NaNoWriMo08 Ch3 Excerpt

I have almost caught up with my target wordcount after a couple of days of writing without having to tweak timelines or character details.  Just following the flow between the timeline signposts is proving to be quite liberating, taking me to places I hadn’t quite expected.  Fun.  Had I been involved in NaNoWriMo since the start of the month and keeping on target I would have been hitting 20,000 words tomorrow, but as it stands I’m currently just under 10,000.  The target I’m following needs me to write 2,000 words per day instead of the 1,666 I would have to do had I started on time, which is a bit more challenging, but I’ve been writing over that for the last two days, so things are picking up.

Unfortunately I’m away with work all day tomorrow, starting early and finishing late, so there’s no chance of getting anything done then, which will set me back again.  I’ll just need to try and squeeze some extra in today to make up for it.

Here’s a chunk of chapter 3, which continues to grow.  I have one more scene to add to it before I can move onto the next chapter.  I’m not sure whether I will have to split it into two later on, but there is a lot that happens to the main character in this one which really sets him on a course that defines the rest of the story.

The weather had been wild over the past few days; high winds and continuous rain, not unusually heavy, but just constantly wet, and it had taken a toll on our garden.  We have a reasonable sized plot of land between the house and the cliff which leads down to the beach, about a quarter of an acre in total of which a third is overgrown grass and the rest in a work-in-progress.  Which essentially means it’s a building site with occasionally scattered pots of shrubs and troughs full of either flowers or herbs.  Following the rain a large pile of topsoil had almost completely migrated from this section down to the middle of the grass, so we spend most of Monday evening, once the rain had finally died off, shovelling the errant earth back to where it belonged before the grass took it as a message to grow higher and we’d need to buy in another load of topsoil.
The phone rang inside the kitchen and I reached through the open window to pick it up.
“Hello” I said, expecting it to be one of the neighbours who had experienced a similar mini landslide over the weekend.
“Huh…” a male voice on the other end grunted at me.
“Hello?” I queried.
Silence.
“Hello?  Who’s there?” I remembered the previous mystery calls and began to get annoyed.
“Um… Heh…”
“Who is this?  What are you calling here for?”
“I, eh, where is she?”  came the question eventually.  Whoever this was sounded drunk and it wasn’t a voice I recognised.
“She who?  Who are you looking for?  Who is this calling?”  I was damn sure I wasn’t going to let him freak her out again without at least knowing who he was.
“It’s me, eh… erm…  shit… eh…”
“Are you taking the piss?” I asked, starting to get angry with whoever this was, but trying to hold back my temper to get him to say who he was.
“No… no… I’m just… I need to talk to Mary.  Eh… Can you put her on the phone?”  Okay, now at least I knew he was definitely wanting to talk to Mary and wasn’t just some drunk calling a wrong number.
“She’s not here at the moment,” I lied, trying to force him to give me a name, “but I can give her a message.  Do you have a number she can contact you on?  What’s your name?”
“A jus’ wanna talk to ‘er!” he was starting to shout and slur his words more.
“She isn’t here.  And she won’t talk to you if she doesn’t even know your name.”
“I…” he let out what sounded like a sob, then sighed and hung up.
“Arsehole” I muttered to myself, turning to Mary who had by now walked over to listen to my side of the conversation.  “Some drunk wanting to talk to you.”
“Drunk?  Who was it?” she asked
“No idea, hon.  I didn’t recognise his voice at all; sort of gravelly with a Scottish accent.  Kind of difficult to tell between the slurring.  He just wanted to talk to you.  That’s all he’d say.  Bloody nutter.”
“You’d better let me get it next time.  It might be important.”
“Ex-boyfriend, maybe?” I joked.  I regularly tease her that one of these days she’ll come to her senses and cast me aside to jet off to a celebrity lifestyle, leaving me to become a pitiful, lonely and bitter alcholic.  Unfortunately we already knew a couple of people who experienced that very scenario, and knew just how harrowing it can be.  She smiled.
“Ha ha.  I don’t know.  Half of the folk round here have English accents anyway and almost everyone I know from before moving here were all from London, so
I really have no idea.  Just let me talk to the nutter next time, eh?”

Explore posts in the same categories: NaNoWriMo

Tags: NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo08, target

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.