Apathy Sketchpad

Yes, I did NaNoWriMo this year.

Yes, I won.

No, you can’t read it.

But here is an extract anyway. It’s one of my favourite passages that doesn’t involve Nigel and that doesn’t so much as hint at the plot, setting, or genre:

Hannah had been allowed in to see Alex for a while, since the doctors didn’t have any particular reason to be in there. As far as they were concerned, he was the healthiest person they’d seen in years, apart from being in a coma, and he’d only been in a coma for a couple of hours. He could just be a heavy sleeper. She wasn’t really sure what she was supposed to feel. She was relieved that he didn’t seem to be hurt at all, but terrified because he wouldn’t wake up. She couldn’t shake either feeling, despite the fact that until then she’d considered them mutually exclusive. It was like feeling dizzy, or using menthol shampoo in a warm shower. She stayed with him for five minutes before both feelings quietly subsided to boredom. They ebbed away so subtly it wasn’t until she got to ‘more beer for Alex’ that she realised she’d been sat there doing her shopping list while her boyfriend lay there not moving. Then she felt guilty, and angry, and resolved to stop having contradictory emotions about things, a resolution she utterly failed to keep when a doctor came in and told her she had to leave now, making her feel bad about leaving Alex on his own and glad that she didn’t have to stay there feeling conflicting emotions about everything. She could go and feel them in the privacy of her own home.

At half past midnight she decided that if she couldn’t feel an internally consistent gamut of emotions, then she must logically have gone insane. A moment later she decided that that was probably perfectly normal in her situation, and therefore nothing to worry about. Then she realised that that made her both insane and normal simultaneously. That neatly explained the conflicting emotions she’d been feeling all evening, and now that that was cleared up she was finally able to get some sleep.