Quick update since I haven't been around lately. My first draft/first-chapter revision is OFFICIALLY my project for my capstone course at college. I am SUPER EXCITED for this largely because it means this novel will have to stop acting like a constipated lump in the back of my head. I have 17,073 words and counting. :D
Anywho, have a nice long snippet from a scene that went VERY QUICKLY AWRY and is being scrapped and completely rewritten. Actually I'm not sure how I feel about even this part, but at least it's not all plot-awkward and Totally Not Following The Purpose Of The Scene.
- “Ladies, meet Eritsena Kingsbrother of Senxal. She’s from Elatxaia, and a princess on her father’s side.”
Clotea, the slave who had handed Eritsena sandals, advanced with a jar of oil and a metal tool that reminded Eritsena of a small scythe. Never having quite understood Quorian bathing practices, Eritsena had always brought her own supplies to the bathhouse and used them as she best saw fit, to the occasional dismay of proprietors; now, she held very, very still in the hopes that the slave woman was not about to murder her.
Meanwhile, the aristocrats broke out into another series of exclamations at Anticia’s introduction. “How exotic!” one woman, Eritsena’s age, beamed. There had been a brief flash of dismay on her face, one Eritsena had not missed, before she noticed that her compatriots were smiling. “What brings you this far south, Eritsena?”
“Travel,” Eritsena answered cautiously. “My people often travel the world in their early twenties. It’s said to bring wisdom.”
Clotea had poured the oil over Eritsena’s left shoulder. Now she began to scrape it away with the scythelike tool. The woman who had spoken before remarked, “How strange! I’ve never seen an Elatxaian before.”
“It’s unlikely you’d see a woman,” Eritsena allowed. “Few of us come this far south.” In recent years, more and more women were restricting their years of wandering to Elatxaia itself. With Quorian ideals seeping outward to the fringes of the Empire, fewer and fewer territories were interested in entertaining a horsewoman or a female messenger. The road was more dangerous for a lone woman than it once had been, as well. “It may be they were dressed as locals, if you saw one – our dress isn’t really…seasonal in this weather.”
“Charming,” the older woman said. She was squinting shortsightedly at Eritsena’s torso. “But you have children, I see, or your stomach says so. Surely they miss their mother?”
Eritsena felt a slow, dark flush creeping up her neck and into her cheekbones. She wished, fervently, that she were stranded on a rock in the ocean, being picked at by vultures; it would have been less excruciating. “I was very young when my son was born. He didn’t survive.” It was a half-truth made mostly by omission, but it was more than she wanted these strangers to know.
Several of the aristocrats made apologetic noises, but the older woman clucked her tongue and looked away, as if Eritsena had killed a child simply by being away from home. A brief silence fell, into which Eritsena clearly heard the younger woman whisper to another, “She hardly has an accent! Do you think she’s really…”
Oh, and if I seem not to exist, this novel is why. So I guess I'll see y'all sometime in March when I have break.
