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november 5th (late).
“Do you not want more from this life than dancing and daydreams,” I ask her eventually, as she gets off her basket throne and wander alone inside the precious, little house that smells of propriety and a good girl’s morals of which she has none, and therefore she hardly belongs. Among the ceramics and the fine China, lain out on platters and plates. They serve cakes of off those, but do they have them, do they eat? When will this queen meet Madame Guillotine? She has met me, she knows the dangers already.
She stacks more little bites of dough, Madeleines made by her maid, yellow drops of sun to consume, onto a silver tray that comes with the house and is as respectable as the kitchenware and the cat that lives in the neighbour’s stables, but sometimes brings its kittens inside for inspection and petting, to the delight of all the ladies but Marguerite. Some of us grew up in the country and some of us were going to a convent as we outgrew our childhood homes, these silly little incidents of stable cats do not touch us the way we touch ourselves or each other. My fingers still smell like honey and seawater if I trace the tips of them over my lips, delicately and gently. A memory of right choices, juxtapositioned by whatever she calls this kitchen, calls these cakes, calls these choices she is continuously making, wrong.
“Dancing and daydream for which I am still getting paid,” she dismisses me. I laugh, a hard, cynical laughter.
“And that satisfies you?”
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Word crawl!! I was part of my first ever word crawl in the Danish NaNoWriMo event channel on Discord last night and it was seriously amazing and so motivating. I think I managed to write 1500 words in two hours, and I was by no definition the fastest writer, so I can only imagine how much the fastest writers got written. It was a lot of fun and made me be a lot less self-critical, which I really needed yesterday which otherwise started out slow and laboriously. There’s another one on Monday (tomorrow) and I’m considering trying again. If I have the energy, because there’s a lot of off-topic talking and joking around, too, and I need the energy for that.
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Looking over my text today, I can’t believe I hadn’t written a single word on the second chapter and now I’m… six pages into it! Yesterday started out really slow and every word felt like a struggle and I wasn’t satisfied with any of it. I think I felt I either lacked a direction for the chapter or I was afraid I couldn’t live up to how good I thought the first chapter had ended up being. Very typical me thoughts and considerations to have, holding me back from writing anything at all. But I soldiered through and after a midday nap, I felt better and got started on a process that was more smooth and easy. That finally culminated in the word crawl I talked about. So the day started out meh and ended yay! All in all, I wrote 2199 words yesterday… is that the god honest word count?? Wow!
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All in all, yesterday was all about letting go - of my inner critic, expectations to what this new chapter should be and even down to what music I was supposed to listen to while writing. Rihanna and Gatti was exchanged for a repeat performance of Krystian Zimerman’s rendition of Chopin’s waltzes, back to classical, back to the basics, remembering the ballet and what the ballet wants to say about this story.
I think, what really helps about being part of a community this round of NaNo, is that it reminds me a bit of the collaborative, communal aspects of RP’ing and although I’m doing all my writing alone, there are people who take interest and actively partake in the process from the sideline. That’s just really motivating.
Having just read through what I wrote yesterday, it isn’t bad at all! Looking forward to continuing on that journey today! Wish me luck!