This year’s October fiction project is a short middle-grade horror novel. The working title is “Turning Leaves,” but that will probably change.
Here are the rules (which I am making up as I go along!):
- Write every day.
- Write about a thousand words every day.
- Write words the same day the characters would be writing them, for the most part (that is, Oct 1 words in the story = Oct 1 words in real life).
- Don’t plan ahead.
- Don’t quit.
I don’t have an outline or even a plan.
It’s been a while since I wrote middle-grade fiction. This should be fun.
…
October Fiction Projects to Date:
2017 – October Nights – General flash fiction short horror-ish stories.
Website – Ebook
2018 – Tales of the Normal – Twilight Zone-style surreal stories.
2019 – Crime du Jour – Short crime stories.
2023 – Turning Leaves – Middle-grade horror.
Website – And sign up for the newsletter to get updates about the final ebook!
Turning Leaves (Working Title): October 7 - Napoleon; Mom; Shh!
October 7 – Lola
Am I SPOILED?
I have two parents who love me and I love them. My mom is a doctor and my dad is a writer and a game reviewer, a freelancer who works from home. Dad did most of the work of raising me and my younger sister Sally while Mom worked at the hospital. He’s really funny and fun to be around. Mom is the strict one. She says Dad lets us get away with too much. But she SMILES when she says that.
She has the cutest little DIMPLES. Sally does too. I just have chubby cheeks like my dad.
Compared to other kids my age, I get a lot of love from BOTH my parents. And I get cool stuff, too, although I have to do a lot of work if I want something big. Dad says some gifts are experiments in seeing what kind of person I will grow into, but other gifts are proof that I have grown into someone who can take care of the gift.
I guess that’s okay, but it also means I don’t have any pets yet, because Dad says you don’t get to experiment with living creatures’ lives and comfort, and he’s not ready for me or Sally to be responsible for another life yet.
Not even a hamster.
But I have a bike and a library card and a debit card with emergency money on it and a phone. Most kids my age don’t have those things, but Dad says he can trust me with them so it’s fine. Sally is eight and she doesn’t get to have those things yet. I mean, she has a bike but she’s not allowed to ride around without me or Dad, not even to go to a friend’s house.
Dad says I am sparkly on the outside but not the inside. Sometimes he says I am an iron hand in a velvet glove. I asked him where that phrase came from and he said Napoleon. I am my father’s daughter (as Mom says) so I looked up Napoleon and read a bunch of Napoleonic fanfiction and a history of Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s wife (for a while, it was a whole thing but I don’t have time to spill THAT tea today).
Now whenever I see a picture of Napoleon with one hand in his jacket, I always think:
WAS HE TRYING TO HIDE HIS IRON HAND?!?
I know Napoleon didn’t really have an iron hand. But I also wonder which hand was his iron hand and which was his human one. Was he a robot? A cyborg? An android or a replicant?
If you look at his face in the portraits that artists painted of him during his lifetime, you can SEE the truth.
Both things are true.
Napoleon had a real iron hand, which he hid inside his jacket or covered with a glove.
Or with fake skin.
AND his iron hand wasn’t real. It was a symbol for diplomacy backed with threats.
After Napoleon was exiled in 1814, people all over Europe made fun of him.
He had brought war to all of Europe and had ruled almost as much territory as the European Union countries before he was defeated. The other armies had won the war against him but they didn’t know how to defeat him.
So they laughed.
October 7 - Jayla
Lola and I went to the library today.
She asked me where I lived and I asked where she lived and we looked up both addresses on her phone (she has a phone) and they were only half a mile apart.
First she invited me to her house, then changed her mind because her dad and younger sister are super nosy and would interrupt us, so we should hang out at the library instead.
Not the school library, but the public library branch near our houses, about halfway between them.
We agreed to meet at 2 p.m.
I hadn’t been there before, so I got there early.
Mom was out of it last night, so I made supper and ate by myself, then went to bed.
This morning, Mom got up early, took a shower, got dressed, went downstairs, made breakfast (pancakes and bacon!), and shouted upstairs:
“Jayla! Breakfast!”
I came downstairs still in my pajamas, I was so surprised.
She had her wild natural hair back in a green and blue headband and was wearing blue jeans and a bright orange-print button-up shirt with gold hoop earrings.
“Mom?”
“Hi, honey,” she said, then gave me a kiss on top of my head. “Come on, now, eat before it gets cold.”
She hummed and poured more pancake batter in the pan. It hissed a little.
She had cleaned out Stepdad Dave’s coffee pot, which he never uses, and made coffee in it, a whole pot. The kitchen smelled like coffee and bacon.
I came into the kitchen on tiptoe.
“Pour yourself a glass of milk and set down in the kitchen with me,” Mom said. “I don’t like to be lonely while I cook.”
I walked over to the cabinet and took down a glass and poured milk.
Mom said, “Pour a little milk into my coffee too, won’t you, baby doll?”
She didn’t have a cup of coffee out yet, so I took down a mug and filled it most of the way with coffee, then added the milk.
She waved at the counter beside the stove.
“Set that down right-chere.”
I put her coffee down, then started carrying my milk over to the breakfast nook in the back half of the kitchen.
Before I could step over the line where the tiles get shinier and less cracked, Mom slammed one hand out. It hit my chest and made me stumble, and I spilled some of the milk.
“Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “Just pull up a stool and sit over here with me, all right. Just leave your milk right-chere.”
This morning was good, except for that one weird part.
I didn’t want to meet Lola at the library then. But I promised. So I asked Mom and she said yes.
Now I am sitting with Lola in the library and worried that by the time I get home, something bad will have happened to Mom.
Or that whatever good thing happened to her this morning, stops happening.
October 7 - Full sheet of notebook paper torn from notebook
what did ur dad say?
mr. henderson should not have said that but he didn’t want to “raise a stink” about it but tell him if mr. henderson said anything else
something wrong with him
mr. henderson
yea
so creepy
yea
but what about the other thing
dad didn’t say anything, shrug shrug
why is the same librarian here?
wut
school librarian, miss emma
that looks like miss emma from school
she works both places?
why? that’s too much work
shrug shrug?
shh