satisfiedSo I have 7500 words of The Stone in the Skull, the first book of the second Eternal Sky trilogy, which is collectively called The Lotus Kingdoms, done. I'm trying to have a bad draft before Readercon if I can.
And because I'm really, really happy with how this is coming out--apparently I've finally learned how to take that advice in the blog title and throw another bear in the canoe--here's the first three paragraphs.
My poor protagonists. I am a horrible person.
Also, very smug.
Chapter One.
The mountain wore a mirrored mask. A pale sun blazed light but no heat in the limpid, icy air and glaciers shimmered against a sky like glass. The air was so still it seemed the encircling peaks held their breaths on some portent.
Their reflections bent toward a vanishing point in the polished egg-shape of the mirrored mask also worn by the brass man who toiled mechanically--tirelessly--up the slope of the notch below the peaks and between. A wrap of cowl had fallen back from his featureless head and his heavy hands gleamed in what might have been brass gauntlets. His brass feet were strapped into iron-thorned crampons without benefit of boots. The spikes bit into the smooth ice of a river made into rock by the cold.
A hawser thick as a woman's wrist draped over the brass man's shoulder. It stretched behind him on a weighty arc, reaching back to the curved bow of a strange ship: square-rigged, boasting a lofty reptilian figurehead gallantly painted in red and gold--but resting on two curved, ice-encased runners that bore it over the surface of the stone-hard river as if glass slid oiled on glass. A pilot stood on the little platform at the back of the bowsprit, peering up at the slopes above through a glass. Though it was early in the winter for avalanches, it was never too early for care.
Behind that ship was another....