FTJ: 1-9-08

Today was the first day of school. I don't have my uniform yet, but I dressed in a blue shirt with khaki pants. The uniform is khaki shirt and pants, with a blue jean jacket, and you have to wear it every day, except on gym day. Anita and I went to the school, El Colegio Tecnologico Superior "Daniel Reyes", or Daniel Reyes for short, at eight in the morning. It's a small school, but it has some fantastic murals, with figures of people and mountains.

When I arrived, all the students were standing in lines in the courtyard. There are less than two hundred students, a change from the three thousand in my school in the US. I am the tallest here, which is a little strange. I have always been big, but there was always someone taller than me. Here? No. I am the tallest. That poor Chris, who's taller than I am, probably feels even weirder. He's 6'6".

Anita and I talked with the Rectora, a person who I think is equal to the American principal. There was no problem with my application except that I needed a letter from AFS. The Rectora was a little arrogant. She told Anita that it made her mad that AFS hadn't given anything to the school to show their gratitude for receiving so many foreign students. I thought she was talking about a thank you letter, or something like that, but no. The Rectora told us that the other foreign exchange programs had given them something useful like a printer. How small, arrogant, and rude! To believe, no, to ask for a gift for a service that makes the world better. When anita explained to me what the Rectora had said, I was very mad. But, whatever. I didn't say anything.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and because this is important, I'm writing in English. (NOTE: Prior to this, it was in Spanish, remember.) November is coming, and besides the election, that means NaNoWriMo. (NOTE: NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which I have competed in successfully for the past three years. For this competition, contestants are charged with writing a 50,000 words novel in the month of November. It's tough. But I'm amazing. Lawl.) And, given that I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, I've decided on not exactly a horror story, but definitely Lovecraft-inspired. Now, ever since I've been in Ecuador, I've been in awe of the mountains they have here, iant things, with heads in the clouds, peppered with green trees, carved into chasms a thousand feet tall, bathed in sunlight and clouded in darkness at the same time. I was staring at one of the mountains, a particularly large one, and a passage jumped into my mind unbidden, describing the above with perfect clarity, and I knew, without a doubt, what I was going to write.

SPOILER WARNING.

It will be entitled The Mountain, which admittedly sounds kind of trite, but I wanted something solid, heavy, and few things are as solid or heavy as a mountain. The main narrator will be an up-and-coming fiction writer who has just sold his or her first work, a moderately successful novel. This writer is approached by a young man who is being plagued by strange dreams, visions, really, and is beginning to hear voices in his head, speaking a language he has never heard. This is all connected, of course, to the mountain. I intend to start with a long Lovecraftian introduction of the writer emploring the reader to believe the following text, despite the recently established genre of the writer. There were be a segment entailing how the writer met the afflicted man, in a shop buying a pen, perhaps, when he seduces her, I'm pretty sure it'll be a her, into writing his story. He uses strange gold trinkets, another Lovecraftian device. His story culminates with an incredibly strange and frightening discovery at the top of the mountain. I'm not quite sure what the discovery is yet, I've in fact been putting off deciding so that it is all the more spontaneous. There is then some confusion when the narration of the young man ends and the writing somehow ends up on top of the mountain and finds out that contained in this mountain is a very tall tower that reaches down to the mountains roots.

That's about as far as I've gotten, but I like the way it's developing. I need to do some work to make it my story, and not an exact Lovecraft rip-off, but I'll figure something out. I always do.

293 more days.

Hey, I'm sorry about not having pictures up. They'll be up tomorrow. If you didn't, I also uploaded the entry for 31-8-08, so read the next one. Thanks for the comment, M. I love all you guys.

Oh, hey! I'm going to start taking guitar lessons next week! I'm just hoping to learn "Bret You Got It Going On" for when any of my monosyllabically-named friends are feeling down. Chris, I'm talking to you. :-P