NaNo Day 13,14

I’m spluttering a bit, which makes me nervous.  Yes, I’m ahead, but not by much.  I don’t have any days off this week, so I really need to get my words in each and every day!

However, we had a HUGE weekend of shopping and prepping for a family dinner today.  The two youngest monsters were baptized today, and we had family over after church for dinner.  I had to get up super early to get the dish prepared.  Michael Smith’s fancy spaghetti was wonderfully yummy, but it needs an hour to simmer (to burn off the alcohol).  I could have done it Sat. night and then put it in the crock pot to warm this morning, but I didn’t feel up to it.  Somehow in all the organizing and cleaning Thursday or Friday, I tweaked my lower back.  It was worse Friday night/Saturday to the point where all I really wanted to do after shopping all day was to put my feet up with a heating pad on my back.

Luckily today it’s much better although still stiff and sore.  Up Dark & Early to cook, but it was sooo worth it to come home and devour such delicious food.  I had the salad prepped, even the garlic bread ready to pop in the oven (one with roasted garlic that I prepared while the spaghetti simmered).  Definitely a WIN for lunch.

However, I didn’t get much done at all on the writing front.  To make it even harder:  I had to START a new story and openings can be slow to get going.  I have to get the setting and voice of the characters nailed, and I’m still a little shaky.  However, I’ve just about got this introduction figured out.  I started in Phantom, but I plan to work in Miseryland too until I get settled on one story for the rest of month.

NaNoWriMo total:  27,025

Snippet:  horribly rough opening.  I know I’ll change it a dozen times.  There are a lot of clues in these lines, though, about what this story is really about.

“Son of a bitch.” Christel stared at the incriminating numbers on her laptop’s screen. “He was right.”

For the last six weeks, an anonymous tipster calling himself Phantom had been leading her through GHI Shipping’s books on a bread-crumb trail of international weapons smuggling, fraud, and murder. The man had to work for GHI to have such in-depth knowledge, but she had no idea who he was or how he’d gotten her name in the first place. Somehow, he’d known exactly why she’d finally let her mother—who just happened to be CEO—browbeat her into accepting a position in the family company.

All she knew about him was his cell number—pre-paid, evidently, yielding no clues to his identity—and his firm belief that the culprit she was looking for could be no other than their boss, Rafael [last name].

Unfortunately, her mother surely suspected him too, or she wouldn’t have sent Christel to the Houston office.

She took off her glasses and rubbed her temples. Not Rafe, surely. She’d known him her entire life. Once upon a time, her mother had even dreamed of a merger between two of the three founding families of GHI, even though Christel had her eyes set on the third family, not Rafe’s. That dream had been doomed from the very first—and only—kiss.