The Mystery

The true mystery is why every one of these Nanovels seem to turn into a mystery. Aside from last year's attempt at a political thriller, each of the others has been some sort of attempt at suspense, and I have so much trouble with coming up with the punchline.... The Baywatch Thing remains my greatest triumph, even though it ended in a hurried and hackneyed manner, and that does have the elements of a suspenseful mystery thriller type thing. Anyhow, I apparently like twists and/or turns....

A conversation the other day about point of view has me thinking about the various merits of the various forms. My first Nano was a rambling first-person mess. I avoided that in the second one by switching to third-person omniscient form. Illinoir was a return to first person, and I think I was pretty successful in keeping the rambling stream of conscious stuff out of it. Last year, with Lincoln we managed some semblance of a third-person-limited-omniscient form which is actually pretty good in terms of keeping my head out of the characters' heads, but allowing for some jumping around to different people. This year has been strictly third-person limited, which has its merits in that I know how to write it, but it does force me to keep locked into Dui's thoughts. Can't say what other people are thinking -- have to make sure to mention that it seemed that they were thinking a particular thing.

Anyway -- my biggest problem with third person omniscience was that I didn't know how to reveal things to the reader. If the narrator knows everything, how can you have a shadowy, unknown figure? All my performance studies training taught me how to extract the voice of the character of the narrator from a work, but I don't really know how to write the narrator as a character.

Or, maybe I do, and I just don't know it.

Blah blah blah. You're all just here for the excerpt! Let's get to it! Here's a little bit of foreshadowization! (And did I mention that were beyond the 30,000 word mark? As of now: 32,208. Less than 20k to go!)

"Cutter is important to this story, isn't he?" Dot asks.

"Indubitably," Decimal replies.

"Creating the system wasn't enough."

"Not by a long shot. You needed -- we needed -- his methods of cataloging in order to create a way for people to find the books they needed."

"We couldn't have done that on our own?"

"We were over our heads as it was. The system was simple, but there was more work than just you and I could do. Going to outside sources helped immensely but we were so focused upon the creation of a classification that could fit all current books while being open enough to allow for future publications. The world was changing -- still is changing, I hope -- and there was no way for us to foresee the advances in society and technology that would create entirely new subjects needing new branches in the system. We had to be open minded, forward-thinking, prognosticators if you will."

"That was the beauty of it," Dot says, allowing himself a moment of pride. "Numbers are infinite. Dots make everything possible. If you have enough of them, you can do anything."

"Exactly," Decimal replies. "And there are always plenty of dots to go around."