Ideas of Beauty

Hello, Friends and Readerly Peeps!

Welcome to another installment of WIPpet Wednesday. This little bloghop started a by KL Schwengel a few years back. Here we share a small snippet of a WIP or Work in Progress for your pleasure. The number of words, sentences or paragraphs depends on the date… abstractly. We choose the amount we share based on what we called WIPpet Maths. Usually there is even some mathematical calculation involved. 🙂

But before I step into that, let me share a bit of my ROW80 progress:

• writing – some every day, but not always 750 words
• typing – two days of three
• blogging – on track
• exercise – need more
• house stuff – LOTS of mortgage paperwork and some packing

The rest of this month I need to focus more on house stuff—packing especially!—but just getting rid of things we won’t ever use too.  I can guarantee my writing  counts will be down, and I’m (mostly) O.K. with that.

WIPpet

I’m not using maths today for my WIPpet. Because it’s just before Valentine’s Day, just before that day commercial/public declarations of love, here’s a scene from March/Promenade (where I’m still trying to bring all my MCs together in one place) in a prelude to love. Perhaps… Or, it could be a I chose six rather long sentences (or three paragraphs) because the maths worked (2+1+3=6, 2+1=3 or 3). 😀

In this scene, ‘Listii has arrived to meet with Alanii in the summer barracks of the Royal Guard just before the men must head to the city outskirts and greet the returning troops coming in from the battlefields.

‘Listii watched as Alanii slowly eased himself out from behind the small desk, barely disturbing the rolled ciphers that he’d been engrossed in reviewing only moments ago. ‘Listii couldn’t help but note the man’s fluid stride, the effortlessness to his movement. A mixture of observations, his own and all those ‘Listii had experienced second-hand, filled him. Ideas of beauty, images from men and women both as to what was desirable, what defined want…

Driven as he’d been by this strange Call, divinely inspired or not the opinions he’d experienced could not say for certain, ‘Listii felt a certain amount of satisfaction that if he had to be forever forsworn to a man from now on in place of the ‘tianei he’d shared with Atara, that at least Alanii was nearly as beautiful as she’d been.

From what little he’d gathered about the Heir’s feelings on the matter, Alanii wasn’t going to resent him for what Fate had forced them to be to each other, that there was even some admiration perhaps in the Heir’s eyes for what ‘Listii might be able to offer in such a relationship, that perhaps the Heir saw something beautiful in him as well….

If you enjoyed that, there’s more to be found.  Head on over to the WIPpet linky to visit some our other awesome members.  These days, WIPpet Wednesdays are hosted by Emily Wrayburn at Letting the Voices Out.

Even Louder

Technically this is a break between ROW80 rounds, so I don’t really have a check-in. Not that there’s much to say anyway… I’ve written, mostly, but I took a break from everything for the holiday and family gatherings. Still have a few more of those to get to yet, as well as writing up my Round 1 Goals for the Round of Words.

For now… I have a WIPpet for you from Singer of the Swan Song. This will be the last of that story for a while. The brain has demanded a different focus… or perhaps a lack of focus. I’ve been drawn back toward the roots of my stories and how the universe developed in the first place.

That means Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors fanfiction all January… 😀

As before, this snippet follows directly after last week’s excerpt, Brave. Many, many thanks to Shan and Beth for their thoughtful crit-comments on that piece. I definitely got some ideas to work with there.

For today’s WIPpet maths, I added the 1+2 from 12 to make three, then added a holiday extra.  And it finished this section just right, I think.

But what if… ‘Tara didn’t know if she could be more scared than she was already, but she had cried a lot the day ‘Listii’d gotten hurt. Was Mama sending her away now too?

Swallowing hiccups and tears as best she could, Atara pushed herself to her feet, even making a show of using her hurt arm so Mama could see how strong she was being. “I’m okay, Mama,” she said when she slipped again. This time she caught herself from getting a mouthful of the icky muck, but her legs splayed so wide in her efforts to control her fall that all the hurts of this week, the unhealed pain from the horned beast’s attack and what her cousin had done after…

She cried again. It still hurt. Not just the tearing pain in her body, but her head burned so bad.

‘Tara didn’t hear her mother step over; she barely noticed the woman’s enormous shadow fall over her until the woman grabbed up her arm and tugged her to her feet. “Really, Atara! You look like you’ve been wrestling with those ruffians, not behaving like a young lady. Now hush! You’ll wake up the whole house.”

Instead of being able to stifle her tears, Atara cried even louder.

 

I hope you enjoyed this month’s offerings.  Now why not  head over to the WIPpet linky and visit some our other awesome members? WIPpet Wednesdays are hosted by Emily Wrayburn at Letting the Voices Out.

Brave

Another week, another ROW80 check-in plus WIPpet Wednesday post…

I’m on roll here.  Almost two months worth of posts again.  Yay me!

Seriously, yay me.  It’s hard to get back into doing things after a long hiatus, and even harder when Life has been busy piling on its blessings of extra things to deal with.  And of course, it’s the holiday season with its standard package of events and obligations…  and memories.

I don’t deal well with the holiday season.

My goals aren’t suffering for this burst of motivation.  I’ve managed, on average, around 800 words a day.  Most of it is brain dumps and plotting ideas, but it’s been good for exploring stories and feelings reactions…  New story is coming a bit slower, but I’ve managed to add around 100-300 words almost every day, just not every day.

For my creativity bursts, I’ve been doing some daily drawing practice, trying out techniques and seeing what I could come up with in 10-20 minute bursts of drawing.  As I used to draw from an image and then tweak to my tastes, having to free-style it has been an interesting challenge.    I’m learning more about what sorts limitations I work best within and how to work around them.

Limits seem to be the best creativity boosters I’ve found lately.  Trying to write or draw just “anything” always seems to become nothing.  But if I set a limit, a number of words or a posture…  somehow I can get “something” on the page.

I’ll have to start Instagraming the pictures so I can post them here as well as Facebook.

And yes, the rest of my goals, to type in pages and to get packing/house-clearing done are progressing…  slowly.

WIPpet

This week’s entry for WIPpet Wednesday is 14 sentences (plus one lead-in from last week’s post) of Singer of the Swan Song.  We’re still in the opening chapter., and I’m really hoping for feedback on whether this would “hook” you all as a reader.

Maths: 12/20/18…  add all the digits, then count two fragments as a sentence 😉

She felt herself start to fall and reached out again. “Mama!”

Smelly muck splashed about her as she landed face-first, just missing the paving cobbles. Her outstretched arm hit one, hard.

It hurt so very much, her breath caught in her throat. The hiccups almost came. ‘Tara forced them back. She wouldn’t cry. The boys had taught her that in their games. The more she cried, the more they’d torment her. But when she’d stiffened her lip and choked back the pain, they’d petted her, telling her how strong and brave she was. Just like them. Not like the twins’ snippy sister.

Her parents had sent her away because she wasn’t strong and brave.

But what if… ‘Tara didn’t know if she could be more scared than she was already, but she had cried a lot the day ‘Listii’d been hurt. Was Mama sending her away now too?

Interested in more? Interested in joining in? Being a WIPpeteer is pretty easy. First, you have to write something (that’s the hardest bit) and then you have to post it to your blog on Wednesday, using what we call “WIPpet Maths”… which really means, fudge around with the numbers on the date until you come up with something that fits what you’d like to share.

For more WIPpet fun, head over to the WIPpet linky and visit some our other awesome members. The WIPpet is hosted by Emily Wrayburn.