It’s Day 4 of NaNoWriMo and I’m starting to get into it. It takes me a few days to get out of my bad habit of editing as I go, which isn’t a bad habit most of the time. Most of the time, it’s just the way I work. It works well for me–most of the time. NaNo is about writing FAST, though, so editing as I go is a habit I have to break during November.

Because this isn’t the way I usually write, it’s good for me to make myself do it. Discipline builds character, or so I’ve often been told when I had to do something I didn’t want to do. So I have a great deal of character, but I still can’t play piano worth a bucket of warm spit.

I also don’t usually write elevator pitches, because I usually write short stories, and also because I usually don’t try to sell things in elevators. In elevators, I’m usually busy thinking things like, “Did she BATHE in that perfume?” and “Oh, dear God, please don’t let this elevator plunge me to my death” and “If this elevator got stuck, how cool would it be to bust out the ceiling and shin up the cable to the roof and get picked up by an Army helicopter?” As if.

But I’m told I need an elevator pitch (though not by the same people who said that discipline builds character), so here’s an elevator pitch for my NaNo novel, entitled PICKLE IN A PEAR TREE.

Retired English teacher Horace and his widowed sister Daphne are irritated with their predictable lives and are too staid to even know it. When a slight acquaintance of Horace’s gives him a hand-carved chess piece and then is murdered with his own knife, they find themselves in a race to find the killer–before the killer finds them.

It takes place around Christmas, hence the goofy title.

WRITING PROMPT: Come up with an elevator pitch for your own work-in-progress, or come up with a random elevator pitch and then write a book for it. Or write an elevator pitch for your favorite book.

MA