New words

795 words today. And things should start getting interesting now, as Yakoba discovers who his fellow prisoner is.

More new words

Today's word count stands at 284, better than yesterday's, which was about 70 or so that I ended up deleting. I know from experience that I always start slow, but build momentum. I'll get there.

Meanwhile, here's a snippet from what I wrote today.

The man looked as if he'd been marching for days without sleep. His hands trembled around the wooden bowl and the smudges under his eyes were the greenish-gray of a bad storm sky. The eyes themselves were a brighter green, like spring grass, but glazed with exhaustion.

He cast a wary glance at Yakoba, as if to assure himself that his fellow prisoner was not about to attack him, before consuming the porridge with famished haste and gulping down water from the skin they'd left him. After he finished, he pulled a fur around himself, lay down as close to the fire as he could get, and instantly fell asleep, leaving Yakoba to wonder grimly how long he would last once Kauldi's sons started playing with him.

AWOL

Anyone who had the faintest interest in this blog will have long since given up on it by now. All casual passers-by have drifted away in search of more interesting fare, and I am alone here again. No noses pressed against the glass, no shadows moving past my door.

Which suits me, at the moment.

I have made a pact with myself to write new words in the WIP every day. Maybe there won't be a lot of them, but they will get written and they will move the story incrementally forward. Yes, it's a slog sometimes, but ground not ventured is ground not taken. It's far, far too easy to camp out on the plot of land that's been tamed so far, to tend it and landscape it to a fare-thee-well, while the remaining wilderness promises nothing but sheer hard work. But (I remind myself) it also promises adventure and secret paths and unexpected discoveries.

I have camped out long enough. Time to explore. Time to climb the last few hundred yards of my own personal Everest.

***
The hound led him through the second arch, first into a tunnel, then a cramped side passage that ended in a crevice much like the one he and Yakoba had used when they first entered the stone river. It opened onto his first sight of the forbidden, immortal land of Cuhlnari legend: a tangle of viciously thorny bushes clinging to a stony mountainside. Skah wriggled through the roots of the thicket, but Riordan had to battle his way out through the worst of it. Hands bleeding from a dozen scratches, he scrambled to the summit to get his bearings.

A distant range that could only be the Graystones sliced the northern sky like a gigantic, toothy jawbone, one peak jutting markedly higher than the others. The Eagle? If so, it looked far sleeker and more deadly from this angle, more like an exposed fang than the watchful head of a raptor. The range dropped southward into a fractured highland of gaunt gray cliffs and crumbling mountains stubbled with fir and spruce and powdered with snow. Ravines ran in crooked seams everywhere, filled with foaming streams and sometimes lined with groves of bent and twisted trees that looked so ancient they might have been seedlings when the world was young.

An odd feeling washed over him, equal parts disillusionment and discovery. The Graystones did not guard the edge of mortal earth after all, but hid a harsh, elderly land. Time and weather had eroded its flesh, but the gnarled bones of it remained, saturated with something that made the hairs prickle along his arms. This might not be the realm of spirits, as he had been taught, but some power slept here, dense and deep.

(from The Knife-Giver, ch. 54 "Woman of Stone")