I admit it. I didn’t write at all yesterday, and today I was planning how I could fake it till the end of the 50,000 words, the end of NaNo, the end of November. I’m pretty good at bsing if I need to, and I admit I spent a little time trying to figure it out. I could just do freewriting until the end. I could just write about nonsense stuff. We mix our words when we submit so nobody can even read what we’ve written, anyway. I like looking at how my mind works through this whole process. My inner critic has pretty much given up on me. It is beginning to see that I’m going to keep slogging through this process no matter she says to me. There are no amounts of abuses that will shame me into stopping. There is nothing awful that can be said that will make me halt my progress. Slow me down, most definitely, but I will not cheat, and I will keep writing. I will not wait until the 11th hour and write for 10 hours to get the last 15,000 words in.
So I did what I know best. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other. I just kept putting one adverb in front of a verb and kept my fingers moving on the keyboard. I discovered a fascinating little part of my novel. The disappearance of the four teenagers was in the exact spot as the house in my novel! And Bill found a picture of the four teenagers standing in front the same silver maple that’s in the house in my novel! Ole Johnson was the farmer who owned the farmstead where the kids disappeared, and before he came to America, was an inventor in Sweden. Bill goes to the library and discovers a photograph of Ole holding a mysterious stick. Then Bill feels hot and gets sick. When he lies down he has a vision in which he’s standing in the field holding the stick. The tip ignites, and when he holds it to his chest, everything goes white.
I’m excited again!!! I think I can keep going, and have a kind of exciting plot as I go! I don’t know what I’ll do with the rat appearing in the trailer home by crawling through the plumbing, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. When I tucked Bill in bed last night, he breathed in really quick while he was reading his mythology book and said, “Look, Mom!” I looked at where he was pointing and saw the definition of one of the gods - Argus! He had several eyes… stunned, I said, “Bill, did you know about this?” “I swear I didn’t,” Bill said. Argus is the Dark Overlord who’s after the Eternal Flame. He always wears sunglasses and no one has ever seen his eyes. I am excited. I really am. Not only WILL I finish my 50,000 words in the next 7 days, I will have the bones of a pretty exciting young adult novel. I really think I will. Am I a good novelist? Uhm, maybe someday. But the real excitement is that I don’t totally suck at it. Not totally. And for now that’s really good enough for me.