What with Christmas and end-of-the-year posts, I got very distracted from sharing about my NaNo novel!  I was working towards a half-NaNo (25,000 words) during December, but happily, I finished ahead of time.  I got to 65,882 words and the end of the story on December 20th!

There will definitely be revision needed, thematically and on some POV issues I’ve mentioned earlier, but overall I’m pretty happy with how the first draft turned out.  Since it’s shorter than most of my first drafts, there’s plenty of space for expansion.  And considering this is a very complicated plot involving alien fairy tales, a conspiracy theory, a millennia-old treasure hunt and, of course, parallel universes, I’m happy to have managed a mostly coherent first draft in the frantic rush of NaNo.  Writing to the end helped me figure a lot out, and give me a better idea of the direction to take when I revise.

But that won’t be for a while.  I plan to let this one percolate in my backbrain for at least several months, maybe a year, while I focus on last year’s NaNo novel, book 4 in my Beyond the Tales series.  So it’ll be some time before this one pops up again.  But have a last excerpt in the meantime. 🙂

        I turned to go, and maybe I really would have gone—or maybe I would have walked five steps and turned around again—but it didn’t matter because when I turned to go, rather too fast and without looking around, I collided right into someone carrying a big lot of groceries, disrupted the antigrav field holding everything together, and sent a whole pile of food flying all over the walkway.

            “Oh—sorry!” I said, stooping down to catch some kind of wildly rolling fruit.

            “No, I wasn’t looking where I was going either.”

            My breath caught and I looked up, fruit in one hand but letting another piece go right by me.

            Of course it was Lark. Her hair was a little bit longer and I had somehow, irrationally, expected her to be wearing her blue coat, which she wasn’t, but it was still definitely, unmistakably Lark, briskly and cheerfully tossing groceries back into the antigrav net.

            “I’m sorry,” I said again. For a lot of things.

            “No harm done,” she said, tossing one last loaf of bread back into the hovering pile and standing up. She flashed me a grin, a familiar grin that made my chest hurt. “I’m Lark, I live here,” she said with a nod towards the house. I managed not to say I knew that. “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

            Because of course she’d introduce herself to any new neighbors. She was like that. “No,” I said, regretting it. “I’m—my family, we’re startraders. Our ship is—in port.” Or in orbit. I had no idea, but it probably didn’t matter. Then I started slightly, realizing what I hadn’t said, overlooking the obvious thing that she still didn’t know. “I’m Aza.”