This first bits of unfinished work thing that's wandering around rasfcers:
The WIE:
"Let me comb your hair." When she spoke, her preoccupation became a taste, thick and metallic, rather than just a noise at the edges of my attention.
The backburnered thing:
They say she came into the village on a Sunday, smelling of the sea, with kelp tangled into her hair. She sat on a rock at the edge of the commons combing it out with her fingers and dropping it onto the ground, while the truants from services gathered at the other end and pointed at her and stared. The priest came out, and the acolytes with the censer and candles, and they tried holy water and prayer on her, but she did not vanish in a puff of brimstone.
The thing for which I have only fragments and I'm not sure about the order, but this is the first bit I wrote of it even though I know it's not the first part:
It was only a few years before he died that I finally realised that my father was a dragon.
Actually, the first bit may be this, now that I think of it:
I met her at a party, one of those pointless social dances intended primarily for the display of plumage. The host was a tiresome old troll of a woman with a craggy face that suggested one sunbeam too many. She was tedious; her associates were tedious; her conversation was tedious. I cannot for the life of me remember why I thought it a good idea to attend in the first place; it was a long time ago, and I was much younger then.
The gargoyle thing:
"It'll have to wear gloves."
The thing that's probably wrong and needs to be ripped out and started over:
The worst thing about coming home was the dust. The paths were clay, the same clay that made the pottery in the carts that had pounded those same paths flat and dead on their outward journeys. It had been a hot day, and the impossible sun had baked the road for the caravan's special benefit. As a result, the wagons traveled in a perpetual cloud of billowing dust, which swirled in patterns like bad omens in the lantern-light.
The WIP:
The track wound crookedly through the trees, trodden to pounded dirt and roots by the passage of many hooves. Now and again a branch rustled or a bush protested with a soft crackle as the horse followed that trail, moving at a walk that occasionally danced into a trot; she was eager to move, and her ears angled forward almost like arrows.
Most everything else is notes, dead, or finished.
Thud: 209 words (I think) finishes 3.2. 131 on 3.3, not sure how I need to manage some of the tensions here.
"Let me comb your hair." When she spoke, her preoccupation became a taste, thick and metallic, rather than just a noise at the edges of my attention.
The backburnered thing:
They say she came into the village on a Sunday, smelling of the sea, with kelp tangled into her hair. She sat on a rock at the edge of the commons combing it out with her fingers and dropping it onto the ground, while the truants from services gathered at the other end and pointed at her and stared. The priest came out, and the acolytes with the censer and candles, and they tried holy water and prayer on her, but she did not vanish in a puff of brimstone.
The thing for which I have only fragments and I'm not sure about the order, but this is the first bit I wrote of it even though I know it's not the first part:
It was only a few years before he died that I finally realised that my father was a dragon.
Actually, the first bit may be this, now that I think of it:
I met her at a party, one of those pointless social dances intended primarily for the display of plumage. The host was a tiresome old troll of a woman with a craggy face that suggested one sunbeam too many. She was tedious; her associates were tedious; her conversation was tedious. I cannot for the life of me remember why I thought it a good idea to attend in the first place; it was a long time ago, and I was much younger then.
The gargoyle thing:
"It'll have to wear gloves."
The thing that's probably wrong and needs to be ripped out and started over:
The worst thing about coming home was the dust. The paths were clay, the same clay that made the pottery in the carts that had pounded those same paths flat and dead on their outward journeys. It had been a hot day, and the impossible sun had baked the road for the caravan's special benefit. As a result, the wagons traveled in a perpetual cloud of billowing dust, which swirled in patterns like bad omens in the lantern-light.
The WIP:
The track wound crookedly through the trees, trodden to pounded dirt and roots by the passage of many hooves. Now and again a branch rustled or a bush protested with a soft crackle as the horse followed that trail, moving at a walk that occasionally danced into a trot; she was eager to move, and her ears angled forward almost like arrows.
Most everything else is notes, dead, or finished.
Thud: 209 words (I think) finishes 3.2. 131 on 3.3, not sure how I need to manage some of the tensions here.