Patrick Johanneson 🚀 🇨🇦Motifs that might influence the 2nd draft of my novella:
- I destroyed the map / I even thought I forgot it
- It'd be better for us if you don't understand / it'd be better for me if you don't understand
It appears my mother keeps finding ways to reach out from beyond the grave.
the last few commits on my Weird Fantasy novella:
- It's not a thrumming sound, it's a whisper
- No more double spaces (for now); possible market; a bit more from Rhéal's sleepover
- Another tower nightmare
- Notes on Mark's religious status
- [redacted] has been missing a while
- Added a couple more sentences, which is progress
- Minor updates to the beginning of the climb
- Digression about the aurora
- Made a few notes; named Mark's school
- Shuffled the 2nd Tower Discovery to after Thanksgiving; added some more to the endgame
- Another walk, another instance of Fizzgig refusing to go near the tower
I dreamt that I was in a forest fire. I was safe because I was a ghost, but no one else was. The trees blazed all around me, and I felt the heat of their passing. Animals fled past me, wide-eyed and panicked, predator and prey united in terror. Firefighters sprayed water that turned to steam. Flames jumped from crown to crown. The wind was hot and stank of ash and endings.
I walked unhurt but not unmarked to the edge of a sullen lake whose entire surface had gone black with ash. I watched its lazy undulations for a while, like a pool of oil disturbed by unseen forces.
My current #WiP contains:
- a tower
- a diary
- an unreliable narrator (age 15)
- an unreliable narrator (age 45)
- they're the same person
- another tower
- or is it the same tower?
- a dog named Fizzgig
- Thanksgiving
- an absence
...among many other things.
The writing is going great, thanks for asking
After work today I'm going to go to École Savard, without Fizzgig. Before supper, so I'm home long before sunset.
I don't particularly want to, but I feel like I have to. In part I'm writing this down so that I go through with it. Things are more real when they're written down, or at least I find they are.
When I leave for work I'm going to leave this binder on the table, open to this page, so I can't chicken out and then claim I forgot.
#
it's
oh god
oh shit
#
sorry
I had the day off work today, and I seem to have written about 1700 words in my WiP.
Here are just a few of them (first draft, be kind):
There was a weird feeling in the air; there was no wind, not even a breeze, really, but there was a strange whisper like the leaves that are still on the trees—yellow and red, but plenty of green still, even this deep into fall—were shivering with anticipation, and the sense that whatever they were anticipating wasn't good. I don't think it was just my imagination, either; a couple of times Fizzgig pulled at the leash, like she wanted to cross the street, to go another way.. The second time, when I declined, she actually sat down in the grass at the edge of the sidewalk, the leaves rustling under her, and whined in a way I don't think I've ever heard come out of her. I gave in, and we turned up the block. As we walked away from the school, I kept looking over my shoulder, trying to see what had bothered her so much.
From tonight's writing:
From the ground the tower was twenty, maybe thirty feet tall; from its roof it seemed I was two hundred feet in the air. More, perhaps. It was dizzying, looking down. The fall would kill anyone who chose to step off.
I almost stepped off.
To this day I don't know why. To this day I don't know why I didn't. The temptation was strong, almost overwhelming. When I realized what I was thinking (Just one step, that's all it will take—I remember the words, and I remember thinking that they weren't my words), I lurched back from the edge.
Hashtag AmWriting
The progress so far: uneven and sporadic.
Reading these diaries is a weird experience. My handwriting has changed a lot since my teen years—the loops got smaller, the straight lines got sharper—but then I suppose most people in their forties might have a hard time reconciling their younger self's script with their current writing.
—from my current WiP, working title "The Tower"