Progress on the rewrite of my novel (revised and expanded from my short story “The Hiker’s Tale”) continues apace; ordinarily I would post something like this on my LiveJournal but that forum continues not to function, so, I share here. Today I actually reached the point I had hoped to reach this past Sunday night had much adult world travails not gotten in the way during last week’s vacation. And this is where that puts me word count-wise:

91547 / 110000
(83.22%)

This is a pretty intense part of the book. Here’s a segment I’ll share for a taste:

These are the things I saw, lying on the cold stone floor. A single long room lit by electric lights strung from the ceiling, all the wires visible. A low table of what looked like stone, the first of several in a row, on which someone lay chained, though it seemed like overkill, because his legs were missing from below the knees and his arms were missing past the elbows. The sobs I heard were coming from the figure on the table. “I’m sorry,” I heard again.

I saw that every tile in the floor, every block in the wall, had an inscription on it. A name, and a date of birth, and a date of death. Some of them had epitaphs. Every single one was a gravestone. The letters in the stone beside my head — “Her father’s joy and the comfort of his last years” — were spattered by and filling with my blood.

A bad day, yes.

Posted in Fiction, Novels, Writing