A NaNoWriMo Carol

Maybe it was a hallucination born of one too many peanut butter cups on Halloween night, but methought I heard a noise. I bolted upright in the bed. Above the soft sounds of the house came a faint  tapping, a chittering of clicks and scritches. Far away at first, but getting louder, closer. I crept to the window. The floor was deadly cold. I peeked around the shade. The streetlamp gave an eldritch glow to the bare tree branches with their twisted, twiggy fingers. The clock on my nightstand read 12:01. A figure stood beside it.

She wore glasses and a backpack with a power cord sticking halfway out of it; she carried a paper cup with a plastic lid and smelled of ink and coffee. “Hey, How are ya? I’m the ghost of NaNoWriMos past,” she told me. “We met that time you went to Barnes and Noble for a write-in? We sat next to a window and typed.”

The Burlington B&N, with its long escalators. The cafe was full, and so was every chair.  “Humbug!” I muttered, remembering. “My back hurt for the rest of the day from being crouched on the floor.” I’d just found out about the annual event, in which participants try to get 50,000 words of some creative project on the page during November. (More information at NaNoWriMo.org!) I set up my free account, selected my region, read the motivational messages, and found a write-in.

“Nothing an ibuprofen couldn’t fix,” said the spirit.

“True,” I admitted. “The real pain came on November 30, when I hadn’t hit 50,000.”

“You had better luck some other years,” said the spirit. With a wave of her hand we were back in my home.

”Begone, spirit,” I replied. “I don’t have the time this year.” I gestured in the direction of my study. “Steve needs me.”  Steve being the first draft of a mystery novel that I finished this summer, now early in the revision process. “He’s just started teething.”

The spirit shrugged. “Maybe someone else can convince you. But I’ll remind you: you don’t have to hit 50,000. You can make your own goals: set a lower word count, choose a different genre. Maybe meet some new friends—there were more than 500,000 people writing in 2020. You included.”

“Points noted, but I’m not convinced,” I replied, getting back into bed. “I’m getting tired; how about you let me get back to sleep?”

She vanished. I pulled the covers around my ears and closed my eyes, only to have them snatched away. “Just ten more minutes, Mom,” I pleaded.

“I am the ghost of NaNoWriMo present,” said the spirit. He was an energetic man with silvering hair. He wore a gray NaNoWriMo word-slayer sweatshirt and was twirling a pencil. “We’ve been sending you emails for months. And now it’s go-time! We know you have some stories in there.”

“Normally I’d love to, but Steve’s not sleeping through the night,” I said. Steve has turned out to be quite colicky. I love him, I adore him, he’s always doing cute and funny things, but he’s a lot of work. 

 “Bring him along, then,” said the spirit, tossing his pencil into the air and catching it behind his back. “Come with me!” Across the world we flew. I clutched Steve’s binder to my chest as we peered into the midnight warriors’ windows. Fingers tapped on keyboards, two finger or touch type, as the writers raced with the dawn for their first thousand words. I saw some friends from an old writers group. Ed, sipping tea and watching the moon. Pauline, typing. Denise, writing longhand in her notebook with the flower on the cover.

Back to my bedroom. “Can’t I tempt you to join us?” said the spirit.

I peeked inside Steve’s covers. He needed a change. “Steve’s just not ready for a sibling. If I don’t raise him right he’s going to turn out like his sisters, stuck on a closet shelf.”

The spirit stuck the pencil behind his ear with a frown. “Well, there’s always time to change your mind. Remember, you can activate your account at any time. There’s no requirement to start on November 1.” 

“Begone, fiendish spirit. Not this year.”

The prospect was appealing. A shiny new story, a couple hundred pages by the end of the month…what a delicious prospect. But Steve can barely hold his head upright. I needed to be a responsible parent…maybe I could look through my poem files, work on some short pieces. Anything that would placate the third spirit. We all know the story: the last spirit is the most fearsome. A skeleton, maybe, or a big black nothing, eyes glowing with the fires of burnt books.

Or, as it turned out, my sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Lynch, all angles, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and laugh lines carved deep into her face. The first person in my life who thought of me as a writer. “I am the ghost of NaNoWriMo future,” she said in her smoker’s voice.

I showed her Steve. “I can’t shove 1700 new words a day into him,” I whined.

The spirit cradled Steve for a moment, then gave him back to me. The sky above us was gray, and the earth was crunchy with frost. Just beyond an iron gate were rows of tombstones. “Wait!” I said. “I don’t—“

“Don’t be silly,” said the spirit, and led me to the coffeehouse across the street. There were people writing, so many people, and coffee and donuts and not a mask in sight, just papers and laptops, and the happy, beginning-of-November chatter. Ideas ready to march onto the page.

“Begone, fair spirit,” I said mournfully.

Mrs. Lynch gave me a hug. Still wearing those scratchy sweaters. “Not this year,” she said, “but next year—all of this will still be here for you.”

In my bedroom, I hummed a lullaby. I took Steve downstairs to rest in my study.  In the moonlit kitchen, I poured tap water into my favorite glass and raised it to all the writers beginning their 2021 projects. Best of luck to you all, and see you next year!