Nano Progress and Tidbits

I am cooking along on the novels.  I still am not thrilled with my efforts (worry that the story is a bit too smarmy, the stakes not high enough, and the story not interesting enough to hold a reader), but I keep reminding myself that it is a first draft.  All of these weaknesses can be addressed during the numerous editing stages the manuscript will go through after the Nanowrimo challenge is done.

The novel holding my primary focus is called "The Golden Bobby Pin" and is about a terribly shy, self-conscious teen who finds a golden bobby pin and decides to wear it in her hair.  She finds that when she wears the pin, good things happen and her self-confidence increases.  She becomes convinced that it bears some magic, despite her best friend's skepticism. Eventually, the pin will disappear and she will have to determine whether the confidence comes from within or from the pin.  As my niece puts it, it's a feel-good novel.  Not intense story-line, like some of my others.

The second novel I started is called "Dethroning the Queen of Sheba." This is one I began many years ago, so the story line has had a good long time to simmer.  However, somehow my enthusiasm for the tale is lagging, even though I think it holds more promise than the somewhat unbelievable bobby pin story. I suppose part of it is that I really liked the beginning I wrote before and cannot find it anywhere in my papers (although I know I never would have thrown it out - it is there somewhere).

It is about a teen who is forced to spend the summer with her prissy younger sister at her grandmother's house.  She decides to bring her sister down a peg by sending her fake anonymous love letters.  She is unsettled when someone else begins sending real letters.  Who is sending the real letters and will the older sister end up being the one who is brought down a peg instead? It just isn't coming as smoothly as the other tale, for now.  I still write about a thousand words on it, every other day.

So, on November 8th, I achieved the mid-way point of the Nanowrimo goal - achieving 25,000 words. I tend to average about 3600 words on days when the boys are not home and 1500 words when they are home.  This is still not enough to make 100,000 words by the end of the month, but I'm hoping I will at least complete the bobby pin novel entirely.

In other news, my son's football team lost their sectional game on Friday.  It was not unexpected, but still a bit of a disappointment (equally disappointing because we didn't get to see it as planned - we drove all the way out to the venue, only to find that there were no parking spaces left - the game was mobbed and Bryce said even if we had parked in a store parking lot across the street, we would have even struggled to find standing room). I did manage to snag a photo of him in his game jersey prior to leaving for school on Friday morning:

Plus, I realized that I failed to post a photo of my younger sons dressed in their Halloween attire this year.  So here is a photo of my skateboarding zombie and my Scream character: