spinning yarns from heartstrings
One of the things I both love and hate about the first draft is how wordy it is. For NaNoWriMo, it’s a blessing because you’re likely adding a bunch of world-building, character-building fluff you’ll wind up cutting out in draft two. That stuff also helps you get to know your characters and world a little […]
I didn’t do well with Camp NaNoWriMo, and I haven’t been writing nearly at all these last few months, but it is my hope that one sure-fire way to get the wheels spinning and turning again is to buckle down and hit the 50,000 words in a month trail. I spent several weeks plotting last […]
Every day the people in the village brought offerings to the small shrine in hopes of appeasing the god they believed took up residence there. Good favor would mean larger crop yields come harvest, they said. It would mean fewer deaths during the long winters. But Henrietta knew in her soul there was no god at […]
It was the one time each year she could move freely among the children, giving in to her own child-like nature without fear or consequence. No one looked on her in dread because on that night there were far scarier things than Death: monsters and fiends and devils and ghouls. And they were hungry, so […]
They put the old gods on display in the desert after the Great Purge, trapped them in glass cages and set them out like ancient relics or antiques for the masses to gawk upon and poke at like children at a zoo. Spectators brought their image capturing devices and posed in front of the display […]
He was tired of holding onto it, clutching it in his hand, fingers gripping so tight the bright white edges of it seeped out through the cracks between his knuckles. It wriggled softly against his palm, tickling his skin almost affectionately. At his back, the sounds of an argument that existed long before he was […]
I have no idea if this loosely plotted thing is even going to make sense once I start writing it next month, and I’m already seeing weak spots I will have to rework and delete and expand upon and throw up in the air or even in the trash, but I’m sort of enjoying figuring […]
I’ve been an active participant in NaNoWriMo for over a decade now, but in truth I haven’t finished a novel in several years. Last year, I made it to just over 30,000 words before I lost steam, and I think part of the reason was because I hadn’t fully plotted everything out. I used to […]
The seven watched the child approach the ancient stone of a great-grandmother she’d only ever heard stories of. Spectral hands bound before them, they knew not what to expect, but they remembered Esmerelda’s promise. One day, her issue would arrive to set them free and the debt between them would be paid. They’d waited […]
From across the dungeon, Asin-al Liada watched the members of her party fall. Luatha of the temple of Nistaari was the first to fall, the lich dooming them all with that carefully planned strike against the cleric. The barbarian, Tom Barkskin, lie pinned beneath his maul, dead eyes staring at nothing. Laughing Isharti, the jovial […]