Ah! I wrote over 6,000 words today for NaNoWriMo! In one day! And that’s not counting all the tweets, the chat conversations, the texting, and of course the blogging. In the interest of my sanity, I shall only post an excerpt for tonight, with my thoughts on the noveling process coming later…

As for those unavailable, commitment phobic, politically bent, lazy, workoholic, destructive, protective, masterful, brilliant, socially inept men…? There’s the married ones, the divorced ones, no fathers thankfully. There’s the musicians, the lobbyists, the youngins who still think they’ll change the world and don’t realize that Liz doesn’t know their names or even care to learn them. Faces blend together, eventually she’s just looking for someone with a beard who will argue with her and drink with her and make her think hard and ignore her otherwise. There was at least one from every branch of the US military (and more than one NATO member as well), one from every fraternity at her Alma Mater (who’s to discriminate against undergraduates?). The boy she met at the Pride Parade who left her for a man (ok, so there was a string of boys who left her for boys but she was never one to judge, being pretty fluid with such things herself). There was the lawyer, a gorgeous Mexican woman, and the first gangster, then the second. One or both of them had since been shot, but she couldn’t recall if asked. Artists, hippies, Asians who liked her for being so short and blond, WASPs who didn’t like her for not being Asian but used her anyway. The one who dumped her when she dyed her hair red and the other who loved the red hair because it made her look like his ex wife. There were the drug users, the alcohol pushers, the partiers, the professors, she gave an interested eye to a politician every so often but stopped short of the messy public offerings of elected officials. That one guy who took pictures of her when she was asleep. She had a great time with a movie fan for a little bit, but his obsession with all things quiet and beautifully shot grated on her noisier tendencies (and sure, his request to make a movie starring their possible future bedroom hijinks was the final line)…

And then, suddenly, Liz is 25 years old, almost 26, and the alarm is going off at 7 am. It’s too early, you mumble, and roll over to hit snooze, your arms coming back around her. She’s sighing, and warm, and when the alarm goes off again and you must get up, Liz simply cannot believe the time has come.