| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Nov | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
Word Count: 893
Total Words: 2596
I got distracted but a number of things today and failed to reach my 1500 minimum today. I’m 500 words in the hole, but I don’t feel too bad because the things I was dealing with made me smile, so feh. I can still do this.
Tomorrow is my day off and I’ll be doing both my nano and the next Descendants issue. Hopefully, I’ll manage to write enough to give myself a reasonable pad.
Today’s writing under the cut:
“Yes,” my father, he of infinite patience, said, “Tell him exactly that.”
It went on like that for a while longer. Mom and I would try and get a rise out of him and he calmly turned out slings and arrows of annoyance aside. By the time I finished breakfast, absolutely no worthwhile conversation had taken place. It was great.
“Ten minutes to get to the bus stop.” I announced, reading the clock on the hov. “Better get moving.” I stood up and grabbed my vinyl messenger bag from the chair by the phone. “Thanks for the
Dad’s amused snort was enough to set me off laughing.
“Oh, Alan, don’t forget an umbrella, it’s really coming down out there.” Mom called even as I was heading for the hall closet to get one. Not that it would help against the horizontal rain.
But I grabbed it anyway. That plus the only really nice piece of clothing I had to my name. It was my going-to-college gift from my aunt in
I threw on the coat with a flourish, feeling pretty badass if I did say so myself. Leather coat, black bumbershoot, yeah, I was ready for…
Riding the city bus. Being a poor college student, going to school in the gridlock capitol of the word, I didn’t see much point in owning a car even if I could afford one. Two bucks to school, two bucks back and I got to meet so many interesting people.
Okay, not interesting. Frankly, most of them were as boring as me, a few of them were pretty scary, and a disturbing number of those smelled funny. Not bad, not all the time at least… but you have to wonder when a guy sits next to you smelling like a horse stall and wood smoke in the middle of Gravesend.
I used to complain about that sort of thing. Loudly and often. That is, until some time in late August when someone genuinely interesting started riding.
She (of course it was a girl, it’s always about a girl, isn’t it?) got on the bus in
But it was not her looks that held my attention. It was her reading material.
Everyone had a palmtop computer, or dedicated digi-book reader even in those days, and it just wasn’t ‘cool’ to be seen with paper when and OLED screen and vision friendly text software were to be had.
But this girl read nothing but paper and in a vast variety. One day, it would be a paperback novel, the next, a magazine (where she got it, I’ll never know, I haven’t seen a magazine stand in NYC since I was five), and that day… that day she was reading a thick textbook.
I looked closer. I recognized the cover. It was the same title page as Professor Caldwell’s second year molecular physics text, which was still on my own cheap digi-book in my bag.
Now that was really interesting. The Prof was never short on students in his engineering classes, but his molecular physics classes were something of a specialty; a lot of people were excited about the new branch of science that finally made wide scale nanotechnology work, but there weren’t many that didn’t run screaming when it came to actually dealing with the theory and study involved. Case in point: I was one of only three that stayed on for a third year of it. My class the previous year could be counted without taking your shoes off.
Like I said. Interesting.
She noticed me looking at her book and smiled. It wasn’t so much a polite smile, as a physical challenge to talk to her. It hadn’t been the first time either; she’d caught me reading over her shoulder one day when she was reading a comic book supposedly detailing the real exploits of some guy in Chicago who apparently used his psionic-born powers to rights wrongs and protect the Great Lakes.
I hadn’t talked to her that time, just hung my head and muttered an apology. Not because I’m shy or anything, I’m not. I’m the opposite of shy. I’m bombastic, talkative, and I’ve got a love affair with public speaking. I just didn’t see any good coming from chatting up some girl I met on a bus.