Day 1 - Word count and an Excerpt

And the final word count for Day 1 is... 2,431. Not bad! Surpassed the 1667 mark anyway. True it turned out to be a bunch of stream of consciousness rambling for the most part, but hey... it's progress. At least I got a prologue and the first chapter down.

A couple of peculiar things happened in today's writing. First, between the two sections, I switched point of view. Ever since I decided to shoot for a YA angle, I've agonized over whether or not to keep the third person POV like the original story or try a first person approach, since that seems to be the thing in YA. I started off in first, wasn't feeling it, switched to third for the prologue... then switched back in Chapter 1. Guess I'll fix that in revision.

Second odd thing: my teen protaganist decided in Chapter one to go off on a rambling tangent about how his parents met. Odd, since he (obviously) wasn't there, but I think it might work.

*sigh* Will I ever learn to make an outline? :) Then again, if I outlined the thing to death I wouldn't get these surprises. Can't wait to see what happens when I write tomorrow.

So anyway, I close with a little excerpt from the prologue, when it was still third person. It's pretty close to the first scene of the Music Lessons short story, but a little more drawn out to up the word count (and, IMO, a lot sloppier!)

Enjoy or something. It's very painful posting this without editing, so cut me some slack, okay? :)

***

“Do you ever sleep?”

The music stopped, the last notes still vibrating the air as gently as they had drifted down the hall. Shanna looked up from her guitar and gave her brother a little smile. “Not much. Do you?”

Neil stood in the hallway watching her sit in her usual spot on our worn-out dark leather couch, and the way he was yawning, the way his long copper hair stuck up in the back he looked like he would much rather be in bed.

“Jon snores.” He put on his glasses, stepped into the living room, and flopped onto the couch beside her. “I can’t sleep anyway. Mind if I join you?”

“Sure! But only if you practice your scales.”

“At midnight?”

“Hey, I didn’t tell you to come in here and interrupt my private practice time, did I?”

“Yeah, but…”

“No buts, you.” She dropped the instrument onto his lap. “You walked into this.”

He sighed. She was right, as usual. He was up anyway, so there was no point in wasting time. He held the guitar close, taking time to feel the smooth, polished wooden body of the instrument against his skin, to feel the steel strings cutting into his fingers as he pressed on the frets. It was a miracle that this contraption could make beautiful music in capable hands. He strummed each one lightly, letting each pure note resonate in the air, low to high. Then he fumbled to position his fingers, and attempted to pluck out a clumsy basic scale, just as she had been teaching him.

His hands weren’t exactly the capable ones.

...

“Here,” he said with a discouraged frown, passing the instrument back to her. “I can’t concentrate.”

“Oh, good grief…”

“No, really.” He couldn’t get the sound of her laugh out of his mind. “Will you play something?”

“Sure.” She positioned her fingers over the strings, gave them one quick pass with her hand.

Then she began to play… chords, notes, a little arpeggio. Her fingers spun steel and air into a delicate melody she had composed herself. It swelled in the right places to feel sweeping, melancholy, but in some ways, hopeful and true.

If she were a song, this would be her sound. A sad song, one that didn’t resolve. But a beautiful song that made you want to sing, made you want to believe things were okay, even though everything around you — the world, the people around you, your own better judgment — said it wasn’t. A song to help a broken world come to terms with the pain.

That was Shanna.