As I type this, the snow they've been threatening all weekend has finally started to settle outside my window. It's not doing much, mind you, and on Friday when the weather people went nuts and told us to stock up on fuel supplies and essential food items (generally most parts of New Zealand see significant snow only rarely, and it tends to screw us up) I went to the Four Square and returned with a litre of low fat milk, a bottle of vanilla, a dozen eggs and a package of dates. Because obviously, as far as I am concerned, if I am snowed in all I care about is omelettes, date scones and Oreo-infused chocolate chip cookies.
...probably it's better, if you don't ask about that last one.
But yes, I have had to spend the weekend being somewhat productive considering the fact that in less than two weeks I will be out of the country for an indeterminate period. Today I've spent the afternoon cleaning the bathroom out and throwing clothes and laundry from my room into Tyler's. I'm not sure that I've achieved all that much by doing so, but...it was a start? I also cleaned the kitchen, mostly because I'd left it in a state after the Brownie Experiment of Thursday night and I wanted to make soda bread for lunch. I also need to make soup for dinner. Oh, joy. (The Oreo cookies are, somewhat thankfully, on hold for the meantime.) Despite all this, though, I have actually managed to do some writing over the week. Probably not as much as I ought to have, but considering everything...
Right as of this minute, the Greywater .doc is sitting at 92,177 words. The writing I've done over the last week, too, has been a little...odd. Well, not odd, strictly; it's just that on Monday I started to get a much clearer idea about where the story is supposed to be going, and instead of writing things in full I've been sketching out scenes in dialogue and stage direction, and going through the novel in order to get things straight before I smooth out the line art and colour it all in. This is how I write short stories; it doesn't usually work so well with longer pieces, but considering the fact I started writing this story with no idea as to where it was going...well. It's all good, in any way I get it? I don't know.
Still, for a bit of a giggle, have an example of my sketchy-writing:
The head rose, turned to him, and the eyes opened.
Otho wanted to rear back, but he was frozen in place by the eyes. The statue was made of ice, but the colour in the eyes was there. Blue, green, grey, white – the sea in full storm. But no anger. Just the force of a great personality, a greater art.
“I…”
Slight shake of his head. And then, he reached forward. The bear. Woken, it raised its head, yawned, and then looked to him. Black eyes, rich with intelligence, lazy with easily-given affection.
As if in a dream, Otho accepted the bear from the boy-god. He nodded, smiled. Had not exactly been beautiful in life, not in the fashion of the brawn farmer Janerin or the notorious courtesan Amanita, but that did not matter. Otho could not look anywhere else.
The bear nuzzled, butted his chin. For a strange moment he wondered what he would do, if it decided to sink its little ice-teeth into the great vein in his throat. But he felt no danger, no fear, and then it settled as it had in the boy-god’s cradling embrace, and Inamoran smiled wider. Sadness, in those storm-ridden eyes, but still he smiled.
“What am I supposed to do?” “You want me to help her, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“How?”
Turned his head. Janerin, in the darkness before them.
“He won’t help me.”
And Inamoran shook his head. Otho knew he’d misunderstood, and wished he would speak. But the cold of the bear was spreading through his limbs. Not uncomfortable. Reminded him of how strange he’d always thought it, when people said that drowning was a peaceful way to die. Lungs filling with liquid, struggling, fighting against a force overwhelming every inch of your body. Had never seen what could possibly be peaceful about that.
Thought he understood now. The cold in every part of him, and yet it felt like a dream pulling him deeper into sleep, into a place where dreams were no long necessary. No desire to fight, but then he looked into those eyes again.
“Please!” “Please, tell me how to save her!”
Smiled.
When he opened his eyes, he was in his bed. A dream? But the pillow was wet. Put a trembling finger to it, then to his lips. The taste of salt, the taste of tears. But he remembered the weight of the ice-cub in his arms, and he wondered.
As I said, I tend to just go by the dialogue to get the point of the scene, and then I just throw in half-formed sentences and key snippets of description so that when I eventually get around to filling in the gaps, I remember the road of the Zone I was careening down at a thousand miles an hour the first time I did a drive-by of it. Good times, as I said. The polar bear cub story, incidentally, still depresses me but this little snippet here has gone a long way towards cheering me up. Daw.
And you know, when I was walking around the reserve this morning looking for the snow that never turned up, I had all these ideas about what I was going to write about today in this blog. Mostly it was a tvtropes-driven explanation of the genesis of the two lead characters of Greywater, but I find after having spent the afternoon tidying and cleaning and whatnot I'd much rather just go and write. But just for laughs, if you look in that picture up there of my desk you should be able to see a drawing on the left, somewhere above the plate of my Pink Lady apple (yes, I have to cut my apple up like a baby; I had braces for years as a kid and also knocked half of one of my front teeth off when I was seven at Conon Street swimming pool; I honestly can't bite into an apple to save my own life). That drawing is some line-art from a commission in progress by RaraHoWa, and I'm ridiculously excited about it. Even though the character on the right is Nan. Fucking Nan. ...this is relevant to this entry's interests, you see, in that Nan was supposed to be with Alara (the stone cold fox on the left) in forevergirl. Yet somehow she is careening around Greywater making my life hell.
This is somehow awesome.
...so, let's get back to the awesome?
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