secure this beckoning sunshine

*does the dance of PROGRESS*

I'm not going to win, I strongly suspect; I'm not even going to win with the 30K goal instead of the 50K goal. But I made PROGRESS. 2456 words (which, okay, most were schoolwork, but words) for a total of 6672 in the novel and 27798 for the month. And the first scene of chapter three is complete.

Snippet:

Leah strummed her guitar at the bus stop, softly, but she had an audience nonetheless. A paying audience, even; someone had paper-airplaned a five-dollar bill and thrown it to land at her feet, upon which she'd taken off her hat and put it brim up on the ground, and a few more coins and small bills were collecting in the hat.

This wasn't going to get her very far.

The bus would take Leah the rest of the way upstate. From there she could get a train, maybe. She could go anywhere at all from there.

An actual post! I am shocked. I finally put "FIX IN EDITING :DDDD" in for the scene that's been giving me fits, and now I have PROGRESS. Sixty-five words of it that I'm not sure I'm keeping, quoted in full below, for a total of 5066 words in the novel and 19579 words for the month.

Snippet:

Becca spent the trip to San Francisco alternately driving, reading, and sleeping, with breaks for gas, food, and restroom. "You need to get where you can be trained as quickly as we can manage," was Maricel's opinion. "I'll fumigate the car later." Becca'd snorted, but after forty-odd hours in the car she stank to high heaven and was ready to kill for a shower.

Well, today sucked. 111 words, counting all the words in the brackets below, for a total of 5096 in the novel and 17270 for the month.

Snippet:

Rae unlocked the front door of the Driscoll home. In the living room, Becca lay on the sofa, out for the count, and Serafina Sanchez sat in the armchair, paging through a copy of [recent urban fantasy, maybe Seanan McGuire but can't be Chimes at Midnight, that's too recent]. Serafina looked up. "She fell asleep almost as soon as she sat down," she said. "Sorry. I didn't want to wake her."

"I feel like taking a nap myself," Rae admitted. The sofa being fully occupied, Rae took the computer chair. "You want to tell us what the fuck just happened?"

I blasted right through the rest of chapter two scene two. More writing possible later, but for now 750 words exactly for the day, 4018 in the novel, 13650 for the month.

Snippet:

"What gave you the right to chase out our customers?" Becca demanded. "Sounded like he was gonna buy a diamond ring. That's serious money. More than enough to fix..." She waved a hand. "This. Boss lady's gonna have to dip into the funds for setting up the Milford location. She is not going to be happy."

"Let's get Sarah to the hospital," said the woman with the gun. "Then let's find somewhere quiet where the three of us can talk."

"Who are you, anyway?" Rae asked.

"Call me Serafina Sanchez. I'm with the men in black."

I forgot to post last night! 1249 words for a total of 3317 in the novel draft and 12114 for the month.

Snippet:

Leah hiked north along the highway. This wasn't particularly safe and probably wasn't legal, but she didn't care. Places to be. People to see. Nor did she care that she didn't know.

Rae's music hummed in her ear: Leah hadn't had time to reload the old MP3 player with music more to her own taste. "Meet Virginia", "Ave Mary A", "Anna Begins", and a version of "Barbara Allen": Sweet William died for me today, I'll die for him tomorrow—

It wasn't a vision but a knowing.

Leah walked a while longer and stopped at the first fast-food place she saw. It did have free wi-fi, as she'd hoped, and she ordered a small fries so the staff wouldn't bother her while she checked her information and sent a single email.

I think I'm done writing for the evening. 2043 words today for a total of 3312 in the novel draft and 10495 in the words for the month. And the first chapter is done! I think. Down to just tweaks, anyway.

Snippet:

Leah, after all, had no power over fire. She couldn't start them, accidentally or on purpose, without doing so deliberately and with full knowledge and intent that lighting the match would cause a flame. [...] Becca by contrast had vivid memories of setting other kids' hair on fire when they teased her about her own. The fires were always out by the time adults came investigating, and no one could prove anything about any of the incidents, but however much Becca had wanted the fires to start, never once had she consciously meant to start them.

Dear body: That was supposed to be a 'lie down for fifteen to thirty minutes', not a 'sleep all night, wake up at six-thirty'.

1790 words (woot!) for a total of 7632 (was supposed to be past 10K by today), of which only 2314 are in the novel draft. Which includes the frontispiece and the back-cover text draft.

On the flip side, my jukebox_fest story is done.

Snippet (of the novel, not the jukebox_fest):

Happy damn birthday to Anne's baby girl. Eighteen years old with everything to live for, Leah was now, just emerging from the chrysalis and spreading her butterfly wings.

Anne didn't know a damn thing about vodou except what was in the movies, and knew damn well the movies were all lies. But the movies were right about one thing, in real-world terms if not necessarily about vodou: casting a spell on a doll, if done right, was the same as casting a spell on the person the doll represented.

Four small dolls, hand-sewn of cloth in bright colors (one per doll) and varied shades of brown, lay in a shallow glass bowl. Miles away, four daughters went about their business, unaware of Anne's spellcasting as Anne had never been unaware of theirs.

The edge of the bowl was as perfect a circle as human hands could make. Let no evil cross this circle, Anne willed. Let no harm come to those within.

Her husband had warned her before his death, and now that Leah was adult, that warning was coming due.

Anne sealed off the spell, glowing golden around the rim of the bowl. Here's to the damned.

588 words so far today for a total of 1335 in the novel project and 4337 in the word count file. I damn well better have a fabulous writing weekend.

Snippet:

"Do you want to talk about anything?" Sarah asked.

"Not men," said Becca at once. "Or relationships."

That narrowed it down hardly at all. Sarah picked a subject at random. "Seen the commercials for Sleepy Hollow?" Sarah asked.

Becca snorted. "Oh, yeah. National Treasure meets Left Behind meets crap zombie movie. Might watch it just for the cop."

"Am watching it just for the cop," said Sarah. "Will be, anyway. Unless the premise pisses me off too badly. Pacific Rim's premise did. But then Pacific Rim is a movie, not a TV series, and I'd already paid the ticket price. I don't regret it, the Mako-Raleigh fight scene alone was worth the price of admission, but."

"Mako Mori was worth the price of admission," said Becca. "You realize the sword on the infuriatingly named robot was her idea?

712 words. I should have outlined better. I know what happens later, I just don't know what happens next.

Snippet:

"Ash, two o'clock!" Rae said.

Ashley turned smoothly to gun down the oncoming zombies. "Hell," she said, as the blinking light onscreen noted her looming lack of ammo. "Grenades, do I still have grenades?"

Rae brought up her character's inventory. "I've got grenades." She faced the zombies, pressed the right key combination, and held the button for distance—there! The grenade made a perfect arc to land a couple rows back in the zombie horde, and BOOM. Zombie bits everywhere— "Damn!" There were more than she'd seen at first. Grenades were precious, but Rae was even lower on bullets than Ashley. "'Nother grenade—" BOOM.

I have school obligations and am sure to have extra paycheck-work obligations during November. I am unlikely to attempt National Novel Writing Month in November. (Read: I'll do it but I'll fail miserably.) I do not have school obligations in September (this is effectively the last week of summer term, and fall term doesn't start till the thirtieth), and paycheck-work is so very not busy right now and is likely to remain so until sometime in November (where it will get scary busy, scary fast).

What I plan to do is September Novel Writing Month. I'm not sure which novel—probably Leah Far-Sighted as I have the best handle on it; Black Velvet Band Medley is barely more than a handful of vague ideas and I need to research and outline the hell out of Breath of Life before writing it—but I intend to write fifty thousand words of a novel during September. I also intend to post daily word count updates and brief snippets of the day's writing. Call it accountability.

Wish me luck!