Highlights From My Nano

March is National Editing Month so in the spirit of the month, here are some highlights from my Nano novel that I really like as I reread it.

I was trying to remain calm, but each crazy thing Cooper said to me was piling one on top of another and fused together into one big clump of insane that I was finding harder and harder to go along with.

“Now, he’s either going to take us somewhere, or he’s going to go suicidal and run the bus off a bridge or something. I’m assuming it’s the former. We just need to incapacitate him and stop the bus ourselves.” I smiled brightly. “It’s cake.”
“The cake is a lie,” Cooper said, deadpan.
“I don’t think this is the time for Portal jokes,” I said in a low voice.
[AN: It is ALWAYS the time for Portal jokes!]

I crawled painfully over to where Cooper was tangled up like a performer from Cirque de Soleil, only not as frightening. He wasn’t bleeding, as far as I could see, but that didn’t mean that his injuries weren’t traumatic. I straightened out his arms and legs and then started slapping his face. I probably did so a little harder than I needed to, but it was surprisingly amusing.

“He’s had one too many,” I explained. “Passed out a while ago.” I hoped that if I didn’t elaborate on why I was taking someone who was passed out drunk to a computer lab at the university, he wouldn’t ask, which he didn’t.

“What happened to your face?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, unsure of how to say this so that I didn’t sound like a complete lunatic. I decided there was no good way and just dived in. “I’ve been waking up with nosebleeds and then I fainted in psychology and Cooper here told me that I had been abducted by aliens, as was he, and then I was attacked by a Man in Black in my apartment and we jumped out a window-”
“Your apartment’s on the second floor,” she pointed out, and I wondered why that was the only thing she found insane about what I had said thus far.

“Let’s send the Men in Black for a ride,” I said mischievously. There was a bathroom just across the hall from where we were and I threw it in the toilet where it floated innocuously. The flush of the toilet sounded like music to my ears. I could just imagine the Men in Black running through sewers trying to figure out where the hell I was. The mental image made me feel almost as though it were Christmas.

“You know, my mom got stuck on an elevator,” I said for no apparent reason. “She was visiting my grandparents at their apartment. She was in there for fifteen minutes before she finally got out at the floor where they kept all the people with Alzheimer’s.” The doors started to close and Cooper reached out a hand to push them open again. “Maybe it’s hereditary.” [AN: This is actually a true story.]
“There is no ‘getting stuck in elevators’ gene,” Cooper said. “Get on the freaking elevator.”

“0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...” and he continued on.
“What’s he doing?” Cooper whispered.
“He’s saying the Fibonacci Sequence,” Veronica said. “Discovered by Leonardo of Pisa. The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself.”
“It’s related to the Golden Ratio,” I said, suddenly remembering this information from an extremely off-topic math class that I had almost failed.
“Golden Ratio?” Cooper asked, puzzled.
“Two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller,” I explained.
“You guys both sound like a Wikipedia article,” Cooper pointed out.
[AN: Ha ha ha ha ha. They sound like a Wikipedia article for a reason: All that information was copy and pasted from Wikipedia. I love word padding.]

“I think I was better off in the hospital,” Jake said wryly. He pushed hair out of his eyes impatiently.
“Oh come on,” I teased. “This is almost as fun as the time we were playing in that flax field when we were six and we suddenly noticed that there were like a million bees.”
[AN: This is also a true story. My friend and I were playing in a field (don't think it was flax though) and we suddenly noticed all these bees and something that looked like a ginormous wasp with pincers. It was the most frightening thing that ever happened to me in my childhood.]

“You want to willingly walk in to the middle of aliens who might possibly be malevolent and try to talk to them?” he demanded incredulously. “Who are you, Dr. Phil? He couldn’t even help Britney.”
“Jesus couldn’t help Britney,” I said.
[AN: Ha ha ha, I don't even remember writing this. Don't know whether it's awesome or moronic.]

“What exactly are you planning on saying to them?”
“Oh, ‘we come in peace’. ‘Take me to your leader’. That kind of thing,” I said.
“You don’t even know that they speak English,” Cooper said.
“All the aliens on Stargate SG-1 speak English,” I said. “As well as the ones on Andromeda, Stargate Atlantis, some on Star Trek…at the very least, they’ll have a babelfish.”
“You do realize that those are fiction?” Cooper asked. “And that babelfish don’t exist?”
“Plus, I speak French. Veronica used to date a Jewish guy so she knows a little Yiddish. No doubt Jake knows Klingon. Between all those languages, we’ll be able to understand them somehow,” I said.

“They’re kind of douchey,” Cooper observed.
[AN: They meet aliens from another planet. They realize they are not alone in the universe, and this is his observation? Again, not sure if it's hilarious or moronic.]

“I need to know! It’s important. I’m…her husband.” It was the only plausible lie he could think of and he thought of how utterly ridiculous it sounded, considering he looked at least two years younger than he actually was.
“You’re like sixteen,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“Eighteen. We got married young. Like Bella and Edward.”
“Oh, I love Twilight!” she exclaimed. “Sparkly vampires, mmmm…”
[AN: HA HA HA HA. I was just thinking that I should have made a Twilight joke in this novel since I used every other pop culture reference in existence, and then I found this.]

“Haven’t you seen Firefly? They’ll probably have an escape pod, or something,” I said. “We just need to find it.”
“And then who’s going to pilot it?” he asked. “You?”
“I’ve played enough video games,” I said, waving my hand. “I’m sure it will be no trouble.”
“I’m fairly certain that Mariokart: Double Dash does not prepare you to fly an alien spacecraft,” Cooper said. “You’re absolutely out of your mind crazy.”
“Duh, it wasn’t Mariokart: Double Dash,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It was Asteroids, obviously.”

"Let’s go John McClane on this spaceship!”
“Impressive speech, but what are you planning on doing, blowing up the ship? With what, your brain?” he said, looking at me in amused way, ostensibly at my outburst. I thought it was pretty eloquent, myself.
“Okay, maybe not John McClane,” I said. “We don’t have the ingredients for Molotov cocktails or anything. I guess I’d settle for just getting out of here alive.”
“You know how to make Molotov cocktails?” he asked, frowning.
“When you grow up on a farm, there’s not much else to do,” I said, continuing to run my hands up and down walls, feeling for thin fissures or bumps or anything incongruous in the shiny silver of the walls.
“So you alleviate boredom by making explosives?” he wanted to know. “I wish I grew up in a small town.”
“Barns catch on fire like that,” I said, snapping my fingers to emphasize the word that.
“That’s a little…disconcerting,” he said slowly. “Are you a member of the Crips?”
“Yes, yes I am,” I said. “That’s why I’m attending university in Canada. Also, I am not an African-American, as you may have noticed in all the time that we’ve spent together.”
“Really? You’re not black?” he asked in mock surprise. “Huh. I think my retinas are defective.”
“Your retinas, as well as your brain,” I said.
[AN: I don't actually know any farm kids who blow up barns with Molotov cocktails for recreation. I know I didn't. I wish I did though. That sounds awesome.]

I could tell he had an idea but he was going to force me to endure endless amounts of rhetoric until he got to the point. The guy was like Hercule Poirot.
[AN: Like I said. Every pop culture reference on the planet.]

He wondered briefly if it was Jesse Ventura or Alex Trebek, like in The X-Files, season three, episode 20: Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, written by Darin Morgan and directed by Rob Bowman.
[AN: Best word padding EVAR.]

“You can’t stop us,” he said. “There are over nine thousand of us helping the aliens on Earth.”
I couldn’t resist. “IT’S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAND!” I quoted. Cooper and Ryan stared at me.
“You guys need to get on the internet more,” I said.
“You need to get on the internet less,” Cooper retorted.
[AN: I definitely rearranged that whole scene to shoehorn that joke in.]

“Mina, where are you?” Veronica hissed. “We’re all out. I need to detonate before the Men in Black arrive. I’m sure they’ve heard about our escape from the pokey by now.”
[AN: I don't remember writing the word 'pokey'. I kind of can't believe I did.]