One NaNo year I went to an all-nighter write-in at a small town called Collector. It’s half an hour out of Canberra, so not a big deal…right?
That entire town is terrifying.
First off, I arrived at the town around 9pm on a moonless night. There were no streetlights, and apparently no-one was awake because all the houses were dark too. The only well-lit building was the pub, which for some reason still had all its Halloween decorations still a-dangling three weeks later (in Australia, not many people celebrate Halloween at all).
Something loomed out of the shadows and I jerked backwards, knowing it couldn’t possibly be a woman’s face just standing next to the road, staring, with her mouth gaping in a silent scream. But I had to look again. She had wild, looping hair, frozen as it lifted in a non-existent blast of wind. There were other things all around her: not-quite-faces and not-quite hands, all of them huge and heavy and pitted and grey.
The small town of Collector has an artist. Specifically, a sculptor.
It was art. Just art.
It was almost worse to learn that the artist is hated (especially by our host, who lives next door to him) throughout the town, that the sculpture is made of rubbish and is structurally unstable as well as a tetanus hazard, and that the artist’s son died of cancer. The sculpture may or may not be about that heart-wrenching grief.
When I finally found the hall where we were writing, it turned out that only half of the building had working lights. Immediately outside the warped wooden door there was a dead rabbit, just lying on the dirt like a gift. Or a sacrifice. To what, I couldn’t say.
So yeah, a great night. Highly recommended.
Oddly enough, I never did go to another write-in.
But I did go back to see the sculpture… when it was light.
)
(I’m still in the process of making one up, so if you’ve got any ideas, bring it on!)
(it’s included in the current wordcount). Part 1 was just under 25000 words.