The official NaNoWriMo crest

Total wordage: 32,812 Today’s words: 1068

It’s hard to keep up the pace of 1,667 words daily for a whole month. Especially the month that has Thanksgiving in it.

The story has gotten so complex that I don’t know how it is going to come together. I just have to write parts of the story even if I don’t know where they go or how they figure in. That will come during the rewrite phase. Or so they tell me.

One thing I did today was write a few characters’ backstories in their own words. Here’s Spud’s:

            I grew up in Philly. It wasn’t a great place. My parents were heavy into the drug scene. I smoked weed starting when I was little. They’d give it to me instead of food. It’s what they had. They kept the hard stuff for themselves.

When I was fourteen, I saw my parent get killed. They were negotiating a drug deal, and the pusher didn’t like their terms so he wasted them. I couldn’t go to the police because I was wanted for a robbery where someone got shot. I wasn’t the shooter, but I was there, so I’m an accessory.

I figured my best bet was to get as far away from Philly as possible. So I started hitchhiking, and I ended up here. I figured I was pretty invisible here.

Someone turned me on to Square World. They have a lot of rules here. You can’t do this, you can’t do that, you have to do whatever they assign you. At first, I wasn’t gonna put up with that. Then, for the heck of it, I tried it for one day. And then another. Surprisingly, it’s not that bad.

One day, I saw this girl get the crap beat out of her. She was hurt really bad, bleeding, strung out. That could have been me, you know? So I took her to Square World. They told me she was my responsibility until she could hold her own. Then, she had to live by the rules or she was out.

She was a fighter. And not in a good way. She fought everybody who tried to help her. She wanted out, she wanted to go back to her old life, even if it killed her. It was all she knew. But I knew if she went back, she’d die young. So I stuck it out.