Mia poked at her laptop again. Day eleven? Really? she thought to herself.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she asked herself while pacing the square. “Amy has just had a bad date, Ian’s nice and content with his toys, Brenda’s having fun doing whatever the hell it is she does, and Mr. Ian Woon is out of the picture. I could write another day of Ian at school, but who wants to read about that?” Mia turned a corner toward the Plot Doctoring forum. “And I can’t kill someone because I’ve already sort of done that, and it was not with the traveling shovel of death!” She entered the Plot Doctoring forum and started digging through the adoptable stuff stickied near the entrance.
“I already have a plot,” she said to herself. “I have characters. I don’t have a subplot! Let’s see.” She touched the Adopt a Subplot thread and vanished.
It began as a lightheaded and dizzy feeling. “Oh god, this can’t be happening,” Mia thought, and she looked around for a place to lie down, only to realize that she wouldn’t want to lie down here because all the walls were sticky. Even the floor was sticky. Besides, even if the floor were comfortable, she couldn’t lie down.
Her finger was stuck to the wall. Mia tried to unstick it so she could walk out and lie down on one of those eraser benches (once she got used to them, they proved to be quite comfortable when she took a nap between sessions), but the more she pulled, the more the wall resisted, and eventually she just gave up and let the finger stick to the wall. The wall sucked her in, and the force of it made Mia close her eyes.
Mia didn’t know what happened next; all she knew was that her eyes were closed and that she wasn’t standing or sitting. Was it possible that she was floating? She didn’t dare open her eyes or flail for fear of falling. It was a rather peaceful feeling, and it was only when she fell to the ground and landed on her backside (the floor was quite comfortable, she noted) that she opened her eyes and looked around.
Wrimos were milling about, and by now seeing some of them accompanied by strange-looking figures, some of which weren’t even human, was perfectly natural. Mia looked straight ahead, where a door stood in front of her.
Adopt a Subplot. Mia smiled. The sticky thread did know well. She got up, dusted herself off even though there was nothing to dust off, and walked through the door into the forum.
Pages and pages of subplots filled the walls, and Wrimos walked in and out of the room, leaving and adopting their very own subplots. A few other Wrimos stood around the room, none of them leaving subplots, but all of them trying to adopt.
“Are you stuck too?” Mia asked the Wrimo nearest her.
The other Wrimo nodded. “My characters just won’t do anything,” he replied. I’ve run out of ideas in my first ten thousand words, and now I need something to carry them through the next forty thousand without getting to the end by twenty thousand.”
“What is your word count?” Mia asked, looking up at his blue bar. She couldn’t help but notice that his blue bar wasn’t as long as hers.
“Eleven thousand,” he replied, looking down.
“That’s okay,” Mia replied. “I’m not much further ahead. I’m at thirteen thousand.”
“And I’ve done this before too!” he exclaimed. “You’d think I’d know better by now to get ahead in the first week, but no, my whole family decided to come into town for the entire first week, and something possessed me to say yes.”
“I don’t have an excuse,” Mia told him. “My characters just haven’t been doing anything, and the writing just hasn’t been there.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied. “Let’s see what we have here. Ooh, a romantic subplot.”
“I tried that,” Mia said. “Crashed and burned after their first date.”
“What happened?” he asked. “Did the date die?”
“No,” Mia replied. “He thought that my character’s four-year-old brother was her son.”
“She should run into him again,” he replied. “Preferably with a new date who doesn’t believe that nonsense.”
Mia pondered this. “But how will she prove it?” she asked. “And I haven’t even gotten to my real plot yet.”
“Why not?”
“It’s kind of boring, to be honest. I touched on it awhile back, but now I just want to write about my character’s love life.”
The other Wrimo looked at her. “You do know that there’s an entire industry designed around romance, right? You don’t have a bad idea there.”
“I know,” Mia replied, sighing. “I just need the motivation to write.” She paused. “What are you writing about?”
“An investigator who falls in love with the murdered person’s wife,” he replied.
“And you don’t have conflict enough right there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just needs something… more. Something that won’t make this a bunch of sex and investigating and his breaking the news to her at the end.”
“Have you considered giving the killer some connection to the investigator? Just a weird coincidence,” Mia suggested.
“Hmm… I’ll have to think about that.” And he ran out of the room without another word. Mia, however, was left only with questions. Where would Amy meet a new date? What would they do next? What kind of person would he be to accept that Ian wasn’t Amy’s son?
Mia sat down on an eraser bench outside the forum and began to write, thinking that she had just solved her entire plot. Unfortunately, only five hundred more words came out that day, and Mia found herself staring at the laptop an hour later, trying to figure out what to do after Amy introduced herself to the curator of a new local gallery. She came up with nothing, though, and walked away with nothing new on her mind.
****
Part Twenty already? Granted, I know how many parts are left, but still. Mia has quite the road ahead of her for the rest of the month. I’m pretty sure the unnamed Wrimo’s plot has been done before. I’d say this is why said Wrimo is unnamed, but the real reason is because I didn’t want to go through this entire scene and write a name in. Yeah, I’m lazy.
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