NaNoWriMo Update: I'm still under 9000 words, so there's realistically no chance that I can catch up before month's end. However, it's 9000 words that would not have been written if I hadn't tried at all, so I'm happy.

What helped to slow me down (aside of life getting in the way) was that I couldn't see a neat way to combine the several Bune stories I've scripted into one homogenous novel, and I let this interfere. I should have kept plugging on anything Bune related, as it would have counted (the NaNoWriMo novel doesn't have to be perfect or even good; it just has to be 50,000 words). I could readily have tidied things up in the revision, or even split it into several consecutive stories.

Below, the next excerpt.

The sun brushed the rim of the circular skylight, and Leiske's room came alive.

Photosenors released paths of current into nitinol vines, leaves and petals like relativistic sap, and the walls blossomed with a slight quiver that was functionally designed to shake the dust from the various parts. A recording of earth birds and at least one earth cat filled the room and set off a similar reaction in Leiske's body. She stirred and her eyes slowly opened, still relishing a dream that was already hazy and nonsensical at the edges... Why should her heart be a cinderblock? It had been convincing enough that she still felt a pressure between her breasts. She gazed up into the sky and drifting clouds; one, bright at its edges rather than diffuse, was a skyrealm. The light spilled into the room through the domed skylight, scattered in the prismed reflectors she had used to rim it, and spilled rainbows around the room. She could shift a control later to throw pure white light down to her workspace below.

She looked down towards the foot of her bed, and saw a black-handled knife sticking up from her chest.

It took a second, during which a small still-rational part of her insisted that this was still a dream, for a full panic to rise as she convulsed with a shrill scream and a flight of bedsheets. The knife disappeared and left her staring at her chest, nightgown intact, no blood. She had to feel her sternum to be sure, but she was unharmed, though her heart still pounded and breath whistled through her clenched teeth.

A dream after all?

No. She had heard something fall to the floor.