I had me some coffee and some breakfast, then got to work. I got a bit over 2,200 words today in two writing stints (morning and afternoon), which put me over the 35,000-word mark. I finished off the last six chapters of The Book of the New Sun (which was a lot clearer to me on a second read; Michael-Andre Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus was a huge help, too) and the final chapter of Fugitive Telemetry, the latest of the Murderbot novellas by Martha Wells.
I ventured down to the Dari Isle and had takeout for supper. Their dining room is closed at the moment, but that’s all right. I enjoyed their chicken fingers and parfait in the comfort of the cabin. Then I started my re-read of Catch-22 and—since the sky was clouded over—fell asleep about midnight.
Sample
This is from one of the rewritten palimpsests, titled “Low Key and the Ice”. It’s very first draft, and may change entirely in the final form.
The trickster and the dragon met for the last time on an icy plain.
It was not the natural home for either of them; the trickster came from shining halls walled in gold, or at least he’d tell you if you chanced to ask that that was his home, as his father—one of his fathers, the one he claimed when he felt a need to prove his worth—had built it when the worlds were young. He was too caught up in the idea of his own herited nobility to admit where he really lived, which was, these late days, in exile among the rabble, those who died and didn’t return.
The dragon’s home was the seabord, where her innate fire completed the four elements (water, earth, and air being provided by the ocean, strand, and sky, of course) and brought them into, if not harmony, at least an uneasy balance.