A/N: A flashback chapter while I plan out the next chapters. Better explanation at the end, I promise.
June, 2012
The humid air of July hung like an invisible wet bed sheet across the Burgess community. Everywhere there was a thermometer, it was recording new highs for the record books, but it did not take a piece of equipment to see that. The sun blared down without the buffer of white clouds and had no signs of relief in the foreseeable future. Most people chose to stay under the cover of their homes, but there were the select few that were crazy enough to brave the bright heat and venture out to the store and take in the free air conditioning as they shopped.
Ithilwen was not one of those people.
As a matter of fact, she was sitting in the covered section of her front porch with her laptop resting on her crossed legs. A glass of sweet tea was sitting on the small table beside her seat, sweating under the hot temperature. Ithilwen, being elfkind from Middle Earth, did not feel the heat as the mortals of this world did. It did make her sweat slightly, however not near as much as the drink she presently reached for.
"Should I?" She muttered to herself, looking at the computer screen. The browser was open and pulled up a website that she was debating over joining. She had heard from some online acquaintances of the horrors they willingly put themselves through in November, but at that time she was in a heavy course load of fifteen credit hours. They suggested that if she were interested, there was a summer event that took place during the months of April and July that she could look into.
Camp Nanowrimo, the summer cousin of the National Novel Writing Month.
Ithilwen bit her lip. What else was there to do? The weather was too unbearable to do anything physically active outside. She had nearly a month's break before the last run of her semester was to begin. Fiona and her naneth were out of town, and she did not feel like going out herself. The weather was not much different anywhere else in the country anyway.
"Why the hell not, I'm gonna do it!" she exclaimed out loud. She looked around the area, not seeing anyone within hearing distance and felt a little silly for verbally convincing herself to take part in the event. Chuckling at her oddness, she brought the mouse to the link labeled 'Sign up for a free account' and began to put in her information.
Now the million dollar question was: what was she going to write about?
"I am screwed," she said with realization.
The topic of her choosing was not hard to decide on when she thought about it. She opened up a blank document on her laptop after registering on the website and began to type up any kind of idea that came to her mind. After returning from the kitchen to collect a freshly filled glass of tea, she began to weed out the bad ideas. Needless to say, the list was nearly decimated when she got through.
Ithilwen pouted and stared at the screen's blinking cursor in frustration. The event began in two days and she barely had anything to go on as far as an idea. The options she had not eliminated were vampire, haunted house, high school, fairy tale, and zombies. The list, though short, was not helping her inspiration any. She decided to click around on the website's discussion forum for any tips that might help her with her decision. While it did not offer any suggestions that she had not thought of, she did feel better to learn that after about twenty minutes of browsing, she was not the only person to sign up and not know what to write about.
Switching back to the word processing document, she looked over the miniscule list again. Her mind kept focusing on the words high school and fairy tale. A high school built around a fairy tale? A modern day high school student as the reincarnation of a fairy tale character? A fairy tale themed high school? The ideas had possibilities, but the one about the reincarnation had some possibilities, especially if it was not focused on a single character's reincarnation.
"Oh, this is going to be good," Ithilwen said, beginning to type up notes and a possible outline as her muse began to wake up and move into high gear. She may have had to wait two whole days to even begin writing the story, but there was nothing in the rules that forbid her from making notes and planning.
Week One
They say that week one is the easiest, because the muse is working overtime with inspiration, and the ideas are just pouring out like water. Ithilwen actually passed her word count goals for the first few days. The overdraft was only slight, but she was proud of her accomplishments nonetheless. And her hands began to cramp from her furious typing on the laptop's keypad. By the end of the week, she had written the back story of her main characters and how their tragic end in the fairy tale realm came to bring about their reincarnation by the hands of a wizard who felt that their time together was cut too short. Over the weekend, she had written sections of what she believed - at the time - to be the first chapter.
Week Two
Week two had a similar start as week one, but somewhere by Wednesday her word count was only just crossing over the goal, or just shy of reaching that goal. Thursday night of that week, which was designated as a catch up and pass night, was spent in a large portion of her writing time talking on the phone to Fiona and the webcam to Morwen. She spoke to them of her writing project, and both sent her words of encouragement. Friday she spent more time catching up to her current goals during the day, which left a large pile of laundry for her to fold during the eleven o clock news. Saturday was more balanced, but she still did not meet her daily goal.
Week Three
By week three, Ithilwen was in a panic. The fifteenth of the month came and went in a flurry - and left her close to ten thousand words behind. She spent the sixteenth and the seventeenth closing in on under four thousand words behind, but cried in frustration on the eighteenth as the word count goal increased by almost two thousand once more. Her naneth called during the sob fest and was able to motivate her daughter to keep going with the story. Unfortunately, her muse had made other plans. From the nineteenth to the twenty first, she fought with every little spark of inspiration she could glean.
Morwen called again the evening of the twenty first to check in on her progress. Ithilwen told her that she was just shy of being on target by a thousand words, but the sprint she needed just was not coming. Her naneth's suggestion came out of the blue.
"You can not go wrong with smut," was the matter of fact suggestion.
Shocked at the idea, Ithilwen thought it over and could not find any reason not to try it, the more she thought it over. It made sense. Take a turn down the literary road that you have not ventured yet and see what happens.
"This is a draft, right? Well it is quantity over quality here, sweetie. If during your revisions you feel that it does not work, leave it out," Morwen explained. So in the early hours of the twenty second morning, smut was written. And to her sleep deprived mind, it was good.
Weeks Four & Five
From the twenty second to the twenty seventh, Ithilwen had gotten her second, third, and fourth winds of inspiration. Her muse came back from her vacation, relaxed and ready to go on a word sprint spree. In retrospect, Ithilwen thought that if she had thought to write smut earlier in the month, her muse might not have stayed away as long as she had. Apparently even muses need to get laid.
The random bursts of ideas came at the oddest times - when she was cooking, in the bathroom, and almost always right before she fell asleep. She knew that with the limited amount of time left, she had to stop what she was doing and get the ideas down and as elaborate as possible so that she could come back to them later. This resulted in cases of slightly burned food on more than one occasion. After the charred quesadillas she was preparing for lunch (which were still edible with a heaping amount of medium salsa), Ithilwen began to carry a small spiral notebook and pen around with her wherever she went, be it through the house or through the store. She acquired odd looks in public, but made some "writing buddies" with some teenage writers who were also taking part when she stopped at the McDonald's for her carryout lunch.
Then that thing about Murphy's Law happened, which was anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. And she received the Camp Nanowrimo writer's worst nightmare on the twenty eighth. The worst thing was that she never once uttered "What could go wrong?"
That morning she got up to boot her laptop while she was fixing breakfast, only instead of the operating system that she saw, it read 'Format disc error. Press any key to restart.' After trying to reboot once more, she knew the hard disk drive had finally given out on her. A string of curses flowed out and echoed around the first floor of the manor house. She pulled her cell phone out and dialed up a computer friend she had met online for advice. He told her to bring it by and he would see what he could do to repair it, but she told him that she needed to finish her project first.
"Since it sounds like it could be your drive," he mulled, "I would suggest buying an external drive and install your operating system on that so that you can finish your work. They are relatively cheap now, anyway." On the status of her laptop, he added, "Worst case scenario is that it is your motherboard, and if that is it then you would be better off replacing the whole thing. If it comes to that, I can meet up with you and help you find a new one."
Thanking her friend, she went up to her room to dress, forgetting about breakfast altogether for the time being. She stopped for a few sausage biscuits on the way to the store and ate them in the electronics department while she browsed the shelves looking for a suitable drive. She discovered that the internal drives were relatively less, but she had no desire to fight with the innards of her computer with a pressing deadline hanging over her. And, she reasoned, if her friend was right about it being the motherboard that shorted out, an external drive would be more compatible for a laptop of another brand and model. Securing her purchase, along with some paper and ink for her printer, she returned home.
Ithilwen returned home at noon, purchases in hand, and began to unpack everything. She managed to connect the external drive and set it as the primary boot device, but this also meant that she would have to spend an additional three hours installing the operating system. Good thing she had her writing backed up on her little flash drive. While she waited for the hard disk drive to format and install her operating system, she drug out her notebooks and pen and got back work - old school style. The typing would be a nightmare, but she was determined to win. By the end of the day, her new external hard disk drive had her operating system installed, and she was typing her written words at breakneck speed well past midnight.
On the twenty ninth, she had accumulated roughly forty six thousand words, a couple hundred shy of being halfway to forty seven thousand words. Ithilwen was feeling good about herself, and was even beginning to see the gaps she had skipped through the month begin to fill in. By this point it was what she considered pointless dialogue, but it might prove to be beneficial during revisions. She often resorted to her mini notebook for plot bunny ideas to fill in the word count. On the evening of the twenty ninth, she fell asleep on the leather love seat in the den watching the evening news.
On the last day of Camp Nanowrimo, Ithilwen slept in. She had not meant to, to be truthful, but the odd patterns of sleep had finally caught up with her from the previous day. She awoke around nine thirty and nearly had a fit until she remembered that it was still early, and that she had plenty of time to finish and validate her novel. She booted the laptop and checked her nano mail for the latest pep talks from the organizers and municipal leisions. Then she attached her flash drive and opened up the project file.
And then her brain went blank.
Frustrated again, she rose to go take a shower and clear her mind, hoping that the warm bath would do some good for her senses. She thought back to her naneth's suggestions and thought about how she could incorporate another smutty scene into the story, filler or not. She thought of a shower scene, a kitchen scene, and an outdoors scene, all just that side of kinky without going overboard. It was something she did not care for in those novels she bought, to find that a scene goes over the top to try and engage the reader; she normally tossed the book into the pile to leave. She also got inspired for an epilogue, since she had created a prologue at the beginning of the month. She thought about setting it a little ways into the future after the relationship had progressed past 'happily ever after' and not so cliché.
Content with her ideas, she dried and dressed before sprinting down the steps to continue her novel.
It was almost five that afternoon when she typed the words 'the end' at the end of her document. It was silly, she knew this, but it felt good. Now it was just a matter of selecting the entire document and having it validated. Easier said than done with over ninety pages of uncut prose - unless the keys control and a are used in tandem. Ithilwen was practically vibrating in her seat as she waited for the site to open the window to paste her text into. Clicking submit she waited some more.
Finally, the count changed to sixty thousand, two hundred and fifteen. Ithilwen had won Camp Nanowrimo 2012.
The screams of triumph could be heard throughout the house, but Ithilwen did not care. She had won! The sense of elation she felt was unbelievable! A month of drama and frustration had led to something wonderful, and the little 'winner!' graphic that was listed by her screen name made it all the more real.
Ithilwen collapsed back onto the leather loveseat and sighed. She was done. Done with Camp Nanowrimo. Done with the draft to her novel.
Now what?
Stomach growling made the decision for her. She was going to get something to eat.
A/N: This was something that I had tucked away in my draft file that I decided to pull out for a few reasons. 1) I am stuck on the next chapter; I know where I want it to go, but I'm having trouble getting it started. 2) It doesn't look like it'll fit with the story, but you'll see Ithilwen going back and working on her story again later on, and I felt it important to show the nightmare she went through. 3) Not all of what happened to Ithilwen happened to me writing this story last November, but I did have my computer's HDD wipe out right before fall semester started. And then once before midterms the year before.
Anyway, I know it's not what you guys wanted to read, but I hope it makes you laugh at least. The next couple of chapters won't where Ithilwen is concerned. Also, the mention of Morwen telling Ithilwen to write smut to work out the writer's block can work – just don't leave them hanging. If it wasn't for reading Paradise Lost and being worn out from my 5k event, I would have some more content ready. But, spring break is this coming week so I'll have a better opportunity to write.