This is When I Get Back on the Horse

Yay, celebrate, I actually got a reasonable word count in today and my muse has returned (hopefully for a more prolonged stay this time), however, I did not get back on the NaNo horse early enough in the day to write the almost 4,000 words required to catch up. Blah.

Today's final word count: 3,895. Word count for tomorrow: 8,335. Yes, I have to more than double what I have written so far to get back on track tomorrow, but I'm on a roll and I think if I don't make it I will at least get close. You see, our heroine is in a potentially lethal situation, which I will not reveal at this time, with her back literally up against the wall and the adrenaline is running high. Things are going to get rough and I'm stoked.

OK, I can't deny anyone this information--I'm just too excited! Hink is currently trapped in a cage with a 12-foot, venomous, flying snake-dragon that is supposed to be sedated and is not. Did I mention she is armed only with a whip? Yeah, it's about to go down in the snake-dragon cage. I promise to share the action--expect an excerpt tomorrow.

This is When My Muse Decides to be as Useful as a Lead Balloon

Due to some unforeseeable circumstances, I ended up staying up until 4:30AM yesterday/this morning. And, I think due to that unfortunate turn of events, my muse has deserted me. She didn't even leave a note or any spare ideas. Of course, there are also several other possible explanations such as being busier than any 19-year-old has any business being or not making a novel outline BEFORE NaNo. Regardless, I am in desperate need of some sleep and without any inspiration so I'm making the difficult and absolutely irresponsible decision to call it a night with only 2,911 words out of 5,001.

Yes, that means being responsible for a whopping 3,357 words tomorrow, but it also means approaching that ridiculous amount of work with a solid night's sleep under my belt. I'd give you an excerpt, but nothing spectacular has come our heroine's way tonight.

This is When I Realize You Can't Make a Silk Purse out of an Hour and a Half

Today was my first Senate meeting as Secretary and the sheer logistics required for meeting preparation left me with no time before the meeting to work with and, as you can see from the time stamp on this entry, very little time after.

To be on track I needed to hit 3,334 words today. I made 2,707. However, I did create a working(ish) Senate agenda on incredibly short notice, finalize a newspaper article, and breeze through a Child and Adolescent Development Exam. With those accomplishments in mind, I'm going to try not to feel completely desolate about already being behind so early in the game.

That confession made, today was an eventful day for our heroine. A total of four characters who drive her totally crazy were introduced and she resisted the inexplicable urge to bite them. Here's a little taster of her interaction with her coworker, Brangen:

Brangen was sitting in front of the werekid cage, staring in at them. They were curled up together, sleeping peaceably, so there was at least that to be thankful for. Brangen’s blond head bobbed as if to a rhythm that only he could hear, his thin curls bounced dejectedly with the disinterested movement. Hink could not fathom what Antin had seen in the kid.

Brangen began rubbing his cheek against the cage bars, staring in at the sleeping werekids. Hink’s skin prickled unpleasantly. Werekids were cuddly enough, but she would never have allowed her face that near their clawed hands and sharp, short teeth, even while they were sleeping.

“Brangen,” she barked.

The teenager hardly reacted, turning slowly to face her, still leaning his shoulders against the cage bars, but the werekids woke. The weregirl jumped in front of her sleepy-eyed companion, snarling at Hink. She seemed to realize that Brangen was no threat to her or her new friend, but perhaps that was not because Brangen came off as harmless, but rather that she recognized Hink as female and, therefore, a challenge to her ownership of the wereboy.

“Get up, Brangen, she’ll take your face off.”

This is an Historic Event

It is my great pleasure to introduce you to my NaNoWriMo novel for 2011 (sans real synopsis, but with an extra 10 words to its name):

Clocker

Sky pirates. Kidnapped bride. Clockwork people. Circus animals. Flying contraptions (heavy steampunk influence). Cigar smoke and steam. Giant golden eagles and anti-romantically romantic romance. And BIG guns.

(Please note, Clocker is a working title and it, like essentially everything else in this introduction, is subject to change.)

Exciting, no? If you've read any of my upcoming projects you will notice that I have combined two separate ideas (sky brigands and clockwork people). We'll see how well that actually works. If you know me personally you may also recognize a slight correlation between the way clockers (clockwork or partially clockwork people) are presented and the way cyborgs (mechanical or partially mechanical people) are presented in one of my favorite Disney movies (no, I won't tell you which one--guess). And, because I really am super stoked for this project, here is a little excerpt (the first approximately 500 words of today's word count):

It was late afternoon, low tide. The jetsam that had drifted over from the mainland to beach itself on Hanwood’s shores stank. Steaming beneath the late summer sun the cloth wrappings of kilstca bales, the bodies of illegal exotic pets probably dropped in the water when the Land Rangers passed by and left to drown, and contraband literature written on parchment made from animal hide gave off a stench worse than when the cemetery had flooded, bringing cadavers floating up to the surface of the water.

But Hanwood always stank. If it was not the beach refuse decaying in the heat, it was the great black chimneys belching yellow and gray smoke as they burned heaven only knew what in an effort to heat storefronts or the fumes drifting up from the cracked open street-level windows of kilstca dens. Most of the island’s residents had lived with the seasonally shifting odors of Hanwood for long enough that they could ignore it; only the mainland tourists even noticed the reek of decay rising from every aspect of the tiny islet.

Hink walked down to the beach on her midday break, regretting that the break had not come until it was nearly evening. She loved to walk the broken, littered strand and stare across the channel at the mainland and listen to the whir of the tram lines above her, the light reflecting off the water so brilliant that it turned everything white and gold. But the sun had sunk too far to scald the crests of the channel waves so Hink sucked on the stump of a cigar and observed the debris of the beach beneath her feet.

She remembered venturing down to the shoreline as a child and playing in the cold, salt water waves. Taking in a deep drag of her cigar, which smelled almost as repellant as the beach itself, she wondered why she did not remember any of the children who must have come with her.

They had probably been orphans and island-born like the children she passed on the street in the morning—so covered in filth they had hardly and need to wear clothing and one could only guess at what they actually looked like. But she could not remember and of their names or faces.

Clamping the end of her cigar between her teeth, sucking cold air into her mouth around it, she bent to gingerly turn over a long, narrow wood frame. The sea water had warped the image in the frame, bubbling and crumpling paper, but Hink could see a pretty woman with dark hair, too dark to be a native mainlander, and a heavy upper lip, perhaps made heavier by the portrait’s sea journey. Hink scoffed in her throat. The portrait was probably of some Land Ranger’s son’s immigrant lover. Forbidden and so entrancing and then forgotten. The mainlander had probably dumped her into the sea along with the portrait and any other evidence of the affair.

This is the Party Getting Started

You will have noticed that I have done absolutely nothing with Reah. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I hope to get back to her soon, but now an even more intimidating project is looming. National Novel Writing Month (NaNo and/or NaNoWriMo) is here and I am determined to participate despite my literature and creative writing classes, newspaper and literary magazine submissions which will be due during November, and my (brand spanking new) Senate secretary responsibilities. I'm determined.

Last year I participated in NaNo for the first time and completed about 65,000 words in my novel Iron Shoes (which, unfortunately, is still not complete) and I loved it. It helped organize my life and got me motivated so I'm hoping it will do that for me again (granted, this November it is a much larger task).

That being said, I am nowhere near prepared for to crank out my next novel. I don't have an outline, or even a summary. Or a title. That's my goal for my allotted 1667 words today-get this party started.

Here's what I do have: Sky pirates. Kidnapped bride. Circus animals. Flying contraptions (heavy steampunk influence). Cigar smoke and steam. Also giant golden eagles and anti-romantically romantic romance. And BIG guns.

This is the Long and Short of It

Here's the long of it:

Joseph Conrad said that "writing in English is like throwing mud at the wall." Of course, he thought that because his native language was Polish . . . That aside, right now I totally agree with him. As you may or may not have noticed, I have written exactly 953 words of Reah in the first two weeks of its existence. And I wrote those on the first day.

In case you have wondered or are currently wondering, no, that wasn't part of the plan and, yeah, I'm pretty ashamed of myself. I have a few good reasons for why this occurred though:

1. I am currently taking two British Literature classes (hence the Conrad quotation) and a Creative Writing class. Believe me, I have been writing (and reading too), just not in Reah.
2. This semester I'm working as a writer for the school newspaper. The paper is published every other week and, being the overachiever that I am, I signed up to do two articles for the first publication. Like I said, I really have been writing.
3. My homework load is much much heavier this semester than I anticipated. I have two classes which, as 100 level classes, I expected to be fairly straight forward and neither of them are. Due to that wonderful surprise, I was forced to drop a class. And a lot of my time is delegated just to keeping up with my homework.
4. I found out that I will not be able to graduate until December of next year which means that I will not be able to apply for my Master's Program until Fall 2013 (as they only take fall applications). This has cut down on my motivation substantially.
5. I had intended to use Sundays as my catch up days, but this semester, in order to give the Sabbath the reverence I feel it requires, I have decided not to use the Internet on Sundays. I'm also not doing homework on Sunday, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
   

However, justified as these reasons are, I don't think they excuse my negligence of this project. This project is a very important step for me to take toward my future goals. Regardless of the fact that my academic "next step" has been postponed a year, I'll still need to turn in a manuscript as part of my application. Now I just have more time to work the kinks out of it.

Here's the short of it:

No, I haven't been doing very well on this project so far. Yes, I'm going to work on it. No, you shouldn't expect me to suddenly be back on track. No, I don't expect to get right back on track. Yes, I will finish Chapter One very soon if I have my way.

This is an Hour Late and 194 Words Short

This beginning was not as simple as I had hoped it would be. However, that being said, I'm trying to keep the fact that this is a voluntary and flexible enterprise at the forefront of my mind. Some stuff came up tonight that prevented me from penning the last almost 200 words and even though nothing ever made my NaNo work a day late, I am a lot busier now than I was in November. I'm just going to keep reminding myself of that . . .

Anyway, without further ado, here is the first installment of Reah:

A heavy rain had fallen for endless days, an extension of the rain season which had lasted longer than any in memory. The woods, soil, even the rocks were saturated with rainwater. The animals insignificant enough to go unnoticed and undisturbed on goblin land – thrushes, grouse, squirrels – spoke in hushed chirrups about their small lives; the fledgling that had yet to leave the nest and what they could do for the next night’s supper though all the nuts and seeds were going rotten under the steady rain. Their little voices were tinny in the woods’ hollow spaces where they had tucked themselves and their offspring away, safe from the rain.

In a somewhat bigger hollow than those inhabited by any rodent or bird, a many-layered cave worn deep into the side of an ancient stone hillock by generations of sweeping brooms, a goblin dame was having contractions. She was well-prepared for the coming child; it was her first, an event she had spent her entire life in preparation to complete. The dame had swept the cave floor smooth, made up a whelp-sized cradle, and set aside swaddling for the whelp infant when it arrived. She even had cloths ready to clean up after the mess of birth.

The dame could hear the soft echoes of animal families, hidden out of sight beyond the sheeting rain, and for a moment she feared being alone, despite her hulking bull mate who reclined in a corner of the cave, dozing and awaiting the new whelp’s cries to awaken him. But a moment was all she was allowed and the next another wave of pain tingled through her body.

The pain of her contractions was greater than the dame had ever anticipated while seated before her dame-mother or dame-grandmother while they spoke of the torment of birth pains. Such proclamations had always been followed by a lecture on how it was the great duty of goblin dames to bear whelps stronger than their father so as to aid the goblin race. As a gangling, the dame had always focused on the purpose of childbearing and rearing, never feeling the slightest concern for the discomfort it would include. In her moments of fiery agony, far from her dame-mother’s instruction, she wished that she had paid closer attention to the details of distracting oneself from pain and the formulas for time-tested poultices that could stave it off.

The dame knew the pain would end after the child came, that was not her fear, but she kept glancing at her mate in his corner, tucked away like so many of the smaller creatures and snoring lightly. If she were to release a cry, to make any noise at all, she might waken him and by alerting him to her anguish, bring down his scorn on her own head. Goblin dames were not to feel pain; they could only make their offspring weaker that way, instilling in them the same cowardice. So the dame dug her serrated upper teeth deep into her lip when the next pain came, but she carried on with her preparations, never pausing.

Nothing paused for the whelp’s birth. The bull’s snoring continued unaltered as she emerged from her dame-mother’s womb and took a breath to scream. Her dame-mother’s pace as the dame felt the end near and moved nearer the cradle faltered, but never stopped. The dame breathed easier as she reached between her own legs to catch the whelp, cupping the tiny, fragile head in the hollow of her palm. The whelp screamed, wailing as cave air flowed into her lungs, but the dame continued at her pace, severing the cord that bound them together and laying the whelp infant in the cradle. Then she retrieved the extra cloths to clean the blood and afterbirth from the floor. Above all, the dame was relieved that her mate still slept; it would not do to have him see the cave that had been passed from his bull-great-grandfather in such disarray. Outside, it rained steadily, the chatter of lesser woodland things carrying just well enough for the whelp’s sharp ears to pick them up above the ceaseless patterning.

It was, in fact, several minutes after the dame had taken her from the cradle and begun suckling the whelp to quiet her down that the bull awoke. He snorted mightily, rising from his perch with a creak of his bones. The dame did not look up. She felt possessive of the still half-slimy creature in her arms, with its loud sucking and smacking, and refused to give any indication that she had noticed her mate. The moment she saw him and he knew that she had, she would be expected to surrender her new possession. The dame tightened her grip on the little thing, making it squirm, though not causing enough discomfort for it to stop feeding.

The bull stood over them. He blocked the lamplight, and the dame could hear his breathing, still rough from sleep. Still she did not look up. The bull extended a claw; she saw it out of the corner of her eye. He paused a moment. When the dame did not move to respond to his nonverbal command, he grunted.

“Give it here,”

The dame shied away, holding the whelp infant close to her breast and baring her teeth with a snarl.

“I’m holding it.” The blood pockets created when she bit her lip in pain overflowed down her chin.

The bull glared.

The dame’s mouth relaxed; she looked away. What her dame-mother would have said if she had seen such a display of attachment. It was well within her rights to refuse her mate, but never for such a sentimental reason.