It’s been three months. I hope that the sixth of every month isn’t always a reminder.

Note the camera in her lap? She was always the one taking the pictures, so of course there are few of her.

Hmm, maybe that’s not true. I wouldn’t mind having a day of the month on which I always thought about my mom. But I’d like that to be more as if when I remember, I feel happy and loved and lucky to have had my mom as my mom.

Right now, I’m not there. I just miss her. Yesterday, for the very first time, I almost forgot for a second. We passed a garage sale sign and I thought, oh, it’s good weather for garage sales, I wonder if Mom…and then I had to cry in the car for a while.

Poor R was distressed that I was crying again. We were going to pick up a friend of his, and I’m sure he was worried that his friend would think his mom was crazy. (Well, not 100% sure, I could be projecting. But I suspect he was worried about that.) He was good with handing me the tissues, though. Some future female in his life is either going to be impressed or insulted that his response to tears is simply to find the box of tissues.

NaNoWriMo is not working well for me. The pressure to write has actually reduced my writing to even less than it was before. I’ve been aiming for 1000 words a day (except for Thursdays) since September, but for the past week, I’ve been lucky to eke out a few hundred. And somehow knowing that I’m not supposed to edit just makes me edit all the more. I’ve revised the same 600 words about a dozen times and it’s still not good enough. I finally let it go and posted it on fictionpress, but that was just to let it go and move on, not because I was satisfied.

That said, I can tell that my new romantic heroine is going to be just as quirky as my last romantic heroine, although in a totally different way. Apparently, I like quirky in a heroine. But I’m finding Sylvie very entertaining, if only in my head. She’s kickass, cynical, stoic… completely non romantic lead material. If it were a movie, she’d be the sidekick who gets killed while saving the day.