Well hot damn.
NaNo, as my boyfriend informs me, may not be something y’all know about. It boils down to this: thirty days, 50,000 words, one novel. Yes, that is very fast. Yes, that is a very short amount of time. Yes, most of it will be crap (amateurs and veterans alike agree on that). But you know what? That is one more novel, currently crappy or not, than you had written before.
And that’s not half bad.
This is. Bad, I mean. But there’s a joyous fun in that, isn’t there? I’ve done NaNo three times before, so there must be.
[Note: Be prepared for shameless word-padding, confusing dialogue, etc. I'll occasionally add clarifying notes, but if I haven't, you're not misreading anything. This is a very raw display of writing in progress, with all the desperation, confusion, and whining that entails.]
This is the first line of the novel.
This is the second line of the same novel.
Package strapped to her back, she ground her feet hard against the pedals, quads aching. The rain kept pounding, a blink-or-waterblind situation, especially since without both hands on the bars, she was toast.
Her phone beeped at her, twice—right turn. In water the old Duino cables were liable to short—too many times she’d absently jumped off the bike and ripped half the damn setup off—but with only ten blocks separating her from the prize, she wasn’t going to make any stops to insulate.
Going crosstown was the best for her, the worst for the pedestrians. In jammed traffic she could swerve in and out easily, hopping on the sidewalk for when cars had their own arguments. Too many people waited for them—two idiot cars trying to merge at the same time had cost many a prize—but with the right timing a hole in the crowd was always there.
A bright-eyed blond stepped out from the awning of a store to greet her, shining and sparking like a beacon of consumer light. Sohan squinted against the rain and pedaled harder, slamming into her without stopping.
Behind her, the blond still stood, smiling.
Of course, certain instincts were required.
Smarter riders would say it was something in the air, the way it shimmered when holograms were used; you could look for nearby lights and the reflections of cameras in the bike’s front light. Sohan used a mix of habit and cynicism: no one here, she reasoned, would ever be smiling like that.
At least most of the accidents she had been in had injured her most of all. A dull, nagging pain in her right knee snarled every time she pedaled, and her ribs were still sore from a brief flying lesson she had gotten the day before, courtesy of an automated SUV rickshaw. Half the show nowadays was just insisting you had money; getting investors only meant you had to pretend you knew what you were doing.
But there were other ways to earn money.
The phone beeped again—three times, straight ahead now. Sohan grit her teeth and leant forward, snarling into the wind.
