The Collective NaNovel

Daily Word Count: just over 700 (though it’s a bit premature to be posting today’s word count since I’ve only spent 17 minutes on my novel)
Total Word Count: 5,104

Well, Day 1 came to a crashing close last night while I was sitting on a very ambitious 4,800 and some odd words, I feel like I really got a good head start.  Now when I come crashing down into NaNoDepressing during Week 2 (or more likely by the end of Week 1) I won’t feel so far behind.

So, how’s it going?  Well, frankly it’s not going very well.  At least, in my opinion.  My biggest issue is that I’m having to establish a relationship for Stan and Darla (yes, her name is Darla now… she rebelled from the very MOMENT I started writing and she refused to be called Darlene).  You see, I reach incredible new levels of suckitude when I start writing about romance.  Which is why I have specifically kept romance far far away from my NaNovels.

Also, Stan is rather two dimentional.  I was sort of afraid of this, because when I found out that his brother Ernie had that awesome quirk where he thinks that he’s the first born son of Elvis Presley I immediately fell in love with him.  Not only that, but Ernie refuses to make any decisions about anything without first consulting his trusty Magic 8 ball.  So, Ernie is freaking awesome.  There are so many places that I can go with him.  But Stan… not so much.  He’s this weird renegade kind of guy who gets in trouble a lot.  But it seems like when he gets around Darla (aka Angel Bell) he kind of falls apart, drooling all over himself and all.  Also, Stan and Darla were supposed to meet when they’re both still high school age.  And I’m having a hard time relating to a couple of 17-year-olds in love.  Yuck!!

So, Day 1, pretty sucky.  Day 2?  Well, still pretty sucky… but I’m thinking of just starting at some random scene later in the novel to really get going (i.e., be able to deal with adults).  Stay tuned for updates.

I’ll be happy to leave you with an excerpt of the very first scene in my novel.  It’s the only thing that I don’t think is trash and it’s completely random.  I had intended for this scene to make more sense later.

All good stories start with a bang, or a severed hand, or a dead body.  But this one starts with George Pritchett’s prize winning Rhode Island Red chicken.  That chicken had won George a blue ribbon at the Boone County 4-H Fair three years in a row.  She laid eggs that were the most perfect that you’ve ever seen and they were so big that they didn’t fit into a regular egg carton.  After this third win George had started to charge $5.00 a carton for her eggs — he told his customers that you just couldn’t put a price on fame… even chicken fame.  Some people were annoyed, but others thought that those chicken eggs had special powers and they would pay anything for those eggs.  George’s wife sometimes thought that he loved that chicken more than he loved her.  If it weren’t for the very odd dry cracking noise that preceded the incident some would have thought that George’s wife had finally had enough of his love affair with that hen.

So this philosophical question isn’t, “What came first… the chicken or the egg?” or “Why did the chicken cross the road?” (because we all know it was to get to the other side), instead the philosophical question that we all want to know is: If a chicken coop gets obliterated in the dead of the night and there’s no one around to hear it, does it really make a sound?

George Pritchett’s prize winning Rhode Island Red would tell you it does.  That is, if she wasn’t so overly concerned with crossing Route 374 at 11:00pm for the first time in her whole life.  It was like a door of opportunity had opened, the world was hers!  Even though her tail feathers had been a bit singed she was unconcerned.  This was her moment of freedom!  No more slavery laying dozens of eggs just for the amusement and greed of that silly farmer (would-be farmer at that!), no, this hen is a free woman!  That is, until that sneaky fox snatched her up.