I tame a beast

Or at least, I'm trying to tame a beast.*

This is difficult, because it likes to hide in shadows and grow when I'm not looking. Just when I think I have it neatly trapped in its shipping carton, the next thing I know, the sides are bulging, the cardboard is tearing, and the creature has sprouted horns and gills and the odd large barnacle. It wants to wriggle and sprawl. It will not stay box-shaped.

I despair.

But I also persevere.

*aka the Dread Synopsis

~~~

A great black creature swooped down and landed on a ledge, just in front of her, and she realized the forest was gone and she stood at the lip of a long, narrow canyon, its ochre and cinnamon walls dusted with snow, its bottom lost in blue shadows.

The selyf folded his long wings and his head snaked toward her until one brilliant eye filled her vision like a small sun, and the breath from his long reptilian jaw was a hot blast against her cheek.

(from The Knife-Giver, ch. 52, "The Blue Thief")

My first blog entry.

Haven't a clue what to say. Never thought I'd be keeping one of these, but there's a certain...seduction* to it, even though it's not likely to get read. Actually, I count that a good thing. It means I can say anything I want, and no one will know or care.**

A word about the blog title. The stone river is a place in my fantasy novel where an underground river has, through sorcery, been stilled (not frozen, precisely, but hardened. Stopped in its tracks.). There are secret paths through the stone churnings and waves and cascades, like arteries hidden under the skin of the mountains. They sometimes take the traveler to unexpected places, or show him odd things. Maybe a bit like this blog.

*another term for the temptation to procrastinate
**This sounds suspiciously like the lie I told myself when I first sat down to write a novel

~ ~ ~
As they traveled he touched the stone from time to time, feeling some obscure need to reassure himself of its solidity. It was not uniformly pale, as he had first thought, but translucent and softly shaded with bands of gray, green, and turquoise. Once he saw a needle-thin glimmer of gold, and occasionally he glimpsed dark, graceful shapes deep within the rock, like the trapped shadows of fish.

(from The Knife-Giver, ch. 46, "The Stone River")