NaNoWriMore

Well, four of the people who began the NaNoWriMo project are still writing. At least four of them are reporting weekly word counts. There may be others who are writing but not checking in with me.

This morning was gym and library. I did my treadmill and caught up on the leg exercises I was unable to get in yesterday. They are still working on the showers at the gym -- I wonder if they will be finished before we move to Madison -- and so I came home and got cleaned up. I went to the library and unloaded the bags of books and DVDs. That's the end of that, I think, unless we open a door somewhere and discover a forgotten cache. 

Then I put in an hour and a half of writing. Word count: 45,994. Word-of-the-day, hortatory: urging to some course of conduct or action; encouraging. That describes what the narrator's sponsor does and should be easily incorporated into the story. The sponsor also makes fun of the narrator for using big words, so this can be a moment of comic relief.

At this point, I think I will begin sharing bits and pieces from other parts of the novel instead of the part I am working on at the moment. Otherwise, I will give away the ending. So here is a fragment for today:

I closed the door softly and picked my way across the back to Miz Missy’s house.

She took so long to answer the door that I thought maybe she wasn’t at home. I could see her car was in the garage, but the garage door itself was closed. Maybe she was out somewhere with Wanda Mae or one of her daughters. Miz Missy and Frank had raised four daughters: Dawn, Dawneen, Dawnette and Dawnelle.

“Frank wanted to name our first girl after his mother,” Missy had confided once, “but there was no way I was going to give her the satisfaction. She and I never saw eye to eye on anything. Frank and I were arguing about it in the hospital and the baby reached out and grabbed his little finger. He looked at her and said, ‘What about Rosie? Her fingers are so pink.’ I was taking a class on the Iliad and Odyssey at the time, and the phrase ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ popped into my mind. That was Eos, you know, but that was too unusual. ‘How about Aurora?’ I said.”

She laughed.

“Frank said that sounded like some Disney character. He was right, you know. That was the name of the princess in  Sleeping Beauty. So I said, ‘Let’s keep it plain English then. Dawn.’

            "And he agreed. We liked it so well, we just kept naming the girls some version of Dawn as they came along.”

            She had heaved a sigh and looked off into the distance when she said this.

            “It seemed like such a cute idea at the time. The girls, of course, hated it. They all wanted their own name. And Frank never could get them straight. Neither could anyone else, for that matter. I can’t tell you how often Dawneen came home from school upset because a teacher had called her Dawn. And all down the line.”