Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Patricia let May sleep until nearly noon before waking her up.

She herself had already been to the senior citizens' centre and put its paperwork in order, as she did every Tuesday morning, but had begged off her usual haunts for the rest of the day. While she normally joined the bridge tables before lunch, then ate lunch with whomever was in the centre that day, and spent the afternoon working on the latest charity project that the centre was putting together, having her granddaughter up for an unexpected visit was a perfectly valid reason to take the day off. The others had smiled and waved her off, although Patricia suspected they might have been a mite more upset if they hadn't had an even set of fours without her.

May hadn't been awake yet when she got back, so she had turned the computer on and made it through another 2,000 words and a few more of the ideas off her list (ideas from the night before, not her original list, which now seemed a little too scattered to her). It was going faster than it had the day before, as if the ideas were connecting better, although she found herself occasionally distracted by the scrabblings of the rabbit in its cage by the window. She had left most of the cage covered, as the rabbit seemed to like, but it seemed far less calm than it had earlier. Patricia re-filled its food dish, but the extra serving sat in the dish untouched. She didn't know what to do with it, but after her discussion with May the day before, she no longer considered taking it to the animal shelter. There was something important and intriguing about this rabbit and she was determined to get to the bottom of it.

By late morning and the end of her 2,000 words, Patricia was more than ready to have a big stretch and some lunch. She smiled at her granddaughter, looking so peaceful on the couch, and realised that for her to have slept this long she must have had a fitful night the night previous. The whole situation with Alex and Chrissie and the strange influence she felt on her emotions and actions must have weighed on her even more than had emerged from her emotional outburst, for Patricia had never known her granddaughter to be short on sleep in even the most stressful situation – her grandfather's funeral, for example, after the morbidly absurd accident that had killed him.

However, it was time May got up. She would want to shower and dress before lunch, and they would have to have another round of air hockey. Patricia didn't think they would be able to come up with much to help figure out the rabbit situation, unless May had had a subconscious brainwave in the night, but they could at least have some fun and get May a bit more relaxed before she returned to the Island. Maybe they would have time to go down to Granville Island for a bite of fresh food for dinner before they went to tonight's write-in.

That was where they would find out more about the rabbits, Patricia was sure. Narratives were somehow the link between May's and her own experience, and she would ask at the write-in if anyone else had had any strange situations with rabbits.





While write-ins were taking place all over the Greater Vancouver area, the one Jamie and Zale had waxed most enthusiastic about was the one nearest Patricia's home. It was to be in an independent coffee shop on Broadway, one of Vancouver's main streets with several of the fastest and most frequent buses, and it was also quite close to a skytrain station, thereby offering novelists a variety of public transit options.

However, it was only a twenty minute walk from Granville Island, where Patricia had taken May for a delicious chicken pot pie dinner. They had fed the rabbit before they left the house, and somewhat jokingly told it to be good. It had raised itself up onto its haunches, all the better to stare at them until they left.

Now the pair were walking briskly to ward off the chill of the November evening, but still finding time to kick at the yellow maple leaves piled in drifts along the edges of the sidewalk. Both enjoyed the crisp crinkling sound the leaves made, and for a moment Patricia toyed with the idea of running through one of the leaf-laden yards they were passing, all the better to experience the wonders of autumn. However, they were running a bit late, and as Patricia had no laptop, she would be participating in the writing by writing in a notebook she had pulled off one of her shelves. She wanted to get there as soon as she could so that she could get as much writing done as possible - and also take some time to question the others about rabbits. She had been thinking about when it would be best to discuss them, and she had decided - and May had agreed - that it made the most sense to chat at the end, when people were most likely to have reached the word count for which they had been aiming. In any event, she thought, her desire to reach the write-in meant that, this time at least, she would forego the pleasures of the fallen leaves.

Besides the ones on the sidewalk, anyway, Patricia thought, and laughed aloud as she and May both kicked out at leaves at the same moment.

The two turned the corner to move up to Broadway from 8th, and there it was: Steeps Tea. Patricia must have been past it dozens of times, but never really paid much attention to it. She smiled at the quirkiness evident even from outside: she could only see its side from this angle, but its side windows were all round and lined with bright red paint.

They entered the door and seemed almost to have entered a new world. All tea shops were like that to some extent, Patricia thought, but this one had that something more that made some shops extra special. Perhaps it was the deep brown on the walls, set off to perfection by the green leaves on the canvases which, by the labels beneath, had been painted by a local artist. The warm glow of the globe lights made the space even warmer and more inviting, while spot lights meant each table had more than enough light to read by, should the café's patrons desire to.

Patricia went to the till and asked about NaNoWriMo. The girl smiled and said that the writers were all in the back room, and if she ordered her tea now, she would bring it back for her. Patricia ordered a chai-flavoured honeybush tea, and May asked for a pear herbal blend. Patricia paid and they headed into the back room.

It was surprisingly spacious, but just as quaint and cozy as the front room had been. The walls were the same warm terracotta, the paintings the same style and likely the same artist, and there were a few shelves arranged on the walls with tea, tea pots, tea mugs, and honey pots displayed and available for purchase. There were also a half-dozen people arranged around a large central table with a power outlet in the middle, five with laptops and, next to her brother Jamie on the right side of the room, Zale sat scribbling quickly into a moleskin notebook, but paused to look up with a smile, having heard the door open. Patricia almost didn't recognise her with blonde, not metallic red, hair, but the smile was unforgettably friendly.

"Patricia! You came!" Zale grinned exuberantly at her. "And brought a friend?"

The others in the room paused in their fast-paced typing to welcome the new arrivals, and Patricia recognised two more from the kick-off party. Chance, who had been planning a romance of some sort, was sitting on the far side of the table with a sleek black laptop, and Jeffrey, who she had thought dressed as the Mad Hatter, was the first to the left of the door. Between them were two girls Patricia didn't recognise, one with loose brown curls and delicate makeup, and the other with long, straight black hair, classic Japanese looks, and bright red designer eyeglass frames. She didn't see any rabbit ears, but she didn't feel as relieved as she had thought. Perhaps it was all the significance she and May had attributed to rabbits.

"Hi everyone," Patricia smiled. "This is my granddaughter May, who popped over from the Island for a visit and wanted to come along. She isn't convinced she can write a whole novel this month, given her school load," Patricia looked over at her granddaughter. "But she wanted to see what it was like and meet some of the other crazy people who are in for this adventure."

A chorus of "Hi May!" went around the room.

"Introductions later," said Jeffrey. "If anyone has questions or plot problems, of course you are welcome to ask, but the plan right now is to chat at around 8o'clock, then decide if we want to do a word sprint before we head out for the evening."

Patricia and May nodded, and with that, the room went quiet again as heads bowed back to computer screens. Patricia let May take the seat next to Zale and took the one beside that. They both pulled out a notebook and pen, but before they could start writing the girl from the front materialized with a French press and tea cup for each of them. They smiled and thanked her, and she vanished again. May had to watch her grandmother to see how to work the French press - she hadn't seen one before - but soon enough poured herself a cup of tea and started working away in her notebook.




"This just doesn't work!"

It was around an hour later and everyone looked up at the girl with the curls, who had broken the silence.

"What's going on, Sarah?" the Japanese girl asked.

"All my ideas tonight don't work with my story," Sarah explained with an exasperated hand-wave. "I've written all kinds of things, but they're all so ..." another wave of her hands. "...science fiction-y? This is supposed to be a period drama, and it's turning into steampunk or something and I don't like it! Besides, it's completely off the rails of the plot I worked out. This isn't the novel I want to write!"

"Weird," said Chance. "My romance is being hijacked by all kinds of historical details that I've been making up because I don't know much historical trivia. I keep hoping they'll get over it, but my leading man seems more set on finding some sort of historical artefact he's convinced will be at a local auction than with helping his intended escape from her mother's clutches so that they can sneak a few gazes into each other's eyes. And I just started writing about a gryphon, a real live gryphon, and that's a whole 'nother genre I don't want breaking into my novel."

"I've been hijacked too," Jamie admitted. "I'm writing an epic quest where the main character is a dragon, seeking a treasure kept hidden by the humans in the world... and suddenly all kinds of rabbits are everywhere." Patricia, startled, put a hand over her mouth to keep from exclaiming, and, glancing aside, saw May's eyes were open wide as well, but Jamie hadn't finished. "It's like there's an army of them and they're trying to do something - I don't know what - but it's all very strange. I haven't even written about Draco - I know, very imaginative - for over 1,000 words! I thought I was going to get back to his quest now, but instead when I tried to force myself to write about him I ended up writing about a memory of a girl dragon he had liked when he was barely out of the egg. He's already met a different female dragon who is helping him with his quest and who he's supposed to end up with at the end - so how does this other girl fit in? And what do I do with the bunnies? And how do I get my novel back to the quest?"

"Just have the girl dragon eat or burn all the rabbits and fly off into the sunset," Zale suggested. "Then maybe your muse will let you get back to your main story."

"Maybe," Jamie sighed. "How's yours going, Zale? No hijacking for you?"

"Well..." Zale said thoughtfully. "I haven't really gotten anywhere with my main plot. I've mostly been doing things like my suggestion for you, for culling bits that I've written that are doing their best to take over the story but which have nothing to do with my original outline. And there have been a lot of those popping up since we got here."

"Mine had been going well," Patricia offered. "But here I've been having a lot of scatterbrained ideas that don't make sense in a gritty murder mystery from the 1940s. I haven't been writing them down, but my word count tonight is pretty poor." She hesitated. "There's actually something I wanted to talk with you all about, and it might be related with all this hijacking."

Patricia looked around the room, a serious expression on her face. She was the oldest one here. The worst they could do was decide she had gone senile or something. "At the kick-off party, I kept seeing rabbit ears on everyone. I thought I was just going crazy, seeing things, from all the excitement." She smiled. "I haven't been to a party like that since my husband died four years ago, and I guess I might have been overstimulated.

"But after I got home, to my second floor apartment, a rabbit in a cage showed up on my balcony. I don't know how it got there, but something tapped on my balcony door, and there it was. No one else - and no one could have tapped and gotten away fast enough for me not to have noticed something.

"I didn't think there was anything to it. But then May showed up at my door yesterday, and told me that something similar had happened - a plush rabbit showing up on the fourth floor balcony of a friend of hers, shortly before he went to a storytelling workshop with May. And some other events indicate that perhaps narratives are getting disturbed somehow." That was a story for May to tell, if she wanted to, but it was harder to explain. "And now here we are, all of us trying to write a novel, and all of us finding what we want to write about getting twisted around." She paused. Now that it came to saying everything, she wasn't really sure where she was going with it. "I admit, I don't really know what to think about the whole situation. But I think something is going on, and I think it has something to do with rabbits."

Patricia laughed. "Now that I've said that, it sounds crazy. I know. But I don't know how to explain the rabbit on my balcony, and this many novels going haywire at once seems hinky."

Jeffrey looked skeptical, Sarah rather more thoughtful, the Japanese girl doubtful, Chance ... she wasn't sure, Jamie curious, Zale intent, and May smiled at her encouragingly. Patricia supposed May had realised, listening to her grandmother, just how bizarre the whole thing sounded.

"Plot bunnies," breathed Jamie suddenly. "It's like plot bunnies!"

"Plot bunnies?" asked Patricia.

"Story ideas that refuse to go away until they are written," he said. "That's exactly how I feel about the rabbits in my story, and about the story about the dragon girl. I had to write them down. I couldn't write anything else first, nor could I acknowledge that they didn't belong in this book and just move on - I had to write them down." Jamie looked at the others who had shared the issues hijacking their novels; Sarah and Chance both nodded slowly, with Zale and Patricia's offering more decisive nods.

"But it's just a metaphor," Jeffrey said skeptically. "They aren't real."

"Have you had any issues with your novel, Jeff?" asked Zale.

"I suppose," he admitted. "I'm writing a dystopian future somewhat inspired by George W. Bush and by 1984, but James Bond-type spies keep showing up and trying to turn the novel away from the political commentary I'm trying to make and into some sort of fluff backroom dealings. And tonight some blonde Bond girl type has been trying to insert the grounds for a romantic subplot, which actually goes counter to what I'm trying to achieve... If any romance makes it into my novel, it ought to be more realistic and cynical, and between real people, average people, not supermodels. But I couldn't keep her out. I couldn't think of anything else to write until she was down on the page."

"Sounds like plot bunnies to me," Zale opined.

"Yes, but..." Jeff objected. "I agree with the metaphorical idea of plot bunnies. There are ideas that you just need to write down in order to get them out of your head. But I don't agree that somehow actual rabbits are involved in the process. And all of us having plot issues could just be part of the speed with which we're trying to get our novels down on print, and with the whole focus on word count over coherence."

"I don't know about you, Jeff," Sarah responded. "But while I agree with the goal of 50,000 words, I already know that my novel is going to be longer, so I'm not worried about it. I'm also not just trying to get the highest count possible. I'm just trying to get the bare bones of this story down this month, because otherwise I know it won't get written. I have an outline, and usually that means I write exactly what I need to write, maybe a few subplots emerging that I hadn't anticipated, but nothing this crazy. I've done NaNoWriMo three times before, and this has never happened to me. Ever."

Patricia listened to the others with only half of her attention. Jeff was somewhat right - the whole thing was a bit out there. She had been around the block a few times, and had never had anything like this happen before. But she thought of Alfred, and his openness to whatever the world threw at him. She was applying the principles she had learned from him: see what happens, then try to understand it. Don't limit your ability to see by placing what you had previously understood first. She may not have experienced anything like this before, and she certainly had never had a rabbit show up on her balcony before, but it had happened. Same with the rabbit ears she had seen at the kick-off: she had doubted herself then, but no longer. She had seen them. Perhaps the others here had not, but that did not mean that her own experience was false. They did not have to believe her. She knew what she knew and she would figure it out without them.

She had known the whole thing would sound crazy. The scientific method had transformed society's expectations until there was little wonder left - everything had an explanation, and all explanations fit into the scientists' tidy little toolkits. "Plot bunnies" did not seem like they would fit into anyone's toolkit.

Patricia looked around at the young folks seated at the table with her. "Whether there are plot bunnies or not," she told them. "I'm not going to stop writing just because nothing I write holds together. We're supposed to be here for another hour. Why don't we get back to writing, and we can check in again then?"

Heads nodded around the table, and soon fingers were tapping keys and pens were scratching on paper.





The plot bunnies had of course been working the write-in. Write-ins were a key part of the plan, for there the November novelists gathered in groups where a whole cadre of plot bunnies could switch between novelists with no travel time issues. The bunnies had expressed concern to the elder archetypes about this form of feeding, for it was far more typical for a plot bunny to establish a sort of rapport with an author and then remain with him or her for quite some time. Different writing styles had varied tastes associated with them, and quite a few bunnies had become discriminating in their tastes. Buffet feeding did not appeal nearly so much, leaving aside the issue that the bunnies were supposed to deliberately feed off authors whose interests were different from their own, so even when plot bunnies stayed with a single author long enough to eat several brain carrots and plant several ideas, they weren't in phase enough to get the full flavour or nourishment.

Those were the problems they had considered.

What they hadn't considered were the humans figuring out what was going on, especially this quickly. They hadn't thought about the drawbacks of focusing on write-ins - namely that they would be concentrating the confusion they were trying to give the novelists, and that all the novelists present would therefore be having similar experiences of plot problems.

In some places, the teams of plot bunnies had been more careful and each team member had stuck primarily with one author whose plot at least had some similarity to his own narrative, with just one or two crossovers per novelist over the first two days of writing. But a lot of teams had acted quite similarly to the team at the Steeps Tea lounge and had run into similar problems before the end of the first write-in.

Not to the same extent. The group in Steeps Tea was the only one in which a member had had a rabbit show up on her balcony, let alone a non-novelist show up with another related rabbit story, and one of the few in which someone had had any awareness of rabbit ears at some point. It was also the only one in which one of the members had somehow gained a glimpse of the plot bunny army and written it, with any amount of annoyance, into his novel.

But the plot bunnies dealing with the Steeps Tea group were, like so many of the rabbit teams, rather inexperienced. Bunnies do not tend to go for leadership opportunities, but rather satisfy their hunger and breed and do little else. Most teams did exactly what they were told without question. The leader of the Steeps Tea group, known to her friends as Christie for her succession of narrative relationships with novelists of the same name, was rather unusual in that she made the decision that they were all to return to their assigned novelist and remain there for the remainder of the evening, with no further crossovers.

The youngest of her team, a young brown barely-out-of-plotlet status bunny who called himself Fox, had been the only one upset to be limited to one novelist. Unlike the rest of them, he had enjoyed the diversity of flavours - probably because this was his only first-hand experience with brain carrots. He had yet to settle his tastes.

The rest of the team, however, teased her that she was changing her mind because she had finally been forced to try not just one, but several someones whose names were not Christie.

Christie didn't care what any of them had to say. She did not want to be the plot bunny whose team blew the mission for them all. She might not get quite why the elder archetypes had decided that this whole novel-in-a-month thing was bad – several of her plot-sibs had died over the years during the serious shortage of brain carrots after the whole thing finished, yes, but that was the nature of things. Bunnies came, bunnies went, just like plots. She would have thought that the elder archetypes, the greatest at survival of them all, would know that. Regardless of whether or not they did, however, Christie knew it herself, and dropping the ball on this mission would not be good for her own access to brain carrots.

She hadn't known anyone herself, but the bunnies all told tales of the rabbit someone else had known who the elder archetypes had cut off from the human world. And while their own Bunniption Base was pleasant enough, it lacked the sustenance to support any but the youngest of plot-let kits.

Christie was not about to let a few jokes get between her and her continued existence.



Almost exactly an hour later, Zale settled back in her chair and stretched her arms overhead, interlacing her fingers and cracking them as she released the tension built up in the hour of quickly dashing her pen across her page. The others in the room looked up at the new noise, quiet as it was, and soon all of them were stretching, saving documents, closing computers and notebooks.

"That went a lot better for me," Jamie said. "How about everyone else?"

"I agree," answered Sarah. "My plot progressed a little - not quite according to plan, but not far off it."

The others in the room nodded.

"How about yours, May?" asked Zale with her exuberant smile. "Now that you've started, do you think you'll keep going? Can you resist the challenge?"

"I'd really like to!" May said with an answering grin. "At first I was having a lot of trouble, but I think I wrote quite a bit in this hour, and I'd really like to see what happens with these characters."

"What did you decide to write?" asked the Japanese girl whose name Patricia still didn't know.

May glanced at her grandmother as she answered, "Grandma and I have been talking about her murder mystery so much that I thought I might put to use some of the ideas that she decided don't fit in hers. She's setting hers back in the 1940s but I'm setting mine now, so I can throw in things like the internet."

"Sounds like it could be interesting," Jamie told her. "I'm glad you could come and write with us. Patricia said you would be heading back to the Island, but maybe you can come again later this month, or for the TGIO party in December."

"TGIO?" asked May.

"Thank God It's Over!" laughed Chance. "It's always a good time - you should come, even if you don't finish your novel this month. It's a good place to discuss what went wrong and what you'll do differently next time, and for those of us who finish, to swap ideas for the editing process."

"Cool!" said May. "I'd love to go!"

Jeff, the last to stop writing, finally closed his laptop. "Patricia, I don't want to shoot down your ideas, but that was a really productive session for me too. Maybe put plot bunnies to the back of your mind and think about whether or not your building maintenance staff might have some jokers with a ladder." He looked around at everyone else. "Thanks for coming, everyone. Good luck this week, and I'll see you at one of the other group write-ins, or the Sunday Social downtown, or here again next week."

And like that, he was gone, still pulling his coat on.

"Bye, guys," Sarah and her friend said, following Jeff out the door.

Chance had his coat on, but waited for Jamie and Zale. "Are you two taking the skytrain again?" he asked.

"Yeah, just hold on while I finish packing this up..." Jamie answered. He had just finished wrapping up his power cord and was tucking his laptop into a sleeve. "Actually, Patricia, I wondered..." he trailed off.

"Yes?" Patricia answered, as May helped her with a coat sleeve that had somehow turned itself inside out.

"You heard how I said I had written about an army of rabbits?"

"Yes."

"I... think they might have been plot bunnies." Jamie hesitated. "I kept thinking of all these plot-related adjectives for them, and I was describing them as having narratives, and there was a section of them that I didn't write but which came through really strongly, and they were the grammar police... but I didn't want to write in any grammar police when I know my grammar needs a lot of work. And bunnies? For grammar police? I can imagine them as metaphorical ideas, sure, but any sort of rules doesn't fit rabbits, unless it's a formula for exponential growth."

"Interesting," said Patricia thoughtfully. "Thanks for telling me, Jamie. I do hope that I'm just making up crazy ideas in my old age," she smiled.


Patricia and May parted amicably with Chance, Jamie and Zale on the sidewalk in front of the tea shop. By this time, the early November sunset had passed and the air was dark and brisk. Patricia and May each pulled her scarf closer around her neck as the two began walking home.

“I get that man's skepticism,” began May without preamble. “But I still think we're right.”

“His name is Jeff,” Patricia told May. “I probably wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't lived with your grandfather for so long. And beyond that, the rabbit in my apartment is something only I witnessed arriving. What's happened in your head only happened to you and Jeff and the others don't know you – or me, really – particularly well. It makes sense for them to question our experiences and our conclusions both because it's so far from their own understanding and because they don't know what we've said is true.

“Yes...” May agreed almost reluctantly. She changed tack. “I'm going to try to do it, grandma.”

“Write a novel?”

“Yes,” Patricia's granddaughter said decisively. “After all, how else will I know if these plot bunnies are still messing with me?”