We’ve made it through the first week of NaNoWriMo, and…somehow, we’re ahead of the game?
Despite ALLLLL my confusion, I’ll take it!
Current Word Count
When I made my calendar last week, it told me I should be at 10,694 words by the time I finished writing for today.
Happily, I’m at 10,964!
Favorite Line
“I need you to slow it down,” she finally told Kieran, who had made it a few feet above the forest floor. Another charge was coming. The doe lowered its head and gave Roa a full view of the mass spreading across its skull. “I think it’s starved, and I think I can put it in…let’s call it a food coma.”
“There’s too many I thinks in there for comfort, you know,” Kieran answered, looking down at her remaining knives. At least two more poked from her belt, and the lump in her boot was absolutely the outline of a third. “Plus, that means you have to touch it, and we have no idea how contagious that is.”
Kieran and Roa are a DELIGHT. Two peas in a pod, they’re sisters even without shared blood (though the number of monster-related fights they’ve gotten tangled in could count as shared blood, if you think about it), and I can’t even begin to imagine one without the other. Kieran is the instigator to Roa’s laid-back coasting, and Roa is good at reminding Kieran to just chill and enjoy things instead of chasing her next idea. Plus, Kieran is a certified knife lesbian, and Roa is a woods bi at heart. If nothing else, they’re crunchy, something that I can’t quite explain in words, but feel in my bones. They totally got in mud fights as children and pretended to find treasure in the local woods. They’re Ride or Die Best Friends: Wilderness Edition, and every time they banter, I add, like, an extra month to my life.
(They banter a lot. I might live forever at this rate.)
Also? This quote comes from a fight scene in the woods. It’s Kieran and Roa versus a deer with a super nasty-looking magic mass spreading across its skull, and the deer is also…well.
(Yes, I know you probably don’t know. But. You know. 😉)
Favorite Character
Roa. Oh, Roa.
Roa Curtis is the new love of my writing life, and I can’t seem to let her go.
She actually cropped up back in July when I went on that madcap 33k fic spree, and she’s been hanging around ever since, waiting for me to make good on my promises. She’s a rough and tumble woods bi with a deep, protective love of the bees she keeps, and of her mismatched monster family. Of course, her favorite uncle is her Uncle Ash, who’s also Bigfoot, and it brings her great joy to be able to say she’s almost as tall as Bigfoot (she comes up to his shoulder because she is LEGGY).
Plus, Roa is a joy in that she very rarely holds the brain cell. Between her, Kieran, and Everest (you’ll meet those two properly later on), the brain cell usually ends up with Everest, the only one whose entire sense of what is and isn’t advisable isn’t somewhat warped by too many years hanging out with people who are also magic monsters with beyond-human capabilities. This means Roa can and will dive into a problem without thinking (provided trouble comes to her and not the other way around), and sometimes she’ll muscle her way out. Or she’ll run away. Or she’ll have to swallow her pride and trust someone else’s idea. The bottom line is that she’s all kinds of energy except slow, contemplative, rational energy, and it’s a lot of fun seeing which direction she’ll take things! Especially factoring in her ability to end up in the thick of trouble and then shrug it off like “oh, hey, no biggie, let’s just deal with this bull.” I can’t play the sensible writer with her, or it doesn’t truly feel like her. Instead, I ask “What would Roa do?” and then immediately place her in deep, deep trouble.
Keeps me on my toes!
Goals for This Week
It’s NaNoWriMo, so OF COURSE nothing about this slows down. By this time next week, I’m aiming for 22,706 words (thank youuuuu, automatically adjusting word count calendar tool, for telling me where I’m supposed to be!), and to have something more concrete in my plot. I regret so much that I didn’t put in the work to outline before this started (I was super busy, but still, I should have done it), and now it’s biting me, because I’m struggling to find ways to connect all the scenes I want most to include. Scrapping my idea to have an oddball church full of monsters and trading it for a historic farm with community lunches has also solved one problem but introduced others, and the frantic revision needs to come after NaNo, no matter how badly I want to fix it all now.
But we’re going for 50k this month, not a perfect final draft, so I’m going to live with my mistakes and keep pushing this forward.
I’ll see you with more updates on Honey and Haunt in a week! 💛
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