“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
~Jack London
NaNoWriMo has been less productive for me than I had hoped, but still better than I had any right to expect. I’m eking along, a few pages a day. Yes, I am lagging far behind, and yes, I am okay with it. I’ll be thrilled if I end the month with an engaging outline for a future novel. Any freelance work which comes my way must share the front seat alongside the promising guest posts that are lined up.
The month is nearly half over, and I’m still well inside the walls of the first act. I do, however have a fairly good idea about where the story is going, which is a lot more than I could have said two weeks ago. This is the final few hundred words of the opening chapter. I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to critique it below. I chose this particular section because I feel as though it does an adequate job of displaying the setting and I didn’t have too much to choose from.
RedBook:
Billy slid his finger across the glass, then pulled manual control from the on board computer. He dragged his thumb in a neat line across the bar of green dashes until the glass was a straight line of crimson, each dash darkening beneath his drifting thumb. A few nearly silent words fell from the side of Billy’s mouth, and the Skyler soared into a full throttle; launching upward in a single straight shot, fifteen seconds into the sky. It teetered for a single second, with barely a mislaid milisecond of momentum, then hovered into a perfect horizontal.
“Three…two…one,” Conner counted quietly to himself. There was a split second boom that somehow sounded both deafening and quiet, and then the Skyler wrinkled the blue sky at six-hundred kilometers per hour, just as the bones of the planet’s biggest factory for the world’s only narcotic collapsed inside a crumbling sink hole.
“You weren’t kidding,” Billy said a few decibels too loud, his ears ringing from the force of the blast.
Conner was silent. He collapsed in his chair, stared out the window, and wondered for the thousandth time what life would have been like if he had been born just one generation earlier. He had read plenty of histories and seen enough footage to last a dozen lifetimes, but Conner could never quite place himself in those final few years before the Great Melancholy, back when technology had finally outrun philosophy and left the world buried beneath a tsunami of chaos. Of course there had been those few who had seen it coming, but even they could not have imagined it unfolding as fast as it did.
It was two decades later and the world was mostly safe, though safe was a synonym for antiseptic. Conner lived in a world where illegal drugs had been wiped from the planet. There were few alive willing to taint their blood. Such barbarism was so last century. Why would anyone engage in anything so primitive, when a single Primotion chip, implanted in the brain could easily eliminate any negative thought that might be spun in the subconscious.
The elders were the biggest addicts, as they had nursed the biggest burden of transition. The young understood the technology that was turning the gears of the world as though it was a native tongue, which to most of them it was. Use of the Primotion chip among the under twenty population was nearly non existent. But for those in their golden years, it was nearly epidemic.
Once the chip went whirring in the brain, life was all rainbows and dolphins. The problem was, when life is only good, then you don’t know when it’s bad. If you don’t know when it’s bad, you’ll be clueless when it starts getting worse. If you’re clueless when it’s getting worse, then you are powerless to stop it.
Imagine that thirty percent of the Newmerican population was living beneath just such an umbrella, and you’ll know precisely where we are when fifteen year old Conner Quick pulled himself into the Skyler, and why he was smiling at the holocaust he’d left behind.
Writer Dad
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