#tsetc

Tagged by @authoralexharvey last week, and my first time doing one like this!

Writers: post (approximately) six sentences from something you’re working on. If you aren’t ready to do that, add six sentences to your WIP.

Readers: challenge yourselves to leave a six sentence comment or give a writer a six sentence prompt. (or a total of six sentences for the day)

Fans and creators alike: reblog a fandom post and add some love in the tags. Aim for 6 posts - or 6 tags. Whatever you can manage!

From Tinder Saint:

Vahn kept his eyes down, his boots sliding across the marble with the faintest hush. As he passed the doors along the hall, he could feel the signatures within. Most slept, smoldering low, but some rooms sparked with flashes. They were the bright, sharp heat of sudden desire, burning hot and consuming until it was gone. 

This was the Palamidia, after all. Getting attached meant digging a grave for two.

Tagging: @verba-writing , @wayoftheghost , @dragonthusiast . yeah that's not six but all my degrees are in English.

I got tagged by @space-cadead!

I started with TS but had to go into SP to snag a few of these. My words were:

shard (from SP)

The light around Velinius fractured into countless shards, sharper than diamond. Sharper than a blade.

prod (from TS)

When the Saint chamber opened, Hagan would be replaced. Vahn never figured out how to get along with the other fire loas, despite Hagan’s incessant prodding. They were all flare or sparks, and Vahn was an easy target for someone that wanted to show off their strength or gain ground. He would likely fade into the regular tally and get shuffled on assignments at a whim until his grave was dug.

sun (from TS)

Vahn’s vision spotted with black. It wasn’t dark, though, it wasn’t unforgiving or unrelenting. The light filtered through it, the heat of the sun, and Vahn wasn’t going to die like this. He wasn’t going to die when he was so close to understanding something, anything, for once. 

bulb (from SP)

A single bulb flickered, struggling against the dark before lighting with a click.

I got tagged by @oh-no-another-idea ???? My first tag???? I am GIDDY!!

I’ve been flailing a bit the last few... weeks... but I liked this bit:

Kanna’s fingers brushed against Vahn’s wrist as he passed. “Stop holding back,” she said. “Take what is yours.”

This ones from the TS rough draft, and is also the last line of a chapter so it’s playing double duty.

7 & 7 (Tag Game)

I was tagged for this one by @ls-daydreams a little while ago!

Rules: Post 7 lines (or paragraphs, or whatever!) of your WIP, then tag 7 people!

This is a somewhat fun one from TS.

“She’s not like that,” Vahn said, because he thought that Osawa should know. “Not really. That isn’t who she is.”

It shouldn’t matter what this new water loa thought of Kanna, but for some reason, in that moment, Vahn couldn’t stand another person thinking she was a monster. Maybe it was because he could feel the Saint Trials looming. Maybe it was because he wanted them, he wanted that power, but he knew they would eat him alive and Kanna would be left alone. 

Osawa raised his brow. “You misunderstood me,” he said. “She could have killed him, easily. But she didn’t. Most would have.”

Vahn’s smirk tasted stale. “You learn fast, Prospect.”

“Decuni,” Osawa corrected, though there was no ego in it.

Vahn followed the cut of his jacket. The guy must be good. Very good, to rise so quickly when he was willing to stand in front of Vahn and tell him that he didn’t think Kanna was death incarnate, that maybe she was a person and not just a weapon. Those who gave more than a spare thought to Kanna existing as anything else weren’t useful to Velinius.

“Very fast.”

Tagging: @brimorganbooks, @aohendo , @menagerie-of-monsters , @authortango , @wildswrites , @morphaeus , @ladywithalamp

Tinder Saint Progress: * 6 of 15 chapters complete. * word count: 18k (projected: 40k)

An excerpt, with some lore building.

“Rashad wasn’t completely wrong. Almost every Ilazkin text had some story or another in it, but there’s layers. The story of Shahsu and Maran is about parts being separated, and bringing them back together. Under it is the construct of the soul.”

He knelt at the center of the room, and was rewarded by the symbol he was looking for. He brushed his hand over it, feeling the raised edges around it. “This one is the whole.” He waved Jinan over. “Wait here.”

“The soul?” Sita asked.

Once Vahn saw the path, it was easy to follow. “The soul wasn’t a single thing to the ancients. It had parts.” He found a second panel on the opposite wall. “This one is self. Suad?”

They approached, wary but grudgingly willing. “Is there more?”

“One more.” 

Vahn crossed the room to the panel that Rashad had originally found. With the flames illuminating it at the right angle, it was exactly as it had been before.

“What’s that?” Suad asked.

Vahn smiled to himself. He remembered the light slanting through the windows and how the shadows darkened the annoyed knit of Kanna’s brow. “She couldn’t really figure out what to call it.” He tilted his head to the side, studying the lines. “I guess ‘gift’ is pretty close. But…”

“What would you call it?” Sita prompted. 

Vahn had almost forgotten she was there. “Instinct might be closer.”

🎵 A Shell In The Pit's Rings in Rings in Rings

Thoughts:

This week I managed to be more productive than I have been in recent times, finishing a full chapter. It's only about 3k, but that's a good bit for me since I fell out of my regular daily writing habit last year. It felt really good to write, even if it wasn't my favorite scene and once again suffered from "why do I have so many characters doing so many things always all the time."

It did give me a bit of hope, though. I'm aiming now to try and finish a chapter a week. It might be a bit lofty in my current state, but I want to re-establish a writing routine again. I've missed it, and I need it.

Tinder Saint has been going a bit... oddly, in comparison to my usual way of going about things. Because I had been feeling so low about my writing, I had spent months spinning my wheels and getting nowhere, until I decided "fuck it" and just. Banged out an entire scene draft for the whole story in a few days. But when I did that, it helped me to see things much clearer, and I was able to get excited about the project again. I always avoided doing this because I thought it ruined part of the fun/spontaneity of writing, but it... didn't do that for me. I know what is going on and what happens, and now I can't wait to make it pretty and make it hurt.

Thank you for the ask!!

☀️ current word count: Tinder Saint is currently at 16k... which still puts it in my personal "idk what I'm doing yet" phase 😭 It is meant to be more novella length, I'm ballparking it'll end up around 35k, so maybe I'm further along than I think....

🤔 inspiration behind my WIP: I wanted to explore what made this particular character (Vahn) who he is, how he became a Saint, and also show what that even means in a greater context in the world. It's got flavours of The Labours of Herakles and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. When I was fumbling a bit with my themes and solidifying what I wanted, I found inspiration in this web weave , Dark Alley from @smallgodseries , and this poem excerpt :

tagged by @authoralexharvey for this one!

I managed to get a little bit done with some early morning writing, oddly. Might try to get up early again and see if it works! But here's some of TS's latest that I've managed

Vahn had a basic knowledge of how the Ilazkin structure worked, but the only person he knew that could actually read this stuff was Kanna. He had spent many days half napping in the slanted light from the library window as Kanna bent over dusty tomes of scrawls, forced by Velinius to massage the conceptual language into something that she could read. 

He searched the walls, the ceiling and floor, trying to sort the symbols and loops he recognized, but there was something off. A single page of an Ilazkin text could contain entire histories folded into one another. The first thing to find was the edges of the story and the shape of it. But the flickering flames held aloft in the dark cast shadows against the grey stone walls, distorting the lines, and Vahn couldn’t figure out what they were meant to contain. 

I want to scream from the rafters about it but I pushed hard through the ending the last two days and my brain is wiped.

However I WILL likely be dropping content and tag games and yelling about it in the coming weeks as I do my first read through and bask.