In November of 2004, I didn’t write a novel. This is a series of excerpts from all the novels I didn’t write that month.

She knew the church doors would be open for at least another hour. She remembered a time when they were never locked. But maybe that was a world she had dreamed. Maybe churches had never been sanctuaries.

She shivered as she ducked inside and eased the door into place. It had been years since holy water had touched her fingers. Now it dripped down the bridge of her nose from the start of the cross on her forehead. She wiped it away uncomfortably.

“I just came to get warm,” she whispered to the statue of Joseph that stood in the corner of the entrance. Even the whisper seemed too loud to the phantom families that gathered under Joseph’s painted wooden smirk. They sucked in their breaths and peered disapprovingly at her from the corners of their eyes. She pulled her jacket tight over her stomach.

The thin carpet muted her hard-soled heels as she moved back toward the tiny flame near the tabernacle. “I just came to get warm,” she repeated to the statue of Mary silencing the snake beneath her foot. The snake’s tongue flicked in the low light and Mary frowned at its movement, directing the woman to the small chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.

She stumbled a little over the sight of the nun kneeling in the first pew – head tilted back slightly, eyes fixed on something unseeably beautiful. The nun blinked and turned to her. She blushed and lowered her eyes, uncertain of the pure adoration she had witnessed.

Rising a little stiffly, the nun shuffled out of the pew and squeezed the woman’s arm with a smile in passing. Her rubber soled shoes swished against the carpet as she exited the side door.

“No, really. I just came to get warm,” the woman protested. Her voice disappeared into the harshly muffling walls.

In November of 2004, I didn’t write a novel. This is a series of excerpts from all the novels I didn’t write that month.

He was methodically pulling wings off various insects he had trapped in jars when she walked through the garden. She paused to squish one of his poor wingless victims on the path.

“How many more?” she asked.

“Well, I have thirty-three sets right now. I figure I’ll need more than eighty to get the proper size. How is the glue coming?”

She took off her shoe and inspected the bottom. “I’ll need a few more of these. And I still haven’t heard back from Lucy on the spirit gum.”

He nodded, then turned back to the dragonfly he had carefully pinned to tree stump. Delicately, he twisted the first of the four wings from its body. “You understand this is just a prototype. The real wings will be extracted from birds.”

She shifted her weight from her shoe to her bare foot, wincing a little at the pebble that dug in. Her mind went deaf under the shudder of stepping on bloody wingless birds to make the glue that would hold the feathers together.

“I think I’ll need a hammer to kill the birds,” she said. “I don’t think I’m big enough to squash them.”

“Whatever works,” he replied and snapped the last clear wing from the dragonfly. He smiled, holding it up to the sun. “These will be beautiful.”