In Feet First

5:30 AM:
Up early to start my NaNoWriMo project, with no prep work, no plotting, no outlining, just me and the pre-dawn silence and a gulletful of stark terror. I hit 400 words and freeze. I've got nothing, nothing. That 400 words seems too long, and desperately padded. I'm doomed. DOOMED.

1:00 PM:
Slow day at work: decide I'll try and write a little in the afternoon. Go to record store on lunch and and treat myself to some new instrumental music to write by—Peter Gabriel's Long Walk Home (the soundtrack for Philip Noyce's film The Rabbit-Proof Fence, which still has no US distribution) and GodspeedYouBlackEmperor!'s two-CD Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. Get back to my desk and discover my headphones are monstrously fucked-up. No music for the afternoon. Doomed. Karmically doomed.

6:30 PM:
Look again at those horrible 400 words. Vast expanse of white space and no chink in it. On a whim, consult Oblique Strategies.

My card reads —Is the information accurate?—

Wheels spin. Gears grind. I take a quick trip to the supermarket for milk and coffee, barely registering my surroundings. Get home, brew a pot of coffee: and then I find the hole in the paper and leap through.

11:29 PM

He stood in the stillness, holding her, two heartbeats in a far corner of a boxy stillness. There was only the hum of the distant refrigerator in all that space, its low bass rumble (sixty hertz, Gaffney thought) with a high flutey overtone: a harmonic. The whole house as gigantic sounding-chamber, set ringing like a wine-glass by the growl of the compressor motor.

And then he heard something else—a sweet, high pinging, steady as a beating drum. It was distant and metallic. He thought it might be the neighbors' wind chimes; but the trees were motionless. Then another sound answered, a lower, gonging pulse. And then a cymbal-like clang of bronze, from much nearer this time.

And as the sound grew, Gaffney realized that is was the sound of bells—of church bells. Though it was nearly midnight, somebody was ringing the bells, every bell in every church.

Holding Linda high across his shoulder, Gaffney went into the kitchen. He picked up the telephone, and was somehow not surprised to discover that the line was dead.

He hung up the phone and walked back to the nursery. Gaffney laid his daughter gently back in her crib, pulled the blankets up around her, and then went looking for weapons...

2,100 words before bedtime, and the well has no bottom in sight.