Excerpt

So it's day nine of NaNoWriMo, and my word count is seriously lacking. I am however getting very good at Scrabulous. I'm finding that the more games I play simultaneously, the more “in the zone” I actually get. I am playing fourteen games at the moment. Luckily, no one is online to play with me right now, and so I've managed to add 855 words to my word count today. And there will be more. I have the weekend off, and although as a house we've decided to decorate the kitchen, I still believe I will hit my target of lots of words, by Sunday.

I've added an excerpt on my official NaNoWriMo page, so I've decided to post it on here, too. My novel is made up of thinking parts and action parts. At the minute there are more thinking parts, and not very much has happened, action-wise. This following excerpt is a thinking part...


"It's weird how sometimes you can see the split, where your life as it is and how it could have been diverges. Your life is real, but there is a sense that it is being lived more intensely by another version of you, who made the choices you didn't, followed the paths you pretended weren't even there. You are flesh and bones and blood. But your heart, not the muscle of four-chambers, but the idea of your heart, this is elsewhere: it is not with you in this moment. And you feel it's happier in this other place. That somehow, the life you are living is not the one your heart intended. At all.

There are glimpses of this other life when you least expect them. But they come thick and fast, sometimes. Other times, they will creep into your field of vision so you're not really sure whether what you've seen is really real. It happens most at twilight. This is the time when your eyesight is at its worst, when objects that are actually there can be mistaken for shadows, or thoughts, and things that didn't exist before you dreamed them into being shine out from streetlamps and car headlights and through the branches of trees. And at these times, you really think you are that other person, and all your thoughts are the thoughts that that person is thinking. And there is another life, another home you go home to. And while it is not entirely different from the one you occupy, it's not really the same. Perhaps you sleep on the other side of the bed. Perhaps you don't even sleep in a bed, maybe it is a futon, a hammock. And you know your clothes are different, and in the back of your head you think to yourself: I could have the clothes. They are do-able. But you also know, and tell yourself, that you will never get round to such a big upheaval.

When you think of this other life, you feel a weight pushing against your chest. You feel it as a loss.

And even though you go about your day as normal, keep your routine, you feel it's just a body going blindly through the motions. You could be carved up into cuts of meat – a shank, a rack of ribs, a sirloin – and still the part of you that's you would be separate from every sinewy part. The “you” of you would still be free to dream, to imagine. So who's to say you can only exist in one space and time? If this “you” is not a physical thing, if it is an idea, a collection of thoughts and memories, then who's to say these ideas cannot shift, be it across time or space or distance?"