Wednesday, December 07, 2011

The Morning of the Day after I Did It

This was the sight from my pillow when I opened my eyes on November 26.

The dried brown leaves of my neighbor's sycamore were just catching the first rays of sunlight on a day filled with promise. A promise of eating leftover turkey sandwiches for breakfast, of cooking meatballs later in the day, of unhurried folding of clothes in the laundry room ... a promise that I did not have to write one more word on my novel until I felt like writing again, as I had made the requisite fifty thousand words the night before.

This was, to my surprise, one of the easiest NaNoWriMo challenges I've ever done. Through the first weeks of the month, I did not write at all on Sundays -- there were football games that I, as a lazy couch referee, simply had to watch. And usually I didn't write on Monday or Thursday evenings, for the same reason. But when I did write, wow, the words just flew.

How did the story end? In the middle of a sentence, I believe, at a point in which I had paused to check word count, and was surprised to find that I was well over the 50k mark. Well, no, that won't be The End ... and I'm not sure how it will end. My original thought was to kill off one of the main characters, and let tragedy reign. But that's a very simplistic ending; I'm thinking now that the story is more about ramifications of an event, rather than closure.

I've kept on writing a few paragraphs when I get a sense of where the action has to go; I've added a chapter and a half to the interior of the story to slow down the overly-rushed feeling it had.

Yeah. I think this time around, I want to go less for tragedy, and more for redemption.

Redemption.

Yep, that's a fit.

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