Day 3: 8,050 words and arrival at the Hermione Granger Feminist School for Magic

I don't know if I've ever had such a high word count at the end of 3 days - must be because of the weekend start to the month. I got about 700 words written yesterday, around my Dad's kitchen table, with Katie and Jackie, while we simultaneously ordered dinner, chatted about many topics, and vicariously watched a hockey game (I think... maybe it was football?). That left me with 4,300 words to write today and I managed to do it in good time, still in good spirits and enjoying novel-writing.

But you're not here for reports on my mental state; you're here for the excerpts, right? So far, Stella was invited on a trip which turned out to be her recruitment to the Hermione Granger Feminist School for Magic. It was revealed that the real Hermione Granger actually made up the whole Harry Potter world, in order to write bestselling novels that continue to fund the school. So any resemblance to Rowling's world has already ended. Well, not quite all resemblance. I do have a Hagrid and a Hermione in my world.

As sometimes happens, I'm shocked by how much I've written in which the plot has not even really started. 8,000 words and I've only just had my inciting plot point - the arrival at the school. Because nothing has really happened, I'll just leave you with a few of my favorite excerpts, that are mostly meant to be funny (to Esmondes, at least) rather than really advance the plot.

Stella observed that another title had been written beneath the tacked on sign on the side of the van. This title matched the words that stood atop the scrolled gates: Hermione Granger Feminist School for Magic. 

“Hagrid!” called Professor Rosenbloom. “Those gates need to be oiled, stat.”

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Then, introducing everyone's favorite Vampyre:

He had seemed human at first, and had introduced himself as Gordon. But he had insisted, over and over again, in spite of the fact that neither Stella nor Marcy had contradicted or disagreed with him in any way, that he was a Vampyre. He had forced them to rehearse the pronunciation of the two words, vampire and Vampyre, several times, until he declared himself satisfied with the results. Even Stella’s training in voice and elocution couldn’t allow her to discern the differences in the last twenty repetitions of each, but she reminded herself quickly, before she could complete an ungenerous thought, that her critical period in linguistic development had long passed, and she could not be expected to accurately distinguish fine points of languages with which she was unfamiliar.

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And finally,  a completely ridiculous encounter between Hagrid and Gordon the Vampyre, part of which is shamelessly copied and pasted from my last year's novel (which were shamelessly stolen from one of my sisters' novels last year - probably Jill's).

“Did yer start the show?” Hagrid boomed. Gordon scowled, or perhaps simply continued scowling, as a scowl seemed to be his face’s resting state.

“One cannot simply “start the show,” my dear friend. One must properly contextualize or the process will not have the (mis)representations of antisociality/seductivity.”

“All right then, did yer properly contextualize yer liminalitiness?” 
 
Gordon’s scowl deepened.
 
“I’ll help yer out, and remember,” here, Hagrid struck a pose and declaimed, in a voice that made it absolutely clear that he was, indeed, acting, “What’s comin’ will come, and we’ll meet it when it does.” This was, of course, the famous line of the eponymously named actor Hagrid, from the renowned film The Devil’s Lube. The film had been based on an identically titled episode of 2 and a Half Men, in which Emilio Estevez had played foil to brother Charlie Sheen when he dropped dead on the balcony of his beach house. The actor Hagrid had delivered a heartrending performance of identical strangers who ill advisedly switch places, only to have one of them die, thus ensuring that the other was trapped forever in a role he was never intended to play.
 
Of course, that was a different Hagrid than the one who stood before Stella, but she could understand the temptation of delivering the classic line in almost any situation, especially when one was lucky enough to have the same name as so famous an actor. Indeed, Stella had often wished that she shared a name with someone famous, but the best she could come up with was Stella Adler of the renowned Stella Adler actors studio. In honor of her famous namesake, she often tried to discuss her distrust of Lee Asberg’s interpretation of the Stanislavsky method, but was disheartened at how infrequently this topic of conversation came up. 

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And, since one of the new characters introduced to my novel is a little pig named Daggy Dogfoot (after a book I loved dearly as a child), I leave you with this gratuitous picture of the cutest little piglet I have ever seen.