Ten Letters Is Too Long

in-the-closet-fangirl:

*tour guide voice* Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll look at your dash, you’ll be able to see, in real time, an entire fandom self destructing.

(via waffle-dolphin)

soolooxcoopter:

obesealpaca:

When an employee at the McDonald’s drive through asks me how I’m doing, I always ask them back, just in case they need someone to talk to because you never know

Those fries could be salted with tears

So you’re the fucker who slows down the drive through

They are.

(Source: dogs420, via sherlockandsentiment)

The Sorceress and The Fallen

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“Carpe Diem”

Last Creative Writing assignment for a while, promise.

When I saw you lie down at the edge

Of the bed

You widened my weary eyes

To what could still be.

Much is lost,

And the lost things haunt me.

You said tomorrow is uncertain.

I said, “Coffee,

when this is all over,”

When—

Confidence we cannot afford.

Our certainty is an

If.

We’re together tonight,

So I’ll let passions free

Before I lose you, too

Jacqueline (Character Portrait)

Another Creative Writing assignment—this one not related to my book. The goal was to introduce a character fully in about two pages.

Jaqueline Trengrove had spent enough time evading her demons. She regrouped, and was primed to fight back. She was a traditional woman in the sense that  she would smile over any discomfort, and offer comfort to others before admitting to her own pain. She was trained this way, taught to follow the pattern of what a woman “ought to be”. Like many such “traditional” women, the danger of Jaqueline was that there was always a bite waiting behind the smile.

            Seated at a small table in the corner of the Cackling Kettle tavern was a couple, a man and a woman, both armored and wearing weapons. The man leaned over the table and sat still as a statue, gaze fixed on his companion, Jaqueline. Even without the thrown focus, the woman lured the eye. She spoke passionately, using her hands to illustrate to her listener just how large the fish she caught had been. “Half my size,” she insisted, words tumbling off her tongue with more than a hint of an accent from the southern side of the equator. To the credit of her tale, she had been merely six years old at the time of that particular fishing trip, and thus not nearly tall enough to make her claim an impressive one.

            Delicate fingers mimed the baiting of the fated hook.  Small scars crossed the lines on her palms and fingers, proof left from other childhood stories—such as the time she tripped on the docks and the bottle she was carrying shattered when she tried to break her fall (no surprise that she stumbled, given the bottle’s contents), or the mishaps that occurred in her father’s lessons on how to wield a knife. In spite of such incidents her touch was soft, benefited from years of treatment with oils and lotions. Her hands, once toughened from her work on ships, were slowly developing new callouses, and she took great pride in them.  Her toffee-toned skin and the slant of her eyes gave away her Yashiran origin. Those eyes, a dark brown, had a kindness to them that was matched by all her features. Her rounded face and warm smile were inviting, comforting, in contrast to the intense stare of the man across the table from her. The high pitch of her voice joined with the youthful glow of her complexion crafted the image of a girl, but the way she held her shoulders, as if she carried an unseen weight with her, was telling of a much older woman. Appropriate, then, that in actuality she fell somewhere between the two, near her mid-twenties.

            She would introduce herself as Jaqueline, though it was not the name she was born under nor even a name she knew how to spell. It was a name she was told, a name she was ordered by, not a name she was taught how to write by a loving hand, nor a name anyone addressed a friendly letter to. It was little more than a stage name, a mask placed upon her innocent face to separate herself from the men she performed for in the night. Three months distanced herself from those days. Three months and several hundred miles of ocean. Upon her escape on a trade ship she took a dagger to her thick black curls so she could mark the beginning of her new life, leaving herself with the ear-length uneven style she sported, barely longer than her companion’s hair. As her tone calmed and the conversation became more casual, her hands ceased waving and her right hand closed gently around the charm she wore at her throat. The collar was a pale blue, the charm a glittering red heart. She cut her hair, cut herself off from her old life, but kept the cheap trinket and never took it off. Try as she did to deny how her past still cast its shadow on her, proof of its hold on her heart was there for all to see. The collar, a gift from her closest friend in slavery, was a supposed good luck charm. Jaqueline did not believe in luck, though it was a weight on her mind that the girl who wore the necklace had escaped, while its original owner remained locked away.

            Silence fell. Jaqueline leaned back in her chair. Her elbow rested on the backrest, and her left leg crossed over her right. She shrugged, tilted her head back, and her eyes flicked across the ceiling as if searching for something written there. “That’s a good question,” she said with a sigh to the man seated across from her. Stretched out as she was, it was not difficult to see why she had been so prized be her former employer, even with her leather armor disguising her frame. “They would recognize me on sight. I’ll need you to go in first, pose as a customer.” She pursed her lips. “Ask for Yvette.” Rocking forward, she slammed her wrists against the wooden table and met the man’s hard gaze. “I trust you,” she said with all sincerity, “so I know she’ll be safe. You protect her like you would me.” The man nodded solemnly, and Jaqueline relaxed. Her squared stance became slouched, and the tight frown eased into a gentle smile.

            “We still have a few days of travel ahead of us,” she said after a moment, “and it is getting late. You should probably sleep. I don’t want to keep you up.” Her smile grew as she reached across the table to cover his hand with hers. “We’ve both had a long day.”

The Sorceress and the Sea

This is an excerpt from a chapter pretty late in my book. This particular cut was one I turned in for my Creative Writing class, and I think it does a good job of representing the more plot-focused parts of the project.

After weeks of eastward travel, the couple found themselves at the coast. Noah always said that if he were to settle down anywhere, it would be on the coast. The steady sounds of the rushing waves, the marvelous view, and the space—nothing beat those endless horizons. He had spent so many nights stargazing at the ocean’s edge. Whenever he reached the coast once more after weeks of travel, he would stand, soak in the fullness of the sky, and relish in the empty stretch of beach upon which he stood. He could see for miles, and there was not a person in sight. For all of that, however, he was never truly comfortable in any one place for too long. Eventually he would begin to itch for new sights, new sounds. Noah took a deep breath and inhaled the scent of the salty sea air.  He always returned to the coast in the end.

            He was not alone that night. The sorceress, his strange and wonderful companion, stood at his side. The wind coming off the water was cold and strong. Though it whipped Noah’s cloak around, the sorceress remained untouched. The wind simply turned away from her.

            “You know,” the woman said, breaking the silence between them. “I heard once that there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on the beach.”

            He turned to her with a lifted brow. She shrugged. “Or maybe it’s the other way around,” she amended. “I cannot properly remember.”

            Noah glanced upward.  For the moment the pair had managed to elude the rain, and the sky above them was clear. He could not say which was correct, whether the earth or the heavens was more populated. Had anyone counted the stars in the sky, or the sand on the shore? If someone had, he might never know. The answer, if there was one, was irrelevant.

            “Either way,” Noah said, “the point is to remind us how insignificant we are.” He gestured to the stars above their heads. “This beach, and this sky, will be here long after even you are dead and gone.” He lowered his hand and laughed. “All of those little lights, and all of these little bits of sand, they are all bigger than us.”

            The sorceress faced him and tilted her head to one side. Strands of bright red hair fell in front of her eyes. “Well,” she said softly, “here we are between them.”

            “What’s your point?” he asked.

            She shrugged again. “Not sure there is one. Just, what does that make us?”

            He studied her expression for a moment. The sorceress often asked lofty questions like that. Sometimes there was a test for him there. Other times, more rarely, it seemed as though she honestly wanted an answer. Her eyes weren’t teasing. They did not scan his face, he could not see her mentally making tally marks for or against him. It was one of the less common times. The woman wanted to know where they stood in their universe, and the gods knew that Noah did not have an answer.

            To avoid her searching gaze, Noah turned and stared out over the water. A few rocks peeked through the waves when the water receded. The full moon was hung in the sky as perfectly as a portrait in a grand corridor, so beautiful as to seem artificial. It was as if it had been placed there by a designer to accent an important occasion. The moon, bright and golden, cast a spotlight upon the water. A glittering path of light on the deep blue water, water that itself appeared to be made of velvet, seemed to lead the way to some divine purpose, a promise of something greater. The promise that was too good to be true.

            He had half an answer to his companion’s question, though he would never tell her. It did not matter the infinities that simultaneously stretched both beneath and above them. She would always be vast and important. In their weeks together, she made him believe that the world turned only by her will. The only insignificant one on that beach was him. He could be discarded by her on a whim, and he would be left to wander the land until his death, his life an anticlimax without the impossible woman at his side.

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Catching Up

So the reason I started this blog was to post some of my writing. Since then I’ve started my book, and as a result I haven’t been producing many one-shots. I have a few things saved up from Creative Writing that I’ll be posting, but for the most part all my creative energies have been going into this project. I’m thinking that I’ll just dump any thoughts I have about said book and just keep a sort of log on my progress.

Right now I’ve got about eleven chapters finished. They all need heavy editing, but I’ve got the story down. I’m working on a twelfth chapter that might not even make it into the final manuscript because it relies on coincidence. I’m not even half done with the book yet, but it’s decent progress and I’m proud of it.

timeywimeyteapot:

starship15a2:

when your snack gets stuck and youre left pounding on the vending machine like your name is rose tyler and its doomsday

(Source: badwolfparallels, via sherlockandsentiment)