Oct. 20 - 100 words

The problem I’m having with the one hundred words a day is that I’m treating it as a separate assignment, and it really shouldn’t be. I suppose that sometimes it could or should be, but not all the time.

What I need to do is shift my focus from “write one hundred words a day and have it make some sort of sense” to “pound out two thousand or so words a day and throw out a random excerpt of exactly one hundred words”.

Or, you know, I could just write the first one hundred words that come to mind.

Oct. 19 - 100 words

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby. When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses.

Dia yelled and bolted upright in bed, frantically clawing at the sweat-soaked sheets tangled around his body. With large hands balled and ready for a fight, he looked around for someone to hit and blinked in confusion when he found no one.

The flashing red neon sign over the twenty-four hour porn shop across the street lit the tiny room and cut through Dia’s confusion.

Breathing raggedly, Dia slowly rubbed away the sweat beaded on his brow. “Damned nightmares.”

I should be cooking writing.

Last night I was talking to someone about Holly and he commented that he didn’t think he’d ever met her. Because it’s often easier to hand over a profile sheet on a character than it is to explain the character, I started digging for Holly’s profile. After about an hour of hunting through the computer, various disks (those are some ancient records), my filing cabinet, and several different notebooks, I realized that there is no working profile on her. I used to have one, but it’s been eaten by some computer critter or another over the years. Or maybe she’s been in hiding and covered her tracks really well. (Sometimes the characters hide from me.) However, since she’s pushing her way to the foreground again, I need a profile and there’s not one. I’m going to have to recreate her from memory.

This got me thinking that I don’t have any profiles on any of my characters. Not really. What’s in my head is pretty much it. This is a bad thing. A very, very bad thing. I need to find (or create) some sort of formulaic profile sheet and start filling in the blanks on all the characters I have in my head. (This will also give me something to work off of when I sit down with each of them for interviews and evaluations over tea and Twizzlers.) Ideally, this would be done on the computer then backed up (twice) and printed. Sadly, this is not an ideal world and I haven’t got the first clue how it’ll actually turn out.

Good thing I’m creative. Or so they tell me.

*********

Ophelia’s book is kicking my ass. The reason the progress bar has been reset to zero is that I’ve stripped the prologue and redressed it multiple times in the past few weeks, and now I’m thinking it shouldn’t be a prologue at all, but rather the beginning of the first chapter which means that I need to rethink the entire timeline of the story and rewrite the beginning yet again and Ophelia keeps insisting that the whole story line is “just wrong” and demanding that I “fix it”. (*BREATHE*) It doesn’t help that I’m no longer sure WHO is in the book, either. Again we have a rather pressing need for working profile sheets and bio-jackets on everyone.

**********

I still don’t have a plot for NaNo. Or characters. Or anything else.

Ophelia has let me know in no uncertain terms that she will not have any part of NaNo. She’s an unruly character that way, and I don’t think she can be bribed.

Maybe that’s why Holly is reemerging. Maybe HER story will be my NaNo project.

I’ll have to think about this.

Oct. 18 - 100 words

Our lease is due the middle of 2008 so we’re casually looking at houses. I don’t think my requirements are too unreasonable.

*Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. A garage would be great but not mandatory.
*The front door MUST be on the front of the house, not on the side.
*No lakes, ponds, rivers, or other natural bodies of water adjacent to the property.
*Covered front porches are good. Small tunnels are not.
*Must have space between the houses. If I can stand between two houses and touch both of them with a broom without taking a step, they’re too close.

Oct. 17 - 100 words

Lexie took a step forward and Max grabbed her arm to stop her. She looked at him questioningly and he glanced at the fray again, keeping his voice low. “The attackers are under demonic control. Probably looking for us. They’ll fight until they’re recalled or dead. We need to go around.”

Lexie shrugged out of her jacket, leaving it in Max’s hand when she stepped forward again. “They’re innocent, Max, and they’re not fighters.”

Max shook his head. “You can’t help them, Ophelia.”

She moved away from him quickly and glanced over her shoulder with a cold smile. “Wanna bet?”

Oct. 16 - 100 words

The idea of not writing is repugnant to me. It’s one of the few interests I haven’t given up for one reason or another over the years. Yet here I am, sitting in the dark and considering doing just that.

When it comes to choosing between keeping the peace within one’s family and pursuing one’s dreams, it’s a double-edged sword situation. No matter what choice is made, it’s bound to be the wrong one. Or maybe it’ll be the right one, but with painful backlash.

Give up my family or give up my writing. It seems I can’t have both.

Oct. 15 - 100 words

I started the scene with Holly yesterday but never finished it. I got distracted. Not by the deadly beauty taking a shower by the eerie glow of a glow stick in a grimy bathroom in some abandoned building, but by the guy watching her. The guy she couldn’t see despite feeling his gaze on her time and time again, even in the shower stall as she washed off a few days worth of her own personal funk. The guy she couldn’t see because he was not there.

Who is this guy? What is this guy? Why couldn’t she see him?