Wherein the author denies you.

I've been keeping up with Nano writing, and I have to tell you that it feels damn good to be writing every day.  There are certainly moments -- and sometimes they string together into minutes -- when I have no idea what I'm doing, and when on an underground level I'm fairly sure that what I'm writing is a steaming load of crap.  BUT.

But, the good (best) thing is that I'm writing, I'm not thinking about being my own stupid self.  In fact, I'm having an out of the body experience.  And, given the state of my body at this point in time (aching lower back, trashed knees, a rogue pain in my left hip that shoots down to my groin, these damn itchy spots that, like chicken pox, keep popping up on me and not going away for weeks that turn into months -- and this is just the short short story, because I could go on), that's an excellent effect.

Today I figured something out.  I set myself the task of trying to describe, in a nutshell, how the Dead operate.

So I created a bit character to tell Shannon about it.  But I discovered that this bit character couldn't tell Shannon much about the rules of the Dead because to do so would, or might, break some unwritten or unknown rules of the Dead, and result in some horrifying form of punishment.  (Not that Dahlia didn't deserve some punishment, because she -- like every Dead person Shannon will meet -- treats the Lifers like crap and is, down to her transparent and nonexistent bones, a hater.  Also, in Life she was a Philosophy grad student, given to making sure that everything she bothered to say to another human being, when she bothered to communicate, was nearly incomprehensible.)

So the character who was supposed to have answers just brought in more questions.  And she made Shannon have this frustrating conversation outside on a park bench, in November, in Pittsburgh, where the cold is always damp and gets into a woman's (living) bones.

But Dahlia informed me and Shannon of a few things, despite herself:

Oh.

I started writing down this really great specific list of information (if I do say so myself), and got to number 6, on a total roll, and then realized that if I give it all away here, you'll never pay to read my book.

So there's that.  I have to be stingy.

*

Nanowrimo count, day 9:  19, 096
Words written today: 2914