(diaryland) November 01, 2010 - 7:45 a.m.

I'm sorry. I think I left my phone charger at work and my phone ran out so I couldn't call anyone and I was asleep too. I slept basically the entire weekend.

Yeah, I'm November Novelling. God. I have no plan this time. SOmetimes I do, sometimes I don't. For some reason, this novel scares me. Possibly because it's the third year in a row I've done it. Next year, I'd really better not.

THE FLOWER WORLD

Prologue

Bryn Mossman. The man who was about to wake up. The Second Son of a Second Son.

Those Second Sons of Second Sons didn�t really have any special powers. It was those Seventh Sons you had to keep your eye on a lot of the time. They had Second Sight, apparently. It would be a fair exchange if Second Sons had Seventh Sight, but they didn�t. I feel that Seventh Sight could have been X-ray based, but it didn�t exist, so it wasn�t, and he wasn�t. He was just him.

And So It Was Written.

This is the story of him. Bryn Mossman; the one who would not do much out of the ordinary off his own bat. The one who wasn�t a Seventh Son. The one who wasn�t chosen for anything really really cool, except as the subject of this novel. The one who things would happen to, not the other way around. Bryn Mossman did not happen to anyone. He was nearly like a chameleon to most people, especially in his typical habitat, which was Melbourne. He was half Australian-born Welsh, one quarter Australian-born English, one quarter Something Else (not aliens or anything; his grandma was from one of those Central Asian former USSR places where all the photos you see made it look like everybody wore stuff looking like they were from the 1800s, the country starting with a K, maybe). He was a guy in a white shirt with reasonable sideburn length. Which is fine, but -

I don�t know if you know, but everyone has a kind of Richter Scale. But it looks more like a Bell Curve, overall. The events of a life could be plotted out with an especially sensitive needle; the incredible length of paper spanning the years marked with a little wiggly line that most often wiggled up to a high point, and then wiggled down again in an inexorable slow decline over several kilometres, with a few deep dips usually corresponding to a time where you had to go to a funeral, or pass through a massive break-up.

Bryn Mossman was right at the top of this wiggly curve, poised to go down the other side. This is the story of how he got to the other side. There may be some deep dips along the way, or a couple of pointy bits. I reserve the right to fuck with Bryn Mossman�s Life Graph, as I�m calling it now.

If only he could have gotten his hands on his metaphorical wiggly graph to see what was coming. Actually, when I think about it now, if he had managed to find it and have a look, it would have looked just like a plateau because only I know the rest of the graph, and I�m making it up on the spot, so he couldn�t have deduced anything. And he may have been mildly confused about the fact that he was looking at a wiggly line on an incredibly long piece of paper you don�t normally get to see in real life with his name on it. Because that�s all they have. The wiggly line, and the name. If your name changes by Deed Poll, it�s already on there when you begin, in brackets.

But wait a sec � if the graph is being drawn as you live your life, but the name you may change to by Deed Poll is already written on the graph in brackets, what�s going on there? Does this graph know everything already from the start, or doesn�t it?

I don�t trust this graph, man.

Bryn Mossman. The man who was about to wake up. The guy who was having a great time right about now, even in his sleep. The guy who had temporarily been freed from the shackles of his fairly good however monotonous accounting job, and temporarily freed from telling his housemate to just wash up one time to see how it feels, and that his housemate might actually enjoy the new sensation. The man who was about to return to this mass-produced existence.

He may have taken himself out of this life for four-and-a-half weeks, but he was about to throw himself back in. He may be throwing himself back in voluntarily, but he was not about to live the same life.

It had nothing to do with his housemate washing up in an Incredible Surprise when Bryn got home. I can tell you now, his housemate will never wash up. Anyway, his housemate knew what washing up was like; he�d done it as a kid a few times after he had produced from the over an invariably sunken, food-colouring-laden cake.

It was more to do with Me. I�m not actually in the novel. I�m more like a god-like presence who refers to themselves in the first person when they feel like talking about stuff they�re doing to the story. I�m just going to be the one to lay obstacles and trying situations in Bryn Mossman�s path. So far, I haven�t done anything except give you some guy�s name and then briefly describe his ancestry, talk about some graph that doesn�t quite make proper sense, and allude to a housemate. We will learn more about this housemate later.

Bryn Mossman. The Second Son of a Second Son. The man who was about to wake up.

The man who would cry. The man who would have a headache. The man who went home to a place that never felt exactly right. The man who would hallucinate. The man who felt like a malevolent seed of the land in which he was situated right now had entered him and was growing and doing odd things. The man who wouldn�t be quite sure anymore, but realise he was that way anyway, but at least he knew now. The man on a decline. Nothing would ever be as purely good and simplified again as this Contiki Trip.

Bryn Mossman was out cold right now.