Report Card (26 Oct – 1 Nov '09)

weight: 138.8
exercise: all unintentional
books read: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (page 163 and continuing)
blogs written: 1
photographs edited & posted: 2
cumulative time alive: 33 years, 2 days
stress factor: 3.0
NaNo word count: 2588
ribs consumed: 10
slices of cake: 3

…

Tonight, I am officially a novelist… for a month, anyway.  In the space of a couple of hours I was able to crank out just over 2500 words.  At that pace, I can take the weekends off (not that I intend to do that) and still hit the 50,000-word mark.  I can say that, at the moment, I have a well-defined point A and point B.  It is getting from one to the other that is going to be tricky.  I am going to try to avoid giving too many plot points away, as this is a rough rough draft and all is subject to change.  I wanted, though, to at least give a tiny snippet of what the work-in-progress looks like.  At one point in my opening chapter, my protagonist, a traveling musician, is asked by a group of village children to sing a song.  Here is his song:

        There was a tiny little worm
        in a tiny apple core,
        he liked the apple-y taste so much
        he ate it more and more.

        The apple it was juicy.
        It was plump and round and red.
        And the worm, he ate his apple walls,
        and his tiny apple bed.

        He ate and ate until there was
        no apple to be found.
        And then he chewed right through the skin
        and plopped onto the ground!

There you have it.  The first 5% is finished.  I’ll be sure to let you know when I find a plot.