NaNo – the Challenge of Zombies

I am writing a novel in 30 days.  This is hard in and of itself.  But what makes it harder?  Zombies.

Nope, I am not predicting the zombie apocalypse early.  And no, I have not been dared to put zombies in my quaint tale of small towns and friendship.  I am the zombie.

I have a cold.  And I want to power through.  I should be using this afternoon when I got sent home from work to be writing up a storm but instead I’ve been staring at walls.  Literally, I really have.  My brain can’t seem to process things very quickly (you don’t even want to know how long it’s taking me to write this post).

So, see the moral of the story (wait, was I telling a story?) is that sometimes you have to cut yourself some slack.  Because yes, I want to write 50K in 30 days – but I also want it to not be a surrealist treatise on the color of the air.

Below is the beginning of my novel though – I really like it. 🙂

“No one gets it,” she said, staring out across the lake, her feet kicking back and forth idly.  “They say they do, everyone says they do, but no one really gets it at all.”

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the page her notebook had been open to for days.  The page itself was worn, like a hand had been drawn down it multiple times, trying not only to erase the words but their meaning as well.

She leaned her head against his shoulder with a sigh.  “Just something I wrote,” she murmured reluctantly, drawing her feet up onto the dock.  She’d been away for too long, been trapped in a house where no one paid each other any mind far too much, to forget that he’d notice.

“Read it to me.”

“You don’t want to hear it.”  But it was an empty protest, even to her ears.  Smiles darted across their faces.  She knew the expression on his without even needing to look, a side effect of a decade of friendship.

“We both know that’s a lie.  Come on, I showed you mine.  Show me yours.”

She took a deep breath, a slight catch in her throat – she’d never admitted any of this out loud before – and then started to read.

“I had a friend once.  She’s gone now.  I mourn. . . .”