Writeblr Intro! Sulfurous Dreamscapes!

8 years late, but better than never.

In January 2016, I started Sulfurous Dreamscapes as a daily writing practice blog. By some bizarre blessing, I managed to keep up the habit, without fail, for a solid 5 years. This blog contains all the daily writing I did from 2016 to 2021.

Several of my short stories have been published in literary magazines, including Barzakh and Strix! You can see them here.

I also briefly ran a Substack called Sulfur Dreams, where I published short stories. It was previously paywalled, but is completely free to read now.

I'm currently working on a WIP novel called Last Night, New Body. Its genre is sci-fi/literary, and it's about a trans gig worker looking to transfer himself into an android body... and then his darn sister shows up.

Thank you for reading!

In this city, you have to get lucky to see the moon. You'll go up the stairs and down the elevators, your motorcycle will whizz through molten yellow tunnels, and you'll ride round and round the bridges and overpasses until you'll find a place where you can spy a disk in the sky.

It's rotting and smoking in ochre, so it barely looks like the moon when you see it. It's easy to mistake it for a broken streetlamp set up in the heavens.

My hair flies behind me, unfurled and fluttering, and I lean a little forward to stop from being pulled back on his bike. Skyscrapers collude to keep the moon away from me, so I clutch harder on his jacket. He throttles the machine harder, and I wish I could look over his shoulder to see how fast we're going.

"Someone's following us," I tell him, but I don't know if he can hear me over the wind.

A rasher couple than us, a bolder couple than us, speeds to our side. A woman in a leather jacket holds her phone up as if photographing us. I squint at her, and then go back to hunting the moon.

"Zuilee," I hear a shout, practically a scream.

The woman grins ear to ear, her phone unobscured by the salmon-coloured phone. She waves. Her helmeted driver twists the throttle further, and the bike catches up to our velocity.

We enter a tunnel, and under the yellow, I can see who she is.

"Friend of yours?" he asks.

"No," I say.

She keeps calling out my name, but stops waving. I look to the other side of the bike, where the wall, the pavement, the signs, and the lights pass by like innocent spectators.

"Well fuck you too," the woman shouts. It catches my attention, and when I look, their bike is lagging behind us. A van zooms past in the background, on the opposite side of the street.

"Oh now you look at me," she shouts at me.

My nostrils bristle. I want the moon back. I clutch on his jacket. The woman shouts at her partner now, tells him to go faster. It's her tone that takes me back to school, to the corridors and classrooms, to the soaked backpack and the reddened face.

Her partner glances at us, helmet visor keeping his face safe from my glare. He nods, and within seconds, we're the ones trailing them.

"Fuck you, Zuilee," she shouts again, leaning forward on her partner with her entire body.

Once they exit the tunnel, the shadows claim them, and even the red lights on the rear of their bike is gone from view. As we follow the spectres that overtook us, my gaze turns to the left, and there the moon is, sickly and sinking.

"We've gone too far this time," I whisper, not expecting him to hear my voice. "It's like the city spat us out."

He leans back now, spine straight, and the machine slows down. There's a few cars up ahead, I notice. There's a sports bike lying on the asphalt.

I wrap my arms tighter around him, close my eyes, and breathe in the night.

How I Hacked My Short Story Brain into Developing a Novel

I promised I'd make this post, so here it is, but with a proper title and everything so that it'll be more generally helpful to other writers.

Regulars of this blog have probably noticed that I've struggled a lot with long-form fiction over the years, despite having churned out a library's worth of short fiction.

This time though, things are coming together, and it's because I've got a technique down that plays to my strengths as a short story writer.

Step 1: Outline and Draft Something

After writing and abandoning several outlines for my WIP Last Night, New Body, I finally set one in stone and wrote a draft for it this January.

The rough, first, skeleton draft was 30,000 words long - far from ideal, but better than nothing. It was tough, but I got it done in two months.

Step 2: Read Through and Take Notes

Next, I read through the draft and took notes on how I thought the novel could be improved. This included notes on plot, characters, and setting. The notes were all taken in a spread sheet in the following format:

The 'Note Title' could be something witty or referential, but it has to be short, like the name of an achievement in a video game. So for example, it could be:

I took these notes freely, writing down any point that I thought could be changed, expanded, removed, or otherwise mused.

Once I was done with these notes, the question arose: what the hell do I do with these notes?

Step 3: Treat the Notes As Writing Prompts

This step is in-progress at the moment, but I'm halfway through it already! The idea is to take each note and write 500 words for it.

This comes naturally to me because I've written hundreds upon hundreds of flash fiction pieces for my blog, each one targetted for 500 words. This means I'm now developing the novel 500 words at a time, based on the notes I took while reading through the skeleton draft.

The process has been beautifully productive so far, and I've come up with so much detail, so many new scenes, and better developed characters. My next draft will be assuredly be much longer than the 30k words I got down before.

So how long will this take? That depends on how many notes you take. I initially took 72 notes, but I've found that as the story develops and changes, I've had to "delete" many notes because they became redundant or irrelevant. I say delete in quotes because I've actually moved them to a 'recycle bin' sheet of sorts, so that I can retrieve them later if I deem them important after all.

Next Steps? Outline and Draft the Thing

I'm generating a lot of meat for the skeleton draft, and I'm dying to put that meat on the bones. To do that, I plan on first constructing a very detailed outline, including as much detail from the expanded notes (the 500-word pieces) as possible.

This done, I'll write the 'flesh draft' while referencing both this outline and the skeleton draft. As excited as I am for this, I do anticipate this process to be difficult, so I might find a way to divide it into small, short story sized chunks as well.

Then come the edits and everything else. We'll cross those bridges when we get there.

I think it's time for a small update on my WIP Last Night, New Body! 🌃🦾💘

After finishing the skeleton draft for the WIP in February, I began reading it and taking notes for it in March. However, I changed priorities later that month, and so the WIP was left languishing for a while.

In the meantime, I worked on a different WIP, but did not make much headway, and was very disappointed in myself as a result.

Thankfully, a good friend of mine pulled me out early this month and got me focusing on Last Night, New Body again. I've finished reading through the draft now, and I'm building on the story once again.

I'm adopting an interesting strategy for working on this WIP, which plays to my strengths as a short-form writer. I'm not ready to share how it works just yet, but when I hit a certain milestone, I'll make it a reward to myself (and to you guys) to reveal how I'm presently building Last Night, New Body.

It has been so long since Sulfurous Dreamscapes ended, hasn't it? It's been even longer since I promised you guys a book. I must have the most patient readers in existence! Perhaps you will help manifest Last Night, New Body into paper form.

Thank you all! 💖

The rain wasn't going to take away Situna's desire to see a real ghost. So, with her war drum heart, she put a foot on the window sill and alighted in the muddy yard of her father's house. Lucky for her, a clap of thunder covered the noise of the splash.

She climbed over the low wall of her yard and crossed the street, where the fast-flowing water threatened to make her slip into the gutters. With roving gaze and careful steps, she took the tree-lined avenue to Hurlanni's house. No one, not even the grown-up men, would be foolish enough to be out in this downpour.

Well, no one except Situna herself, she thought.

"Hurlanni," she whispered as loud as she could. The brown water had made her feet prune, and her tunic was drenched and sticking to her skin. Explaining this to her parents was going to be difficult, but if she could rope in Hurlanni, then at least she wouldn't be considered possessed by some malevolent spirit.

But what if the ghost possesses me? The thought distracted her enough that she stopped calling for Hurlanni, who was fast asleep on the other side of the house wall.

If the ghost possesses me… that would solve everything, wouldn't it?

She dragged her feet against the current, ducked under the bushes behind Hurlanni's house, and crawled through the hole in the crumbling old wall. Her tunic now smeared and caked in mud, she wondered about the personality of the ghost. Could the ghost have seen this crumbling old wall in its pristine form? Or is the damage to the wall even older than that?

The rain became scantier as she approached the forest. A propitious clearing of the clouds revealed the moon, which marked a trail through the trees, toward the bridge - the bridge, the bridge - the bridge where she was to find the ghost.

She turned around once to make sure she wasn't being followed, and then slid down the usual slope that took her closer to the bridge. Forgetting the rain, she lost her balance, fell on her chest, and tumbled down, hitting her back against a tree. The shock absorbed her scream - not that anyone could hear her over the rain and the thunder.

Once her breath had returned to her, she raised herself to her feet and searched for her sandals while her body complained with vigorous pangs. She found one sandal before deciding to move on.

With the bridge in sight and the clouds running out of water to pour, Situna pushed her sandal against the mud, forming ugly mounds as she went. She matched her breathing to her step.

"Hurlanni should've stayed up like he promised, that idiot," she said aloud, knowing there was no one to hear her now but the monkeys hiding in the trees. But even without the help of her friend, she had made it to the bridge, and wasn't that something to be proud of?

The bridge was nothing but wooden planks and rope. It was used every day by the grown-ups to go to the other, bigger village, across the gap in the hill. It hung far above the gushing river below, but afforded a heavenly view of the west.

It was from that heavenly window that the moon seemed to be watching Situna as she grasped the rope and took step after step on the slippery wooden planks of the bridge. The pain still throbbed across her, and the height made her dizzy.

"Hurlanni would be more scared than me," she said aloud. "But what's so scary about a bridge? People use this bridge every day."

She turned around once more to see if Hurlanni was following her, by some small chance, and just then, the dizziness overcame her. She grabbed the vertical rope, slipped, and felt her heart explode into pieces.

When she came to her senses, she found herself lying on her back, on a swaying rope bridge, a long ways above a hungry river. There were no walls or handles to use for support other than the ropes themselves, and to make matters worse, the wooden planks were wet and slippery.

Did I fall? The thought and the uneasy swaying of the bridge brought another terrifying thought to mind, that perhaps she had weakened the bridge. Perhaps, she was only moments away from the ropes snapping, from the wooden planks giving way, from her falling into the maw of the water below.

"Let go," she heard a voice. It was a woman's voice - a young woman, perhaps even an older teenager. "Let go of the bridge. It's cursed."

Situna took a deep breath charged with rainwater, coughed, and turned to her side. She did not recognise the voice, but its calmness invited her to trust it. "Okay," she said. "It's cursed alright."

The next sensation Situna had was the devilish sensation of falling, the one she'd known just before starting awake from a dream. Except here, it kept going on and on, no matter how much she tried to jerk her body out of bed. There was no bed, and now there was no bridge, and she was somewhere in the middle of the rain, falling with it, falling into a river to be one with it.

The voice. "Why would you come to this cursed bridge?"

"I wanted to see the ghost."

"Are you stupid? You can't see a ghost. Only the ghost can see you."

"Then are you the ghost?"

"Yes. No. I came to find the ghost myself."

The roar of the river rose for a few moments, and then all the sounds died, replaced by whale-like currents of water dragging and pulling her in the water of the river.

"I'm going to die now," Situna said, although she couldn't imagine how she was speaking underwater.

"No," the voice replied.

Situna lost consciousness slowly, all the time thinking about the ghost who refused to let her die. If that ghost came to the bridge to find an older ghost, then who is the original ghost?

When Situna came to, she found a crowd of men and women looking down at her. Her mother cradled her head, shouting out to the world that Situna was alive. Above, the grey-white clouds moved north, and a man, perhaps Walaya, blew a horn to signal the rest of the village.

"What were you doing out here?" Situna's mother roared, mother tigress prepared to rend the person or thing responsible for Situna's state.

Situna, weak, coughed and sighed. "I was possessed by a ghost."

While brows furrowed and faces turned horrified, Situna smiled to herself.

Torùn wasn't a prisoner - she could leave any time she wanted. Instead, she stayed out of spite, despite all the pleading the gods could muster. Tears were shed across the world of mortals for her, and advocates of her freedom wailed in her name on the day that marked her supposed imprisonment. Torùn would not budge.

She remained in her tower, cheeks sticky with ever-flowing tears, as she confronted her memories in her mind again and again. A childhood mischief, a little hand over a god's eye, and that had been enough for the Goddess of the Sun to rise in rage and push aside this god-born child.

"She's just a child," the other gods wailed, but the Sun's Goddess was fierce in her judgement. Dignity soured is dignity soiled. She flung Torùn into the tower, into the room with no windows and no doors, where she was to repent for the rest of her life.

Torùn said nothing in her defence. She stood alone, in the middle of the room for aeons. And then, when her feet could not hold her up any longer, she sat on the floor. Her thoughts bounded from the walls, attacking her like balls in a game of pool. Her eyes dreamed up vistas and visions, projected onto the walls, in search of a window.

Torùn remembered colour. She remembered shape, and size, and she remembered things that existed beyond the floor, the roof, the walls, and herself. Did 'herself' count? She spun around. She beat her immortal head on the walls. She screamed, whispered, and conversed with the spirits she had dreamed up, which would fill up the room like vapours forming a mist.

One day, the mortals succeeded in slaying the Sun's Goddess. This was not expected. This was not wanted. Nonetheless, the folly-infused race of humans killed the spark that they once worshipped, and plunged the world into a darkness that was only alleviated by an artificial sun.

This was no god, of course, but the machine sought its place among the gods nonetheless. A lesser Sun. A more tolerant Sun. It was no ruler, but it sought to free Torùn nonetheless. It looked down on the natural-born immortals, branding them a race of irresponsible barbarians, who would go along with the persecution of a little girl for a moment of mischief.

And so the room's walls fell wide. The roof was flung away, and the floor dropped beneath Torùn's feet. She was made free, but she stayed put. Despite the pleadings of both mortals and immortals, she stayed put. The prison was gone. The prisoner remained.

When the God of Polaris approached her, he offered her a chance to become a child again, to live the life that was robbed from her. Torùn refused.

"The Sun's Goddess would revel in the sight of my freedom, and I will not allow her that," she said.

And so the floor returned, nuzzling beneath her feet, and the ceiling returned, hanging over her respectfully, and each of the walls slid into place. Torùn sat, for aeons more.

The shadow of a fish swam past the crossword puzzle, and that was all the impetus it took for Auguste to search his coat pockets for a pencil. He didn't find one, so he looked behind him, at Samantha, who lay spread eagle on the floor, staring at the glass ceiling that kept the two of them from being submerged in the Atlantic Ocean.

"Do you have a pencil on you, dear Samantha?" Auguste asked, his thin, trimmed moustache curling up into a smile.

"Did you finally decide to have a go at that crossword?" Samantha asked, eyes fixed on a shark ripping apart a catfish.

"Yes."

"I thought you were saving it for a special occasion. Such as when we finally get to leave this prison, as you put it."

"Yes, well. That was then, and this is now."

Samantha groaned and made an effort to get up, before deciding not to get up after all. "There should be a pencil in my handbag."

Auguste waited for the catch, but none came. "Do you want me to look in your handbag for the pencil?"

The red cloud of blood dissipated within a minute, and the sea was dark, dark blue again, with shadows swimming past the glass-topped hotel.

August cleared his throat. "I thought you said I could never touch your belongings."

"This is a special occasion."

Auguste stifled a laugh and got up from his upholstered seat. He went across the hotel restaurant and found the handbag right where he'd first spotted it, tucked against the window wall in a booth for six.

"Let's see what's in here."

Samantha groaned. "How long before they realise we're still alive down here?"

Auguste raised a finger to the air. "It's best to consider this a hell we've been consigned to, based on all our previous sins. That's the newest theory I've come up with, and it's the one that makes the most sense to me, I think."

Samantha closed her eyes. "What did you find in the handbag?"

"Lipstick, a notepad… a little horseshoe charm. Where's the pencil, dear Samantha?"

"Look, Auguste, I have to confess something."

"That there is no pencil in the handbag?"

"That handbag isn't mine."

"Oh."

"I was just pretending it was mine. I never even looked inside it, so I don't know if there is a pencil or not."

"Are you sorry? Or…?"

"I'm not sorry. I just thought that since we're trapped in a hotel under the sea, we should have some secrets from each other. My mother always said that secrets make for the best stories."

"It doesn't look like there's a pencil here."

Samantha sat up and rubbed her eyes. "What will you do if you don't find a pencil in here?"

Auguste looked at her from across the restaurant. "Why, I'd go absolutely insane trying to solve a crossword I can't fill in."

Samantha shook her head. "All this time, we had the perfect balance - you with your crossword, me with my handbag. Now we've crushed it all."

"Yes, we've entered a new phase of hell."

Somewhere far above them, a blue whale passed by, casting a massive, dark shadow over the restaurant as it went. For a moment, Samantha wished the glass would shatter and fall in with all the water, just to see how it'd feel to be suddenly taken by the Atlantic Ocean.

Auguste shouted, breaking her out of her daydreaming.

"I found a pencil!"

I found him screaming in the wind, laughing like a maniac, with his running shoes tattered and his hair drenched and draped over his face.

My tea stall only had the usual customer at this time of the night, and we both turned to look at this banshee of a teenager running along the road. We turned the other way when he passed us by, leaving a trail of muddy splashes behind him.

"What a madman!" Sudesh said, laughing over his steaming glass of tea.

"I hope he doesn't get hurt," I craned my neck, hoping to still see the boy.

The rain battered the tarp over my stall, and cars and lorries sped past the highway, their blinding headlights lighting us up. It was hard to make out a screaming, laughing teenage boy in this downpour.

"We're lucky to be in a tea stall," Sudesh laughed. "If I was somewhere in the dark, alone, I'd be afraid all my past sins have caught up with me. Give me that pack of biscuits."

I pulled down a tan packet of Parle-G biscuits from the wooden plank that served as a shelf and handed it over to Sudesh. As he tore it open and allowed the biscuits inside to fall out like dominoes on the plastic stool, I took a seat in front of him.

Sudesh hummed in surprise. "The tea stall man is the customer tonight? To what do I owe the pleasure?"

I grinned and took one of the biscuits. "I can't resist the magic of those glucose biscuits. And I know you're one patron who won't say no to my filching a few off of you."

Sudesh would have laughed, but he turned his attention instead to the boy, who approached the stall, hunched, drenched, and red-eyed.

"Look who's here. The howling ghost of Mirdanpur himself."

I got off my seat with three more biscuits and retreated to behind the counter. The boy looked unsure of what to do at a tea stall in his state, so I tossed the counter rag at him. He looked at it confusingly, until I suggested he use it as a towel.

Sudesh swore at the glass of tea that took away the Parle-G biscuit he had been dipping in it. Now it was mush at the bottom of the glass, unseen until the tea would be drained.

The boy mimed a glass of tea himself. "How much?" he asked hoarsely.

"On the house, mate," I answered, "If you'll tell us why you were running and laughing like a madman along the highway at 1 am."

I heated up the kettle of tea and motioned toward the empty plastic chair. Sudesh pushed the packet of biscuits to the other side of the stool, but the boy politely refused.

"Go on, it's on me," Sudesh laughed.

"I don't like those biscuits," the boy answered sheepishly and sat on the chair. He tapped his leg violently like a drummer, and looked up at the tarp.

"I don't know if I can explain what I was doing," he said, and yawned. His lean, long face made the yawn seem cavernous, like a cat's.

I put a glass of tea on the stool - right at the edge of it, really - and leaned against the counter. "Teenagers do a lot of things that can't be explained."

The boy picked up the glass with two fingers along the rim, and blew onto the surface to cool it down. "I'll try."

Sudesh exchanged glances with me and leaned back in his chair.

"I'm in a server full of people who don't like to be alive. We call ourselves the Prisoners of Consciousness. We've been together for years now, and we've been miserable for so long, miserable at this existence, at this world, at everything. Including ourselves. Especially ourselves. And now… the admin is going to shut it down, because… well, never mind the because."

"Well, fuck," Sudesh leaned forward. "This sounds like a police matter."

The boy laughed weakly. "The admin lives in Finland, so good luck with that."

"Kids these days," I groaned.

"Anyway, so he suggested we do something to mark the end of the server. Something we'll remember all our lives. I didn't think much of it at first, but then, I was running in the dark, in the thunderstorm, along the highway, at midnight."

"Hard to forget madness like that," I said.

"Exactly. But do you understand the keyword? It's something I'll remember the rest of my life. And I want to remember it for the rest of my life. I want to live a long life so I can remember that moment for as long as possible. Does that make any sense?"

"No," Sudesh said.

"Yes," I said at the same time. "I don't understand what your situation is, or what this whole business was with your prisoners and servers, but I understand wanting to carry a memory for a long, long time."

The boy smiled now. It was an honest smile. He put the glass to his lips and tears blotted his eyes, perhaps from how hot the tea was.

"Now, thanks to you, I'll remember this moment for a long time too," I said. "So while your memory is your own, it has also touched my little stash of memories. Now I have something to remember for the rest of my life."

The rain was lighter now, and Sudesh got up from his seat, stretching himself as much as he could with the low ceiling of the tarp.

"I'm off. If I take too long, wife's going to think I've taken up drinking again."

He opened his umbrella and stepped out of the stall.

"Kid, listen. Try the biscuit with the tea. It's really good that way - just be careful not to hold it in the tea too long, or it'll fall in."

The boy nodded, and picked up one of the biscuits from the stool.

This woman Vaishnavi, worked on the hull of the Estrella-B for 44 years. Wrapped up in a worn spacesuit, she settled herself in a construction station built 125 years ago. It surrounds her, binds to her suit, provides her with all the tools she needs to weld, hammer, grease, connect, and perform all the miscellanea tasks that she has spent her entire life performing.

This woman Vaishnavi, her parents and grandparents also worked on segment E3-I34D, and she keeps their pictures in a small wallet that she never parts with. The photographs were taken on an ancient camera that no longer works. The last picture there is of Vaishnavi is from when she was 16. Vaishnavi broke the camera herself, but she tries not to think of it.

This woman Vaishnavi, we didn't know she existed. She was discovered in the 2882 survey, where she was found diligently reconstructing the hull of the ship as her grandparents and parents had done. The rest of her worker community has died out. She has never been into their quarters, because she believes it would be illegal to trespass.

This woman Vaishnavi, knows she won't finish the construction. She has been trying to summon more workers to her segment of the Estrella-B. However, as we later discovered, a protocol handling error in subsection 92-BB4D caused her requests to be undelivered. Therefore, while Vaishnavi continues to receive the resources necessary for hull repair, she has not been in contact with anyone else on the ship for her entire life.

This woman Vaishnavi, listens to one song so often that she sometimes finds it difficult to separate her speech from the song's lyrics. The music player that was passed down by her parents has seen considerable wear and tear, and a corruption error in the player's code causes it to play only the one song, which was recorded roughly 220 years ago, before the Estrella-B took off.

This woman Vaishnavi, had not spoken to another soul in at least two decades. Camera records depict her sending away her parents' bodies in space burials. With a gentle push, she sent them moving away from the ship, permanently lost in the infinite.

This woman Vaishnavi, became quickly overwhelmed, disoriented, and fidgety when contacted by the 2882 survey team. Through babbling, broken speech, a choked throat, and teary eyes, she explained that she needed more workers to complete the repairs on E3-134D. On being asked whether she would like to retire from her position, she became distraught and confused.

This woman Vaishnavi, we left her where she was. With respect to the labour redistribution committee, we request a transfer of at least fifty workers to E3-134D, where they might assist Vaishnavi in completing the repairs of the segment.

This woman Vaishnavi, in fulfilling her singular, lifelong request, we might put ourselves in the good graces of a Providence we have wronged by the vice of neglect.

Ride a cart south from Voroshkyn, to a signpost, where there's perched a raven whose claws have dug holes into the wood. You can see the monastery from there, if there is no fog. The path to it strangles the sea, which sends waves of brine beating against the rocks. Finally, there is the monastery. Small, like a crucifix that could slip out in the death throes of your drowning.

"Tell me, sweet Khristodin, why don't these grim men and women ever seek our advice? Do they think we're gargoyles standing by the door?"

I ask this, but Khristodin does not answer. He lowers his pruned and wrinkled hands into a pool of stagnant water, and closes his eyes.

"No, not gargoyles. Maybe we're ghosts, brief and fleeting. They look at us once and move on with their fearless chests thrust against the battles to come."

The water in the pool ripples away from Khristodin's hands, and an image forms.

Some day, a brick will be anointed with a lover's ink. That same brick will be illegible a century later. Many years later, it will be tossed down the rocks, and it will meet the sea that lashed it for centuries.

"These are beautiful sights, Khristodin. But what about the man who just passed by us? Oh, him with his crimson stole and his flame-licked armour, hammered by the blacksmith in Voroshkyn. Do you think he comes out?"

Some days, a man called brother by many, walks in circles around the monastery structure, sprinkles water called holy by many as he goes, prays to the sky and nods at the circling hawks.

This is long after Voroshkyn has ceased to exist. The name slips into the sea, and not even ravens care to stop the signpost from being hacked to pieces.

"Khristodin, that is a completely different man. Must it always be a game with you? A gamble? A roulette? You know what happened to this man. What will happen to this man, rather. It is only a matter of feeling the monastery's spine. Reaching across the nerves into the depths of the dungeons, feeling for footsteps, feeling for steel and blood."

A wailing child seeks shelter from the rain, nestled in a nook with his father. The thunder in the distance comes from cannons, but the father assured the child that these are the good cannons. Their only enemy is the rain, he says. It's nothing to worry about.

When the child does stop wailing, it's because the monastery's wall has been smashed open, open, open wound making the insides and outsides one.

"I give up, Khristodin. My curiosity has gone to the wall, and it has dived straight into the water below. It's now bait for the fishes. I will not get a straight answer out of you, and I have made my peace with that."

Khristodin flicks a finger at me, and a drop of water hits my forehead. "What does that mean, then? Is he alive? Is he dead? Spare me all the other futures. Only tell me what happens to this man."

I feel the drop slide down into my brow, pushing through the brown hair, down to the eye.

It slips into my eye. And there it is - everything. What is the man? Where is he? How to tease out one body of cells from an infinity of future events? Khristodin, if he knows, will not tell me.

Closing my eyes, I return to waiting for the next fool to ride a cart south from Voroshkyn, to a signpost…

-------

This fiction piece was inspired by @strehlenau's 'caucasian monastery' piece, which I saw on a blazed post today.

Thank you for reading!

Finished drafting my first novella Last Night, New Body this evening.

I wrote 5,749 words in one day to cap it off. The draft is sitting pretty at 30,000 words. I expect to spend the next few months editing it extensively. With luck, it'll be ready to query in June or July. Let's see how it goes.

I can't help but quote Victor Hugo's letter to Auguste Vacquerie on the former's completion of Les Misérables:

[Excerpted from 'The Novel of the Century' by David Bellos]

Loose update on things!

I've crossed 20,000 words on my draft of Last Night, New Body. I'm aiming for 30,000 words, so that's 2/3rd of the way there!

I often want to check out other WIPs, writers on Tumblr, the whole book publishing rigmarole, and all that jazz, but it's all so overwhelming. Just dipping my toes in leaves me exhausted.

So if any of you have simpler or beginner-friendly resources on all that stuff, I'd be very grateful!