a glimpse into the new novel in the works
It’s been more than a month since last I posted anything, and I could point a finger of blame at the holidays. But that would be insincere; what has distracted me is the same thing that always distracts me. I’ve got a new world, a new cast of characters, and I don’t want to stop forging forward because I want to know what happens next. Scant comfort for you, since you’re not enjoying the new novel alongside me.
So, as a mea culpa, a sneak-peak into my whacky high/low urban fantasy.
a mysterious explosion to get us going
The story starts with a distant detonation that wakes a sleeping city and our protagonist. As I may have mentioned, Jendaiar is chaos embodied. He spent decades being good and doing the right thing, and is striving now to turn over a new leaf. It makes him reckless, irresponsible, and a delight to write.
This is definitely a person who would rush out the door after a wild evening out on the town in the dark of night when it’s cold enough to snow, alone, to investigate a mysterious eruption of unknown puissance.
dive into the new novel: the lake
*exclusive content from the new novel, an urban fantasy that (oh my god, you should know by now not to ask) does not yet have a name.
It wasn’t until hours later that he drew near his destination. Sunrise found him then; the hangover had caught him long since. It hadn’t crossed his mind when he went out his door in a panic that he was still drunk, and that rosy cloud of confidence had evanesced in the cold while night still held. It was hours too late to do anything about the fact that he’d forgotten to pack breakfast and a canteen of warm tea.
At first, he didn’t mark the devastation. The light wasn’t bright – there was a blanket of cloud across the sky – and he wasn’t paying attention. He hadn’t thought to wonder if there was anything worth paying attention to, and the headache filled his mind from ear to ear. So he had been riding between the damaged trees for a while before he noticed them.
When he did, he sat up straight, head rotating right and then left as his wide eyes took in the setting. The trees had already been mostly lacking leaves; Overnica stood on winter’s doorstep. But these hardy old deciduous giants all rose from the ground at a pronounced angle as if leaning back. Everywhere, he saw limbs piled at their feet, the exposed wood free of weathering. This had happened very recently.
This should have been the point where it finally registered that he was doing something reckless, something that could easily get him killed. Riding into the night in pursuit of uncanny eruptions of unknown power by oneself wasn’t recommended, even for a wizard. Jendaiar was too excited to give a damn about the consequences, though, and rode canted forward in the saddle with his eyes squinted as if to pierce the mystery by sheer force of will. His map had worked – which he had known it would, even if no one else had had faith in him – but he couldn’t really tie a bow on the accomplishment until he saw what precisely the map had revealed to him.
He thought he must be seeing things when first it came in view: ahead, a massive dome like half a ball blocked off a frightening portion of the eastern skyline, darker than the sky behind it. The heavens were still colored by dawn, a few bright stars refusing to retire. Between whatever that was and him, the forest petered out to nothing, only a few brave pines that looked as if they had been scoured by a terrible wind standing proud of the rank where the rest ran out.
When they passed beyond that threshold, he sucked in a deep breath, feeling exposed. To what, he didn’t know, and that only heightened the thrill and the tension. It looked like gauzy cloth to him, but cloth wouldn’t have been so still: there was a breeze out here. The closer he drew, the more of the sky it consumed, but it never gained in clarity, fuzzy as an old memory.
He was right at the verge when he realized it wasn’t a dome after all: it was a sphere, plummeting into the ground it had carved out to the same depth that it ate the heavens. He craned his neck, trying to draw sense from what he was seeing. At such close quarters, the sphere wasn’t a mist or a cloth, but he wasn’t sure what it was instead. It looked like powder, hanging motionless in the second between being tossed in the air and falling again. It had seemed black from a distance, but now he had the sense it had only looked that way because it was silhouetted against the bright backdrop of sunrise.
It was dirt, he finally decided. He was looking at dirt; this was the soil that ought to be beneath his feet. He struggled to parse the glinting flecks interspersed between the darker granules like mica in a hunk of granite, but this was supposed to be a lake. There ought to be a lake here, and it didn’t appear that there was anymore. Something must have happened to the water. It might have evaporated, but then again. It might have been smashed apart and tossed in the air by the same calamity that took the land it sheltered in.
further news to come on the new novel
As I mentioned, this story wants to be told and it’s growing with every day. I’ll check back in soon with further reveals. The city and some of the other characters. Cheers!
Comments are closed