I’ve been struggling with the excerpts from the bad novels that I am sprinkling though this year’s NaNoWriMo. The thing is, while all of the writing is rough, I haven’t managed to push the preposterometer to the ridiculous levels I was shooting for. I have fallen far short, for instance, of the ridiculous plot of Step on a Crack.

Until today.

As the month closes out, I have finally managed to write a scene that would rival some of the most ridiculous action stories out there. I haven’t quite reached the level of, say that Die Hard movie that takes place at an airport — I honestly don’t think I’m capable of that level of suspension of thought — or the afore-mentioned Crack, but at last I’ve written something that gets me into that general neighborhood.

In the scene our hero:

• Runs from machine-gun fire, only getting hit in the shoulder.
• Jumps off a bridge while clinging to a bungee-jumper. (Oh, yeah, our hero is afraid of heights.)
• Has flashbacks the whole way down until he and the bungee jumper are plunged into the river. (I think I forgot to call the water ‘icy’ in the scene. You can’t be throwing a hero into water that’s not icy.)
• While hanging there upside-down, sees a bomb on the underside of the bridge
• Releases the bungee jumper so the bungee flings him back up to the underside of the bridge, right next to The Bomb To End All Bombs^tm (which gives time-until-detonation updates in a female voice)
• Uses a piece of debris from an exploding police car to open the hatch on the bomb
• Defuses the bomb
• Gets knocked off the bridge to fall into the raging river below when his own car explodes

The “performing well even when you’ve been shot” thing is all the rage in movies these days, and has become one of my new genre peeves; it seems you can’t have a good guy go a full ninety minutes without absorbing some amount of metal. It’s not allowable that the hero’s performance be in any way diminished, however — he still has to kick ass and take names! Apropos of little, I recently read an assertion by an emergency-room doctor that gang kids who get shot are amazed at just how painful it is to have a bullet in your flesh.

I’m not sure whether I’ll post the scene here or not. Tomorrow I’ll try to decide if it reaches so-bad-it’s-funny level or just wallows in the so-bad-it’s-a-waste-of-time-to-read zone.

Sweet!

Thanks!