Thursday started out like any other weekday. Late for work and caught in communter traffic, Samantha stopped at another red light. She stared out the window and decided that for once, she’d call her boss and let him know she’d be late. Taking advantage of the momentary pause, she rummaged around in her purse for her cell phone, but found nothing in the pocket she normally kept it.

Traffic inched forward in front of her. Hand still, half inside her bag, Samantha eased her foot off the brake, crept along with the moving traffic.

“Damn it, where is my phone.” Eyes averted, she peeked inside her purse. Heard the crunch of breaking glass. Felt the crush of an airbag deflating in front of her. Unfortunately, Thursday didn’t end like any other weekday.

If you are doing NaNo, you are almost at the half-way mark. By Sunday, our word counts should be at 25,000. That deserves a pat on the back. Or a nap.

To bad I’m ::cough, cough:: cheating and using NaNo to re-write the second half of my story. Makes it hard to determine actual word count. Although new words are flying off my fingers, I haven’t got the satisfaction of a new story. Maybe I’ll do my own version of NaNo once this one is polished up and ready for beta readers.

I thought because I’m so caught up on word count today, that I’d make today’s prompt about–well, word count. If you are participating in NaNo, write a new piece that is only 100 words long. That should still be something even I can accomplish.

More from Vincent Van Gogh. This is from a letter (again written to his brother Theo in March, 1883)

“Here’s a scratch, for example, that I did in that kind of daydream. It shows a gentleman who has had to spend the night at a village inn due to the late arrival of diligence or some such reason. Now he has risen early, and while he orders a glass of brandy for the cold he pays the innkeeper’s wife (a woman with a peasant’s cap). But it’s still very early in the morning, ‘the crack of dawn’, — he must catch the mail-coach — the moon is still shining and the glistening snow can be seen through the window of the taproom — and the objects cast oddly whimsical shadows.

In July, 1882, Vincent Van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother, Theo. In it, he included a watercolour and his thoughts on the tree setting he used. I think it is such a wonderful setting that I thought I’d use it for today’s prompt:

A sombre landscape — that dead tree beside a stagnant pond covered in duckweed, in the distance a Rijnspoor depot where railway lines cross, smoke-blackened buildings — also green meadows, a cinder road and a sky in which the clouds are racing, grey with an occasional gleaming white edge, and a depth of blue where the clouds tear apart for a moment.

Here is another random sentence for today’s prompt:

She came out to chat with Bessie and climbed onto the large window seat.

For today, another sentence recovered from my spam file:

I will never call you aunt again as long as I live.

Here’s a little scenario for today’s prompt:

I lied to him about where I would be for the next couple days. Well, maybe not so much lied as told him only as much as I wanted him to know–which wasn’t much at all. Can you stay out of my life, I thought. Or at least pretend that’s what you are doing.

In my spam this morning came this perfectly formed writing prompt. One has to wonder, where is s/he going? And is Bessie going as well? And why?

Bessie and I stepped out the front door and into the darkness–I with my small case.

I realized yesterday that I’d given up last year’s NaNo not because of the lack of plot, but because of the believability of the rock I decided to throw at my main character. So for today’s prompt, throw the biggest, most unbelievable rock at your character you can possibly find. Then make it plausible.

Ooh, I had another revelation the other day. I’m not really a plotter after all. I write by the seat of my pants, have an hilariously great time doing so, and wind up pulling my hair out afterward trying to fix everything.

I hoped to preempt that by plotting the idea for the steampunk story, but couldn’t get past some very wonderful character development. At that point, I decided to continue with the re-writes on the 2007 NaNo by deleting the entire second half of the story and working from scratch. Things are finally getting somewhere. The last missing bit of the plot fell into place yesterday (even though the word count fell short). Oooh so exciting. Now maybe I can actually finish it.