Longer shadows. Chicago River, South Branch, 2014. | Kenneth Lowe

He was talking, but it wasn’t words. Broadcasting, whatever. It was just … meanness. Just bad things. He had eyes like a wolf. Tattoos all over him, his neck, his fingers. And he just looked straight at me and put a finger to his lips, and he got in his car and left.

And my dad was inside with his head in his hands at the table, just bawling. My mom and Tommy weren’t anywhere. And he just looked up at me and told me we had to go.

“I did a bad thing, Daddy did a bad thing, sweetie,” he said. “If we don’t go now she might find us. We have to go before she finds us.”

He wouldn’t say who “she” was. But we were packed that night, just him and me, and then we were gone.

I did a bad thing. I brought another character into the narrative, one who hasn’t even existed before. I would say I hope this doesn’t complicate anything, but I know it does. I am not very disciplined at this, am I?

Still, for sheer word-count as well as successful-completion-of-scene, I had a pretty decent writing day. It took me a while to ignore digital distractions and hunker down and really write, but once I did, it flowed out. And man am I ahead of word count. Let’s take a look at the stats:

NaNoWriMo Day 2
START: 141,399 words
END: 144,425 words
WORDS TODAY: 2,846
GOAL: 4,737/50,000

¡Increíble!

Today’s success is due largely in part to me not fulfilling my adult responsibilities. I doubt I’ll be able to maintain this discipline throughout. I am in the midst of a long scene in which two groups of conspirators reveal important things about their pasts in order to bring everybody else onto the same page. I don’t even know if this structure will survive the final edit, but I’m getting stuff down, and that is better than not getting it down. And further, it is great to be making progress on this monster after all this time.

May I be worthy.