Thinking about NaNo

This just popped into my head today. It'll be October in a few hours, which to my brain means it's time to pick out a new little notebook, buy a nice new pen, and start planning for NaNoWriMo for the 6th year in a row.

The young woman in this snippet is Bernice Sophronia Philomena Greenwater, but if you didn't read her story from 2008, don't worry about it. If you did, I'm sorry it's rather... darker... than her usual adventures.

-----

In a dense and shadowed forest, there walked a young woman, determinedly. Twigs cracked beneath her worn brown leather boots, the laces knotted back together in several places, and she breathed on her hands now and then in an attempt to warm them. She wore a long man’s coat that was much too large for her; it was of some thick, sturdy material, tan on the outside and lined with something warmish and cream-colored inside. There were two splashes of a dark reddish black on the coat: one on the right sleeve, the other near the hem on the same side.

Her hair was in quite a disarray and very dirty, but with a few stubborn pins still holding most of it up. The girl’s tattered maroon skirt snagged occasionally on a bush or fallen branch, but she would just tug it free and walk on, doggedly, no light in her normally shining brown eyes. Now and then she stumbled, which would snatch her attention momentarily back to the present, rather than allow it to stay in the past where it had dwelt for some days now.

The young woman sniffed, gasped in a deep breath, and sniffed again. Then she shook her head as if talking herself out of something. The blur of tears in her eyes made her stumble once more, and this time she fell. She caught herself, hard, on her knees and the heels of her hands. Her knees would merely bruise, but her palms were now scraped bloody from a sharp stick on her left and a lichen-covered grey stone on her right. Biting back a sob, the girl rose slowly to her feet.

She studied her hands a moment, then bent to undo the bottom three buttons of the long coat, which ended at her knees. Her fingers trembled and struggled, but she was very careful to touch only the buttons and the smallest bit of the coat with her fingertips, making sure no more blood would mar the coat. Once she could see her skirt, she wiped the dirt, pieces of dead leaf and twig, and blood gingerly from her palms with the maroon cloth. Then, again with her fingertips, she buttoned the coat up again, smoothed the pad of her thumb lovingly over the fabric of one sleeve, and trudged on in the deepening twilight.