Some NaNoWriMo!

How much more awesome would it be to see ourselves in the transition of elements? In the dust clouds of a volcano, the purple red of a maple leaf, the segmented body of worm or the flashing blue of an Atlantic octopus? That was my fear and trembling, the finding of a rounded and smooth moon snail shell on the beach, picking it up, happy to find one without holes, only to have my thumb pinched by a hermit crab that had made it its home; how perfect a home, vacated and then filled, vacated and then filled until the shell could no longer be used; the creature that had created it, had built it around its soft body, long gone.

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Corbina. A name that surprised me, a roundness I discovered on her mail after I had seen her working a stand at the farmer’s market. A tall stone of a woman, a strong jaw with large teeth that she probably grinded in her sleep. She was selling heirlooms, giant ugly tomatoes that split their own seams. She was concentrating on a book about soil Ph, barely registering anyone around her. She pushed her toes into the ground, digging them in, wriggle by wriggle, impatient to absorb what she needed to know. I took a dark purple tomato and kept walking. I didn’t look back until I was in my truck. She was standing there, eyebrows gathered, lips in a slight frown. I bit into the blackness. Juice ran down my chin.

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Those are two paragraphs from my two narrators, a young woman and an old man. I'm at 8,000--- way behind where I'm supposed to be if I want to finish at the 50,000 goal. But, 8,000 words is the most I've ever written for a story and I'm proud of that. I'm setting up to write more tonight.

Aimee Bender wrote the most encouraging NaNoWriMo post the other day. I'll have to cut and paste some of it here later.