NaNoWriMo Day 10 (& post card #2 & an injury & an excerpt!)

How am I supposed to write with an injured thumb?
I have to use that space button a lot, ya know?
And yes, that is an Iron Man bandaid :)

 Lots of fun things today! Went on a college visit all morning. I had two hours in the car and did absolutely no writing or school work. I know. I'm bad. But I enjoyed visiting with my dad :)

Sad thing happened while I was cleaning the kitchen, though. I cut my thumb with a Cutco knife. Those things are sharp!! I was bleeding all over the place. My thumb is in intense pain -- I can hardly push the space bar. Okay, okay, just kidding. But it is a minor set back =P

I made it to 16,705 words today! I am barely on track/ahead, but I haven't fallen behind yet! Will hopefully wake up early tomorrow and write so that I can work on school Sunday afternoon :)

Have a great weekend!

Oh, and one. More. Excerpt. Seriously, I am having way too much fun with these!

We loved our small frame house on Circle Way. It was a nice size, especially with the new add-on that Mom and Dad put in (an office and a small bathroom).

            There were disadvantages to living in that house, though. Basically every little critter you could ever think of lived in the attic or in the floor of that house.

            Opossums, rats, mice, raccoons… you name it! Probably the raccoons were the worst of them all. The other animals we could catch or poison. But not those pesky raccoons. They were much, much harder to get rid of.

Post card #2 from Williamsburg!
Sent by Monica. Thank you!!

            I think our first attempt at getting rid of the beasts was with some bait and a cage. The only problem with that was that those raccoons were smarter than we thought. They would either ignore the bait altogether or somehow get the bait and avoid getting captured by the cage.

            Our next attempt was music. We read or heard somewhere that if you play loud music all day so that they can’t sleep, the night-creatures will find a quieter, more peaceful place to live. But alas, that was also to no avail.

            Poor 7-year-old Kelsey couldn’t sleep sometimes because of the nasty critters living in our attic. They would roll around or fight just above her bed.

            She staggered into our parent’s bedroom one night, half sobbing as she said, “Daddy, the ca-coons are keeping me up again!”

            That was the final straw for Dad. He had tried to catch them in a humane way, to drive them off without even making contact, but they had to make this difficult, didn’t they?

            He jumped out of bed and headed for the closet where he kept his only weapon: a shot gun.

            “Lance,” Mom said, a bit panicky.

            He was already in the hallway, pulling the attic stares down from the ceiling with a loud squeak and a thump as they reached the floor. 

            “Lance!” Mom said again, a little louder, but to no avail. He was already halfway up the stairs by now, shot gun in hand.

            “Come on,” Mom told Kelsey. They grabbed Colleen and me and we sleepily made our way to the front porch. All four of us could fit on the green swing.

            “What’s Daddy doing?” I asked.

            “We’re just going to sit out here for a minute sweetie until—“

            Boom! Boom!

            Mom winced.

            I covered my ears.

            Colleen cried.

            Kelsey inhaled sharply.

            “What was that?”

            Before Mom could answer Dad was on the front porch.

            “Honey,” he said, serious and stern, “find us a new house.”

            35 days later, we called Daffodil our home. 

NaNoWriMo Day 6 (& another excerpt!)

I can't believe I've managed to blog every day of NaNo up to this point... I wonder how long that will last, haha!

Anyways... today's stats:

Word goal for today: 10,000 words
Total words written: 10,883
Words ahead: 883
10,000th word: Africa (talking about my Dad's mission trip!)

I got through to April 1998 today. Tomorrow, Colleen is going to be born and Dad is going to get Malaria ;)

And, I talked a girl I know into trying NaNoWriMo. I told her it wasn't too late to join in this year (lol!) but she's going to opt to try it sometime next year if she goes for it. I told her maybe she and I could try a different month than November and do it earlier in the year together. We'll see...

Another excerpt was requested so here is a short one from Chapter 5: 1998 --

Mom records January 6, 1998 as a day where Kelsey and I played “Mary and Joseph” all morning. She said the piano bench was our donkey. I guess the Christmas story was still fresh in our minds and we didn’t want the festivities to stop.

            Apparently we had just purchased two fish the day before. When Kelsey and I finally took a break from playing to go into our room and check on our new pets, they were both dead.

            One of them was floating on top, upside down. The other one had sunk to the bottom.

            Kelsey exclaimed, “We better call the pound, quick!”

            Mom tried to explain that they could probably handle this type of thing without the pound getting involved.

            Kelsey said, “Well, Jessica just flushes them down the toilet when her fish die.”

            Mom didn’t think this was such a bad idea.

            I remember Dad later that day taking the fish bowl into the bathroom and flushing our two little goldfish down the toilet. It was rather dramatic to see the little gold things swirling around the toilet and then watching them disappear. But to be honest, I thought they were going off to a better place. I thought they were heading to a pond somewhere and would be revived and alive as soon as they got there.

            I guess I didn’t realize they were dead. 

NaNoWriMo Day 5 (& an excerpt!)

Done with 1997! And up to nearly 10,000 words

Word count goal for today: 8,333 words
8,333rd word: David
Total words written: 9,352
Words over word goal: 1019

Yay! Going well. I'm a little worried that my early childhood is a bit boring. But, I tried to make this part of my life pretty humorous. Despite this, I keep reminding myself that the people who are going to ever read this are the people who are actually going to care about these little moments in my life. I'm not writing for a nation-wide audience.

But, here is an excerpt if you are interested in reading about a moment in my life. This is from Chapter 4: 1997 --

During this time in 1997 Mom and Dad were busy making home improvements to our little frame house on Circle Way. Painting the walls, improving the ceiling, adding on an extra bathroom. They were doing it all! New sidewalk, plumbers coming and going, and bills for these improvements piling up. But Mom and Dad were happy. They were making their house a home.

            During all this, Kelsey and I had to find a way to entertain ourselves. We certainly weren't going to do any of this hard work. We were ladies, after all. And according to Kelsey, ladies don’t have to work. We had recently installed new carpet. A blue carpet. It was pretty, but a little rough. Not so shaggy and soft. But we still liked it.

            However, as a two year old, I’m still getting the hang of this whole walking thing. So running was still a bit difficult. And on new carpet… that’s just asking for trouble.

            So while Kelsey and I tried to entertain ourselves, we decided a game of Duck, Duck, Goose would suffice.

            Yes, there were only two of us. Yes, you need more than two people to play Duck, Duck, Goose.

            But Kelsey and I didn't care. We would have this whole Duck, Duck, Goose thing down without any help from anybody else.

            We would use the coffee table! Yes, that would be perfect!

            So whoever was “It” would start circling around the persons head saying the word “duck” about a thousand times. Finally, they would say the word “goose” and the sister sitting on the carpet would get up, run around the coffee table once, and try to sit down without being tagged.

            Now, we played several peaceful rounds of this. Catching each other, missing each other, laughing, playing. 

            Kelsey circled me, her hand on my head, saying, “Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck…” until finally she shouted, “goose!!”

            I got up and started running. But I didn’t make it far.

            Slip, BOOM!

            I fell over on our new blue carpet, tripping over my own feet I’m sure. I hit the corner of our coffee table – the one we had already had for years and the one we would have for years to come.

            My forehead busted open. Blood started spilling down the side of my face. Tears were falling and I began screaming. 

            I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but I know we went to Dr. Bottenfield’s office and I had to get four stitches.

            When Mom and Dad later asked me what I was doing, I replied, “Playing Duck, Duck, Goose with Kelsey.”

            “With only two of you?” they asked, thinking maybe I meant to say a different game.

            “Yup,”

            Mom and Dad would talk about this day for a long, long time. I don’t suppose their laughing eyes as they recount this story has a thing to do with Kelsey and me playing a two-person version of Duck, Duck, Goose, does it? Certainly not. 

           At any rate, I certainly hope I didn't get any blood on the carpet...

Ten Plagues Excerpt

Ok, so, I'm at 3,300 words. That's about 50 words a day since my last post. HA! That's pretty darn bad. I think this month has just slipped away...I've been trying to finish classes and swim team is keeping me pretty busy. But school is on hold for now and there won't be as much swim so I can focus more on friends and family and writing. Thanksgiving was great but seems like a century ago. Christmas is in 6 days and I still have presents to get, friends coming for a visit, and two songs/one monologue I have to get ready for a Christmas Eve service. I am preparing for the busy week ahead but want to write about 750 words a day if possible (check out 750words.com). That would add almost 10,000 words to my novel by the end of December if I could muster (yes, muster) the time to write that much. Really, 750 is not hard at all. And translated into book form, that's about 3 pages. 


Here is an excerpt from the prologue of Ten Plagues. My MC is named Jendayi but is called Jen. She is nine years old.

After she finished her chores, Jen and Ebonique, Jen’s older sister by one year, were playing in the street. They lived just on the edge of the Hebrew community. In fact, their house nearly touched that of the Hebrew homes. They dared not enter the defined threshold, though. The Hebrews were slaves. And although Jen and her family were poor, they were not slaves and they did not share the same beliefs as the Hebrews – an even larger reason not to associate with them.

            “Ebonique, you better get in here and finish your chores,” Jamila called to her daughter.

            “You didn’t finish your chores?” Jen asked with a laugh.

            “Well,” Ebonique said, “Not exactly,”

            Ebonique ran back to the house and Jen sat on the sand, wondering what she would do now that her playmate had to go. She stuck her finger in the sand and started to draw a simplistic depiction of a little girl. She soon opened her hand, though, and cleaned her drawing slate. She drew a little triangle next as she thought about the pyramids that surrounded the area. But that did not take long so she erased it as well. She now had no inspiration.

           Jen lifted her head and started looking around for something to draw. She caught a glimpse of the Hebrew community as she sometimes did but she never looked for long. This time, though, her eyes did not bounce away from the eyes of a little girl, a Hebrew, staring back at her. The girl looked about the same age as Jen but she looked so different. She had lighter skin, blonde hair, and bright eyes. The girl smiled at Jen. Jen looked away. 

Merry Christmas
I'm going to go write now :)

NaNoWriMo Day 10

Well, it is mid-afternoon on Day 10 and I have reached 17,000 words which is above the daily quota :D Kelsey has helped me try to figure out some plot twists and things to throw in so that I can add words, make it more interesting, and of course not get to board with it.

I used Write or Die again today and wrote 830 words in about 20 minutes. I think Write or Die is a super helpful tool! I know I keep talking about it but it really works for me.

So, here is an excerpt and a synopsis of my novel taken from the first chapter with [brackets added] one time for clarification. This is the same excerpt that I have on my NaNoWriMo page.


Synopsis: Mermaid

Nerin is a mermaid with a horrible life. She has no father, a depressed mother, and an annoying/emotional older brother. After running away from her wedding to a merman named Merrick, her mother only gives her 2 years to find another husband. However, love doesn't come to Nerin right away. A year later, she is still single with no prospective husband in sight. Will she find love in the ocean? Or will she find true love somewhere else?

Excerpt: Mermaid

Merrick stood there, looking quite conceited. I thought he was supposed to look happy on his wedding day but his mouth formed a look of satisfaction for oneself. Oh his smugness. I can hardly stand it now. How can I stand to spend the next eighty-one years of my life with him?

The wedding coordinator started. “Merrick of Delta Marisol, do you take Nerin, also of Delta Marisol, to be your wife until you both depart this form and again become foam of the sea?”

“Yes,” Merrick said.

“And do you, Nerin of Delta Marisol, take Merrick, also of Delta Marisol, to be your husband until you both depart this form and again become foam of the sea?”

I stood there, and blinked. How could I? I was leaving one miserable home for yet another. I was leaving my crazy Mother and emotional brother for the smug Merrick. How could I do that?

“No,” I whispered.

“Speak up,” the wedding coordinator whispered to me. I must have said it softer than I had thought.

“No,” I said louder, much louder. “I will not take Merrick to be my husband,” I said to the coordinator. “I am sorry,” I turned to Merrick, “but I really do not think we are supposed to be together. I hope you find the one you are supposed to be with and that you live a happy life together,”

Merrick’s look of satisfaction for himself turned into shock. I left as fast as I could back down the aisle I had come from and went straight to my small dressing room, locking the door. I hadn’t even looked at my Mother’s face. I am sure it was a look of horror.

It wasn’t two seconds before my Mother came to the door. “Open up, Nerin!” she shouted, “You must marry him,” she insisted.

“Or what? Surely you will take me back into your home, Mother. I am sorry but I just can’t marry him,”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Surely you can see why. He’s so arrogant,” I said, the truth coming out.

“You are so ungrateful! You get out here, you are getting married,”

“Leave me alone, Mother,” I begged, “Just leave me alone.”

She began on another rampage, which I ignored. Meanwhile, Amaya [my best friend] came around the building and tapped on my window. I unlocked it and let her in. I put my finger up to my mouth, signaling her to be quite. She nodded and we sat down and I started softly crying into her chest. She patted my head and stroked my back as my Mother continued on her escapade.

“Fine,” my Mother at last began to wrap things up. “If you don’t want to marry him, then you will have to find another husband, and soon. I am giving you two years. And that’s being generous,” she said, as if she was doing me a favor, and then she left.



Please tell me what ya think! Thanks :)

Later edit in March 2010: I have edited this first chapter a lot since then so don't hold this terrible writing against me, lol. You have to write fast during NaNoWriMo if you want to survive! :)