National Novel Editing Month

[soleta_nf]

I'm horribly delinquent in my National Novel Editing Month hours, at 4/50 so far, but it trudges on. I'm starting to hit some new snippets that I quite like. Such as:

She hated when I called her mother.

I started around age - twelve? - maybe. She put up with it for a while, but one day she just snapped.

"Stop calling me that! I'm 'Mom' or 'Mommy'!"

I glared at her coldly and replied, "No, you are not. You are MOTHER."

She said that reminded her of the book Mommie Dearest, which I hadn't read then and still haven't, but which she said made the word "Mother" sound cold and distant, mangled and ugly, horrid and grotesque.

I just smiled inwardly. She had just hit the nail on the head and wasn't even aware of it.

It amuses me that my sense of editing accomplishment increases every time I see the page number on my Word file decrease. I had 281 double-spaced essay pages to begin with, and now I'm down to 273. Wahoo! Hopefully I can get it down to 200 or so before I print this monster out and start editing the old-fashioned way.