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Time to Rebel, Y'all



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Sun Nov 05, 2017 1:05 am
BluesClues says...



What do you mean, it's time to rebel?



If you want to participate in NaNoWriMo but don't want to start in on a brand-new novel, you can participate as a Rebel. I'm still trying to get to 50,000 words before the end of November, but it'll be between two projects: the Chosen Grandma, which will only get 1500 new words a week, and the story formerly known as The Book Man, which is getting rewritten/revised.


project numero uno: the chosen grandma story



Life at the nursing home sure is dull - until a wizard shows up to tell eighty-three-year-old Edna Fisher she's the Chosen One, destined to defeat evil sorcerer Redway. With the help of her loyal orderly, a rogue teenager, and a grumpy cat, Edna faces dragons, skepticism, irritating wizards, bad directions, and technology.

Knitting needles? Check. Cane? Check. Fate of the world? Bring it on.


Since I'm also participating in LMS, I'll continue working on this story at my usual pace of 1500 words a week. My goal is to have the latest installment done by Tuesday night during the month of November so that I'll have the rest of the week to work on my other project.


project the second: the secret of celadon park



Long after sundown, an injured balloon artist knocks on Christian Abernathy's door. Across town, Liza Smith discovers her husband missing. And in Celadon Park, an ancient beast from another world breaks free of the spell imprisoning him.

I've been attempting to finish the latest draft of this story since...??????? I don't even remember at this point. The last time I seriously worked on it was during Camp NaNo, but I didn't make it to the end. So that's my goal for this month.

And then, once this draft is done, I'm going to put the darned thing away for a good long while, because I've been working on it just about nonstop since the start of 2013 and I need a break. How else am I supposed to come back to the table with fresh eyes, right?


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Sun Nov 05, 2017 1:12 am
BluesClues says...



Day 3, Chosen Grandma



Spoiler! :
CHAPTER TWENTY

In which Clem has a plan.

“What do you mean, you’re not going to Dominion?” Methodius asked indignantly.

He was seated at the kitchen table with Clem and Edna. The rain had finally stopped, long after they’d all fallen asleep, and now, a while after dawn, everything shone wet and bright. Amir had pardoned himself and was now down in his workshop with the others. He didn’t need their help with the carpet, but Benjamin had jumped at the chance to see the carpet-enchanter’s process. Even Kiernan seemed interested. Luckily for them, Edna thought, because the moment the other three had disappeared down the stairs, Methodius had practically dragged her into the kitchen to discuss her next course of action. Nice not to have to keep track of any lies this morning.

“It’s tradition,” he said testily. Behind him, eggs scrambled themselves in a pan. Several slices of turkey bacon deposited themselves in another pan with a sizzle.

I need to learn how to cook like that, Edna thought.

Clem glowered. “Is tradition more important than safety? Or success? Why the hell would we go to Dominion, where there are plenty of dragons to roast us alive and Redway is on his home turf, when we take him by surprise somewhere safer?”

Edna counted her stitches. She had successfully untangled Marguerite’s hat and was making progress on it again.

“She has a point,” she said. “And keep in mind that trekking through Dominion is bound to be harder on an old lady’s hips.”

Methodius pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s why Amir is making you a carpet.”

“We’ll still need that,” Clem said. She reached for the coffeepot, but it lifted itself off the table and poured her a cup. “Cut it out. I can pour my own coffee.”

The lid of the sugar bowl lifted into the air. A spoon dipped itself into the sugar and then hovered in front of Clem’s mug questioningly.

“Sugar?” Methodius asked sweetly.

Clem scowled and shooed the spoon away. “Showoff.”

“Back to the matter at hand,” Edna said, looking at the two of them over her glasses. The wizard blushed. Clem ignored her and downed some coffee. “I’m not exactly a traditional Chosen One myself, Methodius, so I don’t know why you’re throwing such a big stink about this.”

Several plates zipped out of the cabinets behind the wizard’s head and set themselves on the table. The pans drifted off the stove and deposited eggs and turkey bacon on the plates.

“Thank you,” Edna said, and tucked in. “Mmm, not bad.”
Methodius frowned. “I’m not throwing a stink. I fail to see how you can possibly defeat Redway without traveling to Dominion.”

Abandoning her eggs, Clem leaned down and pulled her backpack onto the kitchen table. “Look.”

She pulled out an overstuffed leather journal crammed with loose pages, charts, and photographs, all covered in inky scribbles. The binding was cracked, the pages torn, the corners scuffed, and the papers inside were in worse shape still. But Clem opened it more carefully than you’d handle a baby.

“I’ve been tracking dragon attacks ever since Marisol died.” She turned the pages slowly, setting aside maps, photographs of shadowy figures and distant dragons in flight, news clippings, and charts, all covered in cramped but bubbly handwriting. “Most of them aren’t far from Dominion. A single dragon or maybe a pair, you know, like in the old stories, looking for maidens or gold or something. Maybe just a new territory. The big mountain dragons are supposed to be really territorial. But this attack wasn’t some random dragon, there was a whole flight of them and people. And there have been more like them, a lot more.”

She paused, examined a page, and then added, “Well, a lot more when you consider the fact that this is pretty much unheard of in the history of ever. Oh, here it is.”

With difficulty, she extracted a square of paper that looked older than the rest and had been folded up many, many times. They sat and watched her unfold it. Methodius’ frown deepened.

“And how exactly have you been tracking dragon attacks?”
Clem gave him a look of supreme disdain. “Newspapers. Internet. The same way everyone else does.”

He turned slightly red but didn’t stop frowning. Edna started another row of stitches.

“Anyway,” Clem said primly, turning back to her paper, “for a long time I was really frustrated, because the attacks still seemed completely random, except for the fact that most of them were on Knights or places populated heavily with Knights, which, like, duh. But then, just last year...”

Methodius’ frown was a canyon. “He started heading northwest.”

“Yeah.”

The paper now took up half the kitchen table. Clem smoothed it out. Edna leaned forward: it was a map, not hand-drawn like Kiernan’s, not Dominion, but from just outside Dominion northward, a typical mass-produced map for the area. There were pinholes all over, especially at the bottom, where the map had once hung on a bedroom wall and been marked with the sites of dragon attacks. Clem had written on it, too, ink starring sites of later attacks, her tiny, rounded handwriting taking notes and labeling places too tiny to have been stamped on the map by its makers, recording numbers dead and injured. It looked a mess to Edna. The only thing that made it look like Redway was heading northwest instead of attacking at random was a thin line Clem had drawn in Sharpie.

“What’s northwest?” she asked, feeling a bit stupid. For a Chosen One, she was awfully unprepared. It should’ve been Clem, she thought. I’m just an old woman out of my depth.

Clem shrugged. “A lot of stuff. Major training camps. Plenty of Fateful Objects he might want for some reason.”

Edna squinted at the map. She supposed she could see a vague path wending its way northwest: the largest cities attacked seemed to be more or less northwest of each other.

“But which one is he heading for?”

“No clue.” Clem turned to the wizard. “Unless you know?”

“No.”

“Figures.” Clem’s plate shuffled closer to her. She pushed it away from the precious map. “I’m busy.”

“You really should eat, dear,” Edna said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’m afraid,” Methodius said loudly, “I still don’t see what your plan is. If you don’t know where Redway is headed, then…”

Clem leaned her journal on the edge of the table and flipped further through it. She stopped at a page marked with a frayed ribbon. A dozen thumbnails of women were taped all over it.

“I don’t need to know,” she said, “because she’s going to tell me.”

Edna leaned closer. Every photograph was the same style, the kind of picture you’d see one someone’s ID, head-on, unsmiling, but they were all of different women. Blonde, brunette, red-headed, even a gray-haired old woman who stared sourly at Edna from the page. They had different eyes, different noses, different lips. In fact, the only similarity was their clothing, or what Edna could see of it in the photographs. Every woman was wearing a Knight’s uniform: a black jacket with gold epaulettes, a single bar on the left shoulder, the mark of a squire.

“Which one?” she asked.

Clem pushed the journal closer to her. “They’re all the same. Can’t you tell?”

She certainly could not tell. They were all different.

Methodius leaned forward, looking interested for the first time. “Yes—yes, you’re right.”

Edna was mystified. “Well, they all look different to me.”

“That’s because they are different,” Clem said. She traced one of the photographs. “It’s a spell. If you look close you can see signs of it, just around the eyes…”

“It’s the same woman,” Methodius said, “but she’s disguised herself.”

Edna really couldn’t see. “I’ll take your word for it. Why are we interested in them? Er, her?”

Clem turned another page. This one was covered in dates and names. “Okay, so I figured from pretty early on it had to do with the Knights, whatever Redway’s doing. So I’ve been keeping tabs on them, too. And I noticed that a woman enlisted at each base around two weeks before each attack and defected right after, only it was all different women. But it was like too coincidental, you know? So I looked into them and noticed the evidence of spellwork.”

The wizard’s frown returned. “And how exactly have you been keeping track of who’s in the Knights?”

Clem closed the journal. “Like it’s hard.”



Day 3, The Secret of Celadon Park



Spoiler! :
Sable couldn't understand what had just happened. She had seen it, felt it, she had heard Dane scream as if he had been there in front of her, seen his head fall lifeless to his chest, her son, her son. Dead. Dead because of Goblin.

Her own children had died long ago, in the war. And she had grieved, but she had been proud of them. Proud of the way they died, the way they fought until the end and showed no fear. They had taken so many of the enemy with them and there was no shame in it, dying in battle that way. Many of her ancestors had done so, and, if truth be told, Sable had always thought she would go the same way.

But this. This. Dane.

She didn't know what to do about this.

Every grief she had ever felt, almost every feeling, had manifested itself in her as fury. Rage, cold or hot, fiery or icy, but there it had been, rage, and she had used it and let it fuel her and gone into a controlled frenzy and fought and avenged and done whatever she needed to do.

But now. She hadn't realized. She had thought him in battle, thought she would look up afterward to see him grinning, triumphant, with a bloodied muzzle and bloodied paws, changing back to human form, his black hair awry, and she would smile, just a little, and he would know she was proud of him. She had thought him in battle, had been sure of it, hadn't questioned it, and the whole time he had been in Goblin's clutches. And Goblin, that--that--she couldn't think of a word bad enough, there was no word, in ilvan tongue or any other--he had waited, waited until it was too late for her to do anything, to atone, to amend.

And now Dane was dead.

For the first time since she was very young, Sable was afraid. In a blind frenzy, she returned to her pack, to where they had agreed to meet afterward. The few ilvan already gathered looked at her oddly. She reined it in, tried to calm herself. She could not let them know what had happened, nor let them see her so uncontrolled and frightened. He might have grabbed any one of them, it might have been more than Dane. She hadn't even realized he could, yet.

More ilvan returned from the battle. She tried to count them as they came, tried to see who was there, who was still missing. But how would she know? What if they had been killed in battle? Would she know who had been killed honorably, defeated in a fair fight, and who had been kidnapped and stowed away belowground?

No. None of them had been killed in battle. Of that she was sure. She clenched her fists. The fair folk had been taken completely by surprise. They had killed none of her pack. If anyone was missing--

Rage began to claim its rightful place as the pack gathered. Her fear ebbed away, her grief turned to fury so great that her muscles twitched: she longed to run, to find the tunnel, to run down it and burst in on Goblin and lunge for his throat, tear it out and kill him before he knew what was happening.

No. No, she wouldn't kill him right away. First, she would make him suffer. Make him fear. Make him feel what her son had felt in his last moments, what she knew he had felt because Goblin had made her feel it, too.

Her rage calmed her. She had been almost panicky before, but she knew what to do with anger. As her pack amassed, she grew angrier and angrier. She would kill him. He could do nothing to her now.

She wasn't thinking of her grandpups.

"Sound off," she said hoarsely.

The others looked at her. They were bright-eyed in the aftermath of battle, panting, but something in her tone told them something was wrong. She glared at them.

"Sound off."

They were all accounted for. She smiled grimly, wolfishly. She would send her pack away, somewhere safe, and then Goblin would pay.


  





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Sun Nov 05, 2017 1:53 am
BluesClues says...



Day 4, The Secret of celadon park



Spoiler! :
“We’ll camp here. But—”

“Mistress!”

It was more of a bark than a voice. The ilvan were instantly alert. An ancient wolf shuffled toward them as quickly as he could and changed into human form at the last moment. He was wheezing and crying and half-collapsed as he reached the rest of the pack, but Sable caught him. He had been left behind with the others who could not fight because they were too old, too young, or infirm.

“Mistress,” he said in a gravelly voice. His wrinkled face was streaked with tears. “Mistress, Kyri is gone.”

And the fear was back, sour and burning.

Her voice shook. “What do you mean?”

The faithful old ilvan cried harder. “She was asleep. I swear to you, she was asleep. I put her to bed myself. She was asleep. But when I went back to check on her—”

Sable’s blood ran cold. It wasn’t possible.

“You’re sure?” she said. “You checked everywhere?”

“Yes, Mistress. Forgive me—”

His feet were cracked and bleeding from his long run to tell her. She stroked the brittle hair. “Hush, Azaroth.”

It came out harsher than she intended. How had Goblin managed it? How had he reached beyond the park to steal her grandpup away when he could not yet even leave his prison? Kyri—

“Take care of him,” she said abruptly. She lifted him into the other ilvan’s arms and loped away, deaf to their calls as they asked where she was going, what she was doing, what had happened to Kyri—

“Goblin!” she roared. Around her, the tents and carts that had been left behind were aflame. The grass smoldered, withered, and died. Firebirds drifted overhead, no longer in a frenzy of destruction, slow golden streaks drifting across the sky. Stray nightmares grazed on the ashen grass. She took renewed vicious pleasure in the knowledge that the fae were dead. He was a fool, he had almost caused his own destruction, and she had stopped it, and now she was gladder than ever—whatever reason he had, she was glad she had hurt him so, now that she saw that he had planned all along to take her child, her grandchild—

“Goblin!” she screamed. “Answer me!”

There was the hated voice, as clear in her head as if he was beside her.

“Yes?”

Spittle flew from her mouth. “Where is she? Where is my granddaughter?”

An image flashed through her mind: a bright garden belowground, and in it a black-haired girl with blue eyes and wolf’s paws chasing after a butterfly.

“She’s perfectly safe,” the voice said. “And she’ll remain that way as long as you do nothing without my say-so. Are we perfectly clear?”

Sable swallowed back an angry retort and clenched her fists. He would pay. He would pay. She would kill him herself—as soon as Kyri was safely aboveground again. Until then, she could do nothing. She spoke through gritted teeth.

“Yes.”

“Good,” the voice said. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

And then there was silence, except for the quiet crackling as the fair burned down around her.


  





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Tue Nov 07, 2017 2:43 pm
BluesClues says...



Day 6, chosen grandma



I like broke the number one rule of NaNo and revised the end of this after originally posting, but in my defense this story is just something I'm continuing during NaNo and not my main NaNo project. But! I think my new plan for what Kiernan is going to do next makes way more sense and creates more tension than my original thought.

Spoiler! :
Edna chuckled to herself. Clem’s lips twitched, but she didn’t smile.

“So your plan is to find this woman,” Methodius said in a long-suffering voice, “and ask her nicely, and she’ll tell you what Redway is up to?”

“No. My plan is to find this woman and tell her that there will be consequences if she doesn’t tell me what Redway is up to.”

Her voice was ice. No doubt said consequences would be unpleasant, to say the least. Glad she’s on our side, Edna thought.

Or at least not exactly against them.

“You’re awfully violent for someone so young,” Methodius said. Clem stuck her tongue out at him.

“And you sent an old lady off with a sword to kill a man she’s never met,” Edna said.

He grimaced. “I don’t think I said anything about killing him.”

“No, you didn’t say much of anything about anything. But I’m sure I don’t know how else you meant me to stop him, and what good is a sword if you’re not planning to run someone through with it?”

“Ha,” Clem said under her breath. She began the arduous process of folding her map back up into a square tiny enough to fit back into the overflowing journal. Her plate made another fruitless advance and retreated to the other end of the kitchen table, looking sulky (for a plate).

Methodius looked down his nose at her, but she ignored him. “I don’t understand why you think it will be any easier to find this woman than it would be to find Redway.”

“Dominion’s huge. I don’t even know where we’d start looking for him.”

“It’s not as big as the rest of the world.”

Clem slipped the map back into the journal and then looked at the wizard with a disdainful glance that Edna imagined she had perfected after years of receiving exactly that glance herself from irritated teachers.

“Are you an idiot? First of all, you’re a wizard. So if you’d noticed this, not that you did, you probably could’ve divined this woman by now. But I’m guessing you haven’t divined Redway yet?”

Methodius flushed and looked at the table. “Dragons’ magic is too powerful for us to get a read. We’ve tried, but—”

“Exactly. So we have no way of knowing where in Dominion Redway is based. Whereas I already have a candidate for us to interview, which you would too if you used your brain. Honestly.”

She reached into a different pocket of her backpack and pulled out her phone. Edna tried not to be surprised about it: didn’t all the teenagers have cell phones nowadays? Slim ones, like Benjamin’s, phones with just about everything you could ever want, except buttons to push when you tried to call someone.

It surprised her anyway. Clem had seemed so unattached that for a moment she wondered who the girl even had to call, occasional mentions of her grandmother notwithstanding.

But then these phones could do so much that Edna supposed you could be a hermit and still want one for other pursuits.

Clem poked at the screen, read something, turned slightly pink, and then wiped it away with her finger.

Oh, Edna thought, swiping.

Clem poked at the screen a moment longer and then set the phone on the table so that Edna and Methodius could see it. There was another ID photograph like those in the journal, an unsmiling woman in the black jacket of a Knight, with a gold bar on the shoulder to show she was a squire. She had olive skin and shining black hair pulled back into a severe bun, thin shoulders, and dark eyes that looked blank in that government-issued-ID kind of way.

“She just enlisted,” Clem said. “Monica Evans. Barstow. Based on my research, if she’s the one, we can expect an attack on the city in about two weeks.”

Edna finished her eggs and reached for her knitting.

“Thank you,” she said to her plate, which dipped into a dishware version of a bow and then flew off to the sink for a good washing. Clem’s plate joined it rather sulkily. “Barstow, isn’t that where Sir Carmichael was born?”

Sir Carmichael Barstow, the first and only Knight known to have killed a mountain dragon singlehandedly back in 1871, armed only with a snuffbox and a mostly-empty book of matches. Everyone assumed some serious magic had been involved, but they preferred to tell the story of Sir Carmichael using his wits to fashion a MacGyver-like dragon-killing machine out of the contents of his pockets.

Clem nodded. “The first compound he built is still in use, but you can like tour it and stuff. Marisol always wanted to go.”

“Two weeks doesn’t give us much time.”

“That’s why we need to get going. As soon as our carpet is done.”

They spent the rest of the day discussing travel plans, Barstow, and how to find Monica Evans once they got there. They couldn’t very well go around announcing to everyone in town that they were the Chosen One, and anyway they didn’t want to say anything that would give Ms. Evans the idea that they were after her, in case she decided to run off and leave them waiting for her to pop up elsewhere, under a different name and appearance.

Unfortunately, Clem was no better a liar than Edna.

“I could come up with a good lie,” she said indignantly.

Edna started a new row of stitches. “You tried to tell the Chosen One you were the Chosen One.”

“Okay, I didn’t know you were the Chosen One! Besides, you told that elf the same thing.”

“Yes,” Edna said, “but it’s more convincing when I say it.”

In the end, they decided they’d just have to ask around about Monica Evans’ whereabouts discreetly and hope for the best. It was all for the best, Edna thought: she’d never remember what lie they had come up with anyway. Hard enough to remember her own lies without trying to make them line up with other people’s.

It would be far easier to break the news to Kiernan that they wouldn’t need him after all. Edna figured he’d be pleased. Draconology seemed a tricky, dangerous, thankless job. No doubt he’d be glad not to have to do it with an old woman, a grumpy teenager, and a skittish young man in tow—to say nothing of Mittens, who had been hiding out in Amir’s gallery, behind rugs, since last night.

“So that’s good news, isn’t it, dear?” she said cheerfully in her armchair that evening by the fire. She expected him to sigh in relief and say something along the lines of, “Yes, wonderful news, I know we had an agreement but I really wasn’t looking forward to—”

Instead, his face clouded. Edna shrank away from him. Maybe it was the fire, and the shadows it threw across his eyes and lips, but he suddenly looked almost menacing.

“It—it is good news, isn’t it? It was kind of you to agree, but I’m sure your studies will be easier without us.”

A momentary pause.

“I don’t mind,” he said. Definitely the fire. He looked much less menacing now.

She reached out, a little hesitantly, and patted his arm. “I really do appreciate it, but you see we’ve decided—that is to say, Clem’s decided on a different course of action, so we don’t need—”

“Where are you going?”

“Er—Barstow.” The question came out so bluntly and took her by such surprise that she didn’t even consider telling him it was none of his business.

Edna thought he tensed up, thought, but a moment later she decided she had imagined it. He said, in brighter tones, “Wow, really? I’ve always wanted to go. My studies don’t bring me out that way. Well.”

He held out a hand. Edna got to her feet, a little stiffly, and shook, slightly relieved that he had taken it so well. She had felt bad telling him they didn’t need him after all, so soon after asking him to lead them to Dominion.

“Best of luck to you,” he said, “and of course to Clem.”

“Yes, thank you,” she said. “I’m so sorry if we’ve inconvenienced you.”

He protested that it was nothing, he didn’t mind at all, he understood completely. Edna felt better about the whole thing as she shuffled off to bed a quarter of an hour later. If she had looked back, she might have noticed the ugly look on his face.

And it definitely wasn’t the fire.


  





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Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:04 pm
BluesClues says...



Oops, look who 100% forgot about this. I'll update it later tonight, unless I spend the entire afternoon and evening sleeping, which just now seems likely since I'm cold and achey and about to fall asleep at my computer. Current total word count between both stories is something just over 16k, anyway. Far, far behind, but if I manage to stay awake while I'm home sick from work for the next few days, I can probably get somewhat caught up.
  








Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
— Voltaire