So, I think I may write Chapter 5 tonight while waiting for Diogo to get home. That would put me at 6200 words, which might be awesome sauce for me. I got so much done today in between lecture and seminar, a couple thousand words - over 2500, at least. And that was in two and a half hours. Nice to know I can kick some ass when I'm sitting in the library and it's really quiet.

Other than that, lecture and seminar was boring, but I have reading week next week, and we're all going out to Devon for three days of sitting in a secluded cabin. I'm rather excited about all of this.

I need to remind my mom to grab my sweater from the house in Denver and take it back to St. Louis, so I can bring it back to London for January and February cold snaps.

Alright. I've convinced myself that I'm in a writing mood. I've decided that each of my chapters will be about 1200 words long, which is a nice, relatively easy goal to meet every time I sit down. About an hour's worth of work, with a nice stopping point. The end is always in sight, which I think is terribly important for doing this competition. If you sit down with the vast 50 thousand word goal in front of you, it will kill the will you have to sit and write a bit, but manageable bites are fabulous.

Chapter 4

His mind jolts back into awareness with the small surge of adrenaline that was produced as he unintentionally bumps into a tiny woman that cold fall morning. With the awareness, he gains the feeling of complete exhaustion and the onset of a migraine. He quickens his pace and, fifteen minutes later, he ends up at his front door. He scrambles around in his black messenger back for the keys and he jams them into the lock. Once he gets inside, he throws off his bag and case and strips off his clothes. He doesn’t flip any lights on and trots into his bathroom.

As he waits for the shower water to warm up, he looks at himself in the mirror in the dim light. Huge purple bags are under his eyes and his hair looks like it hasn’t been washed for days. He steps into the nearly scalding water and sighs. He lets the water beat onto his face and wash away the grime that has accumulated on him the past night. Getting home at seven in the morning was starting to wear down his mental acuity and general sanity. He can’t keep up this lifestyle and still use his time to practice what he loved. The clubs at night paid him well enough, but he needed to learn to leave after the show and just go home with a larger profit than he did this morning.

“Bill, you’re a stupid, stupid man,” he chastises, knowing that it’s no one’s fault other than his own that he spent half of his money last night on booze and other chemicals that are currently wearing off and allowing him to feel the damage they incurred. He half believes that he can currently feel his liver aching, but he thinks that is probably just the pain from his head making the rest of his body hurt more than it already did.

He turns off the water after thoroughly soaping and shampooing himself, and he steps out feeling cleaner and more refreshed than he had in the two days he had spent away from his flat. His still dim room was looking very appealing to him from the dark bathroom, and he ties his towel around his waist and walks across the tiny flat to his disheveled, but completely welcoming, bed. He dons his pajama trousers and almost collapses into the bed. He pulls the bedclothes up to his shoulders and welcomes the relief of being horizontal. His body aches and his head’s throbbing is slowly decreasing.

He turns on his side and looks at his little flat - a studio where the bedroom is the living room is the kitchen, with the tiny bathroom looking like an afterthought recessed into a white wall. It wasn’t huge, but Bill appreciated its piece and quiet. His life seemed so loud to him lately, and London was always busy and noisy. Clubs were inherently loud, and even his music didn’t drown out the din of drunken women and men loudly guffawing or tittering, all in search of the same things.

He didn’t really want to live like this. He liked his apartment and his life outside of his music, but he really wanted to make something out of himself. That’s why he moved to the city. He had lived in the country and had been raised on jazz and blues. That’s why he picked up the saxophone - the fact that he had an extreme amount of talent for the instrument was only coincidence and happy chance. He thought it’d be easier than this to make a name for himself in a big city - he thought he’d stand out in the crowd. Well, he did, but the crowd he stood out in wasn’t often sought out by record labels or people interested in jazz and blues. Everyone wanted that pop rock that was vomited out over the airwaves in the form of young, over-makeuped women and baby faced men who either played guitar, or had a wobbly voice that made women think he wanted to cry.

No, Bill wanted to play jazz that people could dance to or cry to. He thought that jazz was one of the most emotive genres of music, and he knew that he could make the saxophone say what he wanted to say. He just needed exposure and the right audience. He just needed someone to have some faith in him and like his music. The clubs paid him enough for him to get by, but the late hours and lack of respect he received playing in them made him lose hope little by little.

He had gotten his first gig three years ago today, and he had thought that his life was going to change and everything was going to be a whirlwind for him as he started his musical career. Little did he know that the beginner’s luck he had received would be the only thing sustaining him for the next three years, and that his life would be stagnant and he would still be playing that same club, with only a few more venues sprinkled in. He was regular act, and people liked his music, but only as a backdrop to their busy lives, with their plans and cares and people in them.

Bill sometimes felt rather hopeless when he thought about how far he’d come in the past few years, but then he’d think about the fact that he was doing something he loved, and even if he only was paid a pittance, he was able to survive and live on something he truly enjoyed. He didn’t care that he didn’t have a lot of money, or could only afford a tiny studio apartment most of the time; he had good friends, a lot of time to practice his instrument, a semi-regular job doing what he loved, and food on the table. However, his recent habits had been hindering a lot of these things.

He’d been feeling more and more depressed by his lack of success lately and had allowed his friends to coerce him into experimenting with chemicals, most of them of the illegal ilk. While he enjoyed the break he got from his worries while high, he didn’t like the fact that he was now struggling to get by each week and month, and the toll it was taking on his body. He knew he had to get out soon, if not now, if he ever wanted to be taken seriously as a musician.

He also knew that he had to go out and get more gigs and create more connections. He knew what he wanted and he knew how to achieve what he wanted. He just didn’t have the willpower to go out, and he disappointed himself with that fact. He knew he was good enough to at least have a gig every night somewhere, even just as the regular act that provided nice background music. Money was money and exposure was exposure, and he sure as hell knew he needed more of both.

Bill decided that he needed to create his own turning point in his life and career, and knew that it wouldn’t be easy like he had expected it to be when he first arrived in London. He needed to knuckle down and really put his mind to his goal.

So, with his mind set on a plan, he lets his mind relax. He sees the images of the pretty girl at the club that he had seen there on more than a few nights, and he slowly drifts off to sleep with her face in his mind.

Chapter 3

As Richard steps out of the lobby of his apartment complex, the noise overwhelms his thoughts. He fishes around in his pockets for his travel card as he walks quickly through the bustling throng of people waiting for buses. He finds an unoccupied spot at his bus stop and watches the traffic’s ebb and flow, bright red buses trundling by, inches from the curb he was standing on. He watches the majority of the people around him pile onto a red bendy bus, cramming themselves in before the obnoxious buzzing signaled the sliding doors were closing. A few stragglers jumped on as the doors sucked into the side of the bus, grabbing their bags and pressing themselves in towards the center. Finally, the doors closed and the bus took a deep breath to level out, and finally, it groaned to a start. His bus followed this one, and he clambers on the double decker headed towards the center of town with a small group of other people.

The bus lurches forward as he is climbing the stairs, and as he cautiously made his way to the top, he notices the front two seats are open. Richard had always liked sitting where he could see the city through the oversized windshield clearly. He slides over to the wall and drops his bag into the aisle seat, since he hated sitting next to people if he didn’t have to, and felt that this move was alright as the entire top floor was empty, save for him.

His eyes flit around the scene moving before him, and he watches business people in their suits scurrying around on the sidewalks, cyclists weaving in and out of traffic, mothers and their children, joggers, and the array of other people walking in their own little worlds outside of his window. The bus jumps when it stops and a long stream of people pile into the bus, filling both floors halfway. Richard continues people watching for a few more stops until, finally, he is disturbed by a young woman, as the seat next to him is the only seat left on the upper floor. He drags his briefcase off the seat and places it between his feet on the floor and glances at the woman sitting next to him. She is digging through her purse, and he quickly loses attention as the bus sets off again and the scene around him changes.

He stares distractedly out the window, now not really seeing anything outside, just watching the shapes and movement with idle eyes, and thinks about his wife. He couldn’t bear to think of her as not his wife anymore. His mind creates the image of him sitting in the bus, where he is, except instead of the dark haired stranger next to him, it is his red haired beautiful wife, laughing at something someone outside of the bus has done. Her laughter breaking the usual morning monotony of sound on the bus, and her smile making his heart and mind more awake than they’ve been in the past eight years he’s had to cope without her. That’s all he has been doing - coping, just getting by.

The bus rolls up to the stop before his, and he reaches mechanically for the stop button on the bright yellow pole behind the woman next to him. She slides her legs to the aisle, and he inches out of the row with his briefcase in front of his knees, and his hand gripping the yellow bar as the bus sways side to side with the bumps in the road. He pauses at the top of the stairs until the bus pulls up to his stop, and then he steps down the stairs slowly, following another line of people.

As he steps onto the curb, back into the cold air of mid-autumn, he pulls at the bottom hem of his jacket and navigates the crowd of people. After a few minutes of watching his feet hit the pavement rhythmically, he ends up at the front door of his building. He grabs the photo card out of his pocket and runs it past the scanner, it beeps, and the door unlatches. He steps onto the spotted white tile and is greeted by warm and almost stuffy air.

His shoes tap-tap along the floor as he reaches the lifts, and he presses the call button and the silver door slides open. As he steps in, he catches a reflection of himself in the mirror at the back of the lift, and grumbles to himself. His dark brown hair has silver streaking through the curls, and his scruffy chin shows it’s fair share of spotted white in it’s follicles as well. His eyes look more sunken than he remembers, and his skin looks more wrinkly than he imagined.

The elevator dings and the doors open out to the third floor, and he taps along to his office. He slips the key in and opens the door to the cluttered and ramshackle office he calls his own. The desk is littered with folders barely containing the piles of papers inside, sticky notes, brightly colored memos and announcements, pens, pencils, and general desk toppers - the photographs, figurines, and paperweights some well-meaning colleague or relative gave and did not realize that paperweights are generally useless in modern society. His bookshelves were crammed full of books, along with most of the free space on the floor, and the narrow path between the stacks was itself littered with random bits of office paraphernalia.

Richard steps in and shuffles the papers in stacks to one side of his desk and he sets his briefcase down on top of the desk. He flips its latches open and takes out the small folder and thick notebook from it, closes the lid and piles them on top. He glances at the white, standardized clock on the wall and it tells him he’s actually fifteen minutes early. With that small achievement in mind, he grabs a thin book from the stack closest to his chair and flips open the front cover. It’s a book about Latin American anthropology and he’s been meaning to finish it for months - the loan at the library was almost overdue.

As he’s about to start reading, there’s a tentative knock on his door and a baby faced young man, wearing a trendy scarf and even trendier jacket, pops his head in and gives Richard a nod, after blinking twice as if to clear his eyes. Richard knew he wasn’t expecting him to come in today on time, let alone early, and was probably thinking some hooligan had come into the office and switched the light on.

“Good morning, David,” Richard says as the door hides the peeping head behind it once more. Richard smiles to himself slightly, and returns to his book. He doesn’t ever start reading, though, because he gets lost again in his thoughts. This time, though, on a slightly lighter subject. His colleagues weren’t his favorite people on the planet, and certainly, he appreciated his alone time in his office, but he did find it reassuring that they came to check his office when they expected him to not be at his best. He felt like he was missing out on something, though, something he had previously had a taste of. It was disconcerting for him to realize that he was no longer somewhere he wanted to be, and that it was only his fault that he had given up what he had previously.

In his head, he was already starting plans for something that would reinvigorate his career, and hopefully return him to his beloved post. The clock on his wall kept ticking, invading his thoughts. He glances at the clock again, once he is bothered enough by the ticking, pushes his chair back, and grabs up the notebook, folder, and a pen and strolls out his office door. Letting his feet take him where they knew to go at this time of day, he was still lost in his thoughts when he reached the open door.

Some(No)Body, Chapter 2

Maria turns around at the bright blue door, fumbles with her keys and locks the door to her apartment block. She tucks her keys back into her purse, behind her red work apron, and pulls out a blocky mobile phone. She presses a button that made the screen light up, and quickly shoves it back into her purse. She starts walking down the street towards the bus stop, and pulls out a cigarette. Her walking pauses as she flicks her lighter to life and inhales, but as she exhales, she regains her previous pace. The walk to the bus stop was about a ten minute walk, and there was another bus she could take from a closer stop, but Maria appreciated the lonely walk down the road.

Maria lived with five other people, and most of the time, there were different arguments between all five of them, and the apartment could not feel any smaller or more cramped at those times. Half of the problem was that none of them spoke the same language efficiently, so effective communication was unheard of, and had been given up on by the lot of them. Maria generally tried to stay out of arguments with her flatmates because she liked the quiet. She had lived in a quiet house with her quiet family in Northern Venezuela until two years ago, and she was generally hard to rile up.

Her pace has slowed as she walks along the now busier sidewalk. The sun has fully risen and is casting light between the buildings that provides no warmth to the chilly morning. She had watched the sun rise through her window this morning because she rarely has the time to see early morning anymore, as she usually starts work well before the sun rose and ends well after it had set in the afternoon.

Even though her days were hellishly long and sometimes left her exhausted, unsatisfied, and depressed, she still loved the city she was in. It had been her dream for years to be able to live in a foreign country and a big city. She had been saving up since she was a little girl, and finally, two years ago to the day, she had gotten up the courage to board a plane after months of bureaucratic finagling, Venezuelan political issues, and sheer terror at the massive upheaval she was creating in her life. Her life back home hadn’t been bad, but she wanted to live somewhere with something to do at all hours of the day or night and with millions of people she didn’t know, and who didn’t know her. A city of endless possibility.

She hadn’t known a soul when she moved, and her funds were dwindling after daily travel expenses, renting an apartment, and the general extortion for everything necessary in London. She had been searching for jobs for three weeks, and her funds had gotten dangerously low when she received an offer from a coffee house to give her a job paying minimum wage. Less than six pounds an hour wasn’t luxurious living, but she was able to afford what she needed and save a little each paycheck. Maria didn’t like working at the coffee house very much - she worked outrageous amounts of hours, until she literally collapsed from exhaustion at night - but, her limited English had made finding a job ten times more difficult than for the average unemployed English-speaking immigrant, which in and of itself was ten times harder than finding a job as an unemployed citizen.

She utilized all of her free time that was not spent sleeping studying English. She wanted to attend university in London for…something intellectual. She hadn’t been given a very full education, though her education level was satisfactory for most people, but she wanted to do something with her life, go somewhere. No one in her family had left Venezuela in generations, and none of them had attended higher education. She felt that she had already achieved a great deal in moving thousands of miles, and now she wanted to finish it with a cherry on top - being bilingual and have a degree from an accredited university. Maria didn’t really care which degree she received, she didn’t have particular leanings towards any course, but she had always been interested by history because that was a common theme between all cultures and people - they all had a story connected to them, and everything connected through history. Though, truth be told, she didn’t know much about European history at all.

London was her symbol of hope and achievement, and, even though it hadn’t actively aided her on her way, she found that there was something passively benevolent about its influence. She had been reached out to by Spanish-speaking groups within her community to help her, even though she had also been mugged twice in the same area. She made progress with her English through speaking with customers every day, even though she often times had customers be rude to her because they couldn’t understand her accent, or she couldn’t understand their words.

Her pace becomes a meandering walk and she feels indifferent to the biting wind on her face and neck. Her jacket hangs open slightly showing her black, button-up work shirt that is always paired with black slacks. Her mind wanders to nostalgic things - her life back in Venezuela and all that accompanied her there- and she reminds herself that the reasonable sum of money in her savings account would be going up now that the holiday season was nearing and she would be working holiday hours for extra pay, and maybe even a bonus. Next year, she could go back to Venezuela to visit her family and friends; see her old neighborhood; and tell everyone that she was successful in her move and that, even though things were tough for her now, she would eventually have the life that she wanted. Her English would be improved beyond its current status of satisfactory, and hopefully would be closer to effortless for her; she might even be able to start thinking about where to go to university - options were starting to close for her as she had turned twenty four this year. She ran into a man carrying a saxophone, and her reverie of her joyous homecoming was halted, and she had nearly walked to the bus stop.

She drops her cigarette butt before she reached the bus stop and sidesteps to tread on it with her black no-slip shoe. She stands away from the crowd on the side she had approached from and pushes a fly-away strand of her long, dark brown hair behind her ear. She shivers as the wind blows between the buildings and the people, and she pulls her black jacket tighter around her.

The double decker bus arrives with a warm gush of polluted air and she steps on behind a long queue of people, then hikes up the steps to the top level. When she reaches the top, she found it almost completely full, so she bothers a man to move his brown leather briefcase to the floor so she could have a seat. The heater in the bus is on full blast, and drowns out most of the noise in the bus, though there’s never much this early in the morning, and the loud humming and whirring puts Maria in a sort of trance.

Some(No)Body, Chapter 1

So, I'm posting this here with good faith that it won't be stolen. Wrote 2,651 words tonight.

<3

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CHAPTER 1

He taps the top of the glowing blue clock that’s been progressively beeping louder and louder in an attempt to wake him up. He stares up at the ceiling in his still dark bedroom, rousing his thoughts and his body. With a flurry of movement, he flings off the comforter and swings his legs to the edge of the bed, scuffing his toes on the smooth, cold hardwood in search of his slippers. He slips both slippers on and stands up with more than a few cracks - his age was getting to him, and his spine did not appreciate being unceremoniously thrown from relaxation into use in such sort notice.

He stands in front of his large bedroom window and looks out at the twinkling city where he had lived for the majority of his life. The horizon was starting to glow faintly, as it was 6:30 in mid-November, and the city lights were losing some of the glamour that shone at night. The sky was clear and it looked cold, crisp and windy - the decaying, brown leaves swirling in haphazard patterns on the oversized sidewalks. Cars were slowly making their way along the street, with tired-eyed drivers and headlights that were almost unnecessary. His eyes glaze over while watching the tempo of the city increase slowly.

London had never been particularly kind to him, but the city hadn’t ever seemed to do anything to actively hinder him, either. The general populace was harried, but well-meaning; the roads were dirty, but with a substance that had the industrial innocence of soot; the trees were large and looming, but budded and bloomed in the spring and summer that helped eradicate the oppression common to cities. London was a cemented industrialized city with loud honking, police sirens, and rowdy people, but it was also a haven for history, freshly fallen leaves, and intellectual free-thinkers. It was a city of paradoxes and the halves both comforted and affronted the sensibilities and senses.

He slowly turns away from the window and blinks heavily a few times while crossing the dark room to his bathroom. Flicking on the light, he steps into the warm room and picks up his toothbrush. Mechanically, he goes through his morning routine of toothbrushing, flossing, and showering. As he steps out of the warm shower, he reaches for the fluffy, white towel hung up on the rack, and enjoys its warmth by pressing it to his face and breathing deeply.

After getting dry, he pads barefoot to his wardrobe in the bedroom and picks out his regular outfit for the winter. A red wool sweater, white collared shirt, black tie, and khaki pants are laid out on the comforter. He pulls out a pair of thick socks and his black leather shoes and sets them by the bed. He shivers due to the cool air and floor of his bedroom and hastily dresses himself, leaving only his shoes off. The room has brightened with the rising sun and the world’s noises are starting to penetrate his window, as he hangs his towel up and leaves his bedroom.

He flips the switch on the tacky, white electric kettle and unhooks a mug from the hooks under the cabinet. He opens a metal tin full of Earl Grey tea bags and plops a bag into the mug. While the rumbling from the heating water gets louder, he opens the refrigerator to his left, grabs out milk and a cool red apple and sets both on the counter. After he retrieves a pan and other sundries from his cabinets, the kettle switch flips off and the roiling bubbles slow. He pours a steaming stream into his mug and sets the kettle back on the element.

He eventually sets his mug of tea on the table next to the bowl of porridge and half-eaten apple, while lost in thoughts of his life in London and how his life used to be. It is an important day in his mind, and one of the only days of the year where he allows his mind to stray into nostalgia and unreasonable “what-if”s. Even if he tried to hold back the flow of thoughts, like he had tried for so many years, they eventually escaped, and with a much more devastating emotional force if they had been pent up all day. He found it much easier to be generally distracted all day instead of viciously wracked with anger and grief and guilt and sadness at any possible moment from any number of catalysts. Everyone had come to expect these things on this day of November: that he might be a little late to work, a little distracted, withdrawn, and the ones who knew the reason understood, and the ones who didn’t know why surely knew something was amiss.

He slurped the last of his tea and set his dishes in the metal sink and ran some water to soak them. He glances at the clock as he re-entered his bright white bedroom, and sits down on the edge of his bed to slip his shoes on. He places his hands on his knees and heaves himself up with a groan. As he reaches the door, he grabs his tweed jacket off the straight-back chair by the doorway and glances back at the bed. His forward motion stops and his hurried shrugging on of the jacket slows until the jacket is creeping up his back and eases gently onto his shoulders. The disheveled bed was too big for one, but he never was able to switch it for a smaller mattress and frame. He had even stripped off the sheets and flipped the mattress up against the wall a few years ago in a fit of anger, but then proceeded to tenderly put the whole contraption back together a few hours later.

His nostalgic imagination grabbed his mind, and he would have sworn on a bible that the figure of a woman was buried beneath the duvet, just like it used to be. The figure not moving, save the slight rise and fall of her side in time with her deep and slow breathing. His feet ached to run to the bedside and rip off the covers, but his mind reasoned that even a mere figment of his imagination was better than the nothing he would find beneath the sheets. His ears were thinking about participating as he vaguely heard, imagined, her voice from under the covers, “Richard, come say goodbye.”

His eyes dampen as he stares at the bed, until a honk from outside shatters the reverent silence and he turns away quickly, almost embarrassed by himself. His shoes make a quick tap-tap-tapping on the floors and he grabs his bag, keys, and reading glasses and throws himself haphazardly out the door.