After Sam's test ends, and discussing the challenges of parenting a gifted child (even if Sam wasn't actually gifted, Anna still believes that at least part of the challenges would still occur in non-gifted high achievers), there comes the break. Garuda shows the election night coverage on CNN, believing it to be the least biased of the TV channels the staff can actually understand.
"The first results have arrived from Maryland's third House district, the Democratic party is in the lead" Anna comments on a brief overview of the results from only a handful of early voting precincts.
Maryland is also in solid blue on the map of the electoral college, updated in real time. For some odd reason, the third House district is the first of the state to even start releasing results this year.
"Pray to the gods of elections that there won't be any kind of foreign interference in this election" Garuda then prays.
"Gods of elections? Are you a practicing Hindu? I never saw you pray before!" Anna gasps, since Hinduism is the only religion she knows about to explicitly have gods specifically for elections.
She gives Garuda the link to Falsebound Kingdom on Wattpad, then peruses new comments on it. A reader (probably from either DC or Northern Virginia) commented on how he never read a story about youth on the campaign trail, much less Chinese kids. Up to this point, Asian youth are stereotyped as being politically inactive. However, where I currently stand, I can always fit in foreign interference into the Republican state senatorial candidate's race, as something he'd need to defend against, but that candidate is pushing the narrative of the Republicans as being more inclusive than ever, Anna reflects on what's next for her story, while realizing that both Florida and Texas are states that are hotly contested this year. So much so that these states could end up crucial in the White House race, and maybe even require judicial recounts.
She also adds new items to her Manifest of No's: No straw-manning, no fallacy-based debating. It's only 6 days in and she already feels the burden of the Manifest threatening to make her journey through NaNo harder with each additional entry in it.
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And Anna also feels like she needs to write the host family getting more involved on the campaign trail. Of course, that would lead to fights in the house, since they campaign for opposite parties. Which leads her in a burst of writing the following day, November 7, at a pace more reminiscent of Day 1 than of the pace of day 5, which she feels is more sustainable.
Why is it that my inspiration lacks any consistency? Sometimes I need to force myself to get to 1700 words, such as on Monday, while at others I can seemingly write twice as many with the same total amount of writing time... and yet the spies fly under the radar at school, since they don't win anything in extemp, nor do the other kids follow the primaries. At least that's how I portrayed these, Anna seems to ruminate over how "Massiekur" seemed to have become a locally polarizing figure for the Republicans, based on the way she kept writing foreign interference as an issue in the Republican primary campaign that Massey had a hand in running. Yet, the candidate Massey supports ran a variety of deepfakes over the Republicans making some inroads among the Asian youth on social media, most of these being made by Claire and the host family.
On the morning of November 8, Yulia awakens Anna by making one loud request at 6AM, when she prepares breakfast:
"There's no more coffee cream! Can you get more coffee cream?" Yulia hollers at her, realizing their increase in coffee intake made a number on the pair's coffee cream supply.
"Want a specific flavor? I'll go get cream later today" Anna asks in a raspy voice, yawning shortly afterward.
"Not really"
YOU ARE READING
Cliche Manifest
HumorAnna, a psychologist working with gifted youth and other high achievers, takes to writing indie literature since she was disillusioned with what she managed to read. She decides to enter NaNoWriMo for the first time in her life. But little did she k...
