It’s been a while since my last NaNo update! I’ve been out of town for several days on a trip to Disneyland–which was excellent, but not the best timing for NaNo. However, because traveling with a writing friend is awesome, I did some writing on the trip and stayed on track for my word count despite the distractions of cool things like Pirates of the Caribbean and the Peter Pan ride–is anyone surprised those are two of my favorites? 🙂
I just passed 30,000 words today, keeping me still on target. Plot-wise I think we’re going ahead pretty well too, though it’s always hard to tell. I’m having something of a POV crisis, as about 25,000 words in Aza suddenly decided she wanted to tell a scene in her POV, and then 4,000 words later decided her next scene ought to be in first person after all, thanks. So I’m just running with it…and will figure this out in revisions!
Have an excerpt! The Boreans are an unusual species in that they are far more sensitive to light than most sentient species, but have excellent night vision. So they’re completely nocturnal, creating some…differences in their mythology. Here Aza is describing the story behind one of their constellations.
“The Boreans have a constellation called the Lightslayer,” I explained. “There was a valley trapped in perpetual daylight, and this one soldier ventured into the brightness and told stories to the glowing dragon guarding the valley and keeping it in daylight. The stories finally put the dragon to sleep and the soldier could kill it and bring the darkness back. But the light had got into his body too, and no one could look on him without being pained by his brilliance. So the gods took pity and placed him in the sky, where his brightness was too far away to hurt anyone, and he could stand as a guardian of the night.
I’ve been making my way through (what I’ve been calling) the random-criteria-reading-challenge this year, and have been getting down towards the criteria I have to deliberately seek out to fulfill. Which is all to explain why I read a memoir. “Memoir” was on the list, so I set about to think what memoir I might actually enjoy. I may be unreasonably prejudiced, but I tend to expect memoirs to be terribly dark and grim and depressing (because people with happy lives don’t tend to write memoirs…) So when I remembered Julie Andrews had written a memoir, that seemed perfect—a happy life, right? Well, Home, a Memoir of My Early Years turned out to have some darker notes than I expected, but I still found it much more readable than most memoirs I’ve heard of.
Tales of the Marvelous 