And so November comes to a close, along with any pretense that I was ever going to actually finish my NaNoWriMo project this year. But I knew that.
Five years ago, a couple of months after we moved out of the house we had owned for nearly 30 years and into the house that we’ve been renting ever since (please, let 2024 be the year we get out and buy our own place again!), there was an amazing sunset. A neighbor across the street (who has since sold his house and moved on) saw me taking pictures from my front yard, looking over the houses on the opposite side of the street. Anthony’s house has a deck in the back, no obstructions to the view, and he invited me over to take some quick photos from there. They were spectacular.
NaNoWriMo 2023 is over, even if it’s not finished. I may not have gotten the words written, but that didn’t stop my brain from thinking about plot points and where the story might go, as silly as it was. So, in the broadest of strokes, maybe…
Sara and Carl get ordered to go investigate what’s going on at the epicenter of that monstrously huge earthquake. A lot of the data doesn’t make any sense and they’re already in the field, so HQ sends them. They can’t get too close, but there’s a drone in the Jeep they’re driving and they launch it and find something really weird and bizarre. Maybe a giant 3/4 hemisphere missing out of the side of that mountain, cut off clean, glowing lights, then something wipes out the drone.
Deb starts to get subjected to “treatments” from the little non-leprechaun critters who want to make her immortal. It’s painful but they do something else and it turns every wave of pain into a wave of pleasure. But she can’t figure out where she is, who they are, or why they’re doing this to her.
Ed gets out of the scrape with the New Mexico cop at the weigh station by pulling out some ID and a great (fake) cover story about being with a top secret division of Homeland Security or the CIA or the NSA. Some hilarity ensues. The cop is a glorified Barney Fife who wants to be in on the plot so he lets Ed and the truck go. Ed starts following the bizarre readings that the truck’s equipment is picking up and abandons his trip to Malibu, instead following the trail off into the desert and mountains.
(Insert much hand waving and bullshit over many chapters.)
Somehow all three plot lines start to come together. Maybe there’s a weird thing in the desert that Ed finds which is similar to what Sara and Carl find in Iceland. Maybe the two are connected in some way. Ed’s “Boss” is a shadowy figure, a rich, wannabe mad scientist type and what he’s looking for with the equipment Ed’s driving around is connected to the technology the non-leprechaun guys are using. Ed’s supposed to be an idiot savant who can run the equipment and drive the truck but does so as a clueless sidekick (think Ned Beatty’s Otis in the original “Superman” movie) but he’s in fact the undercover good guy who’s putting all of the pieces together to save the day.
The day needs saving because the non-leprechaun dudes are trying to make humans immortal, but not because they love us or becuase they want us to be happy and healthy. Nope, they’re the true evil bad guys, looking at a planet of eight billion potential slave laborers (or something – go for something far more bizarre and hilarious if possible) and they need us immortal for it to work. Maybe their starships are run by something connected to exercise bikes and they need legions to be peddling 24/7/365/1,000,000,000 to get back to their home planet?
Wherever Deb is, she’s figuring out that she doesn’t want an eternal spin class as a career and she’s going to escape. She causes some chaos, which causes detectable things that Ed can home in on. The Boss then swoops in to steal the not-leprechaun technology, just as Sara and Carl arrive in the super secret non-leprechaun hiding place in their evil lair halfway along the line between New Mexico and Iceland, a thousand miles underground. There’s a confrontation, conflict, chaos, confusion, which ends in the not-leprechauns being forced to take off and escape in the emergency escape pods from their starship. The Boss goes along with them, thinking that he’ll steal one of their escape pods, but in fact just ends up as another warm body to be experimented on. Sara and Carl end up getting the Nobel Prize for their discoveries. Ed and Deb do a saccarine meet cute as he’s rescuing her (or maybe vice versa) and they fall in love and live happily ever after, just like in a Hallmark Christmas movie.
The Earth is safe! The human race isn’t going to be immortal and have thighs of steel as they power alien starships. It’s over!
Or…
…is it? The non-leprechans have The Boss and his evil genius super sized brain and they need their startship back… Sara and Carl discover a flaw in their award winning theory that leads them to discover that something else isn’t right and soon… Ed notices that Deb’s body is … changing. But into what? How far did the non-leprechauns get in their experiments on her?
OH, NO!!!
It’s time for NaNoWriMo 2024!!!