Tuesday, 20 November 2018

Nanowrimo 2018 - day 19


Daily word count:  5,710
Total word count:  38,123
Oh boy… I broke 4theWords in a big way today. It thinks I wrote 10,665 words. I mean, it’s almost a conspiracy to make my big day look… not so great?
*eyes narrow*
Nah…
I just don’t know. And then it insisted on giving me the 5k word once daily quest THREE times. Which seems kind of like overkill. Isn’t that the real total added together with the wrong total?
But honestly, you do you. I give up.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot about character traits for fiction. How do you make someone up who is VERY different from you? I often worry that all my characters sound, or act, the same.
The house next door is up for lease. There’s been a succession of tenants through, some better than others but none of them stay very long for whatever reasons.
They’d changed agents, the ‘for lease’ sign had come down but on the open days an agent was showing people through the home so we knew it was still waiting for a new tenant to sign on the dotted line. It’s close to schools and transport, it’ll rent eventually.
And then one afternoon I heard a man and some small kids swimming in the pool. It wasn’t the hottest of days and I just assumed it was the new tenants eager to try it out. I didn’t wave and shout ‘Hi!’ over the fence, they were having fun. It could wait for another day.
Odd, I thought. I missed seeing the removal van.
Later in the early evening I went for a walk and I looked at the house from the street.
It’s still empty.
There’s no furniture, no lights on, no car in the garage.
Several days later it’s still empty. It’s become something that I check on, now.
And I wonder: what kind of a person takes their kids and goes for a swim in an empty house? Who would do that?
Clearly that’s a person who is reckless? Adventurous? Criminal? Prone to illegal activities?
What would it be like to be the child of a person like that? Would your life be an adventure? Or, one day, would it all go wrong?
Now, there’s a future book character.

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