Let's get this Teaser out of the way first. You may think I'm an awful person for this, but I adore this bit. I just wrote it yesterday. It's not very good writing wise, but plot wise I love it. A lot.
Some quick background: Natura has married... gasp... Rigel! She's done it mostly because her father wants her to marry him, he actually just wants her to marry anyone. He'd be reasonably fine if he died without seeing her married, so long as she's happy. But Natura is too deeply rooted in her desire to please her dying father that she goes ahead and marries anyways.
Unfortunately, the marriage doesn't turn out as she expected when she arrives at their new home (several days of travel on horseback away from Parcel, her home village).
TEASER
“Shall we see the inside?” Rigel suggested, breaking into her thoughts. He stood beside her horse, his hand held up to her.
She took it and let him help her down. They walked to the front door of the cottage together, Rigel a step behind her. The cottage had an old wooden porch that creaked under her weight, but it was a lovely sound.
Natura grasped the old brass doorknob and slowly opened the door, stepping inside.
“Hello, there.” A familiar young woman, with strong arms typical of Rivalon women leaned against the opposite wall. An elegant young woman with silver hair that waterfalled over her shoulders sat in a chair at the kitchen table.
Natura’s chest tightened and she took a panicked step backwards, only to back right against Rigel. He wrapped an arm around her, restraining her arms, and pressed a damp cloth over her mouth and nose with his other hand.
She gasped for air, inhaling deeply whatever was soaking the cloth. It made her feel lightheaded, and her vision blurred for a moment. She fought to keep control of herself, and struggled against Rigel’s grip.
Grena smirked at her, her arms crossed in front of her chest. “Welcome home, Natura,” she said.
Natura’s legs wobbled under her, threatening to give out, but Rigel held her up. She fought to maintain focus on the room, on what was happening. She needed to be able to react, to be able to protect herself. Her thoughts clouded quickly, though, and she could only wonder why this was happening.
Grena watched Rigel expectantly, an eyebrow raised. “Well?”
“Can’t we—”
“No, you have to,” Grena stopped him.
Rigel let the cloth drop to the floor. Natura gasped for clean air, but it didn’t help to clear her head. Rigel moved his arms, changing how he held her against him, but she couldn’t feel her body to fight back or try to escape.
Something cool pressed against her forearm. She glanced down to her arm, Rigel held it up on one hand, and with his other held the flat side of a shiny dagger to her skin.
“There has to be—”
“Rigel,” Grena growled. “Do it. Now.”
He let out a long breath of air. Natura felt him press his face against her hair for a moment before he turned the dagger and slit her arm open. Natura gasped as blood flowed over her arm, dripping onto the floor.
Grena dumped a jar of some sort of powder onto the gash. Natura briefly wondered how she had missed Grena moving from the other side of the room to her side, and where the jar of powder had come from before her arm erupted in pain.
Natura heard her scream filling the room, but she didn’t feel her voice in her throat. Almost instantly, she could no longer feel the pain, but her scream indicated that some part of her still did.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Rigel whispered repeatedly in her ear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Soon, Natura couldn’t even hear her own scream. She couldn’t decide if it had stopped, or if she was just dying and her ears had given out on her. Her vision blurred, and everything went black.
END TEASER
Perhaps I'm sadicious. But this is such a great scene in my mind. Maybe it's just because it plunges the story into a place where actiony things happen more often than they had been previously.
Anyways. I've reached 25,308 words which is 41 pages in microsoft word. That's just over half of a NaNoWriMo novel. How epic is this? I have hope that I'll have this draft done by christmas. Plus, now that we're into the action it's a lot more exciting to write. Not that I didn't like writing before, but high-tension action scenes equals more words in what seems like less time than the more calm regular life scenes do which makes for a happy word count.
Not much going on in my real life. Just trying to figure out if I want to study abroad, and where/when I want to do that. And what's the best fit for my major(s).
Oh yeah, and I also have to figure out how to go about declaring a second major. Three cheers for being a double english major! (Creative Writing and English Literature! Woot!).
Other than that today has been pretty blah. Cold and cloudy, plus Tuesdays are my hell days. But I get to go home on thursday and see Meghan and Nina and Leah and Schmitty. So that's exciting.
!Bonus Blog Post!
I Need To Stop Phsycoanalyzing Myself
So I had this dream last night. I'm pretty sure my subconscious is trying to tell me things, and has been trying to tell me things for a long time now. Really. I have some crazy dreams all the time. Really specific dreams. Never had it dawned on me to actually think about what these dreams might mean until today.
I should never, ever try to do that again.
Let's backtrack a bit. Here's the dream.
I was with my friend Meghan in a building that was either a hotel or a residence hall at a university. We were wandering down the halls, trying to find my friend Schmitty because we needed to (the reason didn't become apparent until later).
We come to this door, which appeared from the hallway to be just another door to a dorm room. But we opened it and went inside, only to suddenly be in a giant park. Like, outside. It was really sunny and a good, warm temperature, and the grass was green and nice and happy.
Then we see Schmitty and automatically know why we had to find him. Apparently, Emily (his ex-girlfriend) was there somewhere and if he so much as looked at her he would disappear. So Meghan and I had to go and stop him from seeing her so he wouldn't disappear. Since, you know, disappearing is bad.
So we run up to him and try to distract him by talking to him and not letting him look at Emily (who had appeared right behind us). But he looked at her! When he disappeared, it was like we saw his name disappear from a userlist like in a chatroom. So, logically (as logically as a dream can be) we just had to refresh the page and he would appear and we would have to repeat the whole stop him from looking at Emily thing.
But he kept goddamn looking at her!
Finally I got fed up with him disappearing. I mean, I didn't want him to disappear! It was really stressful and emotionally draining to watch this guy I care a lot for disappear because of crazy bitch-witch Emily.
So I'm like sitting behind him hugging him and leaning over his shoulder talking to him and trying to stop him from looking back at Emily, but he keeps trying. So, I kiss him.
That seemed to do the trick. Or at least, it broke whatever curse Emily had put on him to make him disappear when he looked at her because after we stopped kissing he turns to her and starts talking to her like I'm not there. And this is, more or less, how the conversation went.
Schmitty: Emily
Emily: Corey (aka Schmitty's real name)
Schmitty: I don't know...
Emily: I've been looking for you.
Schmitty: I know. I can't deal with this. She (meaning me) just kissed me.
Me: Excuse me, but you definitely kissed me back.
Emily: *scathing look of disapproval directed at the entire world*
Schmitty: I like you both. But Emily, you're going to the dominican republic and I can't do debate team there.
....Yeah. I know the conversation didn't make much sense. I'm probably forgetting most of it, especially the stuff at the beginning. Also, I pretty much spent the whole time glaring at Emily because she wanted to make Schmitty disappear because she's an evil witch.
Anyways. Then Schmitty gets up and leaves the park. He goes to his room at the hotel/residence hall and locks himself there. I go to my own room, only to find Courtney (my roommate) has moved the bunks into the center of the room and Maria is alseep in what was supposed to be Courtney's bed. So I go out in the hallway, because I feel bad that Schmitty got so upset about the park and I want to buy him some candy from the vending machine.
In the hallway, one of his friends (who actually doesn't exist in real life, he was one of those dream placeholder people if you get what I mean) is in the hall trying to talk to him through the door. Apparently he was really moody/depressed about what went down in the park.
So I leave to go buy him some reeses from a vending machine with plans to tape them to his door so he can have them when he comes back out.
Yeah. Then I spent all day trying to analyze the dream, and therefore phsycoanalyze myself. Apparently, I dislike Emily (already knew that bit) and am deeply concerned that if Schmitty keeps hanging out with her she will steal him from the world and they'll start dating again (I mean really, what normal person continues to hang out with their ex all the time even after they break up?? If you still want to be around them, don't break up!). So anyways, Schmitty will in a sense "disappear" from my life (aka my love life) because Emily is a meanie and he should like me better anyways because I'm so much more exciting than she is and I'm made of awesome.
And then somehow I broke into a tangent of how I always get attached to a guy and it doesn't work out and then I can't detach myself so I spend a year and a half pining for him until he completely stops talking to me because I'm crazy and then I lose a close friend and am completely screwed up for the rest of forever.
Thank you, Jeff.
Bringing back those memories and feelings doesn't exactly do much for my mental health. I'm not even exagerating. Maybe sometime I'll go more in depth onto how screwed up my emotional/love life is. It's fun stuff.
Well this blog entry is long enough. Bye.
-Lauren-
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