I’ve been having fun writing everyday, and honestly 1,667 words a day is really not that much. The problem is falling behind, as I did this past weekend, so when you miss two days in a row suddenly on the third day you realize you have to write 5000 words to stay on target, which is not so easy.
There’s good days and bad, and on the bad days I can still eek out 500 or so words so I’m still treading water. I’m only about 2000 words behind, but plan to do some catching up this weekend.
One person has asked to read some, so I’m going to post some below. This sort of violates the rules since by showing people it sort of cements the scene in place and makes it harder to edit later if need be, but I feel like the scene is pretty solid as it is.
Anyway, I condensed a 10 page scene down to 3 pages and posted it below. To give you an idea of word count as it translates into length, the excerpt below is about 2500 words–or about a day and a half’s worth of work.
Read the synopsis of the novel in the last post if you’re not familiar with the plot. This excerpt picks up about 6 hours after Clayton got stuck in the elevator. And if you can’t view the word count graph in the last post but want to keep track of me, you can go to my NaNoWriMo page here and click “Stats.”
Hey, thanks for reading. Comments & critiques welcome, as always.
He turned and backed into the wall, facing the doors. The light had gotten brighter as his eyes adjusted, and it allowed him to see his distorted reflection in the mirrored surface of the aluminum doors.
Three days ain’t nothin’ for a tubbo like you. He clutched his head again, and then moved his hands down to his gut and shook, watching the morbid scene played out in front of him.
He pulled up his sweater and watched as the bare flab of skin fell over his belt. After a while it stopped jiggling, and Clay would swing his hips back and forth to get it bouncing again. This became a game, and brought some amusement to him—mocking himself, keeping the situation light, but…
…starving won’t be a concern, will it?
Eventually he stopped rocking back and forth, and held his protruding stomach as a pregnant woman might, not quite admiring the reflection but staring intently anyway. It was a recent development, brought on as it always is: more food, less exercise. Anybody who looked at Clay would not see a fat man, but perhaps in a few years they might. He knew this. The gut, potbelly, beer belly, whatever, was the first sign.
Clay was never big on exercise. He spent most of his days indoors as a child, huddled over the computer. His mother never said anything but his father did, though not to his face, and that was almost worse. He heard them through the wall one night, his father saying “If that boy doesn’t get out and move, he’s going to have a real problem.” He could never hear his mother’s voice through the wall—too high pitched. But that one line from his father always stuck with him.
Now I have a real problem, dad.
Clay slowly walked his legs out from under him and sat down, stretching the sweater back down to cover himself up. He inched forward and began to pound on the doors with his feet.
He yelled out for someone again, and in doing so a lump formed in his throat. His nostrils began to burn, and before he knew it his eyes were watering.
The panic gave way to fury, and soon he was hurting himself, pounding his feet so hard against the metal doors and clenching and grinding his teeth. His eyes were clenched shut so hard that he later felt soreness in his eyes, and he screamed so many guttural screams that later he later coughed up a bit of blood.
“Fuck!”
After a few moments he stopped.
That felt good. He even smiled a little, in spite of the situation. He found himself laying completely flat on his back, his legs outright even though the elevator’s width didn’t accommodate his entire frame, propping his feet on the door. They held in place by the friction of his sneakers against the metal.
He was breathing deeper now because of the outburst, and let out a soft moan with each exhale. He concentrated on his body temperature, and how great it felt as the dampness on his skin from the heated moment began to dry. He closed his eyes.
Clay lay on the floor for about fifteen minutes. He had a more accurate means of guessing how much time had passed at that point—soon after he closed his eyes, not quite knowing what else to do, he began to count, and counted from one to sixty ten times.
Maybe 9:30? Feels like about two hours, he thought. I wonder what Beth is doing.
A lump formed in his throat at the thought of Beth, and he kept his eyes shut as they began to burn under the lids. He clenched them, and saw the swirling colors, and began to get dizzy so tried to look past them into the darkness to not get lost in the loops and streams.
He felt a pang of guilt at staying so late, just to make her worry—which, if he was being honest, was the real reason he stayed so late to begin with. He tried to justify it, and would likely have told Beth the same thing if he were actually able to get home, that he had to finish up a project before the long weekend. But he knew he could have easily picked up where he left off when the offices opened up again on Tuesday. Maybe he’d have to backtrack a bit to remind himself just where he left off—but code was code, and there wasn’t much to it.
He felt for the thumb drive in his pocket and fished it out, then began to play with it, passing it between both hands over his chest, his elbows resting on the cool elevator floor.
What is she doing now?
She’d be worried, no doubt. Though part of him said she wouldn’t be worried, and maybe that was why she had refused his proposal. Maybe she really didn’t care, and was packing up and leaving the apartment, thinking Clay was out doing whatever—maybe at his mom’s—giving her time to do so.
But it wasn’t that bad, was it? She had just said no. The look on her face when she said it led him to believe she was genuinely sorry, and the painful silence that night as they lay in bed with their backs facing each other indicated remorse.
Perhaps no meant not yet, which is what Clay had wanted to say all along.
Is it possible this whole thing was just a colossal misunderstanding?
Communication was everything, that’s what they always said. Maybe he hadn’t been as clear as he could have been—wait—maybe she wasn’t as clear as she should have been. She hadn’t been the one to propose, it was him, after months and months of pouting faces and subtle hints. But maybe, in the end, she was just as unsure and doubtful as he was, and was just going through the motions she thought girls needed to go through, much the same as him.
Will you marry me, Beth?
He heard her response in his head, and as an extension saw her mouth forming the words. It seemed so foreign to watch now, replayed in his memory. She was speaking to him, he could hardly believe—no. That just wasn’t a word she said to him, ever.
He had thought it was a joke, initially, but his subconscious read her face and body language before he did, and dismissed that thought pretty quickly. She was turning him down.
So they went home, in stunned silence. Clay wasn’t sure if she tried to say anything on the ride back. He went to bed. Woke up, went to work as usual. He got angry at his desk around 9:00, finally. Went to the bathroom and cried in one of the stalls, not so much out of sadness but just unbridled anger. Called her a bitch for making him do something he wasn’t even sure he wanted, and then humiliating him. The anger seethed, then. But now…
Where are you, Beth? Are you looking for me?
The thought made his heart race, and he grew frustrated trying to reason out an answer. Would she be looking for him? Would he look for her? If the situation were reversed, and she had proposed and he turned her down, and then the next day she didn’t come home, would he be wonder where she was?
The answer was simple, at least to him: no.
And so the burning in his eyes came back, but this time he opened them. The cool air dried them out, and he looked up, straight up, avoiding a full-on stare into the emergency light.
As his eyes adjusted, they focused on something, and with a start he propped himself up on his arms. On the ceiling he saw one side of a hatch, hidden behind the overhanging fluorescent light fixture that was now dark.
Yes! He cursed himself for not thinking of it before. As far as he knew, every elevator he had ever been on had some kind of maintenance hatch in the ceiling.
He turned to one side and got to his feet, with one hand holding the rail for support. He craned his neck to get a better look, and to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.
As soon as he was sure that it was, the problem became how to get to it, since the powered-down overheard light fixture was clearly blocking most of the way. It was meant to be removed somehow if the hatch was ever needed.
He spent a few seconds looking for some kind of release lever that would drop the light fixture, but gave up soon. The ceiling, light fixture included, was very plain. A release lever would have stood out in stark contrast to everything else. If there was one, it would likely be tucked away on the other side, out of view.
Clay craned his neck to each side, stretching it out and trying to get it to pop. One side did, the other didn’t, so he rubbed it with his hand instead. He shook his arms loose and eyed the railing, knowing he was going to have to jump up and take a look at the situation from a better angle.
He turned and faced the back wall of the cab, and took a few steps backward toward the two metal doors. He lifted his right leg and extended it outward, and the tip of his shoe caught on the rail. With his left foot still on the ground and supporting most of his weight, he hopped forward with it, bringing up his right knee as he did so, trying to get close enough to grip the rail with both hands.
The plan was to push off with his right foot, hopefully, and lift himself right up. If he could get started, he was pretty sure he’d be able to grab onto the light fixture for support, and rip the fucker down if he had to.
But something was getting in his way. He just couldn’t get close enough to grip the rail and give him the leverage he needed.
Hahaha, three days ain’t nothin’ for a tubbo like you.
It was his gut. His fucking gut was in the way.
His face suddenly grew hot, and he pushed himself forward, feeling his gut push inward against his inside. Soon after, he was grabbing the railing with both hands and bearing his teeth in a struggle. He jumped, trying to push off with the one leg and get the other one in place. He didn’t get very far off the ground, so took a few preparatory hops and tried again.
He finally lifted himself, feeling the strain in his leg, and all at once reached up and grabbed either side of the light fixture and got his left foot on the rail, too. He took a few seconds to steady himself, and then didn’t move as he made sure he was stable.
Instead of turning himself around, though, he decided to keep facing the back wall and simply reach back and grip both sides of the fixture.
He took three deep breaths, and then bent his knees to jump. And before he was ready, the toes of his left foot slipped off the rail, and his body instinctively tried to correct by turning his other foot to give himself more support.
But that foot slipped, too. Not away from the rail, but behind it.
And in less than a second, he fell backward, and his entire body weight pulled the leg down until his ankle snapped at the joint. The noise almost made him vomit, and he heard the loudest crack he ever heard.
His head hit the floor first, and his mouth gaped open. No sound came out.
Looking at himself, he wasn’t quite sure if he understood just what he was seeing. His torso was on the floor, but his leg went up, and then his foot curved back down again behind the railing in such a way that just didn’t look natural.
Finally, he screamed.
He reached up and clutched his calf with both hands. Gritting his teeth, he let tears out and soon he was hysterical. He had never felt such pain, and he moved to one side and laid backward, fists clenched so tight it shot more pain up his arms.
Clay was disoriented for a minute as he lay back, but when his eyes focused he realized he could now see two lights. He blinked, and rubbed his eyes to be sure he wasn’t just seeing double. He saw the intimidating, daunting emergency light in the cab, and also a similarly lit bulb all the way up, through the hatch, on the ceiling…
All sixteen floors above him.
Clay smiled through the tears, and clapped his hands together. He turned his head to one side and saw the lighting fixture in a pile of broken glass and plastic.
His mind raced, and with a fury more intense than anything he felt that night, he reached up and pulled on his right leg. The pain was numbing, and soon he could see the broken ankle slide out from behind the railing until the foot clattered to the floor. He screamed again.
The worst is over, he thought. My ankle is broken, but there is a hole in the ceiling and a light to guide my way.
Clay considered the light, and it occurred to him then there was another difference between him and Beth, and how funny it would be when he got out and told her he followed a light at the end of the tunnel in order to escape.
But that would be later.
He dragged himself around, pulled his leg through the broken glass and plastic, and clutched the railing with both hands. He pulled as hard as he could, trying to get far enough up so that he could sit on the railing and then swing his good leg up—but it was too much. His vision began to tunnel, and there were little pin pricks of stars in his peripheral.
Okay, I’ll rest. He thought. Just for a second.
The numbness in his foot began to subside, then it began to throb all the way up to his knee, which he realized was twisted and swollen. The tears came again as he collapsed on the floor, and the sudden realization that he could not will himself to get up again scared him.
Now I have a real problem, don’t I, dad?
