The Guinea Pig Trilogy

The Guinea Pig Trilogy began with National Novel Writing Month 2010. Thousands of writers worldwide sign up to meet the challenge of writing a 50,000 word draft novel in 30 days.

During NaNoWriMo 2010 I churned out a 50,000 word draft novel called Pig Tails.

During NaNoWriMo 2011 I churned out a 40,000 word draft sequel called Boars Behaving Badly. About 10,000 words in I realised I was barely halfway through a trilogy. My muse had omitted to convey this message earlier, presumably because my attendant anxiety would have caused a bad case of writer's block. As it is, I missed the deadline by 10,000 words.

During NaNoWriMo 2013 and 2014 I completed another 90,000 words, including a surprise fourth book. My muse has an evil sense of humour. I now have 180,000 words awaiting editing, and a fearful headache.

You can read an excerpt below. The Guinea Pig Trilogy is a work in progress and will be published first as an
e-series complete with sound effects, movie clips and a link to the Guinea Pig Empire website which will be completed as soon as I have a break from editing.

Appetiser (frites, shaved pumpkin, with sea salt)

All night long a blonde guinea pig haunted Merridy’s dreams. He was large, sleek and one-eyed. He hovered over the landscape like an enormous golden blimp, suspended by flimsy-looking angel wings.

Those wings don’t look strong enough to hold up an enormous golden blimp, Merridy dreamed vaguely, watching the apparition float about in a pleasantly blue sky. The blimp fixed her with his eye. Merridy, struck painfully in the chest with a hefty remorse for dreaming the word blimp, immediately performed a penance under the blankets. Sixteen nocturnal genuflections plus promises of a magnificent feast of leftover Halloween pumpkin. Enough to feed at least sixteen guinea pigs. It eased the pain, at least to bearable levels, but Merridy groaned in her sleep as the enormous golden blimp flashed her with his halo. She tossed fretfully, muttering ‘no more weetbix, no more weetbix’. She was having nightmares about overfeeding a large golden blimp and giving him a heart attack. It was her mother’s fault for feeding him breakfast on bed, weetbix and bran worms, day after day instead of putting him out with the herd to burn off some fat. Then she, Merridy, the guinea pig mother, couldn’t stop him.

In her dream the blonde guinea pig looked at her mother, the guinea pig grandmother, and her mother, the guinea pig grandmother, fed him another weetbix. Merridy thought, my mother, the guinea pig grandmother, is hypnotised.

Hazel the Pig-God Rules.

Hazel Pinkears Little Nipper Pugh. Once Hazel Tiny Weeny Baby. Now deceased in a corporeal sense, but in every other, alive and wielding that eye to his better advantage. Mao Tse Hazel looks at Merridy from the bedhead, the dressing table, the kitchen bench, the bathroom mirror. His Highness sits above her desk, exquisite in his blonde pelt, groomed to perfection, whiskers at attention, the rose petal ear proclaiming his pedigree. He exited this earthly paradise too soon, of a heart attack feasibly linked to an overenthusiastic taste for weetbix, but reincarnated with angel wings and a persistent habit of lurking about Merridy’s subconscious. Hence, the biggest photograph in the maternal bedroom is a photograph of Hazel, organised by a useful minion after the burial ceremony of the said Hazel, for which the useful minion dug the hole in freezing weather with snow halfway down Mount Wellington.

The minion had out-lived his uses, but unfortunately for Merridy, she had not outlived hers.