Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

The Night of Writing Dangerously was almost a third of the way through and so far everything seemed normal – as normal as any room containing 200 speed-novelists could appear, at any rate. Patricia, like her tablemates, were hard at work on another word sprint, trying to get as many words written in fifteen minutes as they could.

Patricia glanced up at her tablemates: each of them had the same phantom rabbit ears as she had seen during the kick-off party, but as she watched, they faded from her view.

It was the same thing she had seen during her time at the coffee shop the previous night: she herself needed to be plotting for her to be aware of the plot bunnies. She supposed it might be the same as at the kick-off party – once she had decided that she was indeed going to write a novel, the back of her head had been bubbling with plot ideas and stories – so perhaps that did indeed fit a pattern.

Everything else seemed normal, she thought with a quick glance around the room, and she returned her attention to her novel.




A short time later, after the pandemonium caused by three novelists ringing the cowbell together, signs of confusion began to appear.

The first indication was likely only apparent to Patricia. They were word sprinting at her table while the rest of the room wrote or relaxed as they pleased, for one of the girls was only 4,000 words away from 50,000 and she really wanted to win here at the event – especially now that she knew about getting to ring the cowbell. The table members were doing their best to support her, and this extra little sprint was part of that.

However, when Patricia looked up, the rabbit ears over each of her tablemates' heads were no longer the stable phantoms that she had seen earlier. Instead they were flickering rapidly, and it seemed that from one flicker to the next the ears changed, perhaps from a brown rabbit one moment to a white the next or a spotted the third. Patricia wondered if it was a sign that the plot bunnies were making their move.

She looked around for Alfalfa, but was not surprised when she didn't see him anywhere... but found herself wishing she could stroke his fur for even the smallest hint of reassurance that might give her.




The next sign came a few moments later, when a man in a top hat, scruff, and a nicely tailored black suit screamed and ran out of the room. He was probably the single most recognisable person in the room, known even to Patricia, who was on the very fringes of knowledge about NaNoWriMo.

The man was Chris Baty, the founder and director of National Novel Writing Month, and not only were most of the room's occupants women, most of those had a certain level of affection for him.

Most of the other members of the Office of Letters and Light, who were mostly seated at the pair of tables near the door, dashed after Chris, but the tall dark-haired woman, who Cait had explained was Sarah Mackey, the special events coordinator and woman in charge of the night's event, bravely stayed to strive for calm in the ballroom.

Given the elevated levels of excitement and distress in the women, all of whom were currently vocalizing their emotion in high-pitched voices and many of whom were reaching the point when they would get up in order to Do Something, Patricia wished Ms. Mackey the best of luck. She wondered if there was anything she could do to help – she had come to this event in order to help stave off issues if the plot bunnies attacked, but what was she, one grandmother in the process of re-discovering her creative stamina, supposed to do now? If this was part of the attack by the plot bunnies, Patricia felt that she would be vastly disappointed if she was unable to stop it from achieving the plot bunnies' aim.



Violent sneezing erupted, another sign of chaos, Patricia thought, startled out of her paralysis of sudden self-doubt at the same time as the women who had been preparing to move into silence and a chorus of “bless you”s as everyone looked at the source – the fourth sneeze, and fifth, were louder than the first three, and the man sneezing fell over, hitting the edge of the candy buffet and starting an inexplicable slide of the tubs onto the floor.

Several others had been at the table, and they grabbed at the various tubs and tablecloth, trying to prevent the suddenly imminent disaster. Their efforts were mostly successful: only the giant plastic jar full of soft sour gummies in the shape of rabbits spilled onto the floor, scattering sugar-coated squishy bits all over the centre of the room, and showering the poor man who was still sneezing from his location on the floor – now on his ninth and gearing up for his tenth.

A woman, dressed in jeans, a black hooded sweater with white NaNoWriMo text, and a fetching black trilby hat, all of which matched the man on the floor, dashed to his location, squirming her way past the many novelists blocking her path.

“Oh Howard!” she said, kneeling next to him and covering his mouth and nose with a cloth, and supporting his head with her other hand. “There, now, hopefully you won't breathe in anything else...” She looked around at the group clustered closest. “Have any of you got a pet rabbit?” she asked accusingly, and Patricia started in her seat, bending down and checking under the tables between her and the candy buffet. There – she saw Alfalfa hiding between the legs of nearest table – she carefully held open her bag under her chair, and beckoned to the rabbit. He needed to get out of sight quickly, before they started a rabbit hunt.

“Howard is ferociously allergic to rabbits,” the woman was continuing, but the man had apparently finished sneezing and was holding the cloth over his mouth and nose on his own. She helped him back to their table – and everyone in the room calmed down and returned to their writing.

Interesting, Patricia thought. Perhaps that had not been a sign of chaos – perhaps it had been Alfalfa's way of solving the situation over Chris Baty – as if everyone who had felt the need to take action now felt that, with the second crisis resolved, the first must be resolved as well, or was no longer at the top of their minds – she wasn't entirely certain how that worked, but she thought a heartfelt “thank you” to Alfalfa.

“Alright, my lovelies!” Sarah Mackey's voice came over the microphone. “We've had a little bit of excitement, and you should all know what that means.” She paused, and everyone waited expectantly. “It's time for another word sprint, of course! We've got to use that excitement to barrel our way towards the finish line! Fifteen minutes – and...” she counted down the seconds on her watch. “GO!”

Patricia nodded in approval – that would keep everyone occupied, but she herself was going to keep an eye on things. “I'll be right back,” she told her tablemates. “Just going to go find the ladies' room.” Patricia left her notebook on the table, but reached under her chair to pull out her bag. No sense leaving Alfalfa in here if she didn't have to – he might be useful.





The entryway was empty, except for a girl sitting in the coat check typing on her laptop. The girl glanced up with a smile, and Patricia smiled back, asking about the bathroom - “the restroom is just around the corner and to the left,” the girl pointed, and Patricia headed that direction. At least she could have a quiet check-in with Alfalfa in there.

The bathroom was empty – surprising for the ladies' room by this point of the evening, but Patricia wasn't about to complain – and as luxuriously appointed as the rest of the event. Patricia smiled in appreciation as she saw the basket of helpful necessities, likely provided by Sarah, displayed to perfection on the vanity counter. Smart lady, Patricia thought,noting the painkillers alongside the feminine hygiene products, as well as several other odds and ends: toothpicks, mints, gum, caffeinated gum (what would these people come up with next).

She left the basket undisturbed and headed for a stall. It probably wouldn't be good for a woman to find her in the ladies' with a rabbit after that whole incident with poor Howard.





The sound struck Flopsy like a slap across the face.

It must have been building in the background for some time. It was constant, loud, penetrating, yet Flopsy hadn't become aware of it until she hopped through that last wall – when the sound had struck her still and she involuntarily crouched in on herself.

Ah, she realised as she looked inward to check for Earry's direction. The inner certainty of danger rang inside her head with the same frequency as this pounding, penetrating noise – Flopsy thought instantly of Earry and lifted her head. The sound still hurt her, made her wish she were snuggled against the homey fur of her Mama rather than here struggling against noise, but she could fight it. For Earry.

With those ears of his, there was no way he could do anything in here – but she knew from that inner sense that she was close to him, and from the volume, she must be close to the source of the sound.

Taut with effort and determination, Flopsy hopped onwards, finally peeking through what she was certain would be the last wall between her and Earry.

The room within was completely outside her expectations and experience. It was wide but short – she felt she could hop across it in one bound – and lined in maroon-coloured silk. To her, it looked as if it should muffle sound, rather than amplify it, but the sound was even more harsh here. It seemed to reverberate through the small space, and she was glad she had not yet brought her ears fully through the wall.

At the far right – which actually wasn't that far, she realised; it only seemed so in comparison with the distance from the wall across from her – was a contraption of some kind, and it pulsed. She assumed it to be the source of the noise, and knew she should focus on it more, to somehow discover how to stop the infernal racket -

But at the opposite end of the room was Earry. Her heart seemed to shatter at the sight of him, for he was huddled in on himself, his ears curled as tightly as possible in on themselves. Her own tensed even more, almost painfully, in sympathetic response. That poor white form – Flopsy felt an irrational desire to just go to him. The new inner ability to track him ached for her to be beside him.

Yet that would also do him no good.

Flopsy resolutely turned from him, looking at the device across from the white rabbit.

It seemed simple enough.

It was a dark matte grey box-like thing. The part that moved, a silvery disc, was somehow attached or mounted on the front, and it vibrated away and then towards the main box. The box was solid except around the edges of that disc, through which Flopsy could just see what looked like strings.

Wires, she thought suddenly, thinking back to the power cords she had seen humans use at the write-ins. She had heard enough of the novelists joking about their computers being “about to die” to know that the wires somehow fed the machines energy, but she also knew that they had to “plug” into the source of nourishment. Flopsy wondered what this device was plugged into, for she had never heard of anything like it in Bunniption Base.

But things were changing, since this month's mission had started. Perhaps the vampire wanted a new way to power things, so that he could keep more creative energy to himself.

Flopsy glanced back to the left, at Earry, curled so tightly in on himself that he couldn't possibly even be aware of her.

She had no other option. She had to do something.

She resolutely turned away from Earry and towards the device.

Flopsy sidled along through the wall until she was as close as she could get to the noisemaker. Her ears were clenched so tightly now that they did hurt. She couldn't take this volume much longer, she thought, as she felt her bones start to vibrate. She inhaled deeply, and pounced forward, squeezing her nose past the edge of the disc, wincing as the disc moved, pressing against her cheek again and again, and shoved her mouth forward. Just a little more – Flopsy bit through the nearest wire.

One blessed moment of silence.

After a beat just long enough for Flopsy to relax her tightly held ears and pull her face – ouch! her whiskers – back out of the device, a shrill keening replaced the earlier harsh pounding. It seemed to come from the walls themselves, and with its total unexpected arrival, entering into relaxed ears, it hurt far more acutely than the harsh dull ache of the earlier noise. Flopsy fell into a paralysed huddle, the same pose she had seen Earry in at the other end of the room.

“Ah, Flopsy. How nice of you to join us,” a familiar arrogant voice, full of power, cut through the sharp, shrill sound, and Flopsy sank in on herself inwardly just as she had physically.

Trapped, she thought. Trapped...


Twenty minutes after entering the bathroom with Alfalfa, Patricia returned to the ballroom, but not to her table. The plot bunnies were divided, Alfalfa had explained after she managed to narrow her questioning down sufficiently. She had already decided that if she needed to consult him again she was just going to have a nap in her chair. She'd been up a long time that day and her brain was very nearly as overwhelmed as it had been in Chinatown – surely it wouldn't be too hard to fall asleep despite the busy surroundings.

Regardless, she now had a job to do.

Alfalfa said the plot bunnies were close to decimating the novels of almost everyone present, but he had also given her a clue earlier, when he had been talking to that other rabbit, and it had just clicked in her head – she was sure Alfalfa didn't understand why she had stopped questioning him in the middle of a chain of thought, but there was no time to lose.

Patricia marched to the front of the room, up the stairs, and paused at the top. Oh no. Chris Baty had come back in her absence and was in the middle of a speech.

“The first little boy who answered my question summed it up for the rest of them: 'At first, I thought it was a lot of words... and then I got excited.'” Chris Baty was saying, then paused before repeating that last point. “'At first I thought it was a lot of words, and then I got excited.' I think that just about sums it up for all of us.”

Again Chris paused, but this time not for emphasis. This time he was listening to the people in the crowd who were shouting and pointing to the side, where Patricia stood frozen at the top of the steps.

“Oh, hello,” Chris said to her. “Another winner?”

Silently she shook her head.

“Can it wait until I've finished, then?”

Patricia sank down to a seat at the top of the steps. Chris Baty. She was on stage with Chris Baty, however accidentally it had happened. The room was laughing, but she didn't care, and she settled in to wait.

Chris spoke about all the good things NaNoWriMo was achieving: the creative endeavours, the individual and collective accomplishments, and most of all, the introduction of novel-writing into the classrooms of America with the innovative Young Writer's Program. This is what she had interrupted, she realised, and Patricia listened as Chris eloquently described the wonderful world that everyone in the room was a part of.

He was witty, he was charming, he was clear. Every detail contributed to the sense of collective wonder and hope and optimism and drive towards making everything go that little bit farther: if we could each write the bare bones of a novel in thirty days, what more could we achieve?

But it was there that the speech went off the rails. While Chris's description of the programs had been sharply defined, his attempt at exhorting the room to greater efforts, at eliciting increased creativity and word counts, was lost. He spoke about octopi hugging monkeys and space pirates become ballerinas, and everything in and of itself was quirky and wonderful and was probably something Chris could have turned into a brilliant speech or a hilarious story – at any other time, with any foe but the plot bunnies seeking to thwart him.

As it was, the speech was like listening to one of those stories that you write a sentence at a time with a big group of people, in which you are only allowed to read what the person before you wrote: hilarious, in its utter incoherence, but not particularly inspiring.

Patricia wondered if Chris had any idea how crazy what he'd just spouted had sounded, then realised that this was her cue.

She pulled herself up, and went to join the dapper Chris, in his black suit and top hat, at the podium.

“Thank you Chris,” Patricia said. “May I take this opportunity to follow you with a few words?”

“Certainly, Ms...?”

“Patricia,” she told him. “From Vancouver.”

“Novelists,” Chris told the room through the microphone. “Patricia from Vancouver would like to take a few moments of your time.”

Patricia took the microphone and smiled at the room. My goodness, she thought. Two hundred people certainly looked like a lot from up here in the limelight.

“Friends,” she greeted them. “I have two challenging questions for you. Please answer me honestly.”

Patricia paused. Which to ask first?

“How many of you have found your novels slow going this year, with more of a life of their own than usual? If you haven't done this before, as I haven't, perhaps you have had your initial characters go one way while your novel goes another. Perhaps your setting has changed drastically, or your plot gone from a romance to a murder mystery or an action adventure. How many of you, in fact, have been writing ideas for more than one novel into your book?”

Every hand in the room went up. She nodded.

“There's a reason for that. Second question. How many of you found Chris Baty's speech absolutely amazing and inspirational?” The room exploded into applause, and she waited for it to die down. “So did I – until the end. How many of you can say the same about the the part of his speech about working on your novel? Is there anyone in this room who did not find the octopus hugging the monkey just the confusing start to a confusing conclusion?”

The only people who put their hands up were the staff at the Office of Letters and Light, seated around the table at the back of the room near the door, and Patricia nodded again. “There's a reason for that too – both most of us who are not with the Office of Letters and Light being confused, and the OLL staff understanding. There's a reason,” she said, and paused, looking around at the novelists in the room, at the people with their laptops open, and she smiled. “And there's a way we can fight back.

“Are you interested?”

A loud sneeze exploded at the back of the room, and Patricia caught a glimpse of brown fur moving by the windows at the right-hand side of the ballroom. So that's where he had gone... She nodded at her audience.

“Yes Howard,” Patricia smiled across the space, finding Howard's face next to that of his wife, at a table at the back right. “Your sneezing is confirmation of the problem plaguing us all: plot bunnies.

“I don't know why yet, but this year, the plot bunnies are out to get us. In the past, they have helped us, feeding us countless ideas and rescuing novels with too little imagination. But this year they are tossing and turning us about, throwing us at one idea after another and another and another – and yet another.

“Perhaps it's because so many of us abandon their plots and their writing as soon as the month is over. Perhaps it's because they are somehow offended by the cavalier approach this whole project shows to the sacred craft of writing. I don't know. But right now, what matters is that they are plotting against our novels.

“But we have a solution, for we are novelists. Plot bunnies give us ideas, complications, complexities – and these are fantastic and wonderful and give our novels interest and vivacity. But we are the ones who link everything together. We are the ones who pull together the wild free-wheeling threads of the plot bunnies and tie them into neat tidy packages.

“Some of us have already started this. Several people have come up here to ring this bell,” Patricia said, picking up the cowbell and giving it a shake. “They may already be wrapping everything up – and they may already be having an easier time of it, for the plot bunnies have a much harder time hijacking novels at this point than during the generation of ideas.

“They also have a much harder time trying to harvest power from us during that process. And that power is what we need to target. We need to deliver a major blow against the plot bunnies tonight – together – for we here tonight will be their major source of power. The Night of Writing Dangerously is a night of creative mayhem, but if we allow the creative energy to go to the plot bunnies, they will win.

“They will win,” Patricia repeated softly. “They will win, and our initiatives, our programs to support the creativity of young writers, of bringing this delicious madness to our classrooms and our young people, will die. The chance for folks like me to rediscover ourselves and our ability to innovate and be creative and be alive, will die.

“I don't want that to happen,” she said, and paused, looking around the room, making eye contact with everyone she could see.

“So tonight, fellow novelists,” she continued in a peppier tone, grinning at them. “Wherever you are in your story, I challenge you: start tying up those loose threads.

“It's time. It's time for us to start that process, and take the creative power back into our own hands.

“If you aren't already at a point in your novel where it makes sense to tie things up, skip ahead, start a new page, and write 'epilogue' at the top. Where are your characters in five years? Who gets married? Who is still getting into trouble, just as they did at the start of the story you've already started writing?

Patricia looked around the room one more time.

“Are you with me, dear novelists?” she asked softly.

In the silence that followed, the silence that seemed to stretch for eternity, Patricia drew in a deep breath. She, the quiet, domestic grandmother who liked tea, had just given a speech. In front of 200 people! But would it work?

Applause broke out across the room, and Patricia breathed out slowly. She could really use a cup of tea now, actually, she reflected, then stepped aside as Chris Baty put his hand on her shoulder.

“Thank you Patricia,” he said with a broad smile, then leaned into the microphone. “Alright you lot! Fifteen minute word war! You've got one word to start you off already: epilogue!” He glanced at his watch.

“And... 3! 2! 1! Go!”