#tbwd

[briannyssey]

🌹 but PLEASE from the assassination sequence

For you my friend, anything

Time was like water. You needed little cups like hours and days to hold it, or larger pitchers like seasons when there was too much of it. Therrin had never been good at holding on to time. So much flowing through the shattered bowl of his hands. Afterwards he would wonder if this thing had always been true. He wasn’t his mother. He didn’t want to make time an accomplice to lies. Now it will always have been true that muscle would be faster than thought, that his hand would axe down like the executioner’s, that the dagger would leave his hand, that the dagger would spin and part both air and flesh with one inexorable edge.

[briannyssey]

🌹

Taylor, for you of course!

Often, when his mother’s contract for the season was done, she would enlist his help to trick and distract lords with too many books and too little sense. He’d started fires to distract watchmen, cut horse tethers and opened stable gates, and at times had simply played lookout. She would add to her collection and, if he had been very, very, well-behaved, she’d try to snatch a story-book.

[briannyssey]

🌹

Arlo! Why thank you!

Like the actor's mask or the conman's smile, the Cloakhouse had secrets. Buried under the conservatory was an altogether different kind of academy. It was a great labyrinth of concrete tunnels, armories, surgical theaters, ancient libraries, map-rooms, torture chambers, and vaults filled with so much blackmail that in the right hands they could (and had) toppled dynasties.

[briannyssey]

🌹!!

why thank you! From the very first page:

Meanwhile talented would-be musicians plucked strings and blew reeds until their lips and fingers cracked and bled. The Cloakhouse had lined its countless practice rooms with cork and teak (the cost of this alone could beggar duchies) and pleasingly tended hedges muffled the rehearsing students, but all the soundproofing in the world could not quiet that place.

[briannyssey]

you don't understand, this is plot critical swap to the Baskerville font

[briannyssey]

Nonono, this isn’t allusion, it’s Naruto ekphrasis

[briannyssey]

am I freak for putting allusion to Zora Neale Hurston in this draft? What aboust John Constantine? Stanislavski? (of system fame). What about Paul Robeson? The Beatles? Fukuyama? Fantasy novel btw

[briannyssey]

working on the novella, I think I've hit a point where I'm done with drug-addled vision quests. Not that I don't love them, but I feel them dragging the story away from what it is. And as the story drags away I can feel the burn to write it fade.

And that burn drives most my projects I think. There's a resonance I'm chasing in each one. I might produce good work by the time I put a story down, but if it doesn't draw out that resonance then I'm not satisfied.

It's also a lesson I wouldn't be learning without having drafted these vision sequences in the first place. I had the idea, I played with it, and found that it wasn't working. And while discarded pages may not make their way into a manuscript, they still add to the work. Like exercises in a sport or blocking experiments in a play, each improves comfort with the "muscle" of the craft.

It's both strange and nice to have developed the muscle for this story to the point when I can tell a series of developments aren't working for it.