Up The Stream of Consciousness Without a Paddle

Brace yourselves.

Written from scratch without an outline and without looking back, here's my winning entry in National Novel Writing Month 2005.

How do you win? Easy, write non-stop starting November 1st and don't quit till you hit 50,000 words or November 30th, whichever comes first. There's a link to the website on your right.

Is this a work of fiction or a frenzied game of word association? Beats me.

I'll preface with a quote from Thomas Mallon's book on diary writing, "A Book of One's Own," which I stumbled on in mid-novel.

"Is there something about writing so fast that inevitably leads to a kind of drained resolution, the pen having been turned into a runner that knows, perhaps not consciously, that it will break the tape and collapse in exhausted victory? If that is so, when one wakes from the rest that follows, is the victory still real, still there?"