Alexandria brushed aside a tangled lock of her unkempt hair and pressed an ear against one of the splintered, ramshackle walls that held up the cottage she shared with her mother. Biting her lip, she winced —Mother. Surely she had fallen asleep by now. Surely it would be safe to creep out of this tiny, disgusting room and find something to eat. Surely…

Holding her breath, she listened through the crumbling wall and into the excruciating silence, then leapt back as something slammed against the wood, shattered, and left a protruding dent a mere centimetre from where her head had been.

“Cursed. Cursed! I should’a taken ‘er when she was a babe. It’s too late… too late.”

Her mother’s slurred mutterings grabbed at her heart and twisted it before dumping it into the pit of her stomach. Although she had heard those words so many times, they were still painful.

She had been kept isolated, a shameful burden that weighed heavy upon the hearts and minds of those who shared in the knowledge of her blasphemous existence. All she had ever known was that she was a cursed and hated witch that if borne by a stronger woman would not be alive this day to cause such pain and hardship to the surrounding village, and that if she so much as breathed in the wrong direction the Magisters of the Sundered Isles would sense her, send forth their vile horsemen, and after she had been taken to be experimented on in service to the Gods her entire village would be murdered in their role of harbouring her.

Her life was her mother’s fault, and their deaths would be hers.

It's difficult to work on this story again after so long. To try and finally finish it so I can party, edit, send it off to the Beta Readers Group, party again, and moan in despair when I get the feedback back. xD

I know this story by heart, I see it in my mind unfolding like a movie, but when it comes to putting the words down... they fail. It takes me three hours just to write one paragraph.

It's the 6th of November and I've done about 3000 words. That number should be at 12,000 when you take into account normal NaNoWriMo goals. But then I remind myself that technically I'm not doing NaNoWriMo in its accepted form. I'm doing my own version which has a main purpose of simply, "Finish this book! Get 'er done."

And to be fair, those are 3000 new words to slap onto the 45,000 existing ones. Progress.

Plus there are other "life matters" of course. My partner's away for the week, my son is very... rambunctious, I've just finished the last assessment for my Business Administration certificate and am waiting to hear back. With that course out of the way, the near future holds a minor uncertainty. And of course, preparing for a new kitten on the way. (next week!)

...

Everything'll work out.

Good luck to all other NaNoWriters ~ Keep on writing. :)

Will write another update this time next week, hopefully a more favourable one. ;)
Until next time! Thanks for stopping by.