NaNoWriMo Week 2 Check In & 2010 Excerpt

We’re nearly two full weeks into NaNoWriMo and I’m already 5056 words behind. I don’t know about you, but this year NaNoWriMo is kicking my ass. It doesn’t help that Scrivner is missing over 2000 words I wrote yesterday. It makes me want to cry and punch my computer in the face.

My daily word counts will pretty much have to be 2000 words a day if I want to make my goal. Yikes.

How are you doing? Are you on goal? Or are you like me and happen to be wicked behind?

Whatever the case, you’re doing it. You got this.
And I’m sure that anything you’re writing is 10x better than my 2010 NaNoWriMo novel The Good Girl, which was my first attempt into YA lit and is about a high school cross country runner who falls for the wrong guy and her life pretty much spirals out of control. Yeah, it sucks and starts with the cliche of a girl waking up in a hospital.

Prologue

I woke up groggy from a dream I couldn’t seem to remember.    At least it felt like a dream, I didn’t think there was anything else that could explain why my head was so empty and throbbing they way it was.  I struggled to open my eyes, but my eyelids were heavy with fatigue.  I didn’t remember ever being in this much pain before.   I was finally able to open my eyes and took in the dim and sterile room around me:  the blinking monitors of machines, vases of flowers on the windowsill, and my mom asleep in the chair next to the bed.  I had never been in a hospital room before, but I had seen enough television shoes and medical dramas to know what one looked like.  I was definitely in one.  I tried to rack my brain to remember why I was in a hospital room connected to all of these tubes and machines but my brain wasn’t cooperating.  I started to panic when I tried to move my arms but they were too heavy to move.   I tried to look at my body to make sure everything was still intact but my limbs were paralyzed with fatigue.   I was too tired and weak to continue trying to move.  I closed my eyes and as I started to drift off to sleep a face flashed in my mind.  This was his entirely his fault, everything I had done over the last few months was because of him.  They should have warned me about him but they didn’t.  Warned me about what would happen if I let me guard down and trusted him.  Told me to make a better choice.   Would I have really listened if they had?  Probably not.  But I wish they had at least tried to tell me what he was really like.  Perhaps I would have been better off if he had never noticed me in the first place. I wouldn’t be part of a twisted love triangle.  Maybe this broken heart would be the least of my worries.  Blaming someone for this mess makes it only slightly more bearable.   If I had to blame my broken heart on anyone it would be Noelle.  After all she was the one who introduced me to him in the first place.  But it’s not really her fault, is it?  It was his fault.  He did this.  Then my wind went blank.

Chapter 1

This is going to be embarrassing,  I thought as I laced up my running shoes.  This is probably the worst idea ever.  It had been Noelle’s brilliant idea for us to join the cross country team.  If I didn’t love my best friend so much I probably would have told her to bug off and run by herself.   But I didn’t, which was why I was putting on a tiny track uniform and brand new racing flats.