After I dedicated yesterday’s post to how I may have to abandon 2014’s NaNo project, today I figured out how to get past the roadblock in the plot. It was actually ludicrously simple: I just had to discard my pre-conception that they had to be kept out of their mechs or they’d end up killing each other. There’s no reason mech combat should have to end in the deaths of the pilots, after all. Once I realized that, it fell into place pretty handily, and allowed me to give a story role to (the reincarnation of) Nestor, who had previously done nothing but occasionally take up a little word-space. (It’s not all that much of a story role, mind you, but it’s more than he’s had up until now.)
Maybe there’s just something about me complaining about something on here that makes the reverse come true? After I complained about the panic at the grocery store over the announced snowstorm, and how we usually don’t actually get such a storm, then we did actually get about three inches or so. Enough that the university’s automatic contact machine called me at a quarter to five in the morning to let me know the campus would be closed due to the snow. (In the university’s defense, the automatic warning whatsit is supposed to be used to contact students on their cell phones, to let them know of dangerous situations so they can be avoided. However, as my cell phone is almost always off, I had to give them my home phone.) It wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that I realized the most absurd part of that phone call: Monday was a holiday, so there wouldn’t have been any classes anyway!
But if I complain about something on purpose, just in the hopes that the reverse will come true, then it probably won’t, just to mess with me. Because the universe is like that.
