The Scum at the End of the Road
[ thuh skuhm at thuh end of the rohd ]

noun
1 : contemporary fiction novella in which quiet, smarty-pants Melanie Elwood reflects (and retells), the single greatest decision of her life—and the dangerous boy who drove her to it.
2 : National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) product of 2018
3 : the reason I could never commit to a real writing deadline

edits & thoughts
[ ed-its ] & [ thawts ]

For NaNoWriMo, I had three different story ideas; Scum won out for its simplicity and because I’ve never attempted adult fiction.
The character list is small, making each interaction that much more important.
The story is a frame; we begin in the present, move eight years in the past, and finally end in “tomorrow.”
The first draft fell just short of 20k words (meager compared to the 50k goal of NaNoWriMo), but a completed story was most important to me.
One month is the shortest it’s ever taken me to write a story, especially one this self-contained.