NaNoWriMo: Sam's body

4777 words to go.

This is from late in the novel, I think near the end of the second act. I tend to bounce around a lot when I'm writing, like flinging droplets of ink on a piece of paper then going back and expanding from those initial points. This is after Sam and Mary and David have started sleeping together.

Sometimes it felt like there were two Sams. One of them was a white-trash thief with nowhere else to go and no one. He'd lived an ugly life, had ugly things done to him, and he'd die an ugly death. The other lived in a nice house with a new GED on the wall and was thinking about college someday, was loving Mary and David, was loved, was hot.

He'd never been hot before, not the way they made him. His body had never been something that he liked: he was shorter than most dudes and scarred up pretty bad. He didn't know shit about fashionable men's clothing or how to work out and eat right, and his hair was probably starting to grow permanent hat-head. He was too skinny in the chest and too chunky around the waist and he had blackheads permanently embedded across his nose... Sam had long lists of things that were wrong with him.

All of which were completely aside from the fact that he spent about half the month either working up to or coming down from the full moon and at the mercy of some truly haywire hormones that left him raw and nervous or shaky and sick.

Or that he spent one whole night as something else, something hairy and dangerous and wild, and he could never remember any of it through the haze of drugs.

It did no good to whine about things he couldn't change, though. Mostly he just tried not to think about it that much.

When he was with Mary and David, though, all that seemed to drop away. They made his body feel good in ways that he hadn't even known were possible, and they made him feel good about his body. They liked him despite his flaws-- or maybe they didn't even see them, somehow, because Mary loved to run her hands over his back and David waxed poetic about his mouth.

Sometimes Sam imagined that they were physically changing him, drawing over the old Sam with their lips and fingers.

Sam's emotional arc is learning to take control of his life instead of being terrified all the time and just blindly letting things happen to him. A big part of that process is gaining some measure of control over his own body, something that he's never really felt that he had before. He's still a werewolf, he can't change that, but he can change the way that he treats that condition, learning to accept it and himself rather than letting himself be drugged into a haze and not even remembering what happens when he wolfs out.

Despite my jumping-around style of writing, I've got pretty much the whole first act of the story written. It clocks in at 22,500, which means a full rough draft of the novel will be about 90,000. So, even after this I'll have a lot of work to do. I'm actually really looking forward to it.