Let's talk about sex,

Not really. Unless sex is a euphemism for bad writing. Man, I don't know. I'm going to present you the paragraph of my failed NaNoWriMo 2010 novel, and we'll talk about it why I hate it.

The floor was gone. The linoleum tiles had melted away in large monochromatic drops and hurtled towards the unending abyss. He could only stare on in wonder and stand there, same as he was before. There was no reason why he should decide to do anything different. He knew what was going to happen, and what was going to happen was exactly what happened: nothing. He stood there perfectly still in midair. This sequence of events was no great concern to this man. He was a doctor by law, at least as far as the ragged vellum that hung on his wall said. Said doctor had long since stopped practicing; he did not remember where he obtained his license in the first place. His memory was gone, erased by the years of study and physic knowledge that drowned his mind.

Look at that shit. Intentionally ambiguous and  pretentious. "The floor was gone." What is that? Some sort of middle-school girl attempt at hooking an audience, I assume. Also, I'm assuming everyone had the same experience with linoleum as I did. Large, black and white tiles arranged in a checkered pattern, and they often came undone. What is the image I'm trying to convey here? A man, assumedly, standing on a floor that is melting away, and being suspended in space.

Then, there's the problem of my prose itself. I'm trying so hard here to create huge, sprawling sentences with a thousand ideas packed into them. Then follow these sentences with a bunch of short declarative ones. What the fuck was I even doing; I started writing this three hours ago. POKEMON. Well, here's the second paragraph:

Forever floating, the good doctor found amusement in the fallen floor, and could not contain his laughter. His laughter rattled the thin frame which was his body, and the sound was something closer to an exhausted gasp for air than the regular delighted giggle one expects. In all, the doctor was not a well man. His back had curled in his age, his flesh had fallen off his bones, and he stood hunched here, among the walls and ceilings without a base to stand. The face he owned was well past expired with deep lines drawn in his visage and marked with numerous spots. His energy exhausted, he rested his thin lips in a smile, drawing the excess skin of his face slightly more taut than usual and sat down. Eyes quickly closing, the man passed into a blissful sleep, amused by his gravity defying act.

I'm gonna stop you here and tell you why I hate this failure of a novel. First of all, I'm trying to write with the most exasperated, convoluted, and altogether pedantic voice. For what I have attempted to do in later chapters, is re-write Doctor Faustus.

Sitting on his ebony throne casting shadows without light, the doctor waited. The passage of time entirely robbed from his understanding, he sat and slept upon the wooden prison devoid of emotion and thought. Abrupt, a leak sprung from the white ceiling above. Each droplet of water recalled the same life as the linoleum drops. These new drops cast shadows the same as the seat and its sitter did, keeping darkness in a room inexplicably devoid of light but still lit. The stream was steady, though the water did nothing as it hit the floor below. The corner leaking, the walls white, the floor somehow dry, and an old decrepit man perched atop a chair. Jacques did not bother wondering how he survived. He knew he no longer needed to sleep, eat, or drink. Those were luxuries given to men less perfect than he. Alone, in his stained gray suit, pants comically short showing bare ankles, feet planted in curling leather, and a necktie stressed with decorations innumerable. He sat longer, waiting for an occurrence only he knew would happen.  

 This passage is a page or so later. What you would have learned in the omitted page is that the doctor realized what he had to do. It's not explained what he had to do, but he sat in a chair in an empty room. He felt compelled to move (literally walking on air) and sit in this chair and wait. Also, he lost his name tag, which upsets him greatly. "Without his name, he knew nothing." or something similar to that bollocks I wrote.

It happened. He awoke in a hospital bed, his unkempt suit replaced by the oft embarrassing hospital gown loosely tied in the back. Covered with thick blankets, the warmth did not mask the jutting pain in the back of his hand; a cold metal needle pierced him and pumped dulling medicine into his body. For the first time he could remember, Jacques Humbert heard himself think. The monologue with which he spoke in his mind was unlike others. Humbert did not have the interior monologue attributed to a conscious human, instead he spoke dialogue. He spoke fervently with himself, and not in the way most argue and debate with their inner. Inside him was a force completely alien to this time. Years of research and study had shattered his mind. That is what the doctors of the doctor would tell other doctors and any familial relation should they appear. Neither colleagues nor family ever showed while the broken man lay in the hospital. Another nightmare possessed him and drove him to flee the comforts of the hospital, that's what they would write. Forevermore, they prescribed him bed rest and psychiatry. This diagnosis could never hold. They knew it at once when Doctor Jacques Humbert began speaking tongues he had no right to know.

The book opens with a dream sequence. Classy. Then, as if to say, hey! look at me!, he does begin speaking in whatever smattering of Romance languages I could put together. Rudimentary French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and the like. Actually, I think those are the only ones I used. After the doctors react, fear brain damage, the usual boring stuff, we get a really shitty soliloquy from Humbert's inner monologue. It's explained that he has two internal voices because there are two people inside of him! Shock! Horror!  A demon resides within this man, giving him the knowledge he craved so long ago, and wishes only to forget now.

His inner demon materialized in chair at his besides, sitting in the shadows the moon cast. The beast was the same size and form as a man, as he and the doctor agreed upon. Aside from the shape, the monster took great liberty with his form in Jacque's world. The frame of a tall man, roughly seven feet tall, thin and pointed. His left chest and arm were higher and longer than his right, but his legs were equal, his face copied his torso and laid on a slant. He possessed large oval eyes, bright and black. His mouth was perpetually curled in a sick smile filled with yellowed rows of teeth as far back as one could see when he spoke. Devilish hands six fingers wide, void of thumbs, clawed with sickly olive colored nails drummed on the windowsill as his eyes glistened over Jacque's body strapped to the mattress. Where his nose should be, there was nothing, where his feet should be, copies of his hands. Having four hands was amusing for him because he had no reason for hands other than to strike others. This alien body was clothed only when Jacques wished, and he often felt reason to ask his servant to do so. After all, it was a rare occasion for the demon to live anywhere other than the recesses of the mind. Being devoid of hair and any vulgar human extremities, there was little need for clothes. Most distressing to the natural eye was the demon's hue: his skin was the deepest black able to be seen. Unsettling to the eye and the ear, his name was Nybbas.

We meet the demon. Lovely painting, right? The intention was to create a creature that you really couldn't imagine. Their deal is that Jacques surrenders his name for Nybbas' servitude, Nybbas would be at Jacque's beck and call. This would have been a fine deal, if Jacques knew that surrendering his name mean surrendering his emotions and memory. By stroke of luck, he was wearing a name tag, being an actual medical doctor when he performed this dark rite and was able to remember his name through there. Nybbas didn't think it cheating until the doctor tattooed J. Humbert on his chest (where the name tag would normally reside.)

To make a long story short, and why I stopped writing: I introduced time travel. Nybbas is a demon, and is immortal. Immortals, in the context of this book are able to take a mortal's body and perform actions they would not remember. Immortals could not alter the world themselves, they must act through mortal vessels. However, immortal beings could chose any mortal ever. The more angelic fought to create the best time for mortals, and the demonic fought against them. In theory, our history is always in flux, etc. This becomes hard to reconcile. However, the immortals eventually found a wall. They could not move past some year, 2020 or 2012 or something stupid.

The issue is, there are far more mortals than immortals, and so it is difficult to make permanent changes to the mortal timeline. With the populations of bored demons and zealous angels almost equal, Nybbas wagers the  girl's soul with Jacques'. Instead of eating Jacques' soul (that's what demons do, right?) and commit him to a catatonic life, Nybbas would take the scientist's. The stipulation being, Jacques had to forget her name: Olivia.

The plot twist, spoilers for a novel never appearing ever, is that Olivia is Jacques' eventual daughter. As Jacques is skeptical of Nybbas' motives, he makes a list of demands, like eternal youth (or just youth, I can't remember, I'll put the paragraph of demands up) and falls in love with a woman. Then, Jacques argues with Nybbas who has become increasingly antagonistic towards Jacques and his newfound love while his wife is in childbirth.  The wife names the child without Jacques' knowledge, and I never figured out how I wanted it to end. I never got much further than Jacques' demands, so here is the last thing I wrote regarding my utter failure:

“Right, so, let’s get on with it: I want to be young again, this old body of mine does not cut it anymore. I want to be forever young; I want the fear of death forever put out of my mind. I want to know what I am entitled to know without having to ask you what is what. Furthermore, I want to operate above money and law. I want ownership over a man-sized tyrannosaur, versed in the English tongue and obedient to my command. I never want to need to eat or drink again. I want a plastic card worth all the money in the world. I want my wife back. I want--”

            “Whoa there cowboy, you’re wrangling more cattle than you can chew. In order: yes, yes, no, no, maybe, yes, perhaps, no, and no. What’s dead is dead, such a shame for you. A million willing women will sleep with you for the right price. I cannot provide you that price in form of cash or credit, as I simply do not wish to meddle in such affairs. As for your requests regarding life and death, I can make you eternally young, this is true, but to make you truly immortal as I, I will not. Perhaps we can agree on you never dying from old age, or hunger and thirst, and we’ll keep your body perpetually at the state you desire. Should some tragic happenstance befall you, you will die as any man would. Giving you the knowledge you called me for would be ridiculous. If I were to do that, why would I remain? I wish to stay here with you longer, so I won’t grant that. As for your dinosaur, sure, I’ll give you him as you want, but we’ll make him as invisible as I am to the untrained eye. Why you desire such a silly thing is not for me to question but: Why?”

As you can tell, I just gave up trying to make sense of what I was doing. Also plot point I forgot in my earlier summary: Jacques has access to infinite knowledge, as in, Nybbas knows everything a mortal could ever hope to, but Jacques must pose a question to him for an answer, etc. Even the names are ridiculous. Jacques "supplanter"; Nybbas is a trickster demon; Olivia "olive tree, peace, etc." How pretentious! 


I never thought of a name for the T-Rex, but he would have undoubtedly been my favourite character. In my head, he decided to wear a top hat and monocle to show both Nybbas and Jacques he was intelligent and capable of rational thought--despite what they may think. Also, there was gonna be a whole scene with Angels like Raphael and Uriel, I had just got done writing a paper on Paradise Lost at the time, sue me. (Don't sue me.) They were going to be pale bluish tinted men without wings or anything. Completely nude, genitalia removed, and bald as fuck. Halos were to be belts.

Jesus, I am telling you this story because I am a terrible authour. Next week, I should have started brainstorming for Script Frenzy. That, I hope, is significantly less terrible. Creative writing sucks, as do creative writing 'majors.'