So this is NaNo, and what have you done?

Alright, so this is a little late, but it's the official word that I rose to the challenge, I wrote 50,000 words towards a singular, novel-like project in the month of November, and I am officially an author. Well, so says National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo if you enjoy torturing your fingers). I'll believe it when my 'novel' evolves into something slightly more than 144 single-spaced pages of loosely-chaptered, loosely-plotted word stew. For now, let's go with "aspiring author."

So what have I got to show for it? Well, it's called The Building, and it's an idea that was loosely inspired by something Erica once said to me and heavily fed by ideas for it that I've been rolling around in my head ever since I lived in my apartment back in Toronto. Here's something that isn't a cover.

Next, as I have a questionable-yet-affectionate relationship with time, I'm going to be back-filling November with random excerpts from what I wrote that appeal to me but aren't yet fully seated in their complete stories. If you're interested in what this all produced, take a browse back through November as they come up or follow the NaNoWriMo tag (man, am I ever tired of trying to type that). If you can't be assed and would rather more Japananese content, well then you can happily pretend that November was the month that never was (much like October, apparently--sorry about that!).

To give you a basis for that back-diving, though, here's one of the most coherent things I've synthesized from The Building that hopefully makes a bit more sense of it all:

What is The Building?

A NaNoWriMo novel excerpt

“What is the Building?”
“Who are you?”

Jeez. Look at you clever apes. Millennia of evolution and centuries of civilization, and still you can only come so far from what you are. I’ve watched your kind come to me for answers for longer than you can properly understand, and you have always approached the problem of this place from the same angle.

“What is the Building?”
“Who are you?”

Always a realm and a power in your eyes. Always a creation and a creator; an aberration and an aberrator.

Well, I can tell you that I’m the Super. Superintendent? What? Never heard of him. I’m the Super. Just the Super. You could say I watch over this place.

But I guess that’s me starting you off with a lie. This Building is not a place. It rarely is. As Michael—our new tenant—will eventually come to realize, the Building is a wish and a promise. A motivation and a denial. Sometimes, It’s a place. Sometimes, It’s an energy. Sometimes It’s a force, or an idea, or a starting point. But It’s always a challenge.

This time It’s mostly a Building. It’s assumed many forms since It came into being, and if It stays in one form for too long, It will start to take on trappings of that form. Sometimes I catch lingering whiffs of the stomach-turning reek of iron from Its sojourn in your blood. I’m still finding and clearing up ponds and pools and oceans in the forgotten parts of It that have sloshed around in here since Atlantis. And it’s a good thing Watson and Crick made their discovery when they did because Its presence in the building blocks of life was starting to manifest weird traits in your young.

Here, as the Building, It’s become a bit more like a home than I like to give too much thought. It’s exerted that same, strange gravity that It always does, and It’s pulled all of these beings into Its orbit. We’ve had this before when It’s been a place. Back on Olympos, when Its traces in the minds of the Greeks turned into a pantheon of Gods on top of a mountain, I was the one forced to put up with all those Gods. That angry family of absolute powers, running around impregnating each other’s interests and setting their togas on fire with lightning bolts.

It’s different here, though: in the Building. It casts echoes and hints of itself into all minds equally, but It casts them most strongly and draws most directly from the ‘locals,’ as it were. And this city It’s set itself up in…have you seen this city? This city is huge in a way I haven’t seen since Babylon. It’s only got a few million people, but the variety of the worlds that they hold in their minds…Christ! Back on Olympos, the locals were all those Greeks: all with their selfsame ideas about incest and sodomy and vengeance. For all of their individual distinctness, their minds were as varied as porridge, and it manifested in here: in the Gods that they created out of It.

But this city…this world city, with its different minds from the many lands of this planet. I keep thinking that if It hangs around here too long, well we’re going to have Babylon all over again: all those languages from all of their minds, filtering into and being forged together in the unique of It.

With all of those minds out there, from all of those divergent places across this world, the Building manifests a multiculturalism of thought. They’ve got their beliefs and their stories and their gods, and all they do is think think think. Think think think all day long, and all It can do is listen until their thoughts all start shoring up in here: the Building filling its apartments with them like hard drives, like back-ups for all the wonders of the world. All of their dreams and their faiths. Makes me wonder if it’s not dangerous to keep It here: to keep this big ol’ focusing lens in the middle of all that variance.

Man, I tell you, it’s like watching TV. It’s like having every channel in the world. There are times when I go down to the basement floors and sit in that forest of eyes that look in through the peepholes, and I just watch watch watch. You get bored and something new is bound to turn up. Out Front, this Building’s got a finite number of rooms and floors, but in the Back I don’t think It knows any limits. It just keeps pulling them all in—monsters and ideas and dreams—and handing them keys to apartments, and giving them physical form as human-looking tenants in those apartments. You wind up with Back things who have never had a Front before, like those wild children up on 17 and 18. They’ve wandered around out Back for so long that they can’t even remember that they were dreamt up by someone out Front. And then I’ve got to follow around after them: putting out their fires and blotting out their floors and making up Frontwards explanations for all of their Backwardsness.

I tell ya: this place wouldn’t last two ticks without me making sure it was all running tiggity-boo. Even with me around, there’s something in It that’s made a dangerous habit out of testing Its limits. There’s stuff that’s been allowed to set up shop in the Building that’s a little too aware of where it is and what this is all about: stuff that’s got too many ideas about where it’s heading and who it needs to step on to get there.

But I guess that’s the way of it, you know? The nature of the Building is a kind of vaguely vectored chaos. It shows up, It inspires, It draws in the one who’s meant to find It, and then It’s gone again—off to some other place or time or level of being. Everything else is just coincidental: distractions operating within the framework.

Still. This one’s a doozy. This one’s like I haven’t seen since sixty million BC. When you’ve been around as long as I have, and you’ve been put through the kind of wringers I’ve been, you get pretty good at spotting where stuff’s headed. But this one…

…Even I got no idea about this one.