep. Worry always comes before anger with her. "I've been trying to get in touch with you for hours."
"I'm sorry, dear. It's this stupid new Motorola ATOM. You can count the number of subatomic particles in it on one hand. I should have gotten the BRCK like you suggested."

---

I thought I'd try taking a picture of myself every day of this effort as well. So here's the first one (from day 2):

"Can you hear me now?"

Word count: 3413

---

I know I know. All this time, in my jacket's inside pocket, my cell phone, just sitting there, waiting for me to use it. Why didn't I think of that right away? I didn't even bother to look at it. It used to be that when a plotline demanded that a person or group of people be cut off from society and any hope of rescue, the phone lines would be cut. Before that it was that the bridge had been washed out. Before that, I don't know, the fire for the smoke signals had gone out or something. My point being that even with all our advancements in technology, we'll still find ways to be cut off, feeding into one of our greatest fears as a species: being out of touch. Every now and then, you'll hear people rail against cell phones saying, "I don't want to be constantly connected to people," or, "I don't want people to be able to get in touch with me all the time," but you know that's bullshit. We need that kind of contact, and those people know they don't have to always answer the phone. They can claim the newest of technological malfunctions: the loss of signal.
So, I wish I could say that at some point during the last couple hours, I had thought to look at my phone and I wish I could say that when I looked at it, it was just blindly searching for a signal, or that the battery had drained completely due to my lack of foresight and failure to charge it.
Neither of these things are true. And I'm just an idiot.
This is what I get for buying that super-slim, ultra-light, nearly-nonexistent phone that all the 16-year-old girls would put silver sequins on and the boys would buy in black if only they could see the thing but you need an electron microscope just to dial the numbers. And this is what I have, in my jacket pocket, vibrating the weakest little buzz against my chest, like an anorexic hummingbird's death rattle.

"Her blood is on your hands"

Word count: 1914
Time: 1.5hrs

Some excerpts:

I wake up. My eyes stay closed, but I can tell it's dark. I have a feeling about these things and this darkness is definitely the kind you can feel. It's the kind of darkness you can feel even when your eyes are closed, your head is pounding, your body aches, you don't know where you are, you don't even know who you are. Your hands are sticky.
My hands are sticky. I open my eyes. The predictable darkness is there, thicker than life. It's the kind of darkness that forces you to swim through rooms, carefully making your way, feeling for obstacles. Your eyes will never adjust to this darkness. Your pupils can not grow large enough to allow you to use whatever slight amount of light might be present to make out even the murkiest edges of the objects around you.
I'm pretty sure I'm on my back on a hardwood floor. My slight movements -- ginger attempts to assess my situation -- cause pain to shoot virtually everywhere through my body. These slight movements bring echoes: more clues to my environment. It sounds large, empty, alone.

---

How many times do I have to wake up in darkness, in strange locations, in pain, wondering whose blood I am covered with, before I'll get the message and realize that this just isn't the business for me? And yet, I don't know how to do anything else. One might think that finding oneself in such a state more than once might indicate that I'm not that good at this either, but I let my record speak for itself. I'm pretty damn good. I've never let a case go unsolved, never not gotten my man. Sure, I've never been Detective of the Year, but that whole thing is just a popularity contest anyway. I've got more than enough crap cluttering my shelves without some cheap-ass trophy to add to the mix. That might sound like I'm making excuses or trying to justify the lack of peer recognition I've received, but seriously, those guys are a bunch of assholes. If you'd ever been to one of the dinners, you'd know exactly what I was talking about. I just don't need it.

---

Apparently the room doesn't want to completely disappoint me though. When I turn back to the switch and the door it's conveniently placed right next to, I see something that makes me long for a minute ago when there was nothing. Something that makes me long for darkness. It's a note. Well, it's more of a message -- written, in blood, on the door.
"Her blood is on your hands."
I look down at my hands, turn them over, turn them back, searching the now-dry blood for any clue, waiting for it to tell me something, knowing it won't, not yet at least.
I look back at the door and ask it "Well, no shit. But who the hell is she?"

Nano Eve

Here we are -- just twelve hours (and fifteen minutes) prior to the beginning of NaNoWriMo 2006. Are you excited? I sure am.... I think. Everything's ready to go.... We've got a basic plot outline (that's constantly changing), some character names (our protagonist is named Charles Bonnet), some special surprises (cameos! plot twists! betrayal! deception!), and a title.

We've also got a lot of other crap going on which we're hopefully going to be able to balance with the need to write 1666 words a day.

The Glass Writer Pro document is set up, the Excel spreadsheet is ready, the coffee is brewing, the methamphetamines are lined up on the computer desk....

Blammo. Roll on midnight.