The Scene That Ended It All

And that’s when a purple skinned elf randomly apparated into the scene, singing,

“This is the song that never ends,

Yes it goes on and on my friends.

Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,

And they’ll continue singing it forever just because

“This is the song that never ends,

Yes it goes on and on my friends.

Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,

And they’ll continue singing it forever just because

This is the song that never ends –”

“Who the heck are you?” Ron asked, crossing his eyes in confusion.

“Dobby, sir! Dobby the house elf!”

“Okay… and why are you singing the song that never ends?”

“Because the author of this story couldn’t figure out how to break the awkward silence, and therefore threw Dobby in as a filler until her mind gets back on track!”

“Well, I guess that answers the question of whether or not you guys are also fictitious characters,” Kim said blandly.

“So the Fearsome Ferret IS a TV show within a TV show within a TV show!” Ron exclaimed.

“Actually, sir,” Dobby held up a finger, “It’s a TV show within a TV show within a Nanowrimo novel.”

“A what novel?”

“National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. It’s where people try to write fifty thousand words worth of a novel within the thirty days of November.”

“Does this novel have to make any sense?” Mr. Kovach asked with a raised eyebrow. “Is there any criteria for it at all?”

“Nope! Just to get as many words as possible! That’s why the author was having Dobby sing the song that never ends –”

“Because if you sing it long enough, you’ll eventually get fifty thousand words worth of it,” Bear deduced with a smirk.

“Not fifty thousand words worth of it,” Rainbow corrected him. “Just about twelve hundred or so, to get past the finish line.”

“And you know this because…?”

She shrugged. “Because the author wanted someone to say it, but she didn’t want to have Dobby monologue it all.”

Said house elf then returned to singing,

“I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves,

Everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves!

I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves,

And this is how it goes!”

“Shut up!” snapped Raven. “You’re even annoying the author, and she’s the one writing it!”

“Then what should Dobby do to make more words?” The elf lowered his ears in shame.

“Try describing this carpet,” Branded told the little creature, making an ornate decorative rug appear in front of himself. It was mostly several different shades of blue and violet, with gold swirls and a pair of mirroring flame designs. It randomly whacked the lion boy upside the head with one of its corner tassels, and proceeded to fly away haughtily.

“Why are you purple?” Ron suddenly thought to ask Dobby. His naked mole rat nodded and let out a series of squeaks that could be translated as, “Yeah, why?”

“Dobby doesn’t have a clue, sir,” the little elf answered dutifully. “The author wanted an adjective, and used the first one that came to her mind, so she made Dobby’s skin purple. Dobby looks very pretty in purple,” he added, pointing to his mismatched socks. One sock was red and yellow striped, and the other was checkered with purple and green. He was also wearing a black top hat over a hunter’s orange beanie, and a blue sweater with a reindeer pattern on it.

“Wow. Just… wow,” Kim said, shaking her head.

“That’s… colorful,” Mr. Kovach said needlessly, scratching his head awkwardly.

“This is the weirdest scene you’ve written yet,” a cackly old man’s voice said from nowhere. It was the author’s Inner Editor. “Why are you still writing? You should totally give up right now. Or just backspace this whole part and write in something that at least makes sense!”

“NO!” another voice jumped in. This one sounded like a very young child, one young enough to remember the pride in a scribble that must be explained multiple times before anyone knows what it is. “Who care’s if it’s not perfect! This randomness if FUN! And you can go back and fix it later! Right now, you’re almost done! Only five hundred ish words to go!”

“Yeah!” Leroy the mountain duck put in. “Licker Goat Steve and I think this is great! Keep going! And at least it makes more sense than MY story!” Then he and the octopus started to sing,

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,

Round and round, round and round!

The wheels on the bus go round and round,

All through the town!”

Then Mr. Kovach joined in the chaos, singing,

“You better watch out, you better not cry,

You better not pout, I’m telling you why!

Santa Claus is coming to town!”

“Wrong!” Linus jumped in, holding his iconic blue baby blanket. “It’s not even December yet! Why has Christmas become so commercialized? The radio stations start playing Christmas carols in early November, and the stores start selling colorful lights and trees and decorations and wall paper and ornaments before Halloween is even over! People should be paying more respect to the Great Pumpkin!”

“Will this ever go back to making sense?” Raven asked, rubbing his temples.

“Probably not,” Bear replied. “She’s close enough now that it doesn’t have to anymore. It’s all downhill from now on, for us!”

“At least she hasn’t thrown in the werewolves yet,” Mr. Kovach pointed out. “We can be thankful for that!”

“Oh dear,” the white rabbit fretted, gripping his watch as he shook. “Now you’ve given her an idea, and I don’t have time to spend running away! I’m very very late!”

“You’re always late,” Danny Phantom reminded him. “Your watch is two weeks slow, remember? Taking five minutes to run from a random monster in the strangest crossover fanfiction story I’ve ever seen won’t make you any worse off than if you were still in your own story.”

“Will you ever get back to explaining how a pile of demonic looking skeletons got here?” Ron asked, trying to pull his short blonde hair out in frustration.

“Ooh, carrots! Skeletons?!” Mr. Kovach repeated anxiously, then bolted. He ran a good fifty feet down the hall before a big huge massive sign randomly came down and landed on his head, breaking his neck and killing him.

“What’s it say?” Ariel asked, completely ignoring the dead human. Yzma cackled maniacally, and ordered Kronk to pick the sign up and read it. The disproportionally shaped strong man shrugged and moved to lift the sign up so they could see.

“That’s grammatically incorrect!” The Inner Editor announced.

“Shut up!” The Human Torch shouted, lighting the Editor’s pants on fire. The Editor screamed and ran away, hopping wildly as he went. “I don’t think he’ll be coming back before December,” the flaming super hero said with a wink. Then he saluted sarcastically, and motioned for Kronk to read the big sign.

“It says in big red squiggly neon letters, THE END!” he exclaimed joyfully. “The author has finally reached fifty thousand words!”

There was a collective yell of, “HOORAY!” as the author thanked all of the characters and sent them back to their own worlds. And the lucky forty-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-ninth and fifty thousandth words very intentionally were,

THE END!

Words I could write, but shouldn’t

It’s noon here, and I just woke up. Unfortunately, due to the specificity of my goal, I cannot get away with writing down the epic narrative of my dream last night. Sentient zombie showgirls (whose effective Kryptonite is orange soda), giant vicious worms (the size and speed of trains), and hordes of angry panda bears (just the fact that there were hordes of them was apparently unusual enough). Attacking me in an antique store the size of Wal Mart. Yup. So many words…

Ask me about it in two weeks. If I still remember it, I shall write it then. *sigh*

February 2013 Goal

I need to get my current chapter finished by February 15th. So… That’s something like 10k to 12k words in two weeks, or roughly 800 words per day. That may not seem like much, comparatively, but considering the fact that I have half the time to do it, a missed day and/or several particularly low days can really screw me over in the long run…

I know exactly where my story needs to go, and how it needs to get there. I just… Really don’t like writing that way, and I’m already burning out from this story. I should have done a NaNo project that could be completed in November, not one where I didn’t have to worry about getting stuck trying to find the path. I am a genius. A flipping self-defeating genius.

I really should set more realistic goals from now on…

…

OH, and this time, I’m not going to count blog posts as going toward my word count. This makes it harder to “succeed,” but it also makes sure I don’t enter the next month with only a fifth of a project to build off of.

Marathon of Desperation, pt. 4

Getting a late start on this session of the SoC Marathon of Word Count Desperation. I’ve been watching YouTube videos of people singing in sign language. It’s really interesting to watch, even if half of them don’t have background music I can follow, heh. Some of them look like they do direct translations, but I know at least one that translates a few basic words from each line, but in such a way that even I can follow it. And I don’t know any sign language beyond a basic “thank you,” heh. He also pantomimes the notes and other sounds when there aren’t words to translate. It’s really interesting to see what I’m used to hearing.

Blank moment…

There’s a conversation going on behind me about cats and dogs getting baths. “CatDog!” I don’t remember that cartoon at all, but it was one of my favorites growing up. Right up there with “Courage the Cowardly Dog” and “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.”

My nose is all stuffy… But then, it’s always stuffy. I live in a terrible place for people with allergies. It’s too dry and dusty here, and there are a ton of polleny plants in the area that screw with my sinuses.

Blank moment.

There is not enough here for me to talk about… At least with the last one, I had a crazy six hour long dream to write down.

*comes back 45 minutes later* I totally forgot I was writing this…

Popcorn. Corn on the cob. Cobweb. The web of a spider. Spiders are scary. Scary movies generally suck. Another thing that sucks is vampires. Vampires should not be made of glitter. Glitter goes on glue. Glue is sticky. Sticks come from woody plants. Plants eat sunlight. Sunlight hurts when you have a headache. Headaches can happen when you sleep too long. Long has four letters. Letters that get forwarded too many times are called chainmail. Chainmail is a good kind of armor. Armored cars look weird. Weird Al made some interesting songs. Songs are fun to listen to. To be or not to be, that is the question. Questions are the key to learning. Learning to knit sounds fun. Fun is something I like. Like, OMG, duuuuuuude! Duuuuuuude, I am totally high right now! Now y’all probably think I do drugs. Drugs are not something I do. Do not accuse me of lying. Lying is not something I’m good at. At least my cat trusts me. “Me” cannot begin a sentence. Sentence structure is important. Important things in life do not come free. Free puppies tempt me in parking lots. Lots of people like to drink coke. Coke is a kind of soda. Soda by another name is “pop.” Popcorn.

…Okay, next game.

Happy, happy birthday, from all of us to you! We wish it was our birthday, so we could party too!

Llamas. What’s with the second L in the word llama?

I am so far behind, it isn’t funny! Why can’t I think of anything to type? This sucks! I was so stupid, I should have just done a lower goal! RAWR.

Dinosaurs. Why was I dreaming about dinosaurs last night? I mean, I get why I dreamed about aliens and D&D and chocolate and Star Trek and castles, but where the flip did the dinosaurs come from?? My mind makes no sense.

Five hundred and sixty-two words down; three thousand, nine hundred and sixty-nine to go…

This sucks.

Words words words words words words words words words words WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS FLIPPING STUPID WORDS!

*breaks down crying* or else *punches hole in monitor*

Marathon of Desperation, pt. 3

I have so much to do, and so little time to do it! I woke up this morning with a purry kitty sleeping on my stomach and decided to sleep in a couple more hours. BAD idea! I got on my computer this morning, and someone on facebook mentioned it was the 30th. WHAT?? It CAN’T be! Last night was the 28th! I swear, I looked every time I updated my word count! Where did that day go?? I don’t have enough time for this! I’m still 6k words behind! AND I have to leave for work soon! DANG FLABBIT!!

I dreamed I was in some version of Jurassic Park last night. It was a series of rooms in a castle. Stone walls, decorative hanging tapestries, candlesticks and everything. Except, y’know, I was in jeans, my family and I were trying to set up a D&D game, and I was trying to find my chocolate stash in a random prison cell in a bedroom. Which totally makes sense…

Then a tyrannosaurus rex started smashing in walls trying to get at people. He was too massive to even get his head in the building, but he could apparently see through the walls to see people running in the hallways, and kept knocking the walls in with his tail. I got myself locked in the little prison cell with… some girl. We were sitting in two chairs in there, when this giant eye starts looking in the window. I immediately freeze up and tell what’s her face to be quiet and not move. She freezes, but starts whispering to me loudly asking why we’re sitting so still. I try to keep my voice down as low as humanly possible while I explain that he can’t see us if we don’t move, so if we’re quiet enough, he might not know we’re there.

She says, “Oh… Does that mean we’re safe here, then?”

I tell her, “Not if you don’t shut up right now!”

She does. I’m still amazed that the T-Rex completely misses us.  I mean, he smashes the wall and sticks his head in, looking straight at us for this whole exchange… Then decides there’s nothing interesting or edible in here. Until the kittens start mewing. Three kittens, two black and one white, which apparently have been in the room the whole time. T-Rex corners a black one, and for a second I see through his eyes, like in one of those old horror movies with the hilariously bad special effects. His/my arm reaches out (too long for a real T-Rex’s arm, but whatever) grabs the kitten, picks it up, and pulls it toward the “camera”. Then my view switches back to my body and I watch as the Rex bites kitty’s head off. Apparently full, he doesn’t bother with the other two kittens, walks out of the hole in the wall (either he’s gotten smaller, or the hole’s gotten bigger; it’s the Danny Phantom effect) and leaves. Thinking we’re safe, the girl and I race out of the room, and head for.. the Safe Closet? It’s like a “hidden” room with a “reinforced” glass door. Some people make it there, some people don’t. My husband made it, left, and didn’t make it back again. Meh.

I dunno why, but I leave the “safe” room and begin wandering the halls. Anytime I see a giant eye looking in a window, I freeze and wait for it to go away. A few times I see whole heads, which don’t look anything like a T-Rex. One of them even talked, sort of. It sounded like a really massive and ferocious version of George of the Jungle. Ya know, bad grammar, illeism, and no really complex thoughts. And it kinda looked like this

but also with stegosaurus spine-plate thingies:

At some point, I notice a guy riding on the head of an extra-huge T-Rex. I freeze, but the guy sees me and directs his dino to smash in the wall. I’m knocked over, land sprawled on my back, and play dead. After all, it was the guy who pointed me out, so maybe this dino isn’t driven by hunger… Right? Maybe? The dude jumps off Rex’s head, and comes over to me. I continue playing dead, but (and this is seriously the first time this has happened in a dream of mine) he actually remains unfooled! He pokes me a bit in the stomach and sides a few times, grabs me by my ankle, flips me onto my stomach, and then starts poking me in the back and shoulders.

“I think this one is better off left whole,” he says. “I claim it as property of Her Royal Highness…” I don’t remember the whole name. It’s some bizarre alien queen. I know this because after he and his mount leave, I head back down to the safe room, which is now a massive cavern full of people (all guys), and discover an army of aliens and dinosaurs holding the people hostage. Every now and again, the invaders will grab a random group of people, show them to the queen thing, and then dismember them. Well actually, they leave the people mostly intact, minus the intestinal tract. I dunno why.

After several groups go out like this, I suddenly realize that she’s looking for a specific person. Having heard her say at some point that “females tend to work best” I volunteer to go with her, if she’ll just leave everybody else alone. Surprisingly enough, she agrees.

The inside of the spaceship looks oddly like that of a yacht (judging entirely by the sets used on shows like CSI and NCIS, of course) and the queen looks much less tentacly and green once we’re inside. I’m given my own room, which is actually pretty nice, considering I’m a prisoner. I’m not assigned any guards or tied up or locked in or anything, which for some reason doesn’t surprise me.

Now that I’m awake, I am totally baffled as to how and when my dream self figured out I was supposed to be a concubine. I’m pretty certain it was after I volunteered… Fairly sure. Ninety-some-odd percent sure…

No worries, though, because then the dream changes. I’m still a prisoner on an alien ship, except now I’m capable of duplicating myself like Danny Phantom. My duplicate stays on the ship, and the original me changes form and heads back to Earth. Where Chakotay from Star Trek: Voyager is trying to organize a rescue mission of Captain Janeway, which is also apparently the me that’s on the ship. So I, as me and not Janeway, am now going around Chakotay’s base being all cryptic and telling him what I as Janeway am up to. (Waking Self self says, I didn’t mention anything about the concubineness… Did my dream self forget, or did the dream just change so that’s not what was happening anymore? I don’t remember being purposefully deceitful…)

This base was in a forest instead of a castle, but the big stonewalled cavern was still there. Mostly it was a bunch of platforms on trees connected by wooden plank bridges with rope netting sides. Then my dream went into video game mode, and I had a minimap in the corner of my vision, and I was going around shooting random monsters and collecting bonus packs and trying to make checkpoints. Reminds me of Halo a little bit, now that I think of it…

How the heck did I remember all that?? I rarely remember that much of my dreams, and usually the things that happen should be a lot more memorable! Maybe it’s just that this actually made some semblance of continual sense? At least, the storyline was followable. More followable than the last one I posted, anyway. And a thousand times more followable than my most-remembered dream of all time! Giant talking purple penguin with brown hair, breathing underwater while holding my breath, trying not to get eaten by Clifford the Big Red Dog, having a pet bat alien that lived in my pool of jello, flying on a PVC pipe, drowning in orange cotton bubbles wearing a tutu, and being chased through New York City by what I would later come to know as Cthulhu…

Well that makes one thousand, three hundred and ninety words for this post. I’m off to a staff meeting. “See” y’all tonight!

Words. Just Words.

Listening to the same song, over and over again. Why? Because I am doing so through YouTube, and trying to remember specific titles and singers when searching for music to listen to is just too hard. If I happen to recognize a title in the list of “related videos” (and usually they aren’t related at all–like that anime porn one sitting there scarring me with its mini, while I’m watching a lyrics video for Ave Maria. EWW! Seriously?!) then I might click it. Otherwise, I find one or two videos I’ve memorized, and just stick them on repeat until I can’t stand them anymore. Where was I going with this again? I dunno. Not gonna look back up cuz then I’ll start to edit and will lose my train of thought.

Train of thought. Like I ever had one. If it’s a strain, it’s not driving on tracks. It’s driving on a giant plate of spaghetti and occasionally jumping from one random noodle to another. And sometimes the train doesn’t even run. I just sit there with a blank look on my face and then suddenly realize twenty minutes just passed by without my noticing.

Oh god, the dog just farted. It’s sooo much worse than human farts! I mean, my husband has a thing for spicy foods and bean chili, so I should know. If I can get used to sleeping within two feet of that, but can’t handle a dog’s fart… something is wrong with the dog.

Blank moment. Gimme a sec.

I’ve decided I’m going to start putting in my blank moments, instead of having a large gap in writing time that doesn’t even show up to you readers. Yup, that’s what I’m gonna do.

Blank moment.

I wonder if people realize that cursing at NPC’s doesn’t make them die faster in video games. Mop Head is always overly logical and all that, but when he gets frustrated at someone he can’t out-logic, he goes berserk.

Blank moment.

It really doesn’t help that this thingymajiggerbob is constantly sitting there in full view flashing my word count. It’s hard to keep thinking and typing hen I’m constantly being distracted by numbers. I suck at math. Well, actually, I don’t. I just had a long line of sucky teachers. So… I’m good at math, I just don’t know how to do it. I’m the sort of person that will try and calculate how many shuffles it takes to get a deck back in order again, but do so with a very long table wherein I actually shuffle the deck, because I couldn’t figure out how to put it into a mathematical equation. Yeah, I’ve actually done that. The answer was twenty-three, assuming you use the exact same shuffling pattern every single time without missing any cards. That took up a whole afternoon. Yes, I did it during NaNo. Yes, I know it’s sad. Leave me alone.

My keyboard glows blue.

And I am really having a bad day of typos… You won’t be able to tell, of course, because I’m gonna go back and edit them all out, but seriously. I just wrote “Mu keyboatf hloqs blyw” (not going to edit that one). Usually, by the point where my typing gets that bad, I’m trying to find ways to politely bow out of any and all conversations and head off to bed. Really, ask anyone I’ve ever instant messaged, over facebook or otherwise. But I’ve been doing this all day, and it’s only six more hours til I go to bed… Usually the drunken typing doesn’t happen until three or four in the morning.

Blank moment.

Still blanking.

Hey, I has an email! Later, all.

Even my nightmares…

…make no sense whatsoever.

Last night, I was at a wedding. In a housing complex straight from the Swiss Family Robinson. Trying to make friends with mermaids. Being eaten alive by hornets and maggots. The hornets went for my face. The maggots burrowed into my feet and starting eating me from the inside out. The hornets were scary but pretty painless, and the swelling wasn’t even all that bad. The maggots were terrifying, and the pain in my feet was excruciating. I even got a nice image of what I was going to look like afterwards, since there was a half-eaten squirrel corpse hanging from a nearby tree with other maggots showing between its bare ribs.

Did I mention there was a goat singing the wedding march, a half-hippo dragon named Roy (Thanks for THAT, Brigit! :P) attacking the Eiffel Tower, and my mother threatening that if I didn’t pipe down and respect the ceremony (I didn’t know either the bride or the groom, by the way) then I was going to be betrothed to a really ugly dog? The dog also turned into a donkey, which helped me find the mermaids behind the sideways waterfall, and I somehow managed to accidentally summon the Decepticons when I stumbled across a shallow cave high up in a cliff.

And the cave had a hidden door in it, which lead to a very modern looking house inside the mountain. There weren’t any hallways though, and most of the rooms were pretty bare. Except for the first room on the right, which was fully decked out as the awesomest sewing room ever. I considered teleporting my Grammy there, but she was too busy learning how to speak Skunk in China.

So instead I went to my other Grandma’s house, which apparently has a swamp in the living room. Inside this swamp are a number of scary monsters, psychopathic relatives making territorial claims, and a little stone hut in the back that I could move into. If I could find it, which I couldn’t. Then we got attacked by… some corrupted agency’s personal S.W.A.T. team? I dunno. So all of the sudden, we were at their “other” house–which looked exactly like the first, minus the swamp, plus a barn full of snow gear. Made of ice. I swear, I spent twenty minutes hiding in the barn while I tried to find something suitable to run away in, but there was a blizzard outside and every single pair of boots was made of ICE. Eventually, I got found and faked my own death.

So I ended up on TV, where Neil Armstrong was hosting a fundraiser to start a research project to find a way to safely remove the maggots before I died a slow and agonizing death. Wait– those were still there?? Yes, and suddenly I remembered that they still hurt like nothing else.

I think the dog (which wasn’t a donkey anymore) eventually decided to bite my feet off, and I lived the rest of my life as a flying rodeo clown. But I’m not quite sure, because I wake up slowly, and I believe reality was starting to fade in by that point. It’s the only explanation I can find for the smell of fur and cat litter, and the difficulty breathing, and the weird vibrating in my stomach while I tried to escape from this annoying green bull with a firefly butt…