Clubbing
by Jonathan Penton

A few scant minutes ago, I wadded up (insofar as a computer screen can be wadded up) my article for this month. I was going to write about the American Jewish perspective on the current war, but I realized I could sum it down to:

Scared.

That left me with a lot of blank space to fill, and a lot of rambling left to do. So there's no point in me trying to write an article on the American Jewish war perspective, and there's probably someone who's said it better, anyway. Search the web, and I'm sure you'll find all sorts of commentary on the subject.

This left me, at 5pm on November 1^st, with no article for November. This isn't uncommon, but usually I have an idea of what I'm going to write about by this point. So I decided to call my friends, and ask them for ideas. I started with my friend Jennifer. I had helped her pack and move this past weekend, and she suggested that I write about helping her pack and move.

"Does that sound interesting to you?" I asked.

"More interesting than talking about writing through cemeteries at night," she replied.

"Um," I said.

"You can write about packing, and how it sucks to pack other people's things, and what all you did this past weekend."

"This past weekend" would of course refer to October 26^th through 28^th, when the adult population of America celebrated Halloween. On Friday, I helped Jennifer pack. On Saturday, I went to a party. It was a nice party. The various partygoers gossiped to me about each other, then came back to ask me what they were saying about one another. I found this highly entertaining. Furthermore, there was booze and pot.

On Sunday, I helped Jennifer pack some more, and on Monday, I helped her move. All very well, but I've already squeezed out all the entertainment I can out of it and I'm only three-quarters of the way down a page, including the bit about being scared. My cemetery articles may have been boring, but nothing could possibly be more boring than an extended rant on packing other people's things.

So I called Paul. He was in a meeting at work. That's pretty much my entire supply of friends, being pretty insufferable myself. I decided to call my younger brother Nathan; he's a captive audience.

His wife answered the phone. She had absolutely no interest in helping me, and indeed seemed to resent this intrusion on the exciting and worthwhile life of her aging-college-student ass. She did tell me that Nathan had joined a club, and that each member of the club was going to write an entire novel in a month. At that point, she put said Nathan on the phone. I told him I was working on my monthly article, and asked him what I should write about.

"Write about automatic writing," he said.

"Huh?"

"You know, that kind of writing they used to do in occult circles, without applying the conscious mind at all. They tried to let spirits channel through them via the written word…"

"I know what automatic writing is," I said. "I don't know why I should write about it."

"Why not?"

"Do you think anyone would be interested in that?"

"Um, I don't know. Who's your target audience?"

A difficult question, to be sure. "Well, I don't know really, but the article is for Unlikely Stories."

"I don't really know what sort of people read Unlikely Stories."

"Yeah, well, neither do I," I admitted. "Do you read Unlikely Stories?"

"No."

"Ah."

"I've read a couple of the articles."

"Well, then, we're on the same page. Are you really trying to write a novel in a month?"

"Yeah. It sounded like fun."

"Novel-writing isn't fun, Nathan."

"Oh. Well, it's only 50,000 words. That's less than 2000 words a day."

"Great."

"I already have 2000 words."

"What are they about?"

"My main character. I mean, one of my main characters."

"Ah. What will your novel be about?"

"Well, do you know Hemingway?"

"Sure."

"Well, you know how in his books, like, nothing really happens, like, there's a bunch of Americans living in France, and they go to Spain, like they do every year?"

"You're going to write a novel in a month about a bunch of Americans living in France who go to Spain?"

"No, that's The Sun Also Rises."

"I know! I've read it. What's your novel about?"

"Business meetings."

"Ah."

"A month isn't so short a time. There's one club that tries to write an entire novel in a weekend."

"Together?"

"No, each member of the club tries to write an entire novel. They make a weekend of it, and all plan to stay up for 48 hours, and all try to write, I dunno, it's probably not 50,000 words, maybe it's a short novella or something."

"A novella is 7000 words to 35,000 words. A short novella is basically a short story."

"Maybe they try to write a short novel, like 35,000 words. I'm not sure."

"I wrote for 48 hours without sleeping once, and I started to get really anxious and crazy and started hallucinating."

"Oh yeah?"

"But I also forgot to eat and didn't drink anything but coffee."

"Did you finish a novel?"

"No, and most of what I wrote was pretty worthless."

"Yeah, I can understand that. Well, it's time for my nap."

"Wait a second. You were supposed to give me some ideas for my article."

"I gave you an idea. Automatic writing."

"I really don't know enough about it to write an effective article."

"So research it."

"Well, I was kinda hoping to write an article that I didn't have to research."

"What kind of article is that?"

"I don't know. An opinion or something. Besides, does anyone really want to read about automatic writing? And if they did, wouldn't they just go to an occult site?"

"You said yourself that you don't know who your target audience is."

"I'm just going to write about your stupid novel club, Nathan. That'll work."

"OK. Bye-bye."

I'm not planning on researching the novel club, either.

Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.