mandatory

Stubagful NaNoWriMo 2013: Future Highs: Halfway – 25000.

Posted on 15/11/2013 by stubagful

I’m starting to doubt I’ll be finished with this story by 50000 words, which is fine. NaNoWriMo isn’t about finishing your novel, its about being 50000 of a novel which I intend to do by the end of the month.

I started with trying to figure out how a government commission would set this up but the more I thought about it, more implications came up. Wouldn’t compulsary drug law cause incoherency in government? Well undoubtedly but what if an ambitious pretender to the throne of global superpower were to use it to their advantage? So yeah, I’m taking the whole “drugs make you paranoid shtick” and constructing that narrative where there’s three organisations that come up quite a lot who could be working drug law to their own ends.

I’ve finished part one covering before and a little bit of Part 2: After, which I’ve decided to split into two sections (more on that when I reach 30000)

I’m not going to post excerpts from the narrative as that’d be a bit useless, so instead I’ll give you a rundown of what I’ve written so far (this being as much for my benefit as y….yeah no one’s reading this so yeah just my benefit)

Chapter breakdown

Prologue – A Little Bit of History
See my second post in my NaNoWriMo category

PART 1: Before

1. DUCA (Drug Unfied Compulsation Act) Commencement date speech by Arthur Hiesenfeld – 02/12/2133
I’ve posted this as well – basically establishing where all the information in the story fits at the start of it.

2. Marvin Hayes – Senior Press advisor – December 2133
Each chapter is told in third person perspective and the narrator slips in that this narrative is actually an historical analysis of events on occasion. We begin with Marvin arriving at the White House to find the DUCA commission’s prepared files have been sabotaged and four years of work need to either be found or reconstructed to coincide with compulsary drug taking start date and the commission panics.

3. “As Your Are Told” – News Debate show transcript from broadcast on 21/12/2133
Your general sensationalist news debate show breaks down over the issue of the bumbling DUCA department as all participants in the debate offer differing and stupid opinions on the lost files disaster. We get introduced to Ruth Powers, a journalist soon to become government spokeswoman for DUCA and Justine Florestine, a radical leader of anti-drug lobby PAF: Parents Against Fun who will play an important role later on in the book.

4. Judith Barret – Materials manager – December 2133
Judith visits her father in a care home for the mentally ill where he gathers online conspiracy theories regarding DUCA and an internet cult claiming inside knowledge. Marvin demands Judith listen to her father and conduct furthur research because some of what he says tallies with a ransom video sent by the saboteurs.

5. Excerpt from “The Drug Hut Official Employee Training manual”
Lays out procedure for the government institutions to dispense public substances and introduces the mysterious new invention: the MIA-Z chip surgery.

6. Jase Edwards – Materials Supervisor – February 2134
Its been a couple of months and no furthur clues as to who’s sabotaging government preparations of the drug mire and work is progressing slowly. New materials assistant director Jase and Marvin’s ex-girlfriend Michelle, advisor to the vice president, have been dropping acid in a test to see if they can still do their jobs and obey the law.

7. Excerpt from Drug Police Department (DPD) handbook chapter 2
Lays out the daily procedure and key offences to be dealt with by the special force to keep the high up among the general populace.

8. Gerald Harding – Vice President – May 2134
The vice President is treated apallingly by the department because of his controversial public life. He has secret back room deals with a cocaine wholesaler whose shady boss demands taxpayer funds to gain exclusive rights to its sale. Gerald has his doubts over his motivations.

9. The Epistle of St Moremooshi III of the Church of the New Rising Eyes Cream – Religious political commentary site – August edition – 21/07/2134
These are clippings from a conspiratorial site run by a founder of an insane anti-drug religion which appears to be influenced by drugs but is violently against them.

10. Judith Barret – August 2134
Judith and her father attend a meeting of members of the Church of the New Rising Eyes Cream and find him to be a nutbar but one with surprising insight into government initiatives yet to be announced who makes aloof references to someone inside DUCA working to disrupt it and hand global power the US holds to a country denying drug law with designs on being the next superpower.

11. The MIA-Z Chip Surgery – A Government documentary on new drug technology
The MIA-Z chip is inserted into the pineal gland and causes a permanent high. This is a transcript from a government informercial/documentary on how it works and why it’s the best option for citizens of the new utopia.

12. Marvin Hayes – September 2134 – START DATE
Marvin takes the start date and President Harding’s announcements moodily. His department is on nothing stronger than pot as its illegal to do anything harder in his job class, a system whereby jobs are classed on their usefulness and ability to do them while stoned.
Gerald is missing for two days when he shows up at a shopping district where Marvin takes his disappearance and claims of kidnap and forced surgery sarcastically.
Gerald is then killed when an unseen force takes a bite out of his house and he vanishes.
The nation is in shock and Marvin finds that Gerald sent him his diaries from the last eight months. Marvin reads them as he slides into depression.

13. The Era of Hiesenfeld – A 6th grade historical essay by Marmozet Flueison
An incoherent child’s essay on the President that started this experiment and what were the key factors in the brave social experiment’s conception and untimely downfall.

And from then on its Part 2: After where we focus more on Gerald’s journals detailling the corporate side of the new and legal drug’s industry. Judith is working for the church. And Marvin and Jase decide maybe they should do a runner to one of the nations opposing the UN resolution on international drug law: Belgium.

Call me crazy but this is still draft 1 and making it up as you go along is the point.

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Stubagful NaNoWriMo 2013: Future Highs: Day Seven: 10004 words

Posted on 07/11/2013 by stubagful

Well I got a fifth of the way through and I’m not out of ideas yet

Here’s how things are currently looking:

The novel is spilt into three parts: Before, After and Possibly

Before, as it says on the tin, is the events leading up to the change and the introduction of mind-altering substances comes bit by bit prior to the full change when we get to After. Possibly I will talk about when/if I get there by the 50’000 word mark.

OUR PLOT

An anti-drug law terrorist group destroys the DUCA (Drug Unified Compulsation Act) commission’s files and materials made in preparation for the change and kidnaps their filing cabinet of hard copies. The DUCA commission attempt to rebuild and reconstruct the files in line with the announced start date while dealing with bad press and find clues that someone inside the DUCA commission is working for the anti-drug terrorists. After the changes come into effect, the terrorist group’s attempt to reverse the actions lead to international conflict and the intoxicated DUCA commission have to try and keep the administration’s position stable while they personally aren’t. Basically its a trippy drug novel grounded entirely in reality, the humour comes from the contrast really.

OUR CHARACTERS

Marvin Hayes is a brash and arrogant press officer for the DUCA commission with dubious motivations and a hard time relating to people.

Judith Barret is head of materials. She’s in her late thirties and void of any opinion on drug law. She’s been part of far too many failed government policies and just wants to go home and put her feet up at the end of the day.

Judith’s father is John Barret (currently Reverend Bear) and is in a lunatic asylum for his association with a strange online cult who spend their days on conspiracy theories about the DUCA commission and other strange phenomena of recent years.

Jase Edwards is a snide arrogant intern who was promoted to a full position head writer of materials when Marvin saw a lot of himself in the young man.

Michelle Cowdry is Marvin’s ex-girlfriend and Gerald’s personal assistant. She and Jase have been experimenting with doing their jobs while under the influence of certain substances together.

Gerald Harding is currently Vice president and incredibly bad press for the DUCA commission. He has been dealing with a secret cocaine habit for years and was thus keen to act as spokesman for the legislation. He is the bane of Marvin’s life.

Justine Florestine is head of PAF (Parents Against Fun) a leading anti-drug law activist group. Her 5 year old son has been showing up in press campaigns as a spy for their group.

OTHER STUFF

As the prologue I posted probably indicates, I’m trying to incorporate fake historical extracts into the narrative. Most are going to be running throughout the novel and will change and get more erratic as the effects of compulsary recreational drugs takes effect. They’re all woven into where the plot is, mostly to give a feel for the scale of the change. It includes news broadcasts, government materials, other media like that

So far I’ve got some government pamphlets, instructions to current and new public services and things like that, I’ve also invented a couple of new bits of technology because, hell its the future, why not? But the main difference between now and the future is that Dominoes Pizza is a taxpayer funded public service. It had to be done.

I’ve also got transcripts from news debate shows that show up and also fake speeches by fake politicians. I may have overexaggerated the severe dumbness of our characters but that’s the thing: I am trying to make everyone on every side of the drugs argument look bad. This is pretty much a cautionary tale of everyone and everything’s approach to drugs.

Here’s a couple of speeches from early in the novel.

PRESIDENT HIESENFELD – DUCA COMMENCEMENT DATE – 02/12/2133 – Televised address

“My fellow Americans. Many of you may be questioning this administration’s decision to make it not just legal but compulsory for every citizen to be intoxicated by previously illicit substances at all times. Many of you have lobbied against me. Many of you have declared me insane. But most of you have been strangely agreeable. Terrifyingly agreeable in fact.

Those who oppose this bill, I see your point. I understand where your fear of this great change comes from. But let me assure you from the bottom of my heart that America will care for you. America will love and respect you throughout the next great era of this nation.

Every factor has been taken into consideration. The DUCA commission has been working around the clock making sure that when that day in September comes, we will protect you. The staff of America’s Drug Huts will be there for you, the Drug Police will be there for you, the establishment will care for you.

When I set out to make the world a more sympathetic, kinder, more understanding and less comprehensible place, I saw things coming together in the precise manner this commission has been putting this act together. I am immensely proud of the maturity and dignity displayed by this administration.

And let it be known that that pride will be extended to the brave people of America joining with us as we step forward into a new tomorrow filled with boundless potential for new areas of thought and consciousness and intrigue.

When that day comes and the first line is snorted, the first doobie is lit, the first hit is dropped, we will be with you every step of the way. We stand on the border of a freer world than we have been able to comprehend before. We barely believed this new world possible. We are with you every step of the way. America will be by your side and care for you.

As a great man once said, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Thank you.”

THE HOTDOG SPEECH – VICE PRESIDENT GERALD HARDING – 05/05/2133 – Address to congress in support of DUCA

“I see this new initiative by the President to be a wonderful new beginning for America. Now granted there will be many who will immediately see flaw in compulsation but I say to those people: that is a very flawed argument. Very flawed indeed.

The legislation is sort of like when you make hotdogs. Y’know how you boil them in water and it takes so long and you’re like “c’mon, c’mon, I’m starving you’re killing me here.” And you gotta drain the water and let it soak out for a while and its the same here. You’ve gotta let this new lease of life for America to soak for a while until it tastes like the salty brine soaked taste of freedom with mustard.

Mustard is definitely the word I’d use here; this bill is mustard to some people. Some people eat their hotdogs with mustard, some don’t. And I say, that those who oppose mustard are blindsighted egotists. In America we have the right to face UnAmerican dissent and laugh.

Dissent in the face of the DUCA act will soak up a bitter pool of hatred and encouraging war on our children. These fools who surround us everyday won’t accept that in a free democracy, by election we have been empowered to see a new vision of the future for America.

And these dissenters, these infiltrators, with their yes men and no men surrounding them offering discouragement of our cause, they refuse to see the arguments put forward. Like a burnt hotdog they will be left in the garbage along with those who thought the Hummingbird cull was a bad idea, and the opposition to the plastic tree initiative AND the surveillance drone initiative.

We will stand together and fight the forces of unopinion and together we can forge a new beginning for America’s beginning”

RECORDING IS THEN DROWNED OUT BY CONGRESS GROANING AND YELLING.

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Stubagful NaNoWriMo 2013: Future Highs: Week One, Day One

Posted on 01/11/2013 by stubagful

Day one of NaNoWriMo is always the easiest or at least it should be. Its keeping up the good ideas that takes the effort. By and large you’ll have your idea sort of vaguely mapped out before you start. Because I’m kind of an annoying awkward little shit I always try and make sure to have as unconventional sounding idea as possible so I know that if I end up going off the rails and running low on ideas I can just make up whatever bollocks I like and it’ll still work out okay. This is a bad technique for a writer but this is supposed to be fun dammit.

So yeah, Future Highs mostly focuses on some White House office monkeys and follows how governmental administrative procedure breaks down when illicit substances collide with the law and everyone is required under penalty of death to be high on something at all times.

Here’s the prologue. Its one of many instances I’ve got planned in the book of post-event historical record and analysis, there’s going to be more of these.

As stated I won’t shove everything on my blog as that would be mental. Just bits and pieces and whereabouts the plot is at time of writing once a week.

FUTURE HIGHS

PROLOGUE: A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY

The draft bill was prepared at 6:36PM on Thursday the 13^th of January 2126 when President Hiesenfeld, then aged 86, was having a bad day. He was knee deep into his second term as president, opinion polls were down and it looked like not only himself, but any candidate offered up by the Republican Party for public approval were definitely going to be out on their asses before the next election. This was a factor of his bad year thus far, though not necessarily an overall cause of his bad day.

The factors that culminated in his bad day were as follows:

Governors were proposing full legalization up and down the country and putting pressure on those against it to head over to their side. He did not approve of this. Admittedly this had been going on for a while but it was there at the back of his mind every hour of the day and night.
Paul Sampson, one of his junior advisors had got busted for having a secret coke habit twenty four hours earlier. He had not been informed and only found out when he saw news anchors on Fox discussing how this reflected on his administration.
Some embarrassing evidence of the habits of his group of friends during his days as a student in the 50’s had just surfaced in the tabloids. It was all heresy at this point but there was severe speculation regarding the President himself.
A youth on a talk show interviewing one of his chief advisors on the drugs issue had called him a faggot.
The fridge door was broken and no one had mended it no matter how much he had yelled at anyone that would listen.
He had had an argument with his wife the day before – bedroom problems.
His knee had been hurting since Monday.

These reasons were etched into his brain when he entered that meeting. No one was about to cross him.

As his advisors consoled him and bowed to his every whim as they tossed the tetchy issue over, his precise words were as follows:

“They want it? Well they fucking got it! Junkie scum!”

The bill went to the senate and proved surprisingly popular among the general public who strongly swayed their senators’ votes. Of course it was split almost right down the middle at first but as with any proposal, it will swing either way depending on how it’s marketed. This particular bill was marketed to voters well because it was the result of the President throwing a tantrum.

The calls to opinion were inescapable. The media deluge was immense and all those against appeared to be pissing on everyone’s good enthusiasm.

Objectively speaking, one could say that the bill may have been taking things a bit too far. However government research and facts and figures and pie charts that had been smudged when the Surgeon general had spilt his coffee found themselves looking very comforting to a lot of doubting Thomases up and down the county.

Republican governors and others in the party were uneasy at first and were wondering if the President was actually losing his marbles. Then one by one they each decided they couldn’t be bothered and that their leader required more respect than they were giving him by their doubting and moaning. Whether he did deserve more credibility than he had been given was unclear, but let it also be noted that he often mistook the telephone for his pet budgie that had passed away three years previously. He also said once or twice that Enoch would have agreed with him.

The Democratic governors were overjoyed. Those skeptical of how seriously this bill would be handled by the President and his administration were blown away as they watched the bill pass its way through the senate into law and towards becoming an amendment.

Of course, there were those that stood against this idea no matter what the media said. Mostly they were families whose relatives had lost their lives or themselves owing to their respective habits. However the train of joy surrounding the idea was huge and if you weren’t on it then you were what was wrong with America.

Premises for recreational distribution centres were a key issue to the enactment of this amendment as costs would undoubtedly be high. The drug commissioning body decided the cheapest and most effective way to implement the amendment as quickly as possible was to buy up a large corporate chain with installations around the country with an already trained body of distribution and retail staff that was deemed to have no real purpose or general value to society or whose place could easily be filled by a competitor.

And so the entire nation’s branches of Burger King were converted into distribution houses. A national prescription was drafted and everything was set up in about two months ready for the instigation of compulsory recreational drug use. Following that, all governmental draft bills and records have either gone missing or are smudged with food stains and are completely illegible.

Unfortunately, before the effects of the amendment could be seen, President Hiesenfeld was tragically killed in an accident involving a small hippopotamus and some anal beads at his vacation home in Hawaii during a conference.

That was the story of President Hiesenfeld and his bitter end of life vendetta against junkie commie scum.

The story of the legislation’s impact is a much more interesting one.

The unfortunate knock on side effects of across the board international legalisation and accompanying compulsory highs for the entire population later taken on board and ratified by the U.N. into international law, was met with slight puzzlement and around 87% of the population of Earth trying to order a pizza at the same time.

The eventual side effects were world war and the decrease of the population to about 11 million.

Here’s how it happened:

Half a century after global legalisation and compulsation, President Melvin Dryce ran out of nachos one evening and decided the manufacturers must have stopped making them. After conferring with his cabinet of dude bros, they decided the best option was to nuke the evil Mexicans for stealing their nachos.

The nuke missed and hit Nicaragua instead. This caused neighbouring allies Brazil and Luxembourg (formerly Chile) both to bomb Mexico. No one knows why they did this.

The US, paranoid as ever, waged war on all of South America. All sides subsequently forgot they had nuclear weapons and lined up their troops at their borders, who then started hitting each other, called peace and went to have a picnic with hash cookies and lashings of LSD. All nations’ armies were then made to commit suicide by their respective nations’ leaders by telling them there was candy at the bottom of the ocean. Millions of soldiers died in search of that last Reese’s cupcake on the sea bed. The war didn’t end there though.

Special relation on their mother’s side, the United Kingdom, came to America’s aid. However Prime Minister Sparky McGowan forgot what he was doing, phoned up German President Eyesintheceiling and called him out for being a nonce. Sparky and Eyesintheceiling met up in France for a fistfight. Unfortunately, three days into their fist fight, French Prime Minister, Merlin McGriffin, decided they shouldn’t be allowed to have their fist fight here and had them thrown in the Ocean where they both died. The United Kingdom decided this just wasn’t on and nuked France while Germany nuked Russia for some reason.

Nuclear fallout rendered both nations pretty much uninhabitable to anyone except the mutants. The mutants occurred because unfortunately a change to nuclear formula by top UN scientist Einsteina Doolittle was to include powerful psychotropic drugs to the chemical formula. This caused a bizarre inexplicable side effect that caused a person’s flesh to mutate into weird shapes and turn different colours. The mutants were in incredible pain but at the same time they looked really pretty which was a contrast to when they went homicidal and started ripping people’s heads off.

The fallout landed on China where homicidal mutants migrated across Asia wreaking destruction in their path.

Horrified with the destruction, Australia got really bummed out and nuked itself.

And so eventually, the only place on the planet fit for human habitation was Belgium. Residents lived in a protected biosphere to keep radiated mutants out. The eleven million stoned residents, some Belgian, some survivors from a mix of other nations, were all confined to their homes by the supercomputer and its army of robot drones designed by the elder scientists of cheetos to keep everyone under control and very much alive. The robots also pooped small cheesy fried snacks at random intervals to feed the populace. And that was just how life ended up.

Or at least all of this would have happened, if it weren’t for the following events.

They concern a group of dysfunctional White House office drones and some misplaced filing cabinets.

Trust me, it gets better later…

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Stubagful NaNoWriMo 2013: Opening Gambit: Future Highs

Posted on 31/10/201311/11/2013 by stubagful

Anyone unaware, national novel writing month is an organisation challenging you to write a novel in a month. No rules on what it should be, just one month, write 50,000 words. Doesn’t matter if they’re spelt correctly or the grammar’s terrible, there’s no judgement, just write a novel, its easier to play with an idea when you force something out of you to play around with….that sounded wrong on so many levels.

Its a pretty decent idea for a writing exercise, especially in my case. I have at least twenty novel ideas that I haven’t had the excuse to dedicate the full amount of time required to them. And although out of the three times I’ve done nanowrimo before, I haven’t actually gone through and polished what I’ve written and tried to sell it (which is what you’re meant to do) that doesn’t stop me feeling like its necessary to do this again. I need to keep myself creatively active and this year’s idea I’ve been throwing around for a while since I was too lazy to do nanowrimo last year.

My NaNoWriMo Profile is here by the way: http://nanowrimo.org/en/participants/stubagful/

I’ll probably post updates on how its going once a week about where the story is at the moment, maybe an extract or two. I might end up shoving it out as a free epub with lulu if anyone gives a shit.

FUTURE HIGHS

Marijuana, LSD, cocaine and Ecstacy are just some of the substances that are generally illegal throughout the world. This novel postulates on what might happen if the exact opposite were true.

2133: President Arthur Hiesenfeld sets about making all currently illegal substances not just legal but mandatory at all times

2138: This happens.

2139: This becomes international law.

2178: World Population of two million people are consigned to Belgium after global war has reduced most inhabitants to multi coloured transforming acid creatures through a mess up with a nuclear formula and a dominoes pizza menu. All residents are fed by tiny little gremlin pets that excrete cheetos.

This is the story how one thing almost led to another and what we can learn from it.

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