Saturday, November 1, 2008

Three Thousand Six Hundred and Twenty-One

That’s the number of words I’ve hammered out since midnight. Chapter One’s rough draft is done. Since I’m using the very opening of the novel as my “excerpt” on the site, I may as well recreate it here.


I don’t think any of this would have happened if Maddie hadn’t wanted to show off. It was her night, though, so I kept my mouth shut and went along with it.

She’d just “discovered” tea, the kind that’s not pulverized and shoved into a teabag and stapled closed, and in celebration of her new job she decided to drag us all along with her to a proper teahouse. “It’s Japanese,” she said, “and kind of expensive, but these things only happen once in a lifetime so who cares, right?”

Once in a lifetime.


I found a lot out about my characters that I didn’t already know while writing this initial chapter. For instance, Maddie’s newfound love of tea, and her interest in the teahouse, is the responsibility o f a coworker named Kiyoko. The fact that she goes by Maddie and not Madeline surprised me as well. She didn’t strike me as a Maddie right off the bat. Amanda is not a medical researcher like I’d thought - she’s a librarian, and though she’s quiet and seemingly somewhat meek she’s got some strong opinions. The narrator worries about Lucy, who’s way more of a bitter underachiever than I’d imagined her to be. Lucy, however, just doesn’t give a shit. Maintain the status quo and have fun outside the office, that’s her strategy.

Interesting. Very interesting.

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