...to reach And yet, there is only One great thing, The only thing: To live to see in huts and on journeys The great day that dawns And the little light that fills the world. One of the characters for SORROW'S KNOT is a storyteller.  He comes from a slightly different background than the other characters, and his view on the ever-present threat of the restless dead is different too.  I have been thinking...

Today in SORROW'S KNOT, I got my hero Otter to take temporary leave of her friend and head down the side of a mountain to The Next Place Where The Plot Needs Her To Be.  It's only a short scene -- maybe a thousand words -- but it's a lovely one:  effortless and delicate writing, a moment of decision which arises suddenly and believably from the hidden depths of Otter's heart.  I mention this in case...

Here's something I wrote this week.  Enjoy! Otter woke to them: a pair of dark things the size of crows, moving with stiff slowness, pushing close against the loose ward. Otter blinked twice and yawned...story – do you know it? – about the lost woman who was starving, and wished that everything she touched would turn to meat? And then she found her children ...." Hoping to hit 30,000 words this week.

Here's a smidge -- I hesitate to call it a cookie -- from Part Two of my work in progress, SORROW'S KNOT.   Otter, our young hero, comes from a culture where the dead are tied high in trees -- and where the return of the dead as hungry ghosts is a real danger.  Otter's mother's name is Willow.  Otter dreamt of a cord tied around a birch tree – a ward fragment, except that it ancient. The tree had...