A Little Tease

My head cold has not gone away. It's abated a little bit. We're fighting them on the beaches, etc. But the battle's far from over and I'm finding it immensely hard to focus. In that environment, blog posting tends to be a backseat kind of endeavor, and once again I'm finding myself without the mental wherewithal to come up with something interesting to share with you.

So I'm going to cheat and share the first few paragraphs of Soulwoven: Exile with you instead. Because I want to talk about what I'm working on, and since I find myself unable to do that coherently, it makes sense to me to just let it talk for itself.

This is a third draft, I think. Maybe a fourth. I expect it'll change a little between now and the final version, but not too much. Like I talked about last week, it's now in line with the ending, and it introduces the themes and atmosphere and general direction that Soulwoven: Exile is going to follow.

I hope you enjoy it.

--

Prologue

I

One hundred and seventeen days before the destruction of Nutharion City

            What was left of the light was fading.

            It was the gray time between sunset and full dark, when the world falls deeper into shadow second by second, and things lose their shapes. The time when you cling to the last shreds of light you can find, looking for shelter or a way to create your own illumination to keep the oncoming darkness at bay.

            Litnig grabbed for a root and missed.

            Cole caught his wrist and kept him from falling.

--

Feel free to discuss the directions you think the book might be heading in. I'd love to know.

Sick

Red coat. Ring toss burble farwing on the young tines of worldly squiggles. Whereby Smedley's ghost under toss the seabirds scraps of tiny h-u-ll gobbles goblins thunder in the tiniest of manors. Outside chance of pockets of rain in under the choice tree, overbearing under bearing the ball bearings are the place to be.

I have a head cold. The preceding paragraph is a brief sample of what's happening inside my head right now unless I expend a great deal of energy to turn those ramblings into coherence. Chaos is running amok, and I can master it only by effort of will.

So I hope you'll understand why there's no blog post of substance today. I tried to write one, but it turned out terribly. You can reread the first paragraph of this one a few times and probably get more joy out of it.

I shall now close with an old picture of me, taken during college, that I feel is a proper illustration for the preceding work of artpoetry headcoldfiction, which is the name of the new literary magazine I'm going to launch just as soon as I'm feeling better. Good night.