Call Me NaNo-ing

It is November. I am exhausted. (When am I not?) National Novel Writing Month has begun.

I realise I haven't posted in a few days, and I apologise. Don't worry; it's not permanent. But we're down to a T/Th blog (with more posts when I can) for right now, okay? I'll post up excerpts from my NaNo throughout the month so you can see what I'm working on. Like the except we have below. These are the first words, completely unrevised, of my novel, Call Me Lux:

Call me Lux. I used to be known as Luce, Lucine Merrick, but almost no one knows me as Luce these days. That's what happens when you're famous. Oh well.

I always figured I was pretty ordinary. I wasn't particularly happy about it, but I accepted it. It was out of my control, so I knew better than to dwell on it. My hair was brown, plain, flat. It didn't do much but sort of hang there. It never held curl very well, it wasn't shiny, and it wasn't even a particularly nice shade of brown. It was just brown. Like fresh dirt. Like my eyes. My eyes were brown and dull and plain too. Some people had interesting eyes if you looked closely, like some bright colours mixed into their plainer eyes, but not me. My eyes were just brown. Plain. My skin was even plain. I had a few freckles, a little acne in my youth, but I never had that beautifully perfect skin. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. It was just there, like everything else about me. Like me.

In school, I was never an outcast, but I was never popular either. Grace, my best friend since pre-school, was just popular enough to make sure I was never unpopular. She was prettier than me. Her dark blonde hair was shiny and naturally waved in some apparently attractive way. Her eyes were green, and everyone seemed to like green eyes. Her skin wasn't perfect either though. Like I said, she was "just popular enough", not super popular. We weren't queen bee material. If you've ever seen the movie Mean Girls, we were definitely not like those girls. Our high school didn't quite have those girls though either. There were definitely girls who thought they were the queens of the school, but there were too many people who didn't care.

My brother was the hot bad boy to everyone but me. He was Danny from Grease, but not as in love. He acted tough a lot, and I think he convinced himself that's who he really was, but before he got to high school, he had been a loving brother to me, three years my senior. Jules was his name. I loved him as a kid, and I still did after he changed in high school, but things just weren't the same. He seemed angry. He made my head hurt. I couldn't figure out what happened to him, and I slowly gave up on trying to understand him. Of course, this whole "bad boy" act made him hot stuff to all the girls. I think I had friends who were just my friends because they had a crush on my brother. I didn't really care though. I was okay with being used because I knew everyone used everyone. It was just how things worked.