Arrangements

Since this is Sunday, that means ROW80 check-in time (at the bottom of the post, as usual).  It’s also Day 4 of StoryADay September.  So, yes…  another combination post.

First my StoryADay piece from yesterday (I was just not in the mood to post it yesterday evening).  This will be the last piece posted on its own.  From then on, I will be posting a PDF of the stories on Sundays only for people to see the weekly piece.  Daily check-ins are just not my thing.

Because I needed more insanity in my life

Today, however, I am posting Day 3’s Drabble (a story in 100 words). A little piece involving one of my favorite characters:

Edge slight right—not the shadow, just beyond. They watch shadows.

Wait.

One, two… a moment more, the last looks away, off in different directions… severing their connection. Gazing elsewhere, favoring the darkness. He’d already moved beyond the shadows separating them. In… close… nearer than any lover..

A fleeting caress against the neck, heat gushing, blood pounding. “Don’t cry.” He leaves for the next too soon. Swift turning to a last dance of souls, beauty in each others’ movements, matched power, stepping in, closer… a gasp cut short with a kiss, sweet, wet.

No tears.

Those were for the graves.

Row80 Check-in & Assessment

Since Wednesday, I’ve been…  getting my act together after not doing much of anything over our vacation week on Saranac Lake.  It’s not easy to start up writing when one has not done so for a week or so (especially when one was feeling somewhat blocked and over-stressed before taking that week off).  And in coming back there are all the daily tasks to catch up on…

It’s taken me a while to build back up to a pattern again.  I am getting there.

• CRAFT
  • Goal: spend ~three hours a week delving into writing craft related learning
  • Progress: if I managed an hour, I’d be surprised
  • Goal: Hand-write new words daily! (the Five Sentences thingie)
  • Progress: Success!
  • Goal: typing two pages a day of old notebooks into the computer
  • Progress: nada
• SOCIAL
  • Goal: maintain local critique group submission of excerpts and critiques during non-NaNoWriMo months
  • Progress: I owe some work, and a submission
  • Goal: return to regular posting in the WIPpet and WeWriWa blog hops
  • Progress: I managed a WIPpet, but since I jumped into the StoryADay challenge, I am going to (once again) postpone my rejoining the WeWriWa crew
  • Goal: sponsor duties for the ROW80 twice a week
  • Progress: I’m on track for this week.  I need to catch up with the week I missed for vacation
• PERSONAL
  • Goal: Explore my creative side daily
  • Progress: not really…  more I’ve been practicing avoidance
  • Goal: Daily languages (except Sundays)
  • Progress: I didn’t do much while camping, but I’m back on track now
  • Goal: daily exercise amounting to a minimum of 30 minutes a day
  • Progress: even though I’ve been channeling my inner couch potato more than not, I reached my minimum; I’m content
• Temporary! Goal: StoryADay September
• Progress: On track, even if I haven’t posted everything; the goal is to write the story, not necessarily post one, daily

And…  lastly a cheer for a wonderful husband:

This wonderful man does this…

So I can get shots like this…

And this

Dancers: StADaSept #2

Because I needed more insanity in my life

I couldn’t do much earlier today.  Bleh!  Migraine time…  It would have to be the second day of an event.  Well…  an afternoon nap later, maybe I came up with something using the day #2 prompt: the Fourth Grade Spelling List

“Mayor! Another round for my friends!”

The barkeep wiped his hands on his apron and shuffled over to the back shelves near his moneybox where he kept the taller flagons hanging on hooks over the day’s casks. A good day if they paid him, since he’d already called his sons in from the kitchen to help him raise a new cask into the wooden framework that held it up to the wall. A nice bit of creative woodcraft and he was the man who’d come up with the idea to the envy of all the other local innkeepers.

T’were a simple enough thing too. Just a wooden frame slightly smaller than the shelf that lowered around the casks once they were settled on the shelf, holding them in place. So simple, sometimes he wondered how he’d been the only one to come up with it. But as he patted the worn wood with its smoothed grain and slightly sticky finish from the years of dripped wine and ale and greasy palms.., Their loss, his gain.

Soldiers on a holiday … Hopefully that young buck of lordling they were escorting was as good for his debts as he seemed to be to his men. A common touch, and for such a handsome lad. Mayor frowned to himself as he watched the young man offer to dance with one of the maids, bowing low and asking for her hand like she were some lady of the state worthy of such honors. Fool boy… not that he could blame the lad. Della was a looker if one didn’t listen to the stories the maids did relay amongst themselves.

Then, if she were as wrong as they said, she hid it well, he mussed. No shuffling feet, no missteps for her. As Delta laughingly accepted the lordling’s hand, Mayor remembered days when Saninsi and he kicked up their heels on a tavern floor or two in their own youth.

As he leaned over to fill the first flagon, he saw Saninsi smile at him in the silvered glass that he’d placed behind the casks to watch the goings on in the common room. He told himself not to worry. Things were usually better when there were soldiers in residence, provided their lord was one of the local ones…

He didn’t know this young scamp though, and the lad’s willingness to fraternize with his men didn’t bode well. Too common to have the money he’d need for this tab his men and he were growing.

Mayor tried to smile back at his wife, tried to not show how worried he was. No sense in getting her in a state. She was a good woman, but even the finest would fall in a tizzy and remain that way half the night if she thought her home or family might be in danger. He nodded as she set down the pail of sand for the men’s pipes and ash by the door to the outer rooms. A good woman… even still had the slender waist of a girl half her age.

He stood up and placed the flagon on the bar counter, watching as Della and her lordling swung about the hard oak floor, airplaning among the crowd with laughing smiles on their faces.

As he lowered down the next flagon to fill, he decided, once this round was filled, to ask his Saninsi if she’d dance with him too.

It had been too long.

I like it actually. I don’t think it would have come off so well if I’d tried to write it from Alanii’s POV. I considered doing that (actually the bar scene is supposed to be from Val’s POV).

A bit too much blather about the man’s bar and the design of the place… I had no real sense of how to get started here. Played it a bit too much by ear I guess. But it seems to have worked out,at least one of the pieces of his character came through because of that fumbling start. I got a sense of his pride and his humility at the same time, his awareness of how he saw himself in the scheme of things, how he viewed his custom and his competitors. And what he feared…

I hope he enjoys his dance.

StADaSept: #1

Because I need more insanity…

This might seem like the last thing I should be jumping into at this point, but…  my long-time syster, Shan Jeniah, has been talking about the joys of her Story A Day experiences for years, and while I have resisted the urge to participate in May since my first attempt (years ago), I did want to join again…  someday.

Someday is here.

So here it is, rough and unready…  my first entry for Story A Day September following the original time limit prompt for today:

“This was not what I asked you to do!”

He looked at his wife, his anger not wholly abated by the fact he knew he was the one that was really in the wrong here. It wasn’t her fault that he’d chosen to name her. As his lover none of this would have happened.

And the woman that now awaited him in his bed would have been in it for the past twenty years….

“You need to know this, my lord.” Ali brushed away a stray lock of hair that escaped her coif, so frantic she’d been in her run from the solarium.

Another thing to dread… the way the rumors would fly once this was over, both of her womanly failings and her unladylike handling of her shame. Running about the house like a child half the age his firstborn should be by now!

“I already know what I need to know about the Lady Audie. My father’s heart was broken by her shame—”

“And yours is not by the shame I now face that you must take her as your own?” Her jaw trembled the slightest touch. Her voice had faded from defiant to a bare whisper. Her shoulders curled in as she clutched herself in an embrace.

“I have no wish to see you shamed, lovely one, but you cannot have a child. Your physicians have sworn it to be the death of you if you get pregnant again.” He walked over to offer her his arms in place of her own. “Please don’t make this harder than it has to be. I only need an heir of her. Of you, I need your smile and love all my life.”

“Your House? Your heir…” She shook her head, her body becoming stiff and unyielding as he tried to gather her in his arms. “I cannot allow you to destroy their future in taking someone like her. The priests…. she’s a hunted creature, one of THEM!”

The shudder that overtook her seemed to flow through them both as he considered her words. He did know what Audie was. The old blood that flowed through her veins was likely to contaminate his family name for eons, but his father had loved the woman once. Did he not owe the man’s legacy some honor for the woman he’d sworn himself to?

“The priests accepted her as my father’s wife. She cannot be as damned as you think, little one,”

Ali raised her eyes, jutting her chin out just enough to not remind him of her more playful expressions. “You see what you want, Goain. That woman is going to break you. If your House survives beyond that, I would be surprised.”

She slipped from his arms and stalked back down the hall she’d run through so breathlessly and childlike only moments before.

That’s it.  The characters are based off the ones and a scene I have been imagining for my Swan Song Series stories.  I hope you like it.