Well, I didn’t make amazing progress in this second week. I have the usual excuses: tiredness, doing other work, the malaise that the election and the uprise in the pandemic leaves in its wake.
Still, I am enjoying working on my modern Jane Austen tale, which follows four sisters in their teens and early twenties.
I started with 7,806 words I had already previously written (some of this was outlining), and have now reached 20, 327. That’s less than 13,000 words in the first two weeks, which is not too impressive, but I have to keep in mind that progress is progress!
Hopefully, next week I will have doubled that number, as my workload should be lighter this week.
Here’s a small snippet of what I’ve been able to write so far:
After the incident that Carmen had at Alex’s party, the girls’ mother banned them all from attending any event that she or their father could not attend. She felt that the young people they were associated with were untrustworthy and unpredictable.
“I’m not going to allow my young ladies to go around getting drunk at parties and being in the company of young men who have unsavory reputations,” she swore. “ I’m training you up to be young ladies, not just any kind of woman.”
Though most of the girls greatly disliked being punished for an honest mistake by Carmen, Fildegal was glad. After all, it meant they couldn’t go out and make fools of themselves or get into trouble. She felt they should focus on building up their character at home, especially as they were preparing to be wives and mothers.
The social seclusion was a strange transition, as the girls had experienced a good deal of freedom up until then. They were all very excited, therefore, when they received an invitation to a friend’s New Year’s Eve party, which their parents would be attending. They hadn’t been able to get out very much, and so they had spent their days at home working on their homework or, in Carmen’s case, busily talking on the phone to her 100 friends and telling them every single detail of how Billy was such a jerk.
Somehow, Carmen still managed to land herself a date to the New Year’s Eve party, even though she had been locked up for so long. She was bringing along a guy that she had met at the library of all places, one of the few places that she was allowed to go.Fildegal was a mess. At the Bible conference, she had spent nearly the whole time with Steve’s sister and had seen Steve more times than she could count.
At the end of the conference, her heart had raced when he stepped up on the platform. He shared a special mission project that he was involved in helping children in Africa get the clothing education and clean water that they needed.
She had felt by the end of the conference that if she wanted to get married, he was exactly the kind of man she would want to marry. This had strangely resulted in her increasing inability to have a lucid conversation with him.
Keep in mind- this is a WIP and this is the first draft! But I’ve had a lot of fun thinking of Austen-y plots and characters in a modern, Christian setting. I’ve inserted some parallel characters and events, which will be a kind of a mystery for my readers (dare to dream!) to unravel.
Other NaNo Writers or writers: How are your projects going?
Classic Reads 