Excerpt: Twenty Ways Not To Meet Hugh Laurie

You know how it is. You innocently click a link in an email, or go searching for something in Google or on YouTube, and three hours later, you're still surfing the web or watching videos, and you can't even remember what it was you went looking for to begin with. That happened to Ariel all the time, but on that particular October day, she found a web site she was going to hold onto. It was called NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. She'd always been a writer, usually a songwriter, but she was pretty good with anything, as many of her teachers over the years had told her.

So this web site she found explained a contest wherein people all over the world -- because it was now international but had never changed the name -- tried to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That was it. She couldn't even remember how she'd gotten to the site, or what else she had looked at along the way, because she was so intrigued by this new idea. She'd never tried writing a novel, although short stories certainly were not foreign to her. And since it was October, she had just a bit of time until National Novel Writing Month was to begin. She bookmarked the page and set her mind to come up with a novel idea. (Get it? A novel idea? Yeah, you like the pun, admit it.)

The tricky part for Ariel was getting to November. She was about to move half-way across the country. Why? Because. She was just like that. If she got tired of a location, she just packed up and moved on. That was part of the beauty of renting. Well, there really was no other beauty to renting. She actually hated renting; loud and inconsiderate neighbors, apathetic management, no maintenance. She dreamed of the day she owned her own house. But that wasn't in the cards for her just yet.

So she packed up as much as she could fit in her ten year old Corolla and a U-haul trailer and headed off for Salt Lake City. She'd had an unexplained fascination with genealogy since she young, and that was the place to be for genealogy research, home of the biggest genealogy library in the world.

The journey to Salt Lake City had a few bumps along the way. Somehow, she ended up going through Wyoming, which wasn't the smartest move on her part. They had some kind of aversion there to properly dealing with snowy and icy roads; they liked to dump sand on them. That didn't melt the ice or create much traction, but it sure made a gooey, brown mess that ended up all over her white car.

The big snow storm that came through was also part of the problem. She eventually found herself at a big sign on the highway warning drivers that they needed snow tires or chains to continue. Whoops. So naturally, Ariel figured that, if they don't want people driving any farther, they'll have the next exit available for exiting and possibly turning back to the nearest city, right? Wrong. She got off the exit and discovered that it was pure ice. After just barely getting down the ramp, she found herself drifting across the ice and finally sliding down into a ditch. Trouble. Oddly enough, no one else was getting off at the exit. She couldn't figure out why that was. Was everyone else warned earlier to get off the road and no one told her?

What was even worse was that she was in a total dead zone with her cell phone. You would think the major carriers would cover the interstates, but not there. So instead, having discovered that she had patience in college, not having learned the concept from her parents earlier in life, she waited around until a couple of pick-up trucks came by to help pull her out. Then she followed them down the road for a mile and stayed the night in a little motel in Fort Nowheresville, Wyoming.

The next morning, the snow had stopped falling, and she made her way the last thirty miles to Utah. Thirty miles from Utah? She couldn't believe she was that close and stopped. She never did see a sign welcoming her to Utah, or telling her that she was entering the county, but she knew the exact moment when it happened: she saw the road for the first time in a day. In fact, there was a very distinct line of snow and ice, and then road. Utah had an unusual overabundance of ice, after all.

Ariel drove into Salt Lake City and headed for an extended stay hotel that she'd scoped out ahead of time. She had the U-haul trailer for another day, so she could take her time finding storage. But it was the first day of November, time to start her novel. She hadn't really thought about it very much and realized that the only think she could think to write was one of her daydreams: meeting Hugh Laurie. He was her current obsession. She loved him on House, but as usual with her obsessions, she fed it. She went back and watched Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Flight of the Phoenix, The Young Visiters, and still had a few things waiting on her computer to be watched. She loved him when he was younger and doing comedy, and she loved the older and more sophisticated and damaged House.

So, since Hugh Laurie was filling her mind, she decided that that was what she would write about. Twenty Ways Not to Meet Hugh Laurie. She'd come up with a few to start: totally unlikely and impossible events in which she would meet him. Or were they events where she would never meet him? Either way, some were absurd and hopefully would make for interesting stories.

Her first idea was the most unlikely. How likely was she to not only be abducted by aliens, but also find Hugh Laurie on the ship with her at the same time? And in a situation where they would actually have a chance to talk? Ariel decided to start with a scenario slightly more likely to happen, though not at all really likely to happen. She knew that she was going to go to Los Angeles the next summer. There was a genealogy conference that she attended annually, and that summer was set for California. That was more likely to be more likely, but still not likely to happen.

She unpacked a few things in her hotel room, setting up her laptop on the small desk provided. She had picked up some fast food for breakfast on her way to the hotel, so she sat down to start writing. And so she began her quest, for the first time, to write a 50,000 word novel.