NaNoWriMo starts
National Novel Writing Month kicked off on Friday. I was pleased that I actually got to work a little bit on it this weekend, although, the standard incursion of Real Life ™ onto my writing availability is in full effect, and hence I’ve only managed 1600-odd words this weekend.
But, I figured that I’d give you all a sample:
The rope snapped taut.
His neck didn’t break.
Mercy, it seemed, was as conspicuously absent from Walker Blake’s death as it had been during his life. No sudden snap and enveloping darkness for him, but rather the seeming eternity of strangulation as his feet danced an involuntary jig for the amusement of the crowds gathered at the scaffold outside of Newgate Prison.
With the odd sense of detachment that comes with the certainty of death, Blake found himself noticing the rough pressure of the hemp rope on the hinge of his jaw and behind his ears, rather than any sense of suffocation. It was simply that he could not breathe, and that fact struck him as a given and hence not worthy of further notice. His vision began to darken at the edges—a narrowing circle of clarity made him feel as if he was surveying the jeering and clamoring crowd through a spyglass. The violent swinging of his body from the rope recalled the pitching of a rolling deck easily enough, completing the illusion.
The faces of the crowd began to lose distinction for him, one face blurring into another: an old woman spitting, a young man cheering, a little girl more engrossed in the hair of her doll than the pageant of life and death displayed before her. He saw, with a clarity that seemed out of place, a pickpocket cutting purses and lifting watches from the crowd, whose rapt attention was held elsewhere. Life went on, but he was slowly sliding off its surface, like a raindrop on leaded glass.
Flashes of colored light swarmed at the edges of his vision, like fireflies in a summer field. He could hear nothing of the din of the crowd, nothing of the hoarse croaking of his own death-rattle—the only sound was the tidal rush of the blood pounding in his temples, vainly trying to deliver oxygen that simply wasn’t there. A liquid noise, like waves lapping against the wooden sides of a boat.
…And there, in the back of the crowd, visible for an instant before the darkness finally grew into totality, Blake could see the leather-masked face of one of the Ministry’s Collectors, impassive and distant as the love of God.
There ya have it– 100% pure crap, concerned more with putting words on a page than anything else. We’ll see how it all turns out in the end.
GMS
