Target Word Count 50,000 and Target Average Words Per Day 1,667
So yesterday was bad, had to do some family things from dawn to dusk, or as close as it gets on a Saturday, and just didn’t get anything done. But today! well that is a different kettle of fish, as the old family saying goes:
So I did the good thing and contributed to NaNoWriMo (or the organizing group, The office of light and Letters.) I am going to do this and so am moving forward with my planning/thinking. It’s probably fairly obvious that 1700 words a day is not out of this world for me, but keeping the fingers fed with coherent story and words is going to be the trick. We shall see…I still think Elgin’s going to get to go first, but the others all have a corner of my brain….
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Intro to : Mage in Trouble…….(Working title to Fiona’s story)
Fiona MacWallachi stood on the deck of the skyferry and watched the clouds building to the west. The conductor had said they’d make it to Bodwady Bend before the storms came. She really didn’t want to spend another night on the ground watching for young bucks out to get some treaty booty. Particularly Fiona didn’t like the possible option of having to surrender herself as treaty booty, or killing some plains bred teenage idiot who thought all white skin girls were squealing simpletons and easy as well.
“Bodawdy Bend fine off the port bow!” called the navigator who’d been forward in the eyes of the skycraft. Fiona moved to look, pulling her looking-glass from its belt pouch. Bringing the brass tube to her eye she quickly found the town, spotting the towering spire of the Sky Father’s prayer house first. The town, spreading along the East bank of the Missippa river was typical of western Aural treaty towns, its streets and lanes organized on a grid pattern, the manufactories to the east, down wind, of the main living areas. There were docks on the river for water craft, and on the bluff the shinning oval of a landing pond. She turned to scan north, picking up the brown and green line that would be the wheeler road that led back to the Sweet Water Sea and the heart of the Aural Republic.
Looking down she realized that the lanes of the town spread out into the treaty platt and she could make out the outlines of Aural style farms, though there was a lot of open grass and scrub land as well. On a knob of land to the North she could see a fortified great house, probably the Platt Sheriff’s home.
Breathing in a relaxing lungful of cool air Fiona turned and walked back to the second class cabin she had been sharing with a girl coming out to Nanny for the Sheriff’s daughter in law.
Half an hour she was standing on the deck holding on to a grasp rail as the skyferry made its approach to the landing pool, like most it was near the center of town and as one could expect for a small, somewhat isolated community a fair number of people had come out to meet the biweekly Post Ferry. Forward she could see bundles of periodicals ready for landing as well as leather sacks with the post offices seal branded every few hand spans to make sure they couldn’t be stolen and reused by enterprising, if dishonest merchants.
The tones of the airfans eased, then burped up to a roar, one pushing fore, the other aft, spinning the hull as they slid down out of the sky as the pilot let the charge bleed off the lift spines. In the last instant the hull was aligned with the vector of motion imparted by the wind and the engines. Then the keel chines kissed the water and the hull was shuddering, slowing, the airfans splashed to a stop. The slender hundred and some feet of hull settled into the wather with some groans and creaks, as the wooden planked frame of the hull reacquainting itself with the buoyancy of water rather than the focused lift of the spines.
The conductor had done an outstandign job, the skyferry coasted towards the dock with no need for the airfans. The ferrymen and the dockers called out jocular greetings and ran about tossing ropes back and forth, belaying on iron pollards on the dock and hauling, brining the bow to a soft stop and swinging the stern up tight in a few moments. They made it look easy and graceful, but Fiona knew that it was long practice that made it look easy, and layered grace on brute muscle and slightly dangerous work.
The gangplank was thrust out from the ferry to land with a thump on the dock, a ferryman, a girl in this case, leapt across with the landing document, meeting a tall redbrown skinned man in the cream buckskins of a Fire Keeper tribal speaker, his feathered head dress said he was a sub chief. The sub chief read the letter, handed to the man next to him, the post master by the long red jacket with the green pipping. The post master read it and nodded, and the two mean, both gave it their chop with their quill pens.
Now the postal goods started to come off and the élite and first class passengers and luggage started to flow up the second gangplank. Fiona sat on her duffel and watched this all calmly, she was used to being middle class, she saw it as a major step up from where she had started.
-o-
More on her memories later…its later than I thought, have to get back to this tomorrow….
Elgin was born in Beauty Wyoming, one of the more beautiful places one could be born in this world. The name on his birth certificate was Elgin Campbell Chalmers IV, though there were no Elgin Campbell or for that matter Chalmers in his family history. His father who may not have remembered his own real name, thought it was a great name and a bit of a joke.
Elgin’s mother walked out when he was twelve, never to be heard from again. From that time on he lived with his father in an old Airstream camper, on the Split S ranch during the summer and on the edge of Beauty the local ‘big town’ on the end of Black Sky lake, during the winter. His father, one fourth Native American, was constantly fighting the local tribal council for ‘his’ cut of the tribes take from Beauty’s Casino and Tourist industry, spending most winters writing long rambling letters to various people, papers, officials, offices and NGO’s about his terrible plight. Never to any avail.
On Elgin’s sixteenth birthday he left his father drunk on the lean-to porch of the Airstream in the morning to catch the school bus. He returned to find his old man dead of a massive coronary, his father had been a week less than forty.
After that Elgin was taken care of by an until then unknown network of cousins among the locals, quite a few nearly full blooded indians, among whom the blond, blue-eyed Elgin looked out-of-place. He was never much trouble though he often hung with the local hooligans. And though a ‘good looking boy’ and reasonably ‘common sensed’ he was never a good student or a hard worker, though neither lazy or dishonest.
And so Elgin drifted into life. At thirty two Elgin lived in the Airstream he’d ‘inherited’ from his father and worked at the ranch job at the Split S he’d also inherited. He wasn’t exactly a drunk, or a pot head, but he wasn’t sober much of the time away from the ranch. His only companion was a huge cat called Humphrey, who looked like a somewhat chunky Siamese grown to the size of a small German Shepard. Humf had an appropriate Siamese/GerShep cross bad-tempered arrogance that would have gotten him shot long ago except for Elgin.
Elgin knew he was a waste of oxygen most days and a disappointment to his family, such as it was, but didn’t let it bother him, unless he had a really bad drunk. The November of his thirty-second year, in the grips of a particularly bad one, he rode into mountains on a Friday afternoon. Ignoring the oncoming wall of clouds that promised an early snowstorm.
Saturday, half-frozen and still drunk he drove his horse out of the safety of the cavern he’d camped in, out into the snow and ice. An hour later the horse slipped and threw Elgin down a rocky precipice into a shallow stream. Unconscious, with one arm and both legs broken Elgin drowned in six inches of ice-cold water.
It was only then that things started looking up.
Sorry…couldn’t resist, that’s the intro to one of the othe options….which is also a sci fi fantasy as I think you can tell…
So the daughter likes the one about the swordmaid and the old mage, sounds like a bad joke in a MMOG. The good thing is that this story is based in the universe of a novel I’ve been working on for a year or more and ‘know’ pretty well. It could be pretty interesting to work at developing that universe more, with its multiple parallel worlds with different levels and types of magic and different though related inhabitants.
It’s what one might call a QuantFunk universe where magic works because of differences in the ‘Quantum fabric’ of the universe. All of my Fantasy is of this type, not because I have a philosophical thing against supernatural magic, but because I cannot come up with a supernatural magic ‘system’ that makes sense to me. I’ve read plenty of good novels where the author creates good ones, but I just have a mind block, comes from being an engineer I guess.
I had been working on the Five concept, have some settings, characters and plot elements laid out. All of which Fiona and her Mage lack but that’s not stopped me in the past.
So to Fiona’s universe:
So enough for tonight, more thinking to be done.
This World and Others 