#witchnovel

I’ve been gone for so long, writing and finishing school and procrastinating. I’ve been thinking about coming back to this blog as a a way to look back on my journey with this novel I’m in the middle of.

So here we go!

Here’s some fun facts about this project:

- It started off as two independent wip projects that I’d had on the back burner for the last three-ish years until I decided to smash together this past summer.

- This was my #NaNoWriMo17 novel.

- This project started my caffeine addiction, no shame.

- It’s an #OwnVoices project about demons, witches, and Portland.

In a flash I was overwhelmed by images, feelings, memories.  Every witch who had been executed for witchcraft I felt their deaths.  Every non-witch executed, I felt their deaths.  Every great spell cast, I cast.  Every revolutionary potion, I brewed.  It seemed to go on and on.  The history of witches and witchcraft in… I didn’t know.  How much time had passed?

And still the images flashed by.  Until suddenly they didn’t.  It was like a sky clearing after a storm,  the realization sinking in.  I tested my theory.  And felt the horror sink in.

When I reemerged I caught a bit of the chanting, it wasn’t much but it was enough.  Preparations had begun.  They were starting on the convocation brew.  Something I would not have to drink for another four years.  I understood why my mother had been so insistent on her two friends creating the correct angles.  I was about to leave the kitchen and return to my room when my mother turned from the stove.  Her long black hair was frizzy, even tied back with a scarf.

“We need to talk Sable,” she said, pushing a wild strand of hair out of her face.

I knew it was serious, she only used my first name when things were serious.  I tried to meet her green eyes but they were very studiously examining the worn wooden table in the middle of the kitchen.

          Walking into the kitchen was like walking into a Finnish sauna, minus the cedar benches plus the pungent smell of newt liver.  Altogether not the way I intended to start my morning.  I could make out my mother and her two friends huddled around the stove, jointly stirring a bubbling pot.

         “Budge a bit to the right Artemis,” my mother said.  She was standing in the middle and the woman to her right leaned as far that direction as she could without crawling onto the counter-top.  The other woman, seemed to know without speaking that she had to move to the left more and so, she too, awkwardly forced her torso away from her legs.