Short Pieces

I have just realized that as this story’s shaped up, it’s turned out to be as much Elias and Jenny’s story as it is Dorcas’s. This sits well enough with me, although I’m now getting to the bittersweet bit at the end. Which I hope will make other people go Sniff. It does me, a bit!

It satisfies me though to top 500 words, since I actually said I’d do that as I was leaving work today. And I did. Go me!

Closing in on 6K, and also closing in on the end. This thing may come in shorter than “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen”.

Written tonight: 507
The Blood of the Land total: 5,902

All the gushing I’ve been doing about Faerie Blood spreading around the Net aside, I do still have other work in progress–and tonight I actually managed to throw a decent amount into “The Blood of the Land”. Well and thoroughly into the climax at this point, with pissed-off-and-dead Jenny Sutherland going postal on the slave hunters.

Not sure how many more pages I have to go. Ten, maybe; we’ll see if this rough ballpark estimate holds up. And once I get the initial draft done, I can think about whether Jenny is a ghost or more like a zombie. I can’t help but envision her right now as looking a lot like Summer Glau during the Reaver battle in Serenity, only, y’know, dead.

Written tonight: 521
The Blood of the Land total: 5,395

I’m kind of surprised at myself; this thing may come out quite a bit shorter than I originally anticipated. Definitely under 10K, and possibly even under 8K. The ghost of Jenny Sutherland has made her appearance, and hoo boy howdy, is she pissed.

More tomorrow.

Written yesterday: 166
Written today: 583
The Blood of the Land total: 4,875

Got through what little changes I needed to the story and have now returned to adding new words. And… aw, what the hell, here’s a little bit of what I wrote tonight.

Galvanized, Dorcas seized Elias’ arm with one hand and his face with the other, but no matter how she pressed she couldn’t get him to turn his gaze to her. Then Caleb gave a cry and pointed, and shock rolled up from within her, threatening to drown exhaustion and dread alike. The moon’s radiance, thin trickle of light though it was, was enough now to cast a silvery sheen down on the little island–and in the heart of the trees on its nearest bank, she spied the shape of a woman. Dorcas couldn’t see much of her from a distance, what she wore or what her face was like. Yet she could see the moonlight shining right through her as though she were made of mist.

And she could see grief breaking out across the face of Elias Sutherland, enough to tell her he was looking now at his Jenny. His wife, she thought. Her healing Power recoiled in her, as if the shape on the island revolted it somehow, and that was all Dorcas needed to tell her she was looking on no one alive. If that shape was Jenny Sutherland, Jenny Sutherland was dead.

Now I just have to figure out what happens next.

Written tonight: 592
The Blood of the Land total: 3,836

So yesterday I was poking around on Wikipedia, wanting to look up some stuff about Roanoke Island for the story I’m writing–only I discovered that due to the history of the island during the Civil War, there was no real feasible way that my story could take place as I envisioned it on that island. The Confederacy took it over pretty much right after the war broke out, only to be thrown off it by the Union in 1862. So there would have been way too much activity going on there for the story I planned to work.

It did interest me though to learn that thousands of escaping or freed slaves wound up there in a freedsmen’s colony by 1863. Which surely has all sorts of other interesting story potential, just not for the story I’m working on.

I have therefore shifted the action from North Carolina over into Kentucky. I don’t know how much of this will actually come out in the story, given that I’m trying to keep this as short as possible, but I’m now envisioning my heroine and her beloved escaping from a small Kentucky plantation and heading north along the Kentucky River, aiming for the Ohio on their way to Canada. My Warder boy, Elias Sutherland, will now be a secret abolitionist as well as a Warder, and he’ll have been the owner of the first “station” that Dorcas and Caleb were told to shoot for on their escape–the barn where they could find provisions. Only slavehunters will have found Elias out, since he’s suspicious anyway as someone who never ever leaves his land. And the main action of the story will take place on an island on the very edge of Elias’ power range, which is where his wife will have died as well.

Spent most of yesterday trying to work this through, and then started working on changing what I’ve written so far to account for it. Not too much work required here, though I’ve taken the opportunity to edit down some of the verbiage as I go. Today will be finishing that up and hopefully moving the story farther along.

Edited yesterday: -154
The Blood of the Land total: 3,244

Not a bad night’s work on a night when I also had to deal with a code release from work!

Written tonight: 515
The Blood of the Land total: 3,398