A Second NaNoWriMo update!

I fell behind in my writing last week and am struggling to catch up, but I'm past the halfway point. I have the long Thanksgiving break to get some work done, so I hope to get well ahead in the next few days.

Ethan has since dropped out, deciding that while the NaNoWriMo process is cool and definitely an amazing cultural and social experience, it's not his way of writing. I respect that and am still sending... encouragement from time to time. I on the other hand have reached the point of obstinate. Having started and made it past the halfway point I am more determined than ever to finish successfully. The process has become a challenge for me, and I will win, encouragement from other people or no.

The farther I get into this, the more I'm realizing that the characters and the story have a life of their own to me. Sometime in the next week I'm going to write the suicide of one of my characters. It makes me terribly sad because I know it has to happen and I have to put him through painful hell to get him there. The groundwork is being laid and at this point there is no alternative. It hurts to write because he doesn't see it coming.

Anyway, some choice excerpts since my last update:

I squished a very pregnant spider today. Felt bad about it despite the utter hideousness of the thing. I tried to warn it and shoo it toward the window, but it wouldn’t listen to me, so it had to die. It was that or burn the building down and I rather like where I live.

Anyway, food. I made it. People love me and unanimously voted me queen of the dorm and are officially starting a petition to secede from the University so we can operate under a benign monarchy with me as its head. It’s good to be queen. Maybe as a queen I can have tea with Elizabeth II. That would be amazing.

As you can see, Myra has quite the voice. She's not bossy so much as occasionally demanding.

Adrian on the other hand seems a bit more subdued.

It started to snow last night and did not let up until early this morning. I awoke to the most amazingly tranquil and breathtaking scene outside my window. I wanted so badly to capture it with my pen, but as with many things that are this beautiful, it was fleeting. Like a spring butterfly it alighted upon my nose and was gone as I stood there blinking. Jonathan and Eleanor and a few of the neighbor kids were out the door and frolicking in the powder before I was properly awake. The curse of being a teenager, I suppose, our bodies are a war zone of biological weapons priming and immunizing us for adulthood, we need all the rest we can get and yet give ourselves very little.

 We'll see where this goes from here.