What do you get when you take CS Lewis’s ‘That Hideous Strength’ and cross it with… well… me?
You get Shadowlands. Where quasi-human janissaries serve those dithering-fallen angels who could not make up their damned minds.
What happens if one of your overpowered agents wakes up… and turns on you?
Again, this is all here and there… take the walk to the pharmacy door of OTChi Kocchi.
Question: is there anyone, besides me, stupid enough to think that I would wrap things up tonight? I really planned and wanted to. It’s all in my head! But it’s already 1.5L bottle of wine o’clock and tomorrow’s DayJob promises to be awful.
Part Five is it! I swear! Even if I have to wait three days and make it 10k words long!
Ate dinner. Put down 800 words. No one else here. Why the heck not keep going? So: 1200.
I’ll be wrapping all this up – well, sorta – in part 4. Gary figures out what he wants to do with his life and we flick back to ‘present time’ with Lauren and Henge riding home after fishing. I learned something very surprising about present-time Henge today!
Back on track. I re-re-read what I’d re-read yesterday. I’m just a middle-aged hack, but FFS, that was awful! Was I really drunk enough to write that?
I didn’t even bother editing it: deleted. Let’s try again. Sure: dashing Arpad is something of a player; nothing at all wrong with that. Has he a history? Well, lookie here…!
[Personal aside: thought about this all morning. Left phone upstairs in pharmacy while I went to eat lunch in ground floor cafeteria. Rather than troll news sites, I spent the next forty-ish minutes thinking about this story. Bits. Pieces. Glimpses. Pic…
What? Oh: “picnic.” My imagination opened like a carpet. Arpad owes Lily a lunch at her hospital, but after that… they’re going to go on a little date… how, why, where… don’t bother me: I’m writing!]
At 1800, my wife was at the far end of the dining table looking at dishwashers on her phone. She thinks we need a new one; I think she needs to do a better job rinsing dishes before she puts them in.
Anyway.
At that time, I was staring off, wondering what to write. I kinda/sorta knew Gary was due for an appearance, but I really didn’t –
And then, in an instant, I did. Everything below the fold was there in my eyes. Creative writing is so… strange!
After last night I knew I had to get back to writing or I’d die. Considered various ideas throughout the workday. Just after 1700, when I was cleaning the isolation hood, the roar of its motor must have mixed with the chemicals in the Cavicide wipes to let me see something. Not a lot of detail but certainly a week’s or more worth of story. I’d been thinking about Faustina, however by lunch I’d come to know I didn’t know her well enough to tell her story.
For Gary and Henge, though, I’d already laid down two big markers: one in “Echoes of Family Lost” and another in ‘Worlds Without End.’ I’ll be picking them up now. This is, I think, going to be a great deal of fun!
This may seem shorter than usual, but when you only need to write dialog, as in a play, it tends to keep your word count down.
PS I came up with the title after writing all this. It derives from something Ai said late in “The Fourth Law.” In doing so, I may have been given a glimpse of Faustina’s story. Apologies to Cornelius Ryan in advance.
I caught myself thinking about Arpad’s history today. This is a writing exercise, not a novel, dammit!
