“What do you mean I can’t do it? You just watch me…”
Instead of making up lost distance in the writing of my novel from scratch in 30 days, maybe I’ll tag two letters on to the end of the word of my writing ambition.
A novella.
Would it be so wrong?
Maybe.
But at this point it’s either novella – or even novelette, both of which are less in the word count than the 40,000-plus for a novel and the 50,000 of the National Novel Writing Month competition – or it is the writing of lots of lines of “All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy.” Or it is an end for me like that of the main characters in Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, a killer of a short novel.
“Chocolate? Anybody say, Chocolate?”
It can pay to hang out with Granddad. Company, conversation and chocolate. Early on at a Sunday afternoon get-together my six-year-old daughter spied a bag of chocolate Kinder Eggs. The find quickly became top-of-mind for her, to use a marketing term.
“Egg, egg, egg,” she chanted to me in a hushed voice.
She didn’t want to draw attention to her discovery, not with her younger brother and sister milling around.
She continued to chant with the hope of getting me to ask granddad to fork them over.
“You ask,” I said.
But she wasn’t going to, not yet, at least.
When it came time to go as the younger two were getting feisty, the six-year-old said she’d hang out a while with granddad and the other guests. It was then that I gathered at least some of her intentions. So it came as no surprise when she got home that she came up to me and whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell anybody but I ate two eggs.”
Patience can pay, I thought.
Or was it lust?
“Keep climbing!”
I’m 13,394 words into my 50,000-word novel and the November 30 deadline is staring me in the face. A long, long way to go.
I could sure use an escalator.