"Hope Vibrates"

The auditorium fell silent as the two teams set to work. On the left, the “Spring Dodgers” were quietly discussing the question. On the right, members of the “Babbleshop Quartet” were staring at each other in silence, sometimes looking around the room hoping to find inspiration in the familiar curtains of the high school stage.

Robbie, a Dodger, glanced up from the team’s chatter and was hopeful, seeing the expressions of their opponents. She returned her attention to the team’s planning, hoping to come up with an answer to the question posed to the teams by the moderator of the competition. When she looked up again, however, her mouth gaped, her eyes opened wide, and she began to pressure her teammates in a panic to hurry.

“Come on, we have to hurry. They’re going to get the answer first!”

“I thought they were spacing out!”

“They were, but now they know what they’re doing.”

“How do you know?”

“When Hope knows the answer, she vibrates. I can just about feel it from here!”

The team returned to the question, but were too late. They jumped when they heard the bell from the other side of the stage, rung by Hope, the Quartet leader. The moderator prompted the team to respond.

“Is it 107x squared?”

The moderator checked his card. “Yes, it is. You are correct and you win this round! Congratulations!”

(This writing prompt took 5 minutes to conceptualize and write. 233 words = about 46 wpm)

NaNoWriMo 2009 Outline

Rather than going in to work today, I spent some time at the house waiting for the person who provides official measurements for carpet installation. He called this morning and told me that my two-hour window for measurement was between 12:15 and 2:15, so I took a late-morning breakfast break around 10:30, going out in the cooler weather to The Egg and I.

After eating, I was listening to classical music and sipping tea, thinking about the possible directions for the story I am considering trying to write in November. I scribbled a page of notes on it, and turned that into what is basically an outline to a story with some HUGE, GLARING HOLES in it. I'm okay with what is missing at the moment since the overall story has taken on a pretty interesting shape. Now the challenge becomes seeing if I have enough time to commit to writing at least 1667 words a day next month!

Along with this, I feel a nagging need to find or write a tool that will take what I write and check it for word and phrase proximity. That is, I obsessively worry that I'm using the same phrase too many times in a row, or too close to each other, and I would love to have a tool that goes through my work and checks that for me, letting me know where a synonym might be a good idea.