Writing Day 5

Jessamine began to suspect that she might have a serious problem.

She’d had the leaving dream every night for the past seven ten-days, and it only kept getting more intense, its lingering emotions harder to shake off. More and more, her mind drifted over thoughts of Outside in idle moments. Worse, she started finding herself in unfamiliar parts of the City, having chosen detours that just so happened to lead her nearer and nearer the outer walls.

The situation irked her deeply.

It had begun to interfere with her work. She was perturbed and a little nervous to discover, in paging back through the day’s notes, sketches and scrawls in her own hand that she could not recall making – hasty diagrams of adventuring devices that even to her Tinker’s imagination seemed outlandish; almost coherent notes theorizing conditions Outside; and perhaps most unsettling, swaths of paper entirely covered in black ink – darkness.

Her friends were beginning to notice. “Forget to sleep again, Mina? You’re distant today.” “Where’s your mind, sweets? You’ve been staring all Rising.”

As a Tinker, Jessamine lived for problems. Her business was solving them – the more creative the solution, the more lucrative the payoff, the more inflated her reputation.

This, though, was different. This was a problem without a solution.

Leaving the City was out of the question, of course. Inside the City was Light. Outside the City were Beasts. Outside the City was death.

In the leaving dream, however, that logic disappeared. It was always the same.

In it, the entry hall was filled to bursting with people. They stood silent and still, moving only to step aside as she moved through them, making her way to the Gate. It slid open, and beyond was darkness, but she wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t the cold, empty death sentence her waking self knew it to be. This darkness invited, promised adventure, knowledge, freedom far beyond what life inside City walls could ever offer.

Every night in the dream, the Gates closed behind her. Every night in the dream, she didn’t turn back.

Okay, so this… this is a monster. This is the novel I have been trying to write since I was 14. It’s my favorite world I’ve ever built! It has cultures, characters, a magic system, villains… it just doesn’t have a story. Every year or so I bust it out and start over, try to pry something I like out of it… but so far, no dice. I guess this is this year’s attempt at page one!

Violin Day 4!

I’m in Tahoe for family vacation this week, so your video comes to you from the great outdoors!

It was kind of windy out there, and the result of that was this weird background heartbeat sound? Uuuuh…

Highlights of this video:

0:27 – They aren’t just regular ol’ ants, they’re carpenter ants. Google ’em. They felt like hanging out on my legs.

0:57 – I see a bird. I am a complex and sophisticated human. (Read: I’m actually four.)

Drawing Day 4

Whew, minutes to spare!!

In the grand tradition of making my beautiful sisters look like anomalies of nature… Here’s the latest installment. 🙂

Almost Drawing day 4!

I’m working on it!! This is as far as I got between jobs, I’ll have something at least slightly more finished up in half an hour!

Oh my goodness, followers!

Well hello, there! I’m absolutely delighted to see you! Thanks so much for checking out my project. 🙂 Knowing people are following inspires me to be good and not miss days (I’m hoping to get that violin makeup in tonight, btw!), so all you all are seriously the grease that makes this engine turn!

…does grease make engines turn? Maybe I shouldn’t be making mechanical analogies. 

Basically: I’m super excited you’re here, and thank you!!

Writing Day 4

Getting out of the biz really isn’t easy.

I mean first, there’s the guilt to contend with. It’s torture admitting to yourself that you want out in the first place, but actually acting on it? Oof.

I mean, sure, logically you know there’s eventually going to be someone else who’ll pick up your slack. Someone else who can take care of all these people just fine, probably… maybe.

Most guys who realize they want out stay in anyway. I mean, it’s hard to picture doing anything different. This life doesn’t exactly prepare you for a lucrative career in stocks, y’know.

But all right, let’s say you talk yourself into it. You quit. You think that’s the worst part? Not even close, pal. It’s the guilt afterwards that really gets you. See some kid getting pushed around on the subway? Lady gets her purse snatched on the street outside a club? Fire on the fifth floor of an apartment block? Gotta walk on by, man. Gotta leave it to the professionals.

Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. Sure, you quit your job, but does that mean you gotta stop being a decent citizen? You don’t gotta be in uniform to step in and help, right? Yeah, easy for you to say.

I mean, the purse guy for example. What do you want me to do? Chase him down, tell him to hand it over? Okay, let’s say he says no. Let’s say he fights back. He throws a punch, I throw a punch. Only here’s the thing, you ever try to punch someone gently? Not so easy, my friend. And when your casual punch is enough to put a hole in a brick wall, what do you think that’s gonna do to a guy’s bone structure?

It’s all fine when you’ve got the cape on. Stopping crimes, getting the bad guys, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, and the collateral damage? Well, bad dudes should have known better than to fight a superhero, right? I mean, it’s in the name. Super. Hero. If you’re committed enough to crime to end up on the bad side of super law, the justice system generally figures you probably deserve to go to prison in traction.

But some guy in corduroys pummels another dude’s face in in broad daylight? People are gonna ask questions about that one. People are gonna have a problem with it. Not least of which is – say, you have super powers, where’s the cape and mask? Think you’re better than us? Think you don’t have to pull your weight? Think you’re above the law?

Gets ugly. Gets old. Easier to just walk by.

When I first got out, I thought I’d try being a cabby. I mean, I know the city like the back of my hand, I don’t mind going without a little sleep. But man. It was horrible. The kind of stuff you see rolling through back alleys and seedy strips in the middle of the night, and not doing a damn thing about it? This one time a kid recognized me. Split off from his folks, ran to my window, begged for an autograph, asked why he doesn’t see me on TV anymore. Couple people overheard, started to make a scene, and then it’s camera phones everywhere. What a nightmare.

I guess I probably shoulda left the City. Find somewhere else where no one knows me, just start over fresh. But I dunno. You spend your life looking out for a place, saving it from sea monsters and mad scientists and space invaders and the common meanness of human versus human and somehow you just… Well, how do you walk away from that? How are you ever going to walk around between some other skyscrapers and call it home?

Anyway, I got a kitchen job at an all night diner. It’s fine. Lotta pancakes. Lotta apple pie. You can just sorta get in a rhythm and stop thinking about other things. Just ‘flop two over easy and let the sun shine, Eve with a lid on, side of frog sticks’, you know. Make sure we don’t run out of coffee. It’s not bad.

But man, I tell you. It ain’t easy.

Short story related to nothing. 🙂 

Sorry for all the lateness going on this week! Moving is doing a number on my ability to get anything done in a timely manner. 

Sorta good at missing a day D:

Yiiikes, I missed violin yesterday! I didn’t forget about it – but I usually work from 9am – 11pm on Mondays and after I got home I had to pack and that didn’t get done until 4am and there just wasn’t time. I HAVE BROUGHT GREAT SHAME UPON MY BLOG. 

Violin makeup WILL be posted this week. Maybe I’ll be able to get that string fixed tomorrow so I can actually go back to playing sheet music!

 

Drawing Day 3

I ran out of time at the end, hence sketchy placeholder hands and feet! I’d like to work on this one some more and see if I can get it to a more finished place!

I assure you in real life my sister is a graceful, slender waif with excellent proportions and pretty normal-looking arms. 😉

Writing Day 3

At some point along the hike, somewhere in the midst of a thicket of thorny blackberries, dwarfed in the shadow of countless sky-scraping pines, she realized in a sort of back-of-the-brain, take-a-note manner that she’d never made an active decision to leave.

She was still wearing the shoes she’d worn to work – sensible brown office flats. Office sensible, of course, not forest and rock sensible. There were still two pens and a little flip notebook in her back pocket, and she still had her purse with the office key and the car key and the house key and a pack of gum and a coral lipstick and some batteries (just in case) and one of those little tiny pocket knives they give girls sometimes. Metallic purple, like two inches long. She had her wallet and some loose change and twenty-eight bucks. She had the punch card for Gianna’s Best Hoagies.

There were eleven out of twelve stamps on that thing, and if she’d made it to lunch today, she had every intention of finally getting that last stamp taken care of, and then next week she’d get a free sandwich and spend the extra seven dollars on a new paperback. Probably something trashy.

But the thing was, she hadn’t made it to lunch. She hadn’t even made it to a legitimate coffeebreak, really. At 10:13, she’d stood up and headed out of her and Mia’s cubicle, ducked under the string of little neon bat-shaped lights, and made it to the door. She’d walked out of the branch, and outside of a couple of sidelong glances, no one had remarked on her departure. The security guard in the lobby had waved pleasantly and she’d waved back, and then she was outside.

And then she was walking through town, east, toward where the city stopped and the hills started. She came out at a park – it had thick old white oak trees and those little animals on a spring that kids love and the sounds of a swimming pool from somewhere but mostly it was just grass. They had the company picnic here every year. Where the earth started to slant sharply up the mowed and tended lawn stopped and the little twisty coastal oaks started and that was what she walked into, and no one said anything then, either.

She was pretty sure that had been hours ago, though she couldn’t see the sun above the thick green canopy. She was also pretty sure that gigantic red pines that smelled like vanilla didn’t grow around here either, and she was pretty sure blackberries were never usually this gigantic – they could have been apples – and she was pretty sure that even if it had been hours she should still be able to hear the sounds of cars and planes and the ocean and in any case she should have reached the top of the hill by now and started coming down on the other side but this just kept climbing and climbing and she just kept walking and walking.

The only conclusion she could come to, in a sort of distracted way, with the parts of her mind that weren’t more concerned with trying not to rip her slacks up too much on these thorns, was that she had ended up someplace entirely different than she’d been headed. Which wouldn’t have been hard, of course, as she hadn’t been headed anywhere in particular when she’d left in the first place.

None of this particularly distressed her, which was also something she noticed with the back of her mind. She settled on the idea that the reason she hadn’t made a decision to leave at 10:13 that morning, was because she’d already decided to leave a long time ago, and the action had needed some time to catch up with what her mind already knew.

This is a fragment of something that floats around in my brain a lot when I’m driving to work. It always starts like this, and then different things go on to happen to our escaped wage slave. 🙂 

Writing news: I finished the rough outline for the novel I’m working on, today! 

Total word count for this week: 1923 

Not fantastic, but still more than last week! 

Violin Day 3

Here it is Tuesday, and Violin Monday is just now getting posted. I did play and record this yesterday though, I promise!

Sorry about the weird audio clipping. My poor little laptop webcam is doing its best.

Yay violin! 🙂