In the PM chapter Sarah has no problem accepting that Arle is on Earth. There’s actually a bit of unwritten story related to this. Without it, there’s a bit of a plot hole concerning Sarah’s relatively lackluster reaction to seeing Arle.
The concept behind the green jewel is that Samuel has both the blue and green jewels, and he gives the green jewel to Sarah every night while they dream. Because Sarah has the green jewel in her dream, she remembers her dream when she wakes up (although the dreams didn’t stay with her the first few mornings). However, because she does not have the jewel with her by day, the daytime events do not carry over as memories in her dreams. She remembers her dreams when awake, but she does not remember being awake when dreaming. Samuel remembers both at all times.
In a planned arc-transition scene, the jewels have started to regain their power. Here is the original concept I wrote, originally planned for arc two:
Sarah stops by Samuel’s house to borrow white-out. Samuel’s father says “He’s up in his room,” but when Sarah goes upstairs, she finds the door open and Samuel not there.
Inside Samuel’s room, Sarah looks around a little. She hadn’t been in Samuel’s room since the night she visited him when he was ill. She looked at a container of marbles, and found two familiar stones: one green and one blue. Sarah lifted the green one in-between her fingers, a feeling of nostalgia coming over her from her childhood, and a dreamlike haze filled her mind as she recalled the same jewel from her vivid dreams.
As Samuel pushes the door fully open, Sarah spins around toward him, dropping the green jewel into her pocket. She explains why she’s in his room, and Samuel says he knows. He went to get something downstairs, and his father saw him and let him know she was there on Samuel’s way up the stairs.
Samuel tosses a thing of white-out to Sarah, then she hurries home, saying she as a lot of work to do, so she cannot stay.
That night, when Sarah enters her dream, something is different. She has memories of her waking life. Suddenly she feels as if a second person has merged with her, and that person is herself. She realizes that when she was awake she could remember what happened in her dreams, but not the other way around. Now that she has the green jewel, she remembers her waking life even as she dreams. And she now knows that it truly is Samuel playing the role of Shamrock, not just an illusion of her dreams.
I actually forgot to write a chapter with this, and remembered it over 800 words into the PM chapter today. I could have rewritten Sarah’s reaction to seeing Arle as one of surprise, realizing that her dreams really did happen, but I didn’t want to throw out this transition portion. Rather than try juggling things, I’ll simply move forward. It’ll be understood, by this commentary, that Sarah has learned about the dreams being “real”, and Samuel knows she knows.
If I hit a roadblock later this week, I can write that chapter, but for now I’ll leave it out. Because I wrote the above quoted piece before November, it does not qualify as a portion of my NaNoWriMo word count. That’s all right, though, because…
NaNoWriMo Goals
I finished this morning at 50,975 words. Back in October, I wondered if this word count could be reached. The truth is, if I didn’t skip out on writing Monday, I would have had it then. The further truth is that if writing conditions were a little better for me last week, I would have hit it by Friday, and I could always have reached it Friday night or Saturday. For me, that’s very “wow”.
