NaNo Day 10 and a Bit of a Scare (not in that order)

After Sunday's Bedroom Destroying Excitement (which was so much fun in the aftermath), B.B. was a little sluggish the rest of the day, but we chalked that up to the excitement of destroying thousands of dollars of custom window treatments. (It's not every day, after all, that you can increase your personal cost of ownership by a double-digit percentage in one fell swoop.) She came home from the dog park that morning a little sluggish, too (this was pre- the destructive rampage) and for the first in recorded history she didn't eat all of the food we gave her for lunch. She ate about three-quarters of it and then just laid down. That worried us a bit, but since she likes pumpkin (and thank God the Libby's people solved whatever distribution problem they were having earlier) which is good for the digestion, it somehow has the double effect of speeding up things that are slow or slowing down things that are happening too fast, or so we've read, we gave her a little bit on top of the one-quarter food she had left to encourage her to finish. Then we left her alone while we went out to lunch, and the rest is history.

But she didn't eat all of her food at dinner either and struggled over breakfast, too. Now, that could have been because K fed her three slices of Pepperidge Farm's White Bread in the evening because our vet had once told us a story of a dog who ate some sewing needles and the owner gave him white bread which coated the needles and allowed them to pass without tearing up the dogs intestines. But I think perhaps the bread, being something totally new to her, upset her stomach a little.

In the morning she clearly wasn't feeling herself, but she did eat breakfast and K took her to the park to run around, but something was clearly wrong. They came home for lunch and B.B. only had a few bites. So K called the vet and asked what she should do. He recommended we bring B.B. in for an x-ray, better to be safe than sorry. We had to leave her there because they needed the afternoon to sedate her (and I have to confess that I don't like leaving B.B. somewhere that I am not). They found little bits of metal from the flashing around the outsides of the blinds, but the vet said it probably wasn't anything to worry about. Still, though, we worry anyway. She came home, ate the rest of her lunch as dinner, and slept a lot (she was groggy because of the sedative). The vet encouraged us to take her on short walks to encourage her to, well, you know. He said the x-rays showed that she was likely blocked up by something, but he didn't know what. So we did. We walked her several times around the neighborhood, very slowly since she was stumbling around like a drunken sailor (no offense to any sailors reading this). Mostly she just slept as we watched her.

This morning she seems back to her usual self. We got up at five, had a bit of a walk around the yard, she ate her breakfast in usual lightening-fast style that she normally does, and then she chased the cat around, who seemed curious himself to know what was going on with her and just wanted to be in the same room with us. She's lying on the floor next to me right now, watching me type, and Gus is next to me watching her.

I don't like to think about anything bad happening to anybody in my family, K, Gus, B.B. I call them "my girls" even though Gus is technically not (he doesn't mind, though). Yesterday while B.B. was at the vet, I had this feeling of increasing panic rise up in me because she was somewhere that I couldn't just reach out and assure her that everything would be all right, even if it I didn't know that for sure. I knew she was scared by herself and didn't like being without us. Takes us back, full circle, to why she did what she did to the bedroom yesterday. In her little crate (which actually has enough room for her to move around in and almost stretch out, but we can't help our negative reaction to the fact that it is basically a cage) she probably can't do much more than just sit around idle. Given the space of an entire bedroom, her own rising levels of panic probably took over. I guess I can understand that, although I will say that in an entire afternoon without her yesterday I didn't destroy anything more than a grand latte from Starbucks.

Enough of that sentimental crap

Moving on...

NaNoWriMo Day 10. I'm just over the 20,000 words mark and feeling pretty good about it. I've gotten past Chapter One, which was my introduction to the Main Character, background about him, and leading up to an integral part of his storyline that sets everything in motion. Chapter Two always was going to be a transition into the main setting and the formal story-line which would start in Chapter Three, but I needed it to be more than just a couple of paragraphs saying, "...and then he moves to a new place and meets new people." Boring.

Something that fascinates me about creative writing is the creative part. Sometimes, as I'm writing, I just let my mind wander and stumble upon things I hadn't thought of before. For instance, I introduced a character who my main character needed to interact with during this Chapter Two transition, and in the course of writing I realized this new character was more interesting than I'd thought. The more I wrote about him (and he was never supposed to be in more than a couple pages) I found out that he could be useful. I think I'll bring him back later when the plot needs someone like him, which it will. The reader, at that point, will think, "Yeah, I remember that guy" because he got the chance to do some interesting things in Chapter Two that will impact the Main Character going forward.

So that's the interesting part, discovering little gems that you didn't know about. (Not precious gems like diamonds or rubies, because we're not writing at that caliber; more like feldspar or quartz.) You stumble upon them as you get your character from Point A to Point B. There are stops along the way and sometimes you run into interesting people there.

My guy (which is what I'll the MC) had to stop by a hospital in Chapter One and look for someone, just a brief visit but it was necessary to the plot. I had to write in someone at the front desk who he could talk to. So I did. I knew I was going to have to, but I didn't think much of it before I got to that particular scene. So I patterned this woman slightly after a character in a TV show that K and I watch, Nurse Jackie, if you've ever seen it, starring Edie Falco with a great little butch hairstyle who has a well intentioned, somewhat buffoon-ish, always sweet, nursing student assistant named Zooey working for her who became the inspiration for the nurse at the front desk. She didn't have to do much more than say a couple lines and be nice to my guy, but because of the image I have in my head, I feel like she could come back and play a much larger role if I needed her to. She probably won't. He's moving on. But that's what I'm talking about. Little gems. One of the things I like about writing.

Tomorrow I'll bore you with my thoughts on first-person vs. third-person narrative, but I warned you a couple days ago to ignore my rambling. If you're still reading at this point, you have no one to blame but yourself.