Nanoday #7 — the YA teen romance gets going — belles lettres, style…

Had a good morning, but it took a while to get started.  Over at Uppity’s I watched a trailer for “V” — hmm…

It’s harder than I thought a bit going over 2,000 a day.  The secret is not to worry too much about editing the rough draft — I decided to do character driven and I think that is where I spend most of my styling anyway — so sometimes the characters cooperate and sometimes they don’t.

My own grandfather was very much with me this morning as I wrote Devlin’s grandfather and that was magical for me.  Just to use his dialogue in this.  He is going to take Dev up to the mountains but first they are having a pancake breakfast — one thing my grandfather always used to say is “isn’t that swell” — and so, Dev’s grandfather says that too — about his spatula as he flips the pancakes.  This is when Devlin first wakes up:

Devlin slept in for a long, long time.  It was the sound of a black crow’s harsh cawing that finally woke him up.  Devlin could see him out the window fairly screeching at something.
“Hello, crow,” he said.  “What are you up to?”
“Nothing,” the crow seemed to screech back.
“Nothing at all.”
But Devlin knew that was never really true for crows.  They almost always had something in mind.  Sometimes they traveled in fierce packs together — screaming warnings especially if there was a red tail in the neighborhood.  With a swift rustle the crow flew away, but not before cawing ten more times, just to let Devlin know he was king of the tree.  The whole world outside seemed to be shrouded in a mysterious mist.  He’d never really seen the fog before — not quite like this, when he’d lived in the city.  The beaches he’d been to with his mom and dad had always seemed sunny for some reason.
He thought about his mom’s face, and then he remembered where he had put the sad girl’s notes.  I better not leave these in my pillowcase, he thought.  My grandmother might find them.  Devlin had a special wooden box he liked to save things in.  It was his wizard’s box in a way, and he had little collections of things that he called talismans.

Anyway, we are approaching the “central” part now of the book and so I have time to really stretch out the characters and their experiences.  Devlin’s grandfather is taking him up to the mountains to have a talk because Dev lost his mom.  But, really Dev wanted to go back to the beach and see if she left him a note…(and she did!)

So?

So far so good.  Today was 2190 w/c and the grand total is 14,503…

If you want to see inside NaNoWriMo click this link — it’s really something to see all the writers in there and what they are doing!

Mine is under VB-Demoiselle.  And, I have thought of something too.  I could grow these characters up?  I was telling my old best friend that the other night.  I could grow them up on the page into happier childhoods than the two of us had?  Now that would be magic.  Yes it would!  She is telling me what her kids did at that age, and then I can remember the two of us at that age, too… lucky for me she had a girl and a boy!

ps: it is so hard to look at the news right now, terrible… the world of the novel is a place to escape!

Nanoday #6, YA young romance novel moving right along, and I love it!

Ah, what could be more charming than a first crush?  Not much.  How may of us would love to revisit age 13 again?  Probably lots of us.  So today was a fab writing morning.  2364 words to be exact.  Total is now 12,313.    Two things have changed for me as a writer during this process of NaNoWriMo.  One is respect — complete respect for published authors like the ones in this article — some of them are my faves anyway and now that I saw them talk about how they come up with the words? Well.  What occurs to me is that some of us are full of words and we probably always were — even when we were little.  In fact? Maybe the words on the page are the only way we can speak about some things?

Certainly, when I was writing love poems, I knew that.  Some of us burn our words down, sometimes?  That is how much they mean.

And there is something else too — a book is a really important thing.  When I think about the books I read in childhood — and sometimes escaped into?  Well — what if I were making something like that for other kids?  What if I were making something really important that would be left as a legacy of my life in a way?  Hmmm…..

Most serious published authors must feel that way I expect, as well.  That is what the cavern is about for us writers.  I think so — that cavern being the place that we somehow manage to be like the scribes that always existed — since the beginning of time.

Well, enough of that — it was a good day today — my characters have just communicated… here is a snippet from today:

And so he began, a little like this:

I am Devlin,
boy of the dunes and boy of the air who left you the magic feather and you are the sad girl that I saw crying.

Then he sat looking at what he had just written to her.  He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have told her that he’d seen her like that.  But it was too late.  He’d already written it down, and besides, if he wanted to have a relationship with a real girl like she seemed to be, he thought he’d better just tell her the truth.  So, he continued.

I am the boy who built this driftwood shelter
I am fourteen years old and my mom died
and so this summer my dad left me here with my grandparents,
do you want to be friends?

The words had just poured out of him from someplace and he wasn’t even sure where.  But that feeling of tightness in his chest had lessened while he wrote.  He let out a giant sigh.  There was no going back now.  None at all.  He decided that was enough to say for his first answer.  He’d wait and see what she was going to say back.
Devlin stuffed her paper airplane in his pocket, and left his note folded inside the abalone shell — weighting it down with a rock, like she had.  It was time to go home and have dinner, and besides what had happened seemed so magical to him that he didn’t want to break the spell by staying too long in the hut.

I’m writing this in two ways — one of those is as a therapist, in a way –  and that is the really fun part, because, well, I sort of miss doing that work and so this novel is what I said I was going to be doing.  Putting all my “work” into something that hopefully eventually could be a screenplay — so this is serious stuff, for me.  Really serious.  My main characters, the boy and the girl are both grappling with loss — and this friendship they form is going to be very important to both of them.

Ah, the cavern.  It’s made of so many different things for each writer.  It really is!

xxoo!

Loving the writing this morning is going to help me tackle the parts that will be harder?

I have nothing but gratitude for NaNoWriMo in my heart — what an opportunity it is to be among my fellows as a writer!

ps: I love the tweets too!  They are the greatest!

What Teenie Alexander did was to leave Devlin a second note — it was a paper airplane this time — and the passage above is the note he left her back!  It looked a bit like this one!

Nanoday #5! — YA “young romance” novel has a miraculous twist! into happy scene….

Plus, something fab happened for me yesterday as a writer (make that two things during this process) — a very old friend of mine was listening to a reading over the phone of that hard dialogue chapter from yesterday and she wept.  Really.  I hadn’t realized just how much emotion was in that piece but that is where I was blocked like mad in that passage of dialogue.  I really had to write myself out of that place by changing the subject, I swear.  I did!  Anyway, feedback like that is priceless to me as a writer?  It really is.  I sort of teared up myself, after that — but, I’m trying hard to do realistic emotion and ?

Whew.

Also, thank you Song — for taking the time to read that and get well!

Today was 1828 more words — grand total so far is 9949.  I have not done one thing really since this started either — so today I’m going out to paint.  I’ll be by the sea, myself!

I wish all the writers as much luck as I seemed to have today, truly.

So, here was a snippet — from chap 5 — “secret smile” — (romance part building!)  Teenie has baked a pie, and she shares it with Mr. Honeygarten.  Of course, she has something she wants to ask him?  He serves tea in a set much like this picture!

“Oh good,” she sighed.
“Why on earth would you ask such a question?”
“Well, I just wasn’t sure whether I was or not.”
“Well you are dear, and prettiness is something that women grow into — it takes a very long time, by the way.  I suppose you are just at the very beginning of that rather long quest, yourself.”
There was silence for a moment while they both took a sip of tea.  And then Mr. Honeygarten smiled.
“Is there a boy, my dear?”
“Is there a boy involved in all of this asking about prettiness?”
Teenie Alexander blushed.
“There is,” she said.
“I see, dear.”
But then they ate the pie quietly and neither of them said another word about it.  Eventually Teenie’s blush had gone away, all by itself.
Right before she left Mr. Honeygarten had smiled and said, “You know my dear, when I was a boy, there was a certain girl I thought was the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“Her name was Claire.”

I just adore writing the dialogue for old Mr. Honeygarten.  He’s a charmer!

xxoo!

well, so far so good!