Day 1 NaNoWriMo

End of work on day one and I'm a bit behind, but only a few words. Here's the first installment. I can't promise it'll stitch together coherently or in the final order based on what I post here, but we'll see how it goes.

I'm feeling really good about the whole thing. The other girls and the rest of the household will come into focus in their own time, which may or may not come before the end of November. Happy reading and let me know what you think. I filter my comments only to prevent spammers, so if someone thinks it's a howling failure I'll still post the comment. I do ask that, if you have something more than I like it or I loathe it, you do add that in. Feedback on how things are working as well as how the story itself is working is good to have.

Enjoy!





My name is Hazel Seaborne, or so they tell me. I'm an orphan, and I have no one who knew either of my parents. I have no pictures of either of them and only the dimmest memory of my mother as a soft voice and faintly herbal scent. I remember being brought to the House the first time at about 3 years old. There was an old woman standing on the porch at the top of the stairs and I watched her as the social worker pulled me up the walkway. There was just enough length between my upstretched arm and the tips of my toes that I didn't fall, but I knew she was going faster than I could really manage. I knew she didn't like me and she was hurrying because I'd taken more than my share of her precious time. She'd never actually said either thing that I can remember, but little kids aren't as stupid as adults tend to wish they were at times like these. I knew she wanted nothing so much as to be rid of me. She was angry about something, and I knew that was my fault too, but I had no idea why.

The woman at the top of the steps was angry too, but something in her expression let me know it wasn't me she was angry at. The social worker stopped at the bottom of the stairs and a slender woman all in black, with pale yellow hair and pale gray eyes, came down the four steps as though they represented a barrier of a sort that only she could cross. After a moment's staring contest, the social worker handed me and my paperwork to the gray-eyed woman and huffed away without a word exchanged amongst us.

I was the first of us three to arrive, and I think the youngest when I came. I have a hard time remembering a lot about my childhood beyond a few golden instances. that come back in dreams. We were not left alone together, that I remember, and I think that would have been a banner occurrence in my life at least. I, at least, was allowed to sleep alone, though if I set a toenail to the floor Nurse, the yellow-haired, gray-eyed woman from that first day, was there as though I’d conjured her out of the floor boards.



I dreamt about the fire again last night, though it happened several years after I left the House and was out on my own. It’s odd that I can't seem to go more than a month or two without some midnight reference to that night, to Nathan popping up in my sleep. Sometimes he just does a sort of walk thru. This time it was like I went back there again. Back to that horrible night. It still makes my heart pound, my stomach churn and puts me in a cold sweat.

It happened at the Studio that I was sharing that semester with the six other students who needed fire. I was the only enameler, sharing frit with Pete and Edgar, the two glassblowers. There was Clancy, the potter, and Elaine the tile maker and Jake and Joey who were jointly and separately working in scrap metal sculptures, rounding out the other inmates. I remember the tech for the Print lab, which shared a common wall to the south, saying that the lights would dim when we powered up both kilns. In retrospect, I'm somewhat appalled by the fact that they put paper next to fire like that, but at the time it was simply how things were.

I was usually the only night owl out of the crew, but that night Pete had been there most of the time, working on a commission he had been struggling with for weeks. He'd left just after midnight and I'd gone on working for another hour or so before I was satisfied with what I'd done on the piece I was finishing for class. I was tired enough to have reached the point of diminishing returns, and I didn't want to risk starting something I wouldn't want to finish. But it was a measure of how tired I was that I was almost home before I realized that I'd left my phone and my wallet in the Studio. So I carefully turned the car around and went back.

I was shocked to see a light on inside as I pulled up. If I'd had my phone when I got there, I would have called the cops right there and then. I've often wondered if that would have changed anything in the long run, but there you go, I'd really only gone back for the phone. I was a college student, which is sort of the definition of broke, and there was nothing in my wallet worth stealing. The phone, however was a whole 'nother story because it was my lifeline, my connection to the rest of the world, and there was no way I was going to go the night without it.

Which was why I got out of the car. I didn't go charging into the building, like the cavalry; even then I was cautious about putting myself in situation where I was at a physical disadvantage. A mother who's a lawyer will teach you these things before she lets you out of the nest. So, I went up to one of the windows instead.

When I saw Nathan, I was relieved. At first. Then I wondered what he was doing in there. In the first blush of our relationship he'd been very keen and complementary about my work. he'd even had the good taste to lust loudly after a couple of my personal favorites. The one I kept in the Studio was a beautiful, shallow offertory bowl that I'd engraved with a sort of abstract pattern before I'd enameled it. It was a daily inspiration and challenge that was, even though it came from my hands, still capable of sending chills thru me.

So when Nathan had offered me increasingly desperate amounts of money for it I'd just kept fluffing him off. Last week he'd gotten up to $10,000 and I'd unkindly, or perhaps unwisely, laughed at him. He was a college student, like me, which I'd taken to mean he was also perpetually broke, like me. I knew he had a sort of job, at the Hillson compound, but if his wardrobe was anything to go by, he wasn't making enough to come up with that kind of money for the next 20 years. He''d blown up at me and it had quickly degenerated into a screaming match where both of us had wound up shouting hurtful things in the middle of the main parking lot.

I'd cooled down since then, but I hadn't gone looking for Nathan yet, mostly because I hadn't yet decided I was willing to reestablish relations on any level. Seeing him walking around the Studio, when it was clear that no one was, oeven could be expected to be, there, made me feel ill. When I saw him pick up my marvelous little bowl, stroke it admiringly, and then calmly tuck it into the pocket of his leather bomber jacket, I could barely keep from screaming in and attacking him. Preferably with something like one of Jake's heavy pipes. Then he picked up another one of my pendants and put it into his pocket.

I went berserk. I screamed like a banshee and threw myself thru the door at him. He was, I am grateful to say, completely flatfooted. I ripped my bowl out of his pocket and clutched it to me as I screamed curses at him. He collected his wits much more quickly than I did, but then he had more to lose at this point than I did.

"Hazel, honey," he began, holding his hand out as he would to hold off some wild animal.

I watched him. With the blinders off, I realized he was trying to compose an innocuous reason for being there in the middle of the night. I wasn't going to buy it, but I was willing to let him dig his own grave here.

His eyes narrowed, as he seemed to read my attitude. "Look, Hazel, I know what it looks like here, but you have ot believe me, I'm not stealing that. I have a patron whom I've told about your work, about the bowl. He'll give $50,000 for it, but he wants to see the piece..."

I snorted. I couldn't help myself. "So, what, he's like some vampire who can't come out in the daytime that he can't come by the Studio when I might be here?" I shook my head. "Nate, if you have a legitimate collector, I'm a daffodil. You're a liar and a thief and I don't care if you can pay me $100,000, a million even, I'm not interested in selling this bowl. Not to you, not to anyone. Now get out of here, before I call the cops."

And as I said the words I knew I'd made a tactical error of enormous proportions. I had the barest of warnings as he dove at me, but it was just enough to duck under his sweeping grab. He fell behind me and I scooped up my phone and my wallet on my way back to the door. He was behind me when I felt rather than heard the percussion of the explosion. I could smell the heat before I could feel it and I remembered about the print lab and all that paper. It was going to be a disaster for so many other people than just me and I knew it was my fault.

Initiate

I'm a writer. A story-teller by near-genetic inclination. The first time I noticed, really noticed, the words a writer was using, I was in college. I was reading a short story by Leslie Charteris about his creation Simon Templar, The Saint, and he used the word 'vimful' in a sentence. It set the tone for the story and the character perfectly for me, saying 'this is a serious sort of situation, but we're in no way taking it seriously.'

Before this experience, I'd been simply taking in whatever story I was reading, be it comics or any of the other books I was able to get to. When my sibs and I were kids, our home library had paper cards, much different from the plastic bar-coded cards of today. Our mother had written on hers that her children had her permission to use her card because at that time, if you were a juvenile the library would not let your take out any adult books. My grade school had a small library made up of donations and hand-me-downs from other places and they allowed us only one book per week. Picking only one was always hard for me and I was almost always the last kid out of the library when my class's time was up.

I wrote stories in grade school as a way of having a story like the ones I'd liked to read, for no real reason other than that. I entered a couple of contests but nothing came of them beyond a small pile of typed pages I haven't seen in ages. I'd had no thought of publishing; I'd amassed a sizable collection of bound blank books so I could have my stories in books. This was less than successful given how many times I changed my mind and ripped out pages. Not a pretty thing when the pages are sewn in rather than glued.

Now, however, I'm getting tireder of the daily grind at my job. Imagine how an innocent coffee bean feels being roasted and ground down to espresso fine coffee and you have an idea of how I feel some days. Part of that is because we're unsettled at my job just now and the temporary boss is only doing it so there's somebody in charge on paper. She doesn't want the job full time, but then nobody in the department wants the job. Given that they've posted the job inside the system, we may be relieved soon, but I'm not betting on it.

So I'm looking at self-publishing now. Of course to publish something, I'd have to finish it and I have friends who claim they'll have died of old age before I manage that. I'm feeling increasing internal pressure, because of the job situation as much as anything else.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. I've participated since 04 and never managed to get past 25k at best. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days, which they break down as 1667 words a day. Like all the years in the past, I've declared that This Will Be The Year. I have more of a plot laid out than I have had before, so this may indeed be it. I'll probably post some of it here. We'll see.