In late October 2002, I signed up for the first time for an annual project called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. (Someone must have loved Mork & Mindy.) Each participant tries writing a 50,000-word novel during November, then e-mails the results to NaNoWriMo by November 30 to verify the word count—no prizes, just the satisfaction that one has enough self-discipline to eschew activities such as working, looking for work, eating, sleeping, extreme snowboarding-slash-Mountain Dew-guzzling, following the Winona Ryder shoplifting trial, watching gay Quebecois bukkake videos, or reporting that obnoxious neighbor to the government as a leftist atheist Arab-sympathizing enemy combatant (he won’t be blasting those Insane Clown Posse CDs at Camp X-Ray, that’s for sure) in favor of spending countless hours alone churning out something long and most likely unreadable.
I started writing fiction again in late 2001 to challege myself, to hone my writing skills, and to distract myself from stewing over the Bush junta’s right-wing outrages. I hadn’t written much fiction since creative writing class in college during the mid-Eighties, an experience that had almost turned me off on writing altogether; I’d found my early stories so stiff, cliched, melodramatic, derivative, and naive I’d thrown most of them away a few years after graduation. No matter when I’ ve written, though, I’ve stuck to producing short stories, partly because I dislike padding (never overstay one’s welcome), but mostly because I write so slowly.
I strive for perfection in everything I write (or draw or paint), which means countless painstaking revisions in my work until I decide the result at least approaches my minimum requirements for nonwretchedness. Even if nobody else sees what I write (or draw or paint), I’ll still take care to make myself proud of what I do.
I wanted to prove the fruits of hypergraphia could at least approach my Olympian standards. I wanted to prove myself an Olympic long-distance runner, in a sense. So knowing my glacial pace, I started racing even before joining the project. I started expanding my Pixel Stupor story “Coffee Clutch” in mid-October; I’d always felt the story’s suburban milieu and Ray the narrator’s psychological outlook needed much more detail than I’d given them.
Even with my head start, by November 25 I’d hit only 27,843 words, counting the title Coffee Clutch—the longest fiction I’d ever written, true, but not long enough. NaNoWriMo advises authors to aim for quantity, not quality, but I couldn’t resist fiddling with my text, spending what seemed like millennia rewriting and rewriting Ray’s description of his “cantaloupe nose that breaks out in pumpkin zits”; or a long digression about one Percival Marston Grin, a snobbish recluse (he hates what he calls “the mouth-breathing masses”) who composes the score for a cheesy Eighties sci-fi flick, Assault on New York 2055; or (I struggled quite a while with this) an answering-machine outgoing message delivered rap-style by Ray’s white twentysomething dot-com partners, Zack and Bella: “We’re not in right now / But don’t have a cow!”
And when not searching for just the right adjective to describe dried pizza grease, I’d sit before the computer and obsessively mull over crucial plot points. How quickly should Ray ejaculate on his honeymoon? What type of clitoral piercing should Bella have? What should Zack do with his hands when receiving a blowjob? Actually, I’d mull over the plot almost everywhere, from the local Waldenbooks, to the garage changing the oil in my car, to the Jonathan Richman concert where I received my fourth or fifth autograph from him—my brush with fame. Such mulling, alas, didn’t necessarily translate into faster writing, and neither did multiple autographs from Richman—you know, the singer who’d pop up every now and then in There’s Something about Mary?
So to finish the 50K race in time, I did the unthinkable.
I started padding the rest of my novel.
I added autobiographical segments, including an account of my racially-segregated upbringing: “Except for the Vietnamese girl in middle school who had moved away after developing anorexia, I wouldn’t see any real-life Asian people until age 16 in 1983, when I attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts at Bucknell University.”
I added early versions of “Coffee Clutch,” including an outtake where the narrator undergoes a mystical experience one morning in his kitchen while holding “a ceramic Ziggy mug…actually shaped like that squat, bald cartoon character.” (Italics in original.)
I added book, CD, and DVD reviews rejected for good reason by the Pittsburgh City Paper et al. Only weirdos would care about an A/V Geeks DVD compilation that includes the 1968 film Marijuana, in which “an exceedingly laid-back (nudge, nudge) Sonny Bono…warns about the ‘unpredictable and unpleasant bummer’ that can afflict even casual ‘weedheads.’ ”
I added two mature-content funnybook scripts I’d written for the artist, and fellow 1983 Pennsylvania Governor’ s School for the Arts attendee, Kelly Zimmerman: “She Looks Like Trouble,” starring his lowlife gravedigger character Morty (nudity, bloody shootings); and “Just One Good Reason for Living,” about a suicidal nobody (roadkill, existential blathering).
And (of course) I added a monologue from a hungover, horny, hemorrhoidal Fidel Castro: “I’ll bet Ho Chi Minh’s ass doesn’t hurt!”
The morning of November 29, the day before the deadline, I visited the local public library. There, I inserted my Coffee Clutch disk into the computer and discovered my grab-baggish novel had bloated to 49,617 words. Joy! I saw the finish line up ahead! Evidence I hadn’t wasted my life! I set about transferring files from one disk to the novel’s disk to meet the word count. The computer wouldn’t save them due to “file corruption.” I tried saving them again. No luck. I removed the disk, reinserted it, reopened the “3 1/2 Floppy (A:)” drive…
And found my novel vanished forever from the disk. The only copy of the 49,617-word version. No more square white-boy autobiography. No more Ziggy. No more Sonny, no more Morty, no more Ho. Shazbat!
Yes, I’d used Windows.
Fortunately, I discovered the disk had saved a temp file of my novel, the November 25 version sans most of the padding.
I really should hate Bill Gates even more, but in a way his poor software did me a favor. I disliked eating up novelistic space with so much filler. I felt dishonest cheating readers (should I ever acquire any for the novel) and, just as important, cheating myself. As I’ve noted, I have to live with myself after my glacial literary toil has concluded….Oh, what the heck. I’ll hate Gates even more.
In the meantime, I could add more about Percival’s swingin’ life to my manuscript.
December 2-3. 2002
Pixel Stupor: my early 2000s website, now defunct. Coffee Clutch: never published, perhaps for the best. Windows: I’ve used LibreOffice (free and open-source software) on my laptops since the 2010s.
June 15, 2023
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 