Stan Had It Coming
Posted by limpetfan | Posted in nanowrimo | Posted on 12-11-2009-05-2008
5
Well, he did! He was a bad, bad character!
In case you don’t know what I’m referring to, I’m taking about The Collective NaNovel I am writing for this year’s NaNoWriMo. Stan is (was) my main character. And I just killed him off.
Yup… 17,803 words into the 50,000 word-count goal to win NaNoWriMo, and I have given my main character the proverbial axe. To be honest, I’m not that surprised. I had a sneaking suspicion Stan was going to be gone by the end of the novel. I just didn’t realize he would go in the manner he went… or that he’d go so soon.
I’m not going to bore you with the details (and by details, I mean the rough prose that is the first draft of Stan’s final scene). Here is a brief synopsis of what transpired:
- Stan has been slowly… painfully slowly… telling Moe the story of him and Angel Bell and how he has come to be sitting in Moe’s bar (The Toothless Grin), drunk and waiting for the cops.
- Moe has been growing progressively more and more annoyed with Stan the longer he talks.
- Moe keeps a shotgun under his bar “just in case.”
- Stan has become so drunk that he has momentarily forgotten that the terms of his parole expressly forbid him from disclosing the zombie incident that occurred at the state penitentiary where he was incarcerated after accidentally burning down Angel Bell’s trailer a few years back.
- The zombie story is the last straw for Moe. He thinks Stan is full of crap, and trying to get sympathy from him so that when the cops come, someone will be on his side.
- Stan offers Moe a chocolate cookie from his backpack.
- Moe is deathly, deathly allergic to chocolate and takes the cookie offer as an assassination attempt by Stan to provide a distraction so he can sneak away and avoid being arrested. So he shoots Stan in the heart with his shot gun. Then he flees to Mexico.
- Angel Bell and the police arrive just in time for Stan to bleed out in Angel Bell’s arms.
Poor Stan. I’m pretty sure there is no hope of resuscitating him. He was a bad character and I hated writing about him and I’m not too sorry he is gone. Of course, the problem remains: I am behind in my word count, and now I have no main character.
I’m not sure what is going to happen now – if you have an idea, I’m all ears!!!
© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.
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Maybe it is time to create a new character(s) or turn the main character into a menacing ghost who has the ability to make very smelly farts….
i’m all about making Stan come back as a zombie. That stuff could have been airborne in the penitentiary. Then again, you would just have to kill him off again, being one the shambling undead and all. Or you could go the super cheesy route and have the whole thing as one of Moe’s terribly realistic day dreams induced by his severe PTSD.
I am most amused about the chocolate chip cookie offering being the thing that really set Moe off.
Our novels are completely different. But at least you’re not knee deep and mired down in the incredibly long, incredibly boring flashback about how Stan and Ernie’s parents died and how their Aunt Millie is just completely distraught that they won’t come and live with her and her lawyer husband and their five step-kids. *sigh* If only my Stan would even go IN the bar and talk to Moe.
Whitney´s last blog ..Air Travel with a Violin: Part 1
Sadly, I think Stan is just done. However, it looks like Angel Bell is about to get her own spin-off story…
And the chocolate chip cookie thing was actually a NaNoWriMo forum dare that morphed as it was written!
[...] last time I updated you all on my NaNoWriMo progress, Stan was dead in the bar, Moe had fled to sunny Mexico, and Angel Bell was beside herself with grief, eating Bon [...]