Friday Snippet - Steampunk Short

And it's Friday again!  Here's a snippet from something I'm working on. 

First draft.  Please don't copy or re-post.

Mary is aboard a steamboat.  In this world, people use dragonets to create steampower.  This snippet is related to the one from last Friday.


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A rowboat carrying three people angled toward the Celeste from the east bank.  As she watched, someone held up a sign and started shouting.  She could make out the words, Save the Dragons!, on the sign.  Mary held her breath as the steamboat rolled on, causing the small rowboat to tip dangerously in its wash.

“Fools,” she heard behind her, and turned to see Court standing nearby.  He glanced at her.  “Do they think the dragonets stand a chance in the wild, what with the direhawks from England taking over the wilderness cliffs where they breed?  There are fewer wild dragonets every year.  Letting Thia and Thalia go would be like giving them a death sentence.”

“Thia and Thalia?”

Court gave her a speculative look, then said, “Would you like to see?”

He led her down to the hurricane deck and amidships, where he opened a door into the interior of the steamship.  The engine room was noisy, and they had to nearly shout at each other to be heard.  The big walking beam engine dominated the space.  He led her to a quieter room, with glass observation windows. 

Mary looked through the windows and saw another man with a wizard’s mark standing in a room that contained two large boilers.  Two dragonets the size of small dogs zipped around the space and danced around the man like an orchestrated dance troupe. 

Friday Snippet

Hi.  Another post within a week.  Wonder what's got into me?


This is a snippet from a piece of short fiction I've written.  I like the character, and want to write more stories about her.

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    Her trunk loaded first.  A longshoreman shouldered the modest trunk and carried it into the steamboat.  Another tried to take the leather case her trug held.  The trug, in its lumpish simplicity, held on.  Mary Penney, alarmed, waved off the longshoreman and took the heavy leather case into her arms.

   “Watch out for that.  It’s precious cargo,” Mary told the stevedore.

   The stevedore nodded, and himself accepted the leather case.

  “Cabin, miss?” he inquired.

  “Please,” Mary said.

  She turned to her trug and pressed a molasses chew in its hand.  “Go back to the shop now, Arnie.  Do you understand?  Back to the shop.”

  Mary repeated her instructions emphatically and firmly until the trug turned and shuffled away in the right direction, pulling the wheeled flat cart she had harnessed to it to convey her trunk to the wharf.  The cart bounced and clattered on the cobblestones.  She watched for a moment, concerned that Arnie would follow her order, then turned back to the gangplank.  A woman standing nearby had the beginnings of a sneer on her face when she caught Mary’s glacial expression and found somewhere else to look.

   If I want to name my trug, what business is that of anyone else?

   Irritated, Mary turned her attention to the steamboat Celeste tied at the Memphis wharf.  The forty foot sternwheeler nudged the pilings, causing a gentle shudder through the wood under her feet.  Clutching her precious carpetbag, she navigated the short distance from wharf to steamboat, steadied by a helpful hand.  Mary turned to thank the owner of the helpful hand, a man not much older or taller than herself, dressed in trousers and a chambray shirt, and bearing the black and silver of a wizard’s mark on his right collarbone.

He grimaced when he saw her gaze linger on the mark.

   “Follows me around wherever I go,” he quipped.

   A smile tugged at her mouth.  “Rather, it proceeds you, I should say.”

   “Clever,” he said, and extended his hand.  “Bartholomew Courtney.  My friends, few though they be, call me Court.  When they are feeling particularly light-hearted, they call me Conjuring Court.”

   She shifted the carpetbag to her left and shook his hand.  He had a firm grip, which she liked.  “Mary Penney.  I, too, know the eponymous danger surrounding one’s profession.  I’m known as Mechanical Mary on the streets of Memphis.”  She shifted the light scarf around her neck, exposing the engineer’s mark, vividly blue against her pale skin.

   His gaze had sharpened on her face.  “To which you’re not native, I’ll be bound.”

   “No.  I’m from Missouri,” she admitted.

   “Since the Celeste is heading for St. Louis, might I conclude that you are going back to Missouri to visit family?”

   “No,” she said shortly.  He looked a little taken aback at her tone, and she forced a smile.  “Strictly business, I’m afraid.”

   Something in her face seemed to warn him, for he said in a light voice, “As a crewmember of this mighty steamboat, please do me the honor of allowing me to show you to your cabin.”

   He extended his left arm, crooked at the elbow, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she placed her hand inside.  No use blaming him for not knowing that I will never willingly see my family again.

Smashwords

I will (or to be more accurate, A Conspiracy of Authors will) be putting some of my stories on Smashwords.  When I have something to link to, I'll put a shortcut here.

I'm excited about it -- about joining ACOA and about finally doing something more with my work!

Still Alive & Kickin'....

Well, alive anyway.  Where does the time go?  I have had the distinct pleasure?! of going through two separate bosses in the past few months.  And, I've been busy in a nearby community church.  That has taken up a good deal of my time.

I'm thinking about posting bits and pieces of story again on Fridays.

So, with that in mind, here we go.

Rough draft, subject to change, please don't repost anywhere.  Thanks!

               Tiffany stared at the computer screen, wishing for a drink, anything to relieve the boredom.  She’d been half-heartedly playing solitaire for the past hour, a Diet Coke she really didn’t even want. 

               Someone stopped by the table where she sat, and she looked up.

                “Oh, it’s you,” she said with less than enthusiasm.

                “I’m glad to see you, too,” Fred Murray said with irony, and sat down in a nearby empty chair.

                “Adam isn’t here,” she muttered, and went back to playing solitaire.

                “That’s good, because I didn’t come here to see Adam, I came to see you,” Fred said.

                She stared at his thin, clever face, not handsome, but interesting, nonetheless.  “Why?”

                “Good question, if this is the greeting I get,” Fred said.

                “I’m surprised you’re chatting up your friend’s fiancé,” Tiffany said with irony of her own.   “Isn’t that against your code or something?”

                “Give it a rest, Tiffany.”

                “Give what a rest?”

                “You know as well as I do that you and Adam are not engaged, nor are you likely to be,” Fred said. 

                “You don’t know anything about it!” she said, voice shrill.

                “Are you telling me there is an understanding between you and Adam?”

                “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Tiffany jibed.

                “Perhaps I will.”  He leaned back in his chair until it creaked, watching her broodingly.  “I’m not sure what your game is.  I suspect in your mind, you think you’re making Lorrie pay for something.”

                He was so uncannily near the mark that she gave him a quick sideways glance.  She opened her mouth to deny it, but he shook his head at her.

                “Don’t bother.  I wasn’t born yesterday.  What I want to know is, why are you trying to hang onto someone who doesn’t know you’re alive?”

                His words were like a shock of cold water.  To her horror, she felt tears well up in her eyes.  She turned her head away.

                “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he said.  “I just wanted you to realize what you’re doing.  There are others who do know you exist.”

                “Like you?” she said viciously.  “Don’t make me laugh.”

                “Like me,” he said in an even voice. “It’s time you started living in reality, instead of in this fantasy you’ve created for yourself where the whole world revolves around Tiffany James and you have to punish those that don’t buy into the fantasy.”

                “Get out!” she spat at him.  “I hate you!  If you were the last man—“

                “Don’t say something you might regret,” he interrupted her, and stood up.  “When you’re ready to talk to me like an adult instead of a spoiled baby, give me a call.”

                He tossed a business card on the table in front of her.  She picked it up, tore it in two, and threw the pieces at him.

                Fred’s lips tightened, but he said nothing, only spun on his heel and left the room.  Tiffany glared at the door, her teeth clenched, too worked-up to even say all the things that trembled on the end of her tongue.  No one had dared to speak to her like that for years!  If he showed up again, she would blast him with some home truths herself.  He wasn’t even good-looking! 

                Tiffany got out of her chair and picked up the pieces of the card she had flung at him, intending to throw them in the garbage.  And yet, something inside her remembered the look in his eyes as he’d turned to leave.  No man had ever looked at her like that before. 

                She put the pieces of the card in her pocket.

Finally, after three long years, enlightenment....

I have myofascial pain syndrome.  It's a syndrome where your muscles knot up at night when you're sleeping.  The knotted muscles squeeze your nerve endings (simplified explanation) causing pain.  It can be triggered by an accident --- I was involved in a car accident in early 2010.  All this time, I thought it was swelling lymph nodes.  Go figure.

Just knowing what it is removes much of the mystery, and --- much of the fear.  It's usually not permanent, though it can last for years.  I'm a good example of that.  The doctor who finally diagnosed me is a rheumatologist.  He said the two main ways to combat the symptoms is to take a round of ibuprofen (which I had been doing, but only when it got so bad I couldn't stand it), and muscle relaxers.

After two weeks of muscle relaxers, I feel better than I have for a long time.  So good, in fact, that I'm not even taking the muscle relaxers at this present time.  I'm working up to exercising every day instead of just every other day, like before.  I can do things I haven't been able to do, and still sleep at night.  I thank God for this every day.

My vitamin D was something like 13 points when it should have been 30 or higher.  I'm also on a round of 50,000 units of D a week for two months.  Since taking a month of it, my carpal tunnel (which was really De Quervain's) has nearly disappeared.

I've even been writing a little, and it's not the slogging chore it's been in the past couple of years.

Whee!

Why do I feel like I have a big target painted on me....?

Carpal tunnel.  I can't believe it.  I go from slowly getting better from my IBS and lymph node swelling and go right to carpal tunnel.  Sometimes I feel like I can't catch a break.  Then I remember about all the people in the Boston bombing and the Moore, OK tornado and think, get over yourself.  There's lots of people who have it worse than you.

So I'll post a spring-like picture that fills me with hope that things will improve.

October is a Glorious Month!

The trees are absolutely fabulous this year!  October seems to distill every good thought and feeling into an elixir that it pumps back into the air, making the leaves more brilliant and the sky more blue.  And that's my homage to Ray Bradbury.

I'm working on a short story in amongst finishing the novel.  Here's a short snippet of that---a little late for Friday, but better late than never.

First draft, please don't quote or repost without permission.  Thanks!

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               The moon hovered, just above the left tower of Dragonkeep, just in the right spot.  Tia shifted her weight  as she sat on the stone wall that surrounded the church, waiting for the dragon to make his nightly flight.  The moon seemed to balance on the tower’s zenith, then broke away to ride the night sky, free and solitary.

                Tia frowned.  She waited until the moon had risen another handspan before she climbed down from the wall, a sense of foreboding descending on her.  Every night for the past ten years, she had sat upon the wall and watched the dragon rise with the moon.  Even at moon-dark, she could see his shape, a darker black against the night sky, hear the snap of his wings.  He had never failed her.  Until tonight.

                She slid back to her pallet at the rectory, disturbed.   The other acolytes slumbered on, used to her coming and going.  Only Alli stirred when Tia lay down, and whispered sleepily, “You’re back early tonight.”

                Tia grunted in reply, and turned her back to Alli.  Eventually, she heard the other girl’s breathing deepen and slow as she fell asleep again.  An icy dread clutched at Tia’s throat.  Something was wrong with the dragon.