Excerpt #2

I have been beyond busy the past few days, and had some problems yesterday when I fell behind my wordcount, but so far today's been going pretty well.. I still have about 800 words to write tonight, but I think it will be just fine. Next week's going to be a killer -- a civ paper AND exam -- so I have to catch up this weekend. Eek!

Here's a second excerpt of my novel. I can't say it's the best thing ever, but I'm happy enough with it.


Mama was drawn by the religious life that so closely enveloped every aspect of her life. She studied feverishly, spending all of her spare time learning Hebrew so that she could read the Torah her father kept in his study, and memorized the mizvot. No matter how much she learned about her religion, she was never satisfied. In the story she liked to tell, she felt even as a young girl that there was an energy, a positive, all consuming energy in the world that could be nothing other than the messiah her people were praying for, present in the here and now. Slowly, she began to move away from Judaism. Of course, she still attended Shabbat services, and dutifully went to her Hebrew lessons, but now in her spare time, instead of devouring the Torah, she read the Christian Bible and absorbed all she could of Jesus’ teachings and his new Golden Rules. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these,” she would say whenever any of us misbehaved. “Read Mark 12:29-31.”

On her seventeenth birthday, she snuck away from home to attend a local Christian teen prayer service. There, she met my father, and found the Lord. In Daddy’s voice she heard the Lord. “Sela,” he called to her. “Come to me.” And she did.

Exactly a year later, on her eighteenth birthday, she and Daddy married in a private ceremony with only their closest friends from the prayer group present. Daddy was twenty-five at the time, and already established in a small house on the edge of town. That night Mama moved straight out of her parent’s house and into her husband’s. The move wasn’t an easy one. Oma and Opa were furious when they learned what she had done. They didn’t approve of the match. In fact, they had already betrothed her to the rabbi’s son, Zadok Meier. The fallout from my parent’s marriage and my mother’s conversion nearly destroyed Oma, who was so heartbroken at what she saw as Mama’s betrayal that she nearly allowed herself to waste away. Opa reacted by going after Daddy. He called in the local law enforcement and attempted to get my father arrested for sexual relations with a minor, since when their relationship began Mama was only seventeen while Daddy was twenty-four. Opa lost the case, and with it his daughter. He disowned her the day the verdict came in, and growing up we never had any contact with Mama’s family at all.

My parents moved over three hours away the next week, to a small town in Louisiana where Daddy founded his own church. Six months after the move, and ten months after the wedding, my eldest brother Jeremiah was born.

They took the Lord’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” very seriously. Any form of birth control was a sin. Any pill, any condom was a life taken. They entered their relationship as pure as they could be, losing their virginity only after their nuptials, and intended to remain as pure as possible in this world so full of sin. While reading the Bible shortly after Jeremiah was born, Daddy was struck by a passage in Psalms, 127:3-5, which read,

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

He was not the only one to be struck by this passage; in fact, this is the biblical passage often cited by the members of the Quiverfull movement, which my family undoubtedly belongs to. In the next twenty years, my parents had twelve children. I was lost in the middle.

Day 3

And we're off! Today is Day 3, and so far everything is on schedule. My novel this year is about a young girl, Rachel, who is part of a large Evangelical Christian family. It's told as if it were a memoir, with Rachel looking back on her family and life on their farm -- and her eventual escape from her father, a man so wrapped up in his religion and quest to keep his family pure that he abuses his children to keep them in line.

Here's a first excerpt for you - the beginning of Let Down Your Hair:


They told me it was for the best. That the Lord desires his maidens to be pure. Untouched. Unsullied by the modern world. The modern world was no place for the Lord’s true children. We were not allowed off the family’s land without Daddy present to guard over us; it was for our benefit, they said. I had no reason not to trust them at the time. I knew nothing else, nothing outside of our land, nothing outside of our small town. If Daddy told me that the outside world was dangerous, than it was dangerous. I trusted him completely.

Daddy worried about my sisters and I in particular. He believed that my brothers were strong men, following in his footsteps, and so shielded them from the outside world a bit less than us girls. After all, one day they would be the man of the house, in charge of their own wife and brood of children. They had to be prepared to shield their families from the dangers found outside of our small church community. Us girls, though, we needed to be protected. We were Daddy’s property until we entered our husband’s houses, and we were to abide by his rules.

Happy NaNoWriMo Eve!

It's almost here! Tomorrow! I can't wait to start my novel, titled Let Down Your Hair. I've even been dreaming about it, how crazy is that? Tonight's a busy night for me, being Halloween and all. I'm celebrating my last night of freedom by going on a ghost tour of a mansion in Newport (Belcourt Castle, for those who are curious) and possibly attending the pep band costume party off-campus. Midnight will find me in front of a keyboard, ready to go. It's still not too late to sign up! Do it, you know you want to!

I may post a beginning excerpt tomorrow, depending on how many words I can get in before I pass out from exhaustion. No matter what, I'll aim for an excerpt by Monday. See you then, and happy writing!

NaNoWriMo and the Student

Some people wonder if it's possible to write 50,000 words while being a full-time student. It is -- but it is hard. In '06, as a senior in high school, I was taking a full load of classes and working part-time, but despite all that I was doing, I blame my failure to finish on a combination of senioritis and general laziness. In '07, I was determined to succeed. Two failures in a row is just embarrasing ;). It's determination that's really the key. A handy trick is to find someone else who is writing, and try to beat their word count every day. For example, if a writing buddy writes 2000 words in one day, try to write 2001. Stay above 1667 words a day, and you'll be golden!

Editing has no place in NaNoWriMo. Really. I know, I know, editing is important. Save that for NaNoEdMo (known to the common people as March.) Editing takes up far too much time when you're busy with schoolwork and general life duties, and all spare time should be dedicated to writing.

It's okay, if you're struck by writer's block, to skip a scene or two. If you have an idea for something that will happen in the future, go for it, and fill in the blanks later. Some writers may say this is a bad idea, but it works for me. Sometimes writing a future scene helps me to figure out what to do to get me there. If you're really stuck, try it. Just don't forget to fill in the missing pieces.

If you work hard enough, and budget your time carefully, you'll be fine. Don't let your schoolwork slack, though. Most professors don't understand when you say, "But it's NaNoWriMo!" (But hey, maybe you can convert them to the challenge. Then they may understand.)

No Plot? No Problem!

Hello, and welcome to my blog! To those of you who haven't heard about it before, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. For ten years now, the challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November has been extended to those crazy enough to put pen to paper and rough it out. My blog title is the motto of NaNoWriMo - the point is not to create the next Great American (or wherever you are) Novel -- it's to get your ideas out on paper. Create a character, or a basic idea, and run with it. See what you can do.

This is my third year attempting the NaNoWriMo challenge. In '06 I failed miserably, finishing with only 10,000 words. '07 was much more successful - I finished, with time to spare! Unfortunately, in what I now lovingly refer to as the Great Windows Fuck-up of Summer '08, I lost the majority of that novel. That leads me to today, 5 days until the insanity of November begins. I have a basic idea, a main character and a cast of supporting characters, and no clue what I'm going to do with them. Bring on November! I'm planning on blogging at least twice a week, so check back for updates with snippets of my novel (as yet unnamed... hey, at the very least check back to see what I name the damn thing!) and updates on my mental status. I can do it!

It's not too late to sign up yourself! Just visit www.nanowrimo.org and sign up today! Hope to see you there...