(Reginald gave me a hand at my parents house when I wasn’t fixing ALL THE THINGS. Then he just laughed at me.)

Word Count: 43131

I spent the day at the parents fixing computers and helping them set up new phones that were too advanced for them to be comfortable with. Writing is only starting now. And while the scene I was writing at the parent’s was fun, here’s an excerpt from after that where she finds out what happened in real life outside of her dream sequence.

 “What happened with you guys?”

“You started disappearing,” Tommy said bluntly, “so Rick decided to punch one of those things in the face.”

Addie turned to look at him in utter disbelief. “You… punched the incorporeal demon bunny rabbit in the face.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds dumb.”

“That’s because it was,” Tommy informed him.

(Reginald spent most of the day hiding. When I finally found him, he’d found the candy.)

Word Count: 41592

I had difficulties today. See, my plot has changed around. The initial outline is missing about three chapters worth of events and I didn’t know how to get things moving from one point to the next. Which was annoying, since today I had all day to work on it and didn’t get nearly as much written as I’d hoped. Ah well, should still be finished the book by the end of the week at least.

(You’re all going to hurt me now, aren’t you?)

The boys looked between one another for a moment, realizing where they were going, and then back to her. “What are you thinking?” Rick asked carefully, keeping a careful eye on the brunette leading the way.

“Well,” she said hesitantly. “You remember how we could see them after we fell asleep in the classroom? I’ve been thinking that maybe we can see them a little more clearly if we just sleep in the room again. Or, at least if they come after me in my dreams again, then I might be able to get a good look at them before I wake up this time.”

“So you need us to wake you up?” Tommy asked, eyebrow raised and regarding her carefully, though she wasn’t looking back. “Something tells me that two guys watching a sleeping girl in an empty classroom isn’t going to go over well if anyone stumbles across this.”

(Reginald likes it on transit, I think. At least, he liked watching people writing on transit.)

Word Count: 37354

So, went to the transit write in for the first time ever. There were so many of us that we took up a whole car and there was a lot of writing done. Unfortunately, I have a thing with the writing in a moving vehicle, so I didn’t do as well as I could have in the time frame, but it was interesting. Especially watching the poor people who ended up in the midst of it and didn’t know what the hell was going on.

And a short excerpt. For those who doubted that I was using plot bunnies as my villains. Because that’s totally what they are.

 “So we’re dealing with evil bunny rabbits,” Jerry pointed out. “I’m not the only one who finds this incredibly stupid, am I?”

“Oh, it’s dumb,” Wil assured him before anyone else cold. “Very dumb. Spectacularly.” Wil, however, was gone, bursting out into a laugh and seeming to have broken a little in the time since he fought the creatures and finally realized what it was they were dealing with. “Screw it, if they’re just rabbits, then just go for it. BUNNIES!”

(I think Reginald wants a cupcake. Maybe tomorrow. When there is icing.)

Word Count: 32825

I’m going a little slow today, but I have an excuse! I made cupcakes! Because tomorrow, there will be a reason for cupcakes while going around on transit writing like mad. Really, that’s what i’m doing tomorrow with a bunch of other people. AND IT WILL BE AMAZING.

 Jerry noticed it too, he said briefly while they were in the library during lunch cross checking the image against a few other books, hoping that maybe they could cross reference their way into figuring out what the shape was. It didn’t work, but Jerry admitted that he didn’t feel them on his back as often anymore. He continued to wonder if they should bother doing anything at all, but Addie knew better. He was just as worried as they were. He wasn’t happy with Miss B for not raising his grades as high as he wanted, but he liked her more than any of their other teachers. He wanted to help, though he was going to continue to be sceptical about it all. Realistic, he called it. But he was still there.

Still, she went to take her seat, despite Darla’s wavering and watching the things that now wandered about the room. She understood her apprehension and offered her a bit of a smile when she took her seat, seeing the creatures now as well as she could.

They weren’t really any sort of concrete shape, but they were slowly starting to get a little clearer as the days went by now. It was just a vague brown blur over her vision, like a sepia toned filter passed over areas of her vision and didn’t really do anything else but just stand there or move a little to pounce a little closer, though they didn’t pounce as much anymore.

She could only imagine how clearly Darla could see them. The other girl looked almost battle weary from them whenever they came down this wing. She said she discovered the trick a long time ago, falling asleep in class and having a nightmare about creatures coming in to eat her dreams. They sucked everything up out of her dream and she woke up in class still, able to see the vague brown shapes there taunting her, following her and, whenever they touched her, she could feel it like something was there.

She told no one, fearful that they might think she was crazy. Addie couldn’t blame her. She was well liked and generally popular since going out with Tommy and being on the dance team at school. She had a lot to lose if she started talking about the craziness of these things. But she did notice everyone else when she kept watch over the creatures, seeing each of them react to the things.

It was how she’d met Tommy. He never paid attention in class, never sat still and it was the one class that he was a bit of a problem in. He was out of character from the rest of the time and Darla noticed. They met through their dislike of the creatures and became a duo, Darla offering to watch his back to keep them off of him and he’d calmed down in class while helping her with her classes, as she had trouble paying attention while those things were crawling around the classroom.

She wanted them gone. When Miss B came, there was hope that those things would go away and never come back because Miss B knew something that they did not. And now that Miss B was gone, Darla needed a way to get rid of them. Graduating and escaping wasn’t enough, she needed to make them go away forever now.

(Reginald decided to make me write. I really need to lock my knife drawer.)

Word Count: 30650

It’s the first day of the new perspective and I am having them do what I always have my student characters do. Skip school to go to a restaurant and spout exposition! Except Jerry is a cranky skeptic pants.

“You don’t seriously think that Miss B disappeared after taking down a bunch of those things on her own,” Jerry said, looking at the rest of them appraisingly. “You said they couldn’t even touch her.”

“Do you really think she just ran off?” Rick asked. “She left her car there. What else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” Jerry said rolling his eyes. “How about literally anything except invisible demons? Maybe she slipped off to get drunk and woke up in a ditch in Mexico and can’t get back. Or she could have run away from that engagement she was supposed to have. Or maybe someone with a vendetta against her just happened to catch her off guard and she didn’t get a chance to get away. Maybe she quit and didn’t mention it to anyone. Maybe she’s run off to get eloped with her fiancé, I don’t know. There’s a thousand other things that could have happened that aren’t getting attacked by things not everyone can feel and no one here can even see properly.”

(Reginald made a new friend! Her name is Isaboe. Her author is Caitlin on WhatYAReading.)

Word Count: 29028

This worked out to be NOTHING like originally planned, but I’m kind of glad for that. the original version of this is an old short story I wrote ages ago that people seemed to like a lot and involved a very different sort of resolution for it, but I rather like how things went down this time around, fluff and all.

They waited in a stand off for only a moment, but that seemed to stretch on into eternity. She didn’t know how long they just stared at one another, an army of creatures cloaked and sometimes partially showing beneath their brown rags, but they were all there and she just waited a moment, catching her breath with the ruler at her side. This was going to be done soon. She would hear them scream and she would have this done at last.

They rushed at her and she brought the ruler up, hoping that one would be as dumb as the last she had killed and impale itself. She was lucky and one did. She could feel it push right through the brown rags of the material and scrape against the bone within, a sickening feeling as it went right through the creature.

The wail it let out was terrible and none of it’s fellows went to his side. Cassie, however, could not take the screech, the bone rubbing bone mixed into the unearthly wail and her grip on the ruler weakened. It only lasted a moment, that grip, before it finally released all together. She felt it in her own bones and pulsing through her blood, a scream like something from hell was being released, or like an innocent was being sent to hell on it’s own. She covered her ears and dropped to the ground, hr knees giving out at the wail, not able to stand any longer.

The rest of the creatures descended on her and she has nothing to defend her. The screech broke through all of her defences and she had nothing left. Their claws did not hurt, but they seemed to penetrate deeper than before, pulling out something deep from inside her and she did not know what. Whatever they were, she didn’t know what they wanted but they were certainly getting it from her now, despite how much she didn’t want to comply with their demands.

At the claws in her flesh, though, she brought herself back together. She brought her shield back, timid at first and gaining strength as she did back from that sound of the thing screaming. On the ground, she started to push herself up, looking up at the creatures to see something standing there. Jeans.

Something struck the back of her head hard and she fell into blackness. Somewhere in the dark, she thought she head someone say, “Sorry.”

(Reginald is finally being helpful!)

Word Count: 25071

At last something started working! I got to have her actually fight one of the creatures at last and get, you know, horrifically mentally scarred while a class of students had no idea what was going on because, hey, invisible! So fun times!

It was a delicate dance and she knew it. The kids were, thankfully, distracted by the movie and didn’t look up from it to watch her as she stalked the creatures stalking their prey. They set their sights, as she suspected, on Rick at the edge of the room sitting one table away from Tommy and Darla. It was right by her desk too, which was usually safe, but she had herded them that way. The corner would give them little escape and they wanted a treat as well after the class had been empty during this period for so long.

She moved quickly once the slender bone of the claw appeared from beneath the cloak. One stayed back, but the one with the claw out advanced on Rick a little more quickly than she was used to. She moved as quickly as she could, but it was already on him when it got there, doing whatever it was that it usually did when they touched the kids.

She didn’t raise the metre stick high. It was low, aiming at the creature’s legs, and she stuck it between the back of Rick’s chair and the creature. With a quick flick, she swung it backwards and hit it back, feeling the impact this time as it felt the folds of the brown rags it draped itself in, feeling thick and a little woollen as they pushed back against it.

More surprising was the hiss that emerged from the thing as it fell back from the attack, going a little off balance and more of the money claw revealing that there were several more beneath the cuff of its sleeve. The noise sounded like it was passing through bone, rattling as it did so, and the creature seemed dazed. It was unsteady on it’s feet and looked like it might just fall right over there, though that hiss was disrupting. Whatever the creature was, she suddenly knew she didn’t want to cloak it draped itself in to come off, worried about what she might find beneath it.

The creature was not about to accept the fate of simply being smacked back, however. In the back of the classroom, injured and limping back up to a far higher height than Cassie knew they had, it lumbered tall and turned to her, hovering over her for only a moment, the hiss ceasing and it falling silent as it descend down on her.

Whether or not they could actually touch her at that moment became unimportant. She was certain whatever it was about to do was going to cause her death if she didn’t act quickly, though she couldn’t think of a damn thing to do, her limbs going very cold and stiff, muscles wanting nothing more than to run away in fear while her feet refused to move from their spot and the meter stick in her hand the only thing that might save her.

(Reginald made a friend at the social. His name is Pumpkin.)

Word Count: 20637

I’m at a point where I completely don’t care about this half of the novel anymore. The pacing is wrong, the way it’s been structured is weird and it’s way too condensed. The rewrite is going to make a lot of it a lot better, since now I know who these characters are, what they’re supposed to be doing and how they all fit together. But in the mean time, I’m trying to cram in a couple extra points that will be better integrated later.

“Hello Rick,” she said, seeing him waiting outside the teacher’s lounge. “Did you need something?”

“Nothing really, Miss B,” he said, looking awkward as he tucked his cell phone into his pocket. “Just waiting for Mister Keys. “I needed to ask him about the last assignment.”

Cassie smiled back down at him and let the subject drop for the moment. Still, when she went down to the English Wing after lunch that day, she could feel eyes on her the whole way down to the classroom. She looked back to see Darla and Addie talking at the lockers and decided not to think anything of it for the moment, but it seemed that they were once again pouring over her cellphone.

“Anything interesting?” Cassie asked, looking back down at the phone, trying to catch a glimpse. It was a photo, but Addie tucked it away too quickly for her to actually figure out what the photo she had taken was of. Something about the girl’s old cell phone seemed to be fascinating to the two of them, though.

“Nothing Miss B,” Addie said quickly.

Darla watched her, her eyes cold and piercing, though they drifted around to the other side of her soon enough, watching as something else seemed to touch Cassie and bounce off of her. “You should really teach us that trick,” she muttered, her eyes carefully watching as it shied away.

Cassie smiled and nodded a fare well to them. “With any luck you won’t need a trick soon,” she muttered back to her and continued down the hall back to her English room.

(Reginald is not happy with his new diet. Like, at all.)

Word Count: 17770

I was all motivated and wrote lots! Unfortunately, my plot, upon looking at it, seems to have started going a little nuts now. My outline has become jumbled, scenes moving around into better places and leaving me confused. But still, it means I can skip over scenes like this!

Still, when Wil knocked on the door at the end of the day, well before he was supposed to but there’s a lack of interest right now in this scene, she was glad to see him. Selma had devolved more and more into wedding talk near the end and Wil was her lifeline, able to draw her away at last, though she did rope him in for dinner before they left.

And they had a wonderful dinner. It was great and they talked about old time to establish that they were very much a romantic couple and that Selma knows that there is something going on beyond what Cassie is telling her. She tries to get it out of Wil during the course of the dinner, but she doesn’t end up finding out anything at all, Wil not wanting to tell her if Cassie isn’t going to. They also talk about his friend, letting everyone know that Selma is going out with one of his friends right now and it’s going well, but he’s out of the country for the moment and will remain off camera for the entirety of the plot. But Wil does have friends and they hang out with his friends more often than hers. Really. Just not in the book.

So then they head home and the next bit with Wil starts. Cassie has spent all day pretty much allegorically obsessing and, over dinner, has told Wil all about her book that she’s going to write with the class this year and Wil recognizes clearly what it is that she was really asking Selma about all day. But he’s been supportive of everything and hasn’t bothered to say anything else about it up until this point.

(When I got home, Reginald was sleeping off a tummy ache. Poor plot bunny. I warned him.)

Word Count: 12002

I wasn’t home most of the day, so I kind of missed a lot of chances to write. I literally just got home, but I did manage to get some in at work. So, yeah, that’s something. It was just a dream sequence and me going, ‘Oh my god, I know how I’m explaining this! Quick, dream sequence then a news story!” Which only sort of happened.

“Hey, is there something weird about the English wing?”

Cassie’s giggles subsided a little. “What?”

“Well,” Sylvia said nervously, “Ursula told this story to the class today. I know it’s probably not true or anything, but it was this weird horror story and I was wondering… Oh, this just sounds kind of dumb, doesn’t it?”

“The one about the old witch that lived in a hut around here back before the school was put up?” Cassie asked, remembering the story well. “She tells that story to her class every year around Halloween right before she gives them the short story assignment. But it’s not just a story, not really.”

“What?” Sylvia asked, her voice going perfectly flat.

“It’s mostly a story,” Cassie assured her. “Well, parts of it, but it’s based around a true story too. Back when I was in school here, someone managed to dig up some news reports of this man who used to teach at the school right in the English wing who disappeared. Half of his class went missing along with him right near finals before winter, when he took the class on a bit of a strange trip. The details are a little hazy, but there was supposed to be some sort of ritualistic thing from his home lands to gift them all with inspiration and creativity. Some of the articles said that they left the school, some say it was right in the school. But something like it really did happen. Never found the teacher or the kids again.”

Cassie smiled and looked over at her with a comforting smile. “But whatever actually happened, it wasn’t a witch in the woods feasting on children to stay young. Her ghost doesn’t still lurk the halls looking for innocents to gobble up, so you’ve got nothing to worry about there. The English wing might be a bit haunted, though.”

“You are joking.”

Cassie smiled and said nothing.