You better stay offline and be productive Moya! *pester pester pester*
@Ami - Being alive to the world is definitely better than dead to the world when it comes to getting writing done! Set yourself a goal for the day and then shatter it =D
Mors: Yes'm! I had to make breakfast and lunch for my boyfriend, since it saves money, but now he's out the door, and I've settled down with my cereal. Time to write my fingers off!
Up through chapter three is fleshed out! whee How does this look for an intro chapter for my new MC?
In her first life, she'd been born as Tammy Ives of the Quallon Plains. Time had worn away at her earliest memories—she no longer recalled the feeling of heavy, rich earth as she tilled it, the splash of a net cast into the lake in search of dinner. Four hundred or more years had passed, and the fields of her youth were crowded with tall, stern buildings—the lake was considered a conservation site, and only those with government permits were allowed to fish in its waters.
No one alive knew the history of the Quallon Plains, or even recognized that the name Qol had been taken from its people and applied incorrectly to the entire continent. Invaders from the cold north had erased that history with their own, writing lies about how they'd been born to this vibrant land, how nothing had ever been otherwise. There had never been a people with sprawling cities that worked the land, that maintained their own government, their own culture.
There had never been a Tammy Ives.
That quiet life had ended with war. Fire eating away at crops and homes and meeting halls, peeling away paint and memories—spears and swords splitting soldiers and children alike to leave glassy-eyed corpses covered in blood—the frantic pounding of her own heart as she'd sprinted into the forest.
Macy and Cherry, her two daughters, had been firmly anchored in her arms. She remembered their weight, if not their faces. Remembered the heat crackling off of the fires hedging them in. She'd tripped over a corpse, dropping them and hitting the ground hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs. A silhouette had charged them down, spearing her two children.
Tammy had drawn her second life from beneath the skin of their murderer, clawing out a cloud of crackling energy. That was the first moment she could clearly recall: the pinching of a thousand hot needles buried in her pores, the stench of burned hair, the foul mass of ash that had once been a human. She'd fled into the forest, leaving behind her still and unmoving daughters.
The forest had been dense in those days, with towering trees that no longer existed anywhere in Qol. It had been a fight to get herself to the lake, where she thought to drown herself in rage and grief—and, looking at her reflection in the light of three full moons, she had found herself shrunk down to the size of a child.
Unable to return, Tammy had wandered the wide world, growing up for a second time. She visited the cold, hungry lands the invaders had fled as well as the parched desert that supported only a migratory people who moved from one oasis to the next. In the years that followed, she visited every coast, investigating all of the people left untouched by the war that had taken her homeland. The southern mountains were impenetrable, and she could not brave the rocky ocean without a boat.
But as her flesh withered and aged, the knowledge of power still pulsed in her bones—and, when her hair had grown white and brittle, she found her way back to her homeland, which the invaders called Harris. Her farm belonged to someone else, taken exactly as she'd been forced to leave it.
Sixty years had cleared away the ash and smoke, but they remained as a filmy smudge around the edges of her vision, threatening to flash back into life and tear it all apart once again. Tammy recognized none of the faces in the city proper; she wandered the streets looking for any sign of the familiar, any sign of home. Her bones creaked with each step, and she knew that she was at the end of her days, the last survivor of the Quallon Plains.
And then.
Then she heard a scuffle, the pleading of an old man. Though she didn't recognize the voice, the language was unmistakable. Her mother tongue—Samil.
“Please, I have so little left,” he said, and Tammy crept closer to them, hesitating at one dark corner of the alleyway. “I won't be able to eat if you take the last of it.”
“You've lived long enough, old man,” a young woman snapped. Her language was the amalgam of Samil and Tarish that had spread throughout the newly conquered land. As Tammy craned her head around the edge of the brick wall, the woman shoved the elderly man. “I've got years ahead of me. What have you got—a week?”
Tammy could feel the woman's heart pulsing beneath her skin without touching her. Could almost see the energy crackling under the surface, vibrant with the fire of youth. The old man had very little of his left; she shone while he faded.
Unthinking, Tammy's hand rose toward the woman. That youth—she recalled her youth all too well. She'd had her second chance, but this woman was using her only chance at life to harass those who had already suffered. Tammy would do better with that chance.
The woman spun to look at her, and Tammy yanked her hand back as if scalded. Yellow energy burned and popped in the air between them as the young woman wilted. Tammy's skin drew in the energy, prickling with pain as it ate up her wrinkles and liver spots, as her white hair fell in black tangles about her shoulders.
With a thud, the old man's bag fell in a pile of ash that reeked of burnt hair and flesh.
In Tammy's third life, she had gone by Agatha Twine. Terrified of meeting anyone who might know her by her younger face, she'd turned away from all human contact and lived as a hermit on the hills between the land that had robbed her of her home and the home that she no longer recognized. No children to replace those she'd lost—no husband to replace the one who'd died while she was yet pregnant.
As Agatha, she lived a lonely life; when she swallowed the life energy of a murderer, she took up being Marcia Summers, who longed to have children but was infertile during a time when adoption was unheard of and instead ran a daycare.
Decades passed, then centuries. Tammy became Macy Thompson, the chef who spoke three languages and knew everyone by name. The woman she thought her older daughter might have grown to be. Then she was Cherry Spitz, who'd never known a day's work but was willing to give anything a try.
How many lives she led, Tammy could not be sure. Very seldom did she choose to live beyond her forties, tiring of her false identities and taking up new names as they suited her. Pure Yellow, she burned through their waking hours more quickly than another might have; two years of a criminal's life might be only two months to her.
Crime remained low in Harris even as it grew, and Tammy thought of herself as a hero, an urban legend, even if no one knew her story.
However, energy alone could not sustain her. Hunger clawed at her stomach as she prowled the streets alongside cars. New regulations made food stamps impossible without an ID. New regulations prevented her from acquiring a new ID without first checking her face against old IDs. Her name might change, but never her age or her face, at least for long. Criminals were never in short supply.
The glassy storefronts reflected her face back at her. Her eyes stared out at her, deep-set and red-rimmed with exhaustion. Colorless eyes: surely lighter and more washed out than they had been when she lived her first life, as though the pigment had worn away. Her skin shone greasy and yellowed like old parchment in the bright light of day. Her hair hung before her, tangled and dark brown. Once it had been naturally wavy rather than a knotted mess; after all her centuries, only the bangs remained so.
Worst of all was her figure's reflection. Thin and angular, with sharp bones pressing out against the parchment paper skin. No more than a corpse.
Her eyes refocused on the displays beyond the window, looking past her reflection. Crates full of fruit and tables covered with bread waited for her. The hunger eating away at her stomach made her feel sick and dizzy.
Tammy turned into the grocery store and slipped fruit and bread into her pockets and purse. After so many centuries of playing the hero, it was painful to take up villainy.
So this marathon week, it sounds interesting. I could go try to beat Nano and aim for 50k in 7 days. However I actually want some coherency before massive rounds of edits so I am going to place my goal as finish the rough draft of Binding the Stars. Which means I should go look at the outline to figure out how much I have to write.
Edit: Just looked at the outline, yup, what I have left is longer than what I had planned for NaNo... So make it as far as possible I guess... sweatdrop
Pretty excited for marathond week!
Whimsi i will join you in many of those wars!
Goals between now and then 1) outline events 2) get as much homework done as possible to free up time.
Shadow: Sweet! I am excited about it as well.
My goals until then: Get the outline solidified so I know what I am writing, catch up on 365 (and possibly get ahead with a buffer), get more written!
Good morning all!
I looked up my graduate school application status, and it finally says they're reviewing it!
-bites fingernails-
Moya
That was an enjoyable read! I love how you managed to say so much with so few words and make the scene come alive with all those little details that were so easy to visualize (like her gray hair falling black along her shoulders).
Have a good nap!
Mors
Great job being productive this morning!
Whimsi:: Those sound like some pretty do-able goals. How is your day coming along? Morse:: Have fun on campus and with the class. Limitless:: oh, I did. I really like that class as well. Ami:: You can do it! Get those words written.
500
