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A Broken One-Minute Drill With My NaNoWriMo Prep

http://www.online-stopwatch.com/full-screen-stopwatch/

OK.  So everything I just wrote got deleted in a weird keystroke accident.  Which means that not only do I no longer have that material such that it was I also have no proof I had the material in the first place.  I suppose neither are really that big a deal.

I’d like to consider the murdered mage.  I used a word last night as I drove home that appealed to me: dispatched.  Obviously used int he past to mean killed but more accurately just sent on ahead with a message.  I think…

I’d like to pick up on that wording.  Mostly because I don’t want to have to have killed him.  But maybe I’m being a chicken here.  Dawned on me I should kill off Malachi too.  Don’t know why, but the do say kill off your darlings.  I suspect he’ll…

So Malachi was our dispatched mage’s apprentice and made the clockwork spider.  A long time ago.  Long enough ago that none of the gather mages would know this.  Though, of course, one suspects/does know.

Ok. DM was an academic mage.  He wasn’t as much of a practitioner and had no real protective experience.  Therefore when he began to play around in the darker arts he was easily susceptible to the the…

evil-ness or whatever.  The cabal figured this out or at least made up their minds it was true and had Malachi do the dirty work.  They always have him do the dirty work.  He’s just that kind of guy.  They stay clean.

Last one.  What’s Karen’s deal in all this?  She’s M’s lover, but what’s her real goal?  Just to become a promoted mage?  Accepted?  Allowed to perform magic on her own?  What does that even mean in a world such as ours?

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Three Whole Sentences

I am writing.  I have written.  I will be writing more.

The previous paragraph is self referential.  I’m not telling you that I’ve been writing somewhere else and keeping it from you.  The promise at the end of the first paragraph only guarantees that I’ll have written this paragraph and not anything more.  Though I live in hope.

In the past I’ve had varying success at not laying blame on any particular aspect of my life that would have send me off my writing track.  Leaving the blame squarely in my lack of commitment felt truer and more motivating.  I can’t say doing so has been either.

Karen scrubbed the buttery velvet pile bordering a worn area on the arm of a Victorian settee.  She pretended the exposed warp was a continent in a sea of ice-slick green.  Then decided it was the ocean instead.

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Prayer For a Fast Friday

Today I’m resisting. Right now I’m resisting the urge to write about not writing. Strange and wonderful aren’t I? Later I’ll resist some other pointless distractions.
Additionally I’ll twist my 1-minute drill by firing up my collection of motivation notes collected from across the Internet and spin off a few lines from each.

  • We always called it the Ice City, but the alien metal structure buried in the glacier was no more than a power plant or industrial lab. Now that it came to the end of it’s epochal journey to the sea I don’t know what we should call it. Maybe just ruins or wreck.
  • At night, colored lights of shades and intensities we could never produce decried the Monastic Island’s superiority. During the day—many days not all of them—the smells of cooked meat spiced and smoked with woods we would never know drifted across the narrow river separating us from them.
  • The the Victorian lace of her tattoo-like trimmed felt caught the sun’s light around the edges of her nude body, but darkened to a deeper red in the flat. The way her brick-red feltish fur covered her body like a well upholstered divan it was difficult to think of her as truly naked.
  • You’d have thought it fake, a trick of some fine porcelain powder or alabaster mask, if you did not already know her absolute white skin were real. Vabastaline’s thoughtless stare at first ground you like meal under a millstone, but quickly eroded to more of a troublesome nuisance than a soul rending thing it began as.
  • The red circles and pale orange bursts scratched out by hand contrast with the ledger’s machine printed rule. A strange place to find such well made conjuring. A strange conjuring to be found.
  • With happy abandon or a level of worldly obviousness unattainable by most the crayon-yellow balloon drifted up past the shoulder of the iron robot soldier.

OK. I feel better now. Sorry about lying about the new weekly plan and all my motivational deadline plans. Ha.

Day 415