By Maureen L. Bonatch
‘Twas the month after NaNoWri, and all through the
house
The writer sat dressed
in sticky notes with stains on her blouse;
The words had been
written without worry or care,
With the hopes that a
story lay buried in there;
The family slept
soundly, resting in bed;
While the writer woke
early with plot lines circling her head;
With the neighbor’s
Christmas lights gleaming, earlier than she’d remembered,
She struggled to
comprehend how she’d lost November,
While wandering through
the house, that had become such a mess,
She returned to the
computer, neglecting Christmas cards needing addressed.
Facing the blank
screen, she plugged in the flash drive,
Opening the story
where her characters came so alive.
The curser blinked beside
more than one typo,
Making her wonder if
the whole document should go,
When what to her
curious eyes did appear,
But a glorious
sentence, maybe her best all this year,
With prose written so
perfect and slick,
She rapidly scrolled
the document with click after click.
More swiftly than
snowflakes, the needless words came,
She highlighted and
deleted as she called them by name:
Now, That! Now, Had!, now Only and Always!
Backspace on Tried to, Perhaps, delete, Very and
Stall words!
To the trash went the
passive words! Her inflated word count did fall!
As she deleted,
deleted, deleted them all!
As the sentence
structure tightened, her smile grew,
Across the keyboard,
her fingertips flew
Crafting her glorious
story, with characters she knew—
And then, in the background,
she heard something fall
The thrashing and
mauling of her two kids in the hall.
As she paused on the
keyboard, and was turning around,
Into the room, her
kids came with a bound.
Their faces were
scrunched and they demanded some food,
She tried to explain,
she wasn’t in the mood.
The stacks of dirty
laundry lay piled at their back.
The kids looked like
ragamuffins choosing clothes from the stack.
Her characters needed
her, but the kids wanted to eat,
Completing all of this
seemed an impossible feat.
Their little mouths
pulled down into a frown,
When she pleaded to
wait until she wrote just one more word down.
The candy canes for
the tree, lay trampled beneath,
They threatened to
make a salad, from a ratty Christmas wreath.
Their old Christmas
jammies displayed their little round bellies,
She took a whiff and
found her kids had grown a tad smelly.
The story beckoned and
called as she studied her brood,
She smiled at their
frustration, in spite of their mood;
She hopped from the
chair and jumped the laundry pile,
Promising her story it
would only be awhile.
She spoke not a word,
but filled up the tub,
Told the kids to jump
in and rub a dub-dub,
Grabbing all the
laundry, she rushed down the stairs,
Pausing to grab a pair
of stray underwear,
Whipping it all into
the machine she started the load,
Then gathered all the
leftovers she found in the abode,
She paused to exclaim
as she returned to the story—
A crockpot meal for you all, while I unearth my
NaNoWri manuscript’s glory!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Tell me...Did you participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? If so, how did you do and what are you doing with your story now?
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The car accident totaled Sabrina Post’s convertible and reinvented her memories. She can't recall dumping Cole Dawson ten years ago. What her new clairvoyant visions tell Sabrina is he’s her husband.
Any practical girl would question her sanity. But if Sabrina wants to make this imaginary future a reality, she'll have to regain Cole’s trust and eliminate her rival, the coffee shop waitress who’s pegged Cole as husband #4.
