Day 27- 43,794 Words

This EsNoWriMo really has followed all of the stages as outlined in No Plot? No Problem! to a T.  Writing has been so easy this week, since I can finally see the end.  Maybe it's been a little too easy, for that matter, since I'm still in full-on word-wasting mode.  I don't have the space to waste words, but I am anyway.

I have decided that for the rest of the novel I'm going to have to go relatively dark, so to speak, so as to retain some of the mystery of my novel.  I'm setting things up for the ending right now, which will all happen in Montreal.  I have chosen two excerpts, to satisfy the Magic Mick fans out there, and to explain what is happening close to the end.

If Ellie was actually Penny Lane, she might have been thrilled to receive an order for five hundred cupcakes.  She might have relished the opportunity to draw the Montreal Canadiens logo on all five hundred of those cupcakes in les tricolores of red, blue and white for the opening game against the Toronto Maple Leafs.  She might have even enjoyed the fact that they had to be completed in under two days, since Penny Lane was the type who enjoyed making bets with herself and winning (but apparently she wasn’t the type to understand that when you make a bet with yourself you will always win and lose).

But, she was not Penny Lane, small business owner and cupcake expert.  She was Ellie Abbott, Toronto sports whiner and kitchen fire starter.  She had started exactly three kitchen fires in her life: once when she ruined Thanksgiving dinner, once when she was cleaning the oven, and once when she only looked at the oven and it had burst into flames. 

She also had to deal with the fact that she was one staff member short, since Mick Tatum had quit that morning.  This wasn’t one of those times where she hated to see him go but she sure enjoyed the view; she hated to see him go, and the view that she got as he walked out of Penny Lane’s Bakery was nothing compared to the view that she could enjoy every Sunday, Thursday and Friday night for no cover (clothing or entrance) at the Boo!-bie Mansion on rue St. Laurent.  Apparently Mick had taken her offhand comment that “he should just become a stripper” to heart, and had in fact decided that freelance furniture designing was a waste of time when his true calling was hip thrusting into patrons faces while wearing a thong.  As happy as Ellie was that “Magic” Mick Tatum was following his dreams, she was less than enthused that he had chosen to follow his dreams right now.  But as the say, “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land among the strippers.”  No one had said that ever, but they probably should.

The Boo!-bie Mansion was a haunted house themed strip club and the classiest club in town.  Male strippers dressed as mummies, vampires, werewolves, and man-o-lanterns, would entertain the clientele with their sexy Monster Mash.  On Monday nights it became a Glee themed karaoke bar, where Gleeks could try there hand at all of the classics, preferably whilst wearing khaki pants and a sweater vest.  Both were frightening in their own way: seeing a disembodied penis on stage is certainly terrifying, but so is an ill-advised rendition of “Defying Gravity” or “Bust a Move.”  Ellie hoped that she could “visit” Mick at work before he left, and by visit, she meant sit in front of the stage and drool for an entire evening.

And:

They baked, they laughed, they decorated, and they snuck glances at each other’s butts when they thought that the other wasn’t looking.  Everything that Ellie found out about Carson made her like him more.  He had worked at bakeries since he was a teenager, and when he graduated from college he had opened his own bakery where he hired all of his friends.  He hadn’t intended to make it the man candy bakery that it became, but it slowly happened as his friends took dance lessons and developed a love of taking off their clothes while baking.  Carson claimed that he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, which Ellie knew to be a lie since she had had a particularly unpleasant experience with his identical twin Larson.  He was saving up money to go to grad school, but not for a degree in astrology at the Scorpio College of Astronomical Phenomena and Events in the Human World once their online petition for accreditation was successful, but for astronomy.  He ate dinner with his parents every Sunday night, which was why the bakery closed early on Sunday.  He told her about the cupcake cake that he had been dreaming up for the Chavril wedding, which would feature hundreds of cupcakes put together to look like a baby.  Not just any baby, obviously, but a baby that was a mixture of both of their features.  Ellie loved the idea, and hoped that one day someone might do that for her wedding.

But as she listened to him say all of these things, she felt sadder and sadder.  She was leaving to go back to Toronto in one day, and this was going to be the last day that she could spend with him.  Not only could she not tell him about herself because she really didn’t know much about Penny Lane, but additionally, every time that she opened her mouth she was afraid that the truth would spill out, much like some vomit when she had pretended to be a Habs fan that time.  All that she wanted to do was tell him that she was really Ellie Abbott, and that she was a nice woman despite the fact that she had been lying to him for so long.  But every time he smiled at her and touched her arm to get closer to her, the thought of telling him broke her heart.  He was happy, and she didn’t want to ruin it.  Who knows, maybe him and Penny Lane could hit it off?  The thought of that made her incredibly unhappy as well, since she didn’t want to picture anybody else with him, ever.  Although, picturing Penny Lane with him and picturing herself with him was remarkably similar. 

She didn’t tell him.  She just couldn’t.  She wanted to always imagine him like this, on their first date, optimistic about the future.  When he said goodbye and he kissed her—it was just as perfect as she had thought it would be, maybe even more so—she took a picture in her mind and tucked it somewhere safe.  She said goodbye back, knowing that it meant a lot more than he thought that it did.