Today I had the most free time I've had all month

and the smallest word count. I don't even know ~ writing is hard. 

You guys, I'm afraid my 'novel' has no plot. I'm afraid it is just witty banter between a bunch of random 12 year olds and a ghost, at this point; and (in all honestly) the ghost is not holding up her end of these conversations. Of course, that's what half the banter is about - "stupid ghosts and their cryptic, ridiculous, non-clue-ish clues" .  The other half of the banter is between two 12 year old girls who used to be best friends and then something happened.

 I am not being coy by writing 'something happened'; I legitimately do not know yet. Mostly they're just aiming little poison barbs at each other, with the kind of precision that only (pre)teen girls -and particularly girls who know each other very well - can manage.

I'm trying to decide whether it'll be more awesome if their friendship just sort of... dissolved or if it completely blew up. There's certainly going to be blowing up somewhere, but I think, from my own experiences, that it's more realistic that friendships just kind of... break up, piece by tiny piece, in such dribs *and drabs, so slowly that you hardly notice it, you just feel little twinges along the way, and all of the sudden .... everything's different.

Especially when you're twelve.  I feel like twelve/thirteen/fourteen was a whole 'how the hell did the earth shift out from underneath me' kind of experience, and that's the feeling I'm going for with their friendship.  Of course, people handle that kind of thing in very different ways, and one of those ways (at least in my experience/in this book) is to be super sarcastic to each other.  My main character is a snarky little demon, and the other girl - who was dealing with the same things, but dealt with it by just... moving on, instead of being hurt -  is, now that they're thrown together again (courtesy of aforementioned ghost) is now surprised and hurt by the main character's reaction, and trying to hold her own.

This sounds so ridiculous, trying to explain it like this.  My whole point was... seriously, plot: wouldn't you like to make yourself a little bit clearer, because we still have 33,000+ words to write, and - as much fun as it is to write the sniping scenes - I have a feeling they'll get old pretty quickly. 

Also - I don't know how many of you others are writing mysteries, but how hard is it to write a mystery that is hard enough not to be instantly solvable via Google, but still easy enough for your characters to eventually figure out?  I am having the hardest time, but I've never attempted to write a mystery before. I hope that I'm getting a little bit of slack since they're, you know, 12, but Dang: Google, you are making mysteries very difficult to write!

*isn't drib a word? at this point I might as well be inventing my own language, and we're only  nine days into NaNo!, but I could have sworn 'dribs and drabs' was a saying - Google agrees, Blogger, so you lose!

Zoinks!

The current funniest thing about my work in progress is that I have no idea how 12 year old girls curse. And my main character, as well as her former best-friend/current nemesis, are both twelve year old girls who are provided with many opportunities to curse (even though we're only about 4 chapters into the story).

So, instead of swearing outright  - which, probably? is what 12 year-olds do? - I mean I realize my 13-year-old nephew probably has a truck driver's mouth around his friends,  but here I must give my standard "I don't really like cursing, and was a total goodie two shoes as a child, and probably didn't curse in my head, let alone out loud until I was graduating from high school" explanation*. 

Either way, for right now, in the NaNoWriMo flurry of words, I'm inserting different ridiculous made up curses, like "Shnikies" and "Zoinks."

So, basically, my two main characters sound like they are directly out of a Scooby Doo cartoon. Eventually, when the time for editing comes, this will become a problem.  Right now? It's making the re-reads pretty freaking hilarious.


*If you have any opinions on what curses are popular with the tween-set, please, feel free to share them in the comments.