I didn't do NaNoWriMo, but here is the start of a story I wrote earlier this year............... "Karsten sat on the dyke overlooking the West paddy. He was deeply troubled, although by the expression on his weatherworn visage he looked merely thoughtful. Karsten held a half eaten mango in his left hand, in his right was a thin china pipe, its curved stem flowing into a rosebud bowl. The spring rains had brought more destruction than normal this year. On his own land he had lost hundreds of metres of walls, ditches and dykes, swept away when the Spring Tide pushed millions of litres of water up through Brack Fen and into the shallow valleys beyond. Karsten still counted himself lucky, although the old stone farmhouse he shared with Willja and the children had flooded as it did most every year, forcing the family to move in with the Gastaads in their upland goat farm, there had been no loss of life. In the parts of the valleys bordering the Brack there had been devastation. The spring rains had arrived a good two weeks early, the rain set in hard on the first day, two inches falling in the first hour alone. It had rained for three and a half days with no respite. The floods came quickly, paddy fields filled up and overflowed as their trickling water channels became frothing torrents, the little streams and becks that characterised Kendip transformed into surging mud flows. People were of course prepared to some degree, those whose homes flooded annually were well into the process of packing and moving. Most farms owned boats, and as the swirling waters rose at an alarming rate on that first day of rain they put their families and most treasured possessions into them. Alec Danfoss, who farmed land not a kilometre from Karsten had placed his children, Jenny and Julia the six year old twins, and their eight year tainted brother Randall, into his dingy and lashed it to the back of his ox cart. With the two beasts of burden pulling the cart they had set off, the water already being nearly knee height, as they rounded the turn at Willow Forge the seething waters ate into the roadway, the cart skewed sideways and turned over, Alec and Kaz pitched into the water, the cart rolled after them dragging the bellowing oxen with it. Kaz was pinned under the cart and as the panicking, drowning Oxen fought to free themselves she was pushed further into the mud. The carts rear had smashed in its tumble down the banking, the wheels had sheared away, and when Alec looked up from his frantic attempts to save Kaz the little dingy with its cargo of children, were being swept away. Alec later told Karsten that the twins were crying and holding each other, looking back and screaming for their parents, Randall however was stood in the boats prow, leonine face into the teeth of the storm. A week after Alec told this to Karsten he killed himself, putting the barrel of an illegal rifle into his mouth he had pulled the trigger with his toe, even then he hadn’t been lucky, he was still alive when a farmhand found him, the rifle had been angled and the bullet had smashed more teeth than grey matter. Alec lived on for three weeks as infection ran rampant in his shattered mouth and head, a series of seizures took him in the end, it had been a bad way to go. Absently Karsten took another bite from the mango, it was over ripe and orange juice ran over his lips and into his beard, more juice tickled its way across his hand, under his wrist and inside his shirt. Two weeks after Alec’s death he sat on the mans land, newly granted to him by the Guild, and looked at trouble. Not the broken dyke, workers and golems could fix that, and he felt no guilt over the acquisition of the land, good land could never go fallow, not with the Hoop to feed, no, it was the tile that worried Karsten. He’d found the tile in the lowest part of the broken ditch, his shovel ringing against it as he made a few peremptory thrusts into the broken soil. He washed it off in his drinking water revealing a square ceramic plate six inches on a side, dull grey on one side and lightly charred on the other. Thinking nothing of it Karsten had then chucked the thing to one side, but as he made further investigation into the foundation of the side four more tiles had come up. They now sat in a neat stack behind him. Five items of an unusual nature were enough to file a report. He sighed deeply, the broken dyke would not be repaired in time for the next planting." ...............any good ? Would you read more ?