Nanowrimo: Day 10

Well, the noveling is going along. I need to be at about 17,000 by the end of today in order to be caught up. I think I'm at about 14,000.

Did you know that Virginia voted out a republican incumbent? That was distracting. Here is an excerpt from the chapter I was writing on Election Day:

Virginia has a long and important history. Years ago, when the earth was still very young, and fiddler crabs cornered the market on high culture, Virginia was under water. It was covered in full by the Virginian Sea. After some time and the emergence of the Eurasian continent, a contraction of the shrinking earth pushed the Appalachian mountains out of the water, and Virginia rode up on their eastern slopes. This was the first time that the mountains emerged, and after they were worn down by rain and wind and the frowns of the gods, they emerged again two more times, grinding themselves up out of their balding, flattening graves to make higher, sharper peaks. This set of mountains we’re working on now seems old but is actually young. Still capable of giving a cut. Still with their heads in the clouds. No one likes the new mountains. They are actively grinding them, shaking them down, waiting for the earth to flinch up a new set. They’ll see how they like those, when they get a chance to climb them.


Who did they name the rivers for, before they had English monarchs to memorialize? At what river did the ancients go to pray? Did any human man or woman see the original Virginia? Or did it climb up gasping and go down gulping, without any witness on its convulsing shore? Was it waiting, when the people came from the north, pushing out to the ocean, and then stopping? Was it waiting when the people came over the ocean and stopped on the shore? People who live in the water love to go exploring on the land. They love to push as far into the trees as the can, before they have to rush back. It is the same with people who live on the land but swim. All along the whole coast, swimmers dangle their feet into the water, and push out, in a little ripple. The border of the country shimmers with its people trying to extend it, one careful blind step at a time. The border of the ocean changes with every crashing wave. You can’t draw a black line on a map. People spill out. Water spreads over. Trees break up sidewalks and monuments. Tribes intermarry and become one tribe. You can’t say that what is lost is lost altogether. People are conserved like energy. That is to say, imperfectly. A group of people is lost in Roanoke. Another springs up on Hatteras Island.


In Virginia, the first colony was planted. In Virginia, the first lunatic asylum was built. Directly before declaring its independence from its mother England, the colonial collective decided to build a place to house its batshit crazies, instead of making them live out their days as the tiresome aunt, or the smelly brother, or the grandmother that keeps getting out and getting noticed. The first lunatic asylum in the New World was called the Public Hospital and it was built in 1773. The first truly important murderer of the new world was John Bullard, who killed seven people before he was discovered planting one of his victims in a secluded cemetery, right in the same coffin as another dead person. Both hands of the new dead guy were around the neck of the other, older dead guy. At this time in our country’s history, the cemeteries were not very large. It was kind of noticeable. They found the other six people in other grave sites. What with all the colonizing and starving and fighting off natives, people had not been paying attention.

I'm hoping that by this weekend I'll be out of the territory that I've already been through with a different main character, so I'll stop second-guessing myself about what's too much like the other attempt, or what. All of the words I'm counting are new, but I keep thinking of a paragraph I wrote in my first attempt at this book, and making a mental note to insert it later. It gets complicated. Anyway, by this weekend, I'll have passed that part.