VOTING PERIOD IS OVER
Thanks for participating!
The fun begins on November 1.
Watch the drama unfold at LittileVillageMag.com/nanowrimo.
Which submission should be expanded for the Little Village Nanowrimo project?
- Submission Four (36%, 45 Votes)
- Submission Five (31%, 39 Votes)
- Submission Three (13%, 16 Votes)
- Submission Two (11%, 14 Votes)
- Submission One (9%, 11 Votes)
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) the annual, pseudo-masochistic event that challenges all-comers to write a 50,000 word (175 page) novel within 30 days.
Considering our unending references to Iowa City as a “City of Literature,” the Little Village crew decided it would be a great idea to, well, participate. Consider it our very special, unsolicited donation to Iowa City’s literary soup.
We’ve selected five writers within Little Village to write their own introductory paragraph(s) to a NaNoWriMo novel, but here comes the rub. Only one author’s submission will be expanded into a full novel throughout the month of November. What’s more, the remaining four writers will stick around to help co-author the Little Village NaNoWriMo project, and you’ll be able watch it all unfold right here. Call it literary chaos.
Which submission will be selected for expansion, you ask? That’s where you come in, dear readers. Check out the five submissions below and vote for your favorite entry in our poll.
Will the novel be any good? Well, no, but that’s sort of the point! Obsessing over quality flies in the face of everything NaNoWriMo stands for. If the adage is true, and the art of writing is akin to working a muscle, then consider this a marathon.
Submission One
It was in the wintertime, after all the leaves were brown but before the wind blew, that the stereo received its bellyful of birdshot. The sideways tape was cracked and punctured but its wheels kept turning, so Jenny decided it was time for the Steve Miller cassette–and the Panasonic mansion it lived in–to fly eagle-like, once and for all, into the street.
Submission Two
The church basement would have made anyone look sick. Its painted cinder-block walls had saddened from some once-bright shade of yellow, years had worn patterns of unmoppable grime into the floor’s buckling white tile. The room smelled of tinny-sweet disinfectant battling with the memories of small children. Toward the podium, one fluorescent bulb flickered; the others cast their cold light on folded ping-pong tables and buckets of picture books, day-care stuff shoved aside for twenty-odd folding chairs.
Which were filling up by now, back to front, each new arrival careful to give and claim a chair’s worth of distance from the others. Lee inched slowly along the back wall, scanning the group for Carol, adjusting to the glaring gloom of it all, slowly feeling more comfortable standing than with the idea of taking a seat.
Submission Three
Maybe when it was said that ravel and unravel meant the same thing, that’s when the universe really started to ravel or unravel. This was said from the lipsticked mouth of a terrifying woman of incredible poise and a contradictory, absurdly nerdy giggle, an aside from this woman who was the god of that room, whose presence as a point in that circle of which she was also the center was enough to cause that room universe to tremble in its existence the way the world looks in a heat wave; when that casual remark was made in Adam’s Wednesday night book club meeting he suddenly felt that the world really might end–and then The Atlantic ran an article about asteroids destined to hit the earth basically at any minute and he said, Well, there you go! to the kid wearing earbuds behind him in line at the coffee shop, rattling the magazine and thwapping the doom-stricken glossy illustration with a jabbing finger, causing the kid to shake his head and take a step back, and making Adam re-evaluate his mental state in a way that ended with him concluding that it was high time he pushed all that end of the world business out of his head and got back to focusing on what really mattered: tracking down someone in this town with a Kombucha mother so that he could brew his own naturally effervescent, living tonic for his live-in girlfriend, Sophie, in hopes that she would finally stop whining about how toxic her life had become without her magic tea and maybe, just maybe, if Adam was lucky, stop being such a royal pain in the ass. But the world really was ending for Adam, and all the time he was thinking that everything happening around him was simple Life.
Submission Four
“Did you see the moon tonight?” he said.
“No,” I said, “why?”
“It doesn’t even look real, it looks like a painting of the moon, like at an opera.”
“Have you ever even been to an opera?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “why?”
“Then how would you know what it looked like?”
“I dunno,” he said, “it just looks like what I imagined it would be like.”
“How’s that?”
“Different,” he said, “unreal.” Better than real. Bigger.”
“You know what it looks like to me?”
“What?”
“Night,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He was my girlfriend’s kid, a dreamer, no good for this kind of work but she said he was ok. I had my doubts but I was desperate. My regular guy was down with pancreatitis and this needed to be done. What can you do?
We were in the car, headed west to Iowa City. Off to see some dentist from Chicago who left town fifty grand in the hole to somebody he shouldn’t have. We weren’t expected to collect. Just to remind him of his obligations. Why he thought he could skip out I don’t know. You can’t really hide anymore. Not in this day and age.
“What’d he do,” he said, Kevin, the kid.
“He bet more than he had and he lost.”
“What’d he bet on?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“It’s not my job to be curious.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Look,” I said, “what does it matter?”
Curiosity has no business in this business. And neither did I really, but that’s another story.
We had just stopped to pee and eat at a truck stop that claimed to be the “world’s largest.” It wasn’t impressive.
He had a burger and chips and I had eggs and we left. It was just after four and the dentist went jogging every morning at six. It’s good to exercise. That’s when we were going to get him. You can’t hide in this day and age. And you can’t run from your debts either. That’s how I got to where I am today.
The sign by the road said “IOWA CITY 42 miles.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“We’re going to be early,” I said.
“So?”
“So,” I said, “I’m gonna have to burn off some time. I’m not gonna just park in front of his house all Christ in the open waiting for this asshole to wake up.”
“Yeah,” he said, like he understood.
I had never been to Iowa before. Traffic was good, I guess, and it was a quick trip. When I got the job it seemed like halfway to California to me but I grew up near the lake. Cicero Avenue was the edge of the universe when I was a kid and then I thought there was a big forest and some mountains and then Los Angeles. What the hell was Iowa? Okay, maybe I was a dreamer too at that age, but I know I couldn’t have done what we were about to do and I worried if he would be able to either.
Submission Five
Where they came from, at this point, is irrelevant. What matters is they’re not going away any time soon.
It has been 6 days since their silent arrival. It began at 2:37 a.m. EST on November 2, when an unmarked Boeing Model 247, without warning, descended from the sky and onto the tarmac of the Prague International Airport. Twelve minutes later, another landed at Sultan Ismail International Airport in Malaysia. By noon, 16 more would land at airports across six continents.
Never mind that none of the 18 aircraft broke radio silence throughout the nine hour ordeal, despite unending attempts to make contact. Never mind that this particular aircraft model hadn’t been active since the mid-20th century. The real question was, who were the strangers on board?
Each airliner was filled to capacity, as it was later discovered. When the planes opened up at noon, simultaneously, amid the chaos on the tarmac, millions watched live as tanned passengers slowly exited the plane wearing western-style clothing, apathetic to the security personnel that had swarmed each of the airliners. There they stood, waiting, but for what? We didn’t find out that day, nor do we know now. It took only minutes before military personnel in each of the countries gathered the passengers and pilots, detaining them for further investigation.
By mid afternoon, details were still slight, but in the coming days, collaboration across the host countries’ homeland security institutions revealed some alarming details. All of the 216 passengers, pilots included, spoke Quechua, a regional dialect native to South America. None were yet able to explain where the airliners had come from, despite intense questioning from officials. Most alarming, however, was that all of the 216 of the passengers were in perfect health, and as far as medical examiners could determine, none of them had ever been sick.
I recently visited IOWA (the best place in the states, lov'd it) and since then have been loving all things IOWA related. A friend told me about the NaNoWriMo and told me to check it out. Loved No. 5. The sort of excerpt that made me want to read more, I mean I really want to know what happens next….
how do you vote?