Reflections on the puddle of life

or NaNoWriMo which, as you might know, is the National Novel Writing Month in which scores of crazy people attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Including myself.

Now the month is drawing to a close and many are preparing to receive their badge of honour, but not me. Unsurprisingly I am nowhere near attaining the 50,000 word goal. I could make various excuses for this: work, relatives, having a 'life', etc, etc, but in point of fact it comes down to not pushing myself into writing every day.

Am I bothered? No, not in the least bit! Because the attempt has given me so much more than I had hoped: a solid premise for a novel and the determination to keep chipping away at it, however slowly, every day. Because the hardest thing about being a writer is actually getting down to writing, or at least it is for me anyway.

And I've realised that it's a journey, and in a sense that's what the novel is about. That like anything in life worth having it is hard work, sometimes fun and sometimes terrifying. That knowledge helps, and the willingness to acquire knowledge. So I'm reading a lot: existentialism, religion, medicine, geography; and I'm finding that I enjoy the research almost as much, if not more, than the writing itself.

So I thought I'd share with you the first chapter of my novel, entitled The Library. It is unedited - one of the things I've realised is that I tie myself up so much in editing as I go along that I stop myself from making progress. So I'm determined to just keep going and fix all my grammatical and continuity errors, tense changes, repetition, cliches and dubious punctuation later on.

Any feedback would be received with abject gratitude. For those who have read Synth-ethic you might recognise my main character. Just call me Kafka!

Chapter 1: The Landing

He finds himself standing at the bottom of a broad staircase. The stairs are wide and clean; etched sharp lines in white marble. They rise and narrow to a landing where the staircase turns and carries on to somewhere else, and on the landing there is a statue of a man staring down. They make eye contact. The statue is also marble, and the face is cold and wise. The man stands in apparent judgement above him, this makes him uncomfortable so he turns away.

He has no idea where he is.

He turns and sees that he too is on a landing. Behind him is another set of stairs, a narrow, tunnel-like set leading to a darkened door. These stairs are worn, they sag in the centre and have dirt ground so deeply into the surface that it seems no amount of scrubbing would rub them clean. He shivers. He doesn’t like those stairs though he must have passed through them, he reasons, in order to reach his present location. He thinks too that he must pass through them again in order to reach the exit, and the thought of it makes him feel queasy. He wonders if those stairs are the cause of his lack of memory, for now he thinks about it he has no recollection of arriving here, or anything much that happened before he found himself standing at the foot of a marble staircase staring into the dispassionate eyes of a statue.

Again he turns. This time he finds himself facing a long, stained glass window. The window depicts Lady Justice with scales her right hand and raised sword in her left. She shines golden on a backdrop split vertically down the centre: blue on the scales side, red on the sword side. A blindfold part covers her eyes, though it seems to have slipped on the sword side revealing a mischievous eye. On a scroll beneath her feet are the words ‘Veritas et Aequitas’ and he wonders half-heartedly what these mean, but only half-heartedly. There is so much to wonder about, it seems. He would have liked to look through the window thinking, perhaps, that a view of the outside would give him an idea of his location, but the colours so distorted the view that he could glean nothing from it. He leans his head against the window, enjoying the cool feel of it, like a sudden shower against his skin. It reminds him that touching things makes them more real; he remembers this as though it is something someone has told him though he can neither remember when, where nor who.

Ting! A bell chimes behind him and he turns just in time to see the doors of an elevator glide open. The elevator is set so perfectly into the wall that on first impressions one wouldn’t notice it at all, so its sudden appearance is something of a surprise to him. The mechanics move so seamlessly as to not even make a sound, and if it weren’t for the bell he would not have known it was there at all. He walks towards it. A man is standing inside the elevator wearing an old-fashioned bell-hop’s outfit. His jacket is royal blue trimmed with gold piping, with matching trousers and a hat set at a jaunty angle. His face is broad and open. He smiles as the man approaches.

“Hello.” he smiles. “New here?”

The man nods.

“Name’s Daniel, you can call me Dan,” he holds out a clean, well manicured hand. The man shook it. “what’s your name?” Silence. The man searched his mind for the name but nothing came through. “Here,” Dan says “let’s check your name tag.” He reaches towards the man’s chest and carefully turns the small plastic name label attached to his shirt pocket. “Charlie,” he says “nice to meet you Charlie.”

Charlie smiles, “Charlie,” he says, testing the name out and finding it suitable. “Nice to meet you too Dan.” He is surprised by the timbre of his own voice, and its echo rumbling around the hall. He looks up and sees the vaulted ceiling above his head, vast and high and out of reach. It seems to be topped by a cupola painted deep blue and dotted white, like a depiction of the night sky. “Where am I?” he asks.

“Why, you’re in The Library of course.”

“The Library?”

“Yes, The Library. Where else would you be?”

Where else indeed? Charlie muses on the question. Now that he thinks about it, it seems right that he is in The Library. The Library seems to be a good place to be. After all, he likes books and reading, or rather he thought he liked books and reading, having no direct recollection of encountering either.

“The Library,” he repeats bouncing the word off the walls, around and back into his ear a little quieter. He thinks there is another question he should ask, but for the moment it is dangling just outside his grasp like a fish distorted by the surface of the water. Dan watches him expectantly, tapping his left foot lightly on the floor. Charlie watches Dan’s foot. It is almost exactly halfway between the elevator and the landing on which Charlie stands, and it is tapping at a beat of almost exactly 60 beats per minute, like a heartbeat. The rhythm is entrancing. Charlie finds himself drifting into it, as though nothing matters except this sound: tap-tap-tap, beat-beat-beat! He listens. Is it the foot that he hears now or his own heart beating? He places his hand on his chest and closes his eyes, feels the blood rushing just below the surface. It comes to him then, the question, but for the moment he is satisfied by the warm familiarity of his blood, the coolness of his bones, the flexibility of his skin beneath his fingers.

The tapping stops, though it takes a moment for Charlie to register this change. He feels it first; an absence of vibration as though his heart has stopped beating, and he becomes afraid for the first time. Beneath his fingers he feels the adrenalin pounding and realises he is not dead, that his heart is working perfectly well, and with that realisation he also concludes that something else has changed. He opens his eyes. Dan’s foot is still. Charlie looks up directly into Dan’s face and smiles. Dan smiles back ruefully, as though he has seen this many times before.

“Time for me to go now.” Dan says, withdrawing back into the elevator’s open mouth.

“Wait,” Charlie says, unable to hide the desperation in his voice “can I come with you?”

“Oh no, I’m afraid not.”

“Why not?”

Dan points to the name tag dangling from Charlie’s shirt pocket. “You don’t have clearance yet.”

“Clearance?”

“Yes, you need clearance to enter the elevator. When your tag turns yellow then you can enter.”

Charlie looks at his pass, cool and white with the word “CHARLIE” written on it in block capitals. He looks at Dan, “When will that happen?” he asks.

“When it’s time.” Dan reaches towards the buttons, “I have to go now.”

“Don’t!” Charlie reaches into the elevator, blocking the doors as they start to close, “Tell me what I’m doing here.”

“Well that’s easy. You have to find your level.”

“My level?”

“Yes, your level.” Dan points towards the stairs. “You have to decide which way to go.”

Charlie looks left towards the stairs leading up, and then looks right towards the stairs leading down. “Which way?” he asks.

“That’s your choice,” says Dan, gently pushing Charlie’s arm back to the outside of the elevator, “though, if you want my advice, I’d suggest up.”

“Up? Really? Isn’t down the way out?”

“Well,” Dan laughs ruefully “that’s one way of looking at it. But seriously, I would go up. I don’t think you’ll find what you’re looking for down there.”

The elevator doors slide closed without a sound, and Charlie finds himself alone again. He turns to look at Lady Justice, and if he hadn’t been so sure it was impossible he could have sworn that she was winking.

Yep, there's a long way to go. I'm hoping I have the will power to see this one through.