Yay for a three day weekend! Sure the traffic was terrible on the way home and I had to take back roads to avoid adding an hour and a half to my commute after work, but three days off really does help. Got quite a bit more writing done this evening even though I had to work up the energy to do it. I really wanted to just veg out, but books don’t get written that way.

Project: Madam Cloom’s Garden
Current Word Count: 14,526
New Words Written: 1,257

Progress: Got some beautiful imagery in with some terrifying realizations. Shaleigh then dove headfirst into a really bad idea. Fighting in the sky is never a good plan. Even when hand biting is involved.

Commentary: Lots of action in this scene, and still more to come. Talking with my writing buddy, I seem to kind of stub out scenes before I go back in and add descriptions on the second pass. I guess it takes me a bit to really cement the environment in my head before I put it down on paper. I’m glad that I’m keeping a low word count this NaNo. There’s less pressure to produce, so I feel comfortable doing a couple of passes through each section before moving onto the next. I’m trying to make this draft fairly clean if possible.

What’s up with the title of this post, you may ask? Well Shaleigh (my protagonist) is a photographer, and I’m pretty sure she’s aware of the names for different colors and such, which is why I chose that as her hobby of choice. When she heads into the realm of the fae, I’m making a conscious effort to show a difference in color with the environments. The real world is drab with its heels dug into a dirty, decaying, stagnant world, but the realm of the fae is filled with vibrant colors and unusual sights that catches Shaleigh’s artistic eye. One of her first observations is that the sky is the color of a robin’s egg.

Robin’s Egg Blue. One of the cutest colors around. Found from Byteful Travel.

Other: In other news about birds, we seem to have a trio of them who have taken a liking to our front door light. We’ve been living in this house for nearly five years now, and we’ve never seen them do this before. They won’t do it during the day, only around dusk and through the night. We’ve been making a point not to turn on the porch light for fear that we’ll frighten them, but they’re not making nests or anything. Just hanging out and enjoying the spot. We get lots of bumblebees and wasps over there, so if they can help out with that problem, then I think we can get along just fine. Despite the fact that we have guests in and out in the evening, they’ve been quite content to live and let live. Honestly I think they’re better than some roommates (despite the poop, I mean).

Look closely, there are two birds there. The third showed up just after this picture.

If you all have any idea what kind of birds these are, or maybe why they’re roosting like this, I’d love to know! I’m a bird appreciator but certainly not a bird expert or even a bird watcher.