Today, I finally decided to hike up my pants and get some writing done. Since John had his friend over and it was raining, Melanie had nothing to do. Neither did I, since I had finished my coding project for the contest. I decided to make it into a kind of game. We've joked around with the idea of co-authoring a book before, but our ideas were entirely rip-offs and we'd always say we'd start writing 'tomorrow', a mythical day that never comes. The first thing Melanie did when I brought up the idea was lead me to the craft room where our plans for our last story were still written. I had made a point of putting that into a small paragraph and seeing if anyone could riddle it out. No one could.
For inspiration, I brought her back into our room and we watched an episode of the Simpsons, S23E06, The Book Job, where Homer and Bart put together a book-writing team. We kept thinking of what we could possibly write about and just kept putting whatever came to mind down on paper. (Well, I did. She doesn't really write fast, so I did most of the writing) I told her that maybe someone should die because all the best stories had someone die. She thought up an idea of a party. I said we should write a spy novel. She asked wether our protagonist was a girl or a boy. I didn't have the guts to say that I didn't think we should write about kids, until she threw out the number 11. Along that idea, our protagonist, who was later named Lucy Striker, became 7. By 2 o'clock, we had a cast of characters, a setting and a plot planned out chapter by chapter. We had also listened to "I'll Wait" by Van Halen at least 20 times. (Neither of us can work properly without music, so we randomly picked a CD out of my drawer, which turned out to be Van Halen's 1984. We hadn't written anything before I'll Wait, but by the end we had written half a page of ideas, so we dubbed it our thinking song.)
By 4 o'clock, I had written most of chapter 1, a total of 2000 words. Not a bad start for a rainy Saturday project.
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