NaNoWriMo

So, Ms. Gayleen Froese and I are both doing National Novel Writing Month this year. Over 30 days, we will produce a novel of 50,000 words. After the 3 Day, this feels like piker's work to me, but I think the added time could easily serve to make me cocky.

For example, I am at 2500 words and it's day three.

G can tell you about her novel if she likes.

Mine is called "The Murder at the End of This Book". I've decided to post my first draft here in my daily chunks. Feedback is highly welcome. I need to know what's working and what isn't. This book requires me to walk an unusually fine line.

You'll see why.

Anyhow feel free to add me as a buddy. My NaNoWriMo username is RyanStates. Click the link to the right there to sign up. Never too late.

G, you should still have posting privileges, but if not, let me know, or add in the comments.

Here's the first chapter of my book. It's two days in.

Chapter 1


My name is Harry Monster. I'm a private detective. I am about four feet tall, covered in long shaggy blue fur. I have large googly black and white eyes. I have a large purple nose shaped a lot like an egg, and covered in what looks like felt. I wear a fedora and a rumpled grey suit. It's not fashionable anymore, but it's what private detectives wear. It's going to look silly on me anyway. I'm a puppet.

I used to be a cop. I worked with the Caraway Street Precinct. it was the neighborhood where I grew up. It was good to see those streets, and to be seen, walking the beat in uniform. It felt good to be a walking example for all the kids, human and puppets, that there were other ways to live than in the pocket of Big Alphabet. I'd have been happier if I'd stayed a uniform forever. Instead, the department offered me a promotion to detective. I took it for the same reason I liked walking the beast. To show the kids you could do it.

It was a whole different kind of crime as a detective, and not all of it in my little neighborhood. By the time it was over, I could barely remember how to get back to the little street I'd grown up on.

It ended for me with the death of my partner. He was a human. His name was Carlos Gonzalez, and he was my best friend. We were investigating a rhyme syndicate. Some shady operators out of New Jersey were stealing the ends off of words and selling them on the streets. We had a lead on a guy we thought was involved, and we headed out to his house in Queens, looking to ask some routine questions.

In the driveway we saw a tan van. The rest of the neighbourhood was showy sport cars, and Soccer Mom minivans. This was one of those windowless panel jobs, with the back end half rusted out.

"One of these things is not like the others," Carlos said to me, and put his hand on his piece.

"One of these things," I said, "just doesn't belong."

He gestured for me to head around the back door, and I did. I'm small, and I can move pretty quietly. I hadn't even made it all the way around, when I heard him shout, and there was gunfire. A second later something hit me hard in the back of the head and I went down into a deep black hole inside my own head.

When I came to, I was dizzy and my eyes were still shaking around on the front of my face. The van was gone. There were a couple of kids standing on the edge of the driveway looking at me, and one of them just pointed west, not saying anything.

I shouted Carlos' name, and went to the radio to call for backup. He wasn't out front. I started to search the place. I looked around the house. I looked over the house. I looked under the steps. I looked near, and far. When I found him, in one of the back bedrooms, he was through.

I quit the force a week later. I haven't slept since. Not in any meaningful way. This is about as nasty as it sounds. I'm not a human, and so I don't need sleep in the same way, but I certainly miss it. It gives me a lot of time to lay awake in my bed, or to read books and watch movies.

I don't make much money as a private eye, but I don't need much, either, and I have a small trust fund from my time with the show. Which reminds me, back on Caraway Street, I was a child star. I did a children's show there with some other puppets. Some of them have moved on to bigger things, and some are still doing it. For me, it's a lot of good memories, and a small subsidy to my earnings every month.

And I rarely get recognized. There are a lot of blue shaggy monsters. I could be any of them.

So that's where I come from, and what you need to know about me. I'm the protagonist. A protagonist is a central character in a story. Over the course of a story, the protagonist faces conflict and undergoes growth. The setting of this story is New York City in the year 2005. W had just been elected to a second term. The first term had been a doozy. W stood for war, and it also stood for weather. A hurricane is a kind of weather. A hurricane had almost ruined New Orleans with wind and water. Wind and water also begin with W. We were fighting a war in a country most Americans couldn't find on a map. People took to the streets every other week chanting "No Blood for Vowels". The letter shortage was hitting everybody in the vocabulary, and everyone had the willies, and the wigwams. It was no secret that W was in the pocket of Big Alphabet. Both him and his human vice president.

It had been a slow year for me so far. The last case I'd taken had involved helping a little kid find his dog. He paid me in nickels. I was leaned back in my office chair, with my feet up on the desk. I was reading the paper, my little silver reading glasses perched on my nose so far down, you'd think they'd be useless, but they weren't. I needed them to read these days.

I'd been doing this for half an hour when I suddenly looked up and saw that a woman had walked into my office. She was a human woman, tall and blonde in a red Chanel suit, carrying a small red clutch. She was about thirty, and probably pretty if you like human women. I realized this was how all the important cases started, and I sat up in my chair.

"Hey," I said, " I'm sorry. I didn't hear you come in. My name's Harry..."

"Monster," she finished. "I know. Formerly of the Caraway Street Precinct. One of the first monsters to make detective, I believe."

"Heck," I say, "I think there've been a lot of puppet detectives before me."

"Not so many as you'd think. Most of them have been...well...mascots."

I nodded, a little at sea.

"Well," I said, "I guess you did your research. Good for you. There are a lot of questionable characters in this business."

"I like to be certain of what I'm getting into," she said, offering her hand to shake.

I leaned awkwardly across my desk to shake.

"Jelinda Holt," she said. "Pleased to meet you."

"You wouldn't be any relation to Dean Holt?"

"I'm his daughter," she said.

My rear end hit my seat slightly harder than was needed. Jelinda Holt was worth more money than God, or would be some day. Dean Holt was the owner of Holt Software. There wasn't a computer anywhere in the world at this point that didn't run on Holt's Phonix OS.

"How can I help you, Ms. Holt?"

"My sister has gone missing, Mr. Monster."

Her voice shook a little. I made my way around the desk and pulled out her chair for her.

"Please, have a seat. May I get you a glass of water?"

"No. No thank you, but would you mind if I smoked?"

Under the circumstances, what could I say? But I knew that smoke would get in my fur for days.

"I won't tell, if you won't," I said, "but I don't have an ashtray, I'm afraid."

She smiled weakly and produced a small aluminum disposable ashtray from her purse.

"I'm used to bringing my own these days."

She lit the cigarette and took a deep breath of smoke. I could see her face relax a little.

"Have you gone to the police with this?" I asked. It's a legal obligation.

"Of course," she said, sounding about as angry as the average person who takes a missing person to the cops. "They weren't particularly useful."

"How old is your sister?"

Jelinda hesitated for a moment, and then blew some smoke to the side, toward my open window.

"That's complicated," she said.

"No," I said. "It's just subtraction. It's 2005 right now. Subtract the year she was born from 2005 and you'll have her age. Isn't that neat? You can tell how old all kinds of things are. For example, I bought this tie in 2003. 2005 take away 2003 is 2. So this tie is 2 years old."

She blinked, and looked at me without saying anything for a beat. "Well, Mr. Monster," she said, wryly, "If I follow your method, then my sister is 16 years old."

"Yeah," I said, "that's hard then with the police. They have to take it seriously when the missing person is a minor, but with a teenager 9 times out of 10, the kid took off and wasn't abducted."

"The kid is named Darla. She did not run off. I think she has been kidnapped."

"Have you or your father gotten any ransom demand?"

"No. I don't think we will."

"How come?"

"Well, Mr. Monster..."

"Call me Harry," I said.

"Well, Harry. As I was saying. It's complicated."

I poured myself a glass of water and came back to my desk.

"Tell me why."

"Teenagers rebel, Harry. My sister is no different."

"Sure. That's normal. It's hard sometimes, when you're angry, to know the right way to behave, and the wrong way to behave."

"Yes. Unfortunately, she's chosen some of the wrong ways to behave."

"Uh-oh," I said.

"Yes. Also unfortunately, my sister has a lot of money available to her. In addition to her allowance, Darla has made some shrewd investments of her own. She's a very clever young woman."

"How does her money play into this?" I asked. "Do you think she was robbed? Murdered?"

"I hope not," Jelinda said, with a little less concern and worry than I would have wanted to hear from my own sister. "Though that's possible. The real concern is that Darla's become an Anything Person."

"She's a puppet?" I asked, confused.

"No, she's human."

The Anything Persons were a particular sort of puppet. They swapped facial features and clothes, and identities the way other people swapped books. They weren't particularly common except in show business circles where they often made excellent character actors. I had heard that a few humans had embraced the philosophy, but of course it wasn't as easy to do for a living creature made out of meat instead of felt and foam. It would certainly take surgery and lots of it.

"You don't know what she looks like?" I said.

"No. She could look like anybody right now, more or less."

"Okay. What makes you think she was kidnapped?"

"Kidnapped might be the wrong word," she said. "She might have gone along willingly. I think she's gotten involved in a cult."

"Which one?"

"The Church of Etymology."

I almost asked her to leave right then. People who got involved with the Etymologists had a tendency to wind up disappearing suddenly. If they were very lucky it was just a lawsuit instead and you ended up penniless.

"Ms. Holt. The Etymologists are very good at what they do, and if your sister joined of her own free will, it will be very hard to..."

"Damn it," she said. "I know all this. I'm not asking you to get her out. I just want to find out if that's where she is. The rest of it I can handle."

I raised one side of my black busy unibrow.

"Well, I might be able to do that. Where did you see her last?"

"She went to visit some of her friends on Caraway Street, a week ago. She called us from their apartment, and we saw the caller ID reading properly, and we've talked to them, so we're sure she was there as of last Friday. Her friends said that she left with two men in a big black limousine. Nobody has heard from her since."

She handed me a big brown envelope.

"This has the phone numbers and addresses of her friends and people with whom she regularly associates. Also a few pictures."

The early ones were all the same, a shy little girl with dark hair and glasses. Sometime around 12 or 13, she loses her glasses. From that point on, it's a variety of hair dyes, and extreme makeup, and then a series of pictures that may as well be different people. The bone structure is there but that's it. In each of them her face seems to lose character. Her features just become simpler and plainer. In the last she seems to have no lips at all.

"I don't understand why anyone would do this," I said. "She was so beautiful."

"She wants to be a puppet," Ms. Holt said.

"Lots of kids do. They tend to grow out of it," I said. "Doesn't she understand that while pretending is fun, it's only a sometimes thing. Doesn't she understand that she is special, and that people love her just the way she is?"

"No," Jelinda said. "She doesn't. She says that her real life is a lie. She says that we're all puppets, humans too, and she at least wants to be honest."

I felt bad for the kid. It was clear that she was all mixed up, and needed someone to explain things to her. I knew I'd take the case.

"That's just awful," I said. "I'd like to help."

"I'm glad. I wanted someone who knows that neighborhood, and I wanted a puppet. I think she'll be more likely to listen to you than to a human."

"My fee is..."

She waved a hand dismissively.

"I know it vaguely. Keep a record of expenses of course. My people will be in touch with you. Is there anything else you need to know?"

"Not right away," I said. "Try not to worry. I'll start right away, and I'll stay in touch. Is your number in here as well?"

"It is," she said, tossing her cigarette butt and little ashtray in my wastepaper basket.

"Thank you for not littering," I said.

She laughed politely, as though I'd made a little joke. I get that a lot.

"It's been nice to meet you Harry. Would you mind if I told you something?"

"Nope," I said.

"You look very tired. Your fur is all sticking out, and your eyebrows are drooping. You look like you might need a nap."

"Yeah," I said, "Or a dry cleaner."

She laughed again, and left. The little chime on my door worked this time, and she headed out into the street. The smell of fog and the sound of kid's skipping rhymes rose up through the window. I settled in at my desk with the file to plan the days' work.