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bedlamsbardWhen you see this, post a little weensy excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.
I'm not even going to bother putting "Old Timber to New Fires" (Caspian in the Golden Age time travel story), "Till Human Voices Wake Us" (the caves of Angrisla massacre), or "Be Like Water" (Petaverse) on here, because the first two have been stalled for a friggin' year now and Water hasn't been touched since I finished the first draft in January. *stares at "Narnia fic" file on comp* The only things going up are anything that I've actively worked on in the past few weeks.
The Coastwise Lights
Over the Hills and Far Away
How High the River Rises
Our Far-Flung Battle Line
the High Reaches fic (early Golden Age, untitled)
the horse-racing fic (early Golden Age, untitled)
Dust in the Air 18
...yeah, I haven't started version 9 of this yet. Sorry!
I'm not even going to bother putting "Old Timber to New Fires" (Caspian in the Golden Age time travel story), "Till Human Voices Wake Us" (the caves of Angrisla massacre), or "Be Like Water" (Petaverse) on here, because the first two have been stalled for a friggin' year now and Water hasn't been touched since I finished the first draft in January. *stares at "Narnia fic" file on comp* The only things going up are anything that I've actively worked on in the past few weeks.
The Coastwise Lights
“She’s dancing naked as a jaybird, sir,” was the petty officer’s answer to his question, and Osumare sighed and shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked up at the crow’s nest on the Rising Sun’s mainmast.
“Of course she is,” he said dryly.
The petty officer, Kaveran Thorne – not one of Osumare’s original crew, but still a good seaman, even if he was using an assumed name, but half the Narnian Navy used assumed names – grinned happily. “Just like she’s been doing every day, sir,” he went on. “Lucky thing we haven’t had any kind of rough weather yet; I’d hate to be the one to tell her she has to go up with a safety line.”
“Everyone goes up with a safety line in rough weather,” Osumare pointed out. “And everyone with her kind of inexperience should be going up with a safety line no matter if it’s clear as Tethys’s bathtub.”
Thorne shrugged matter-of-factly. “I’m not going to be the one who tells a queen of Narnia what to do, Admiral, begging your pardon.”
“No, the High King has left that unenviable task up to me,” Osumare said, and sighed.
Over the Hills and Far Away
“Run away from home,” said Kerewyn Wildblood, stamping the Royal Narnian Army’s seal onto the bottom of one dispatch after another, “come to Cair Paravel, join the army, and what do I get? Acres and acres of paperwork. I could have stayed at school if I wanted this lot.”
Commander Fiorenza Paolucci, of His Majesty the High King Peter’s Royal Narnian Army, didn’t bother asking where home happened to be; somewhere around a third of all enlistees in the Narnian Army used false names, and while the recruitment office didn’t ask or distinguish, Fiorenza was virtually certain that Kerewyn was one of that thirty percent. Her accent made her Narnian rather than foreign – somewhere around half of the army came from outside Narnia – although the mention of formal schooling somewhat limited where in the country she was from. She looked human, at least, though with a slightly greenish cast to her skin and long fingers that almost looked webbed in the right light, though Fiorenza had gotten close enough to see that what looked like webbing wasn’t actually so. Nix or finfolk blood, maybe; there were certainly enough of those floating around the eastern seaboard.
How High the River Rises
She tilts her head up to look Duke Rumon in the eye. “How much is Lune offering for me?” she asks.
“Enough,” he scowls. “And don’t try and tell me your brother can pay more; everybody from Harfang to Tashbaan knows that Narnia doesn’t have so much as a copper star in its treasuries.”
Lie: the discovery of the salt mines in the High Reaches and the silver veins in the Southern Marches has saved Narnia from bankruptcy; they’re already eighteen thousand suns in debt to the Emerald Bank of Terebinthia, but they’re paying it back fast, and Lucy, with the gleeful suspicion that there are even more secrets that Narnia’s hiding beneath her skirts, has been on a wild rampage back and forth across the country for months now.
“I didn’t say that,” Susan says. “I was just wondering if whatever it is Lune’s giving you for me is worth what you’re going to lose.”
“And what’s that?”
“Your land,” she says, “and everything you hold dear, and just possibly your life if you give me enough reason.”
Rumon leans forward to whisper in her ear. “Your brother isn’t going to make it here in time to save you.”
Susan smiles. “Who says I was talking about my brother?”
Our Far-Flung Battle Line
M had said there would be a plane waiting for him, and sure enough, there’s a de Havilland Mosquito sitting on the tarmac. James strolls up to it, the weight of the pack of papers in his breast pocket a steady pressure against his chest, and sees the pilot sitting in the cockpit, his helmet sitting on the control panel while he reads a battered copy of The Odyssey. He doesn’t look up as James approaches, and James raps on the side of the plane to get his attention.
The pilot puts the book aside and leans down out of the plane. “What’s the color of the day?” he asks.
“The color of the day is scarlet,” James says. “What’s the weather like?”
“Cloudy with a chance of rain,” the pilot replies easily, and passes down an extra set of harness that James puts on before he clambers up into the plane and straps himself into the navigator’s seat.
The pilot has soft blond hair and full lips; his face is young but his eyes are old. There are too many men like that now, after the War; for a moment James wonders what it was that this pilot saw, then the feeling passes. It’s all more of the same, after all.
the High Reaches fic (early Golden Age, untitled)
The High Reaches of Narnia are stark and cold, miles of empty moor stretching out in all directions. Down in the heart of Narnia, among her rolling hills and cool green forests, it's easy to forget that there's more than the lowlands to the country. But this is Narnia too, just as much as the Shuddering Wood or Glasswater or Lantern Waste; the High Reaches, with scantier resources than the rest of Narnia, took the Long Winter harder than most, and they sent as many soldiers to join Aslan's army against the White Witch as any territory in the lowlands, and more than most.
Peter turns his face up to the sky, feeling the wind play cold across his face. It feels like winter up here; it's hard to believe that it's still summer down in the lowlands, that the heat hangs heavy and oppressive over Cair Paravel.
He turns to Oreius, who's looking around at the vast expanse of seeming emptiness with the blank expression Peter's learned means he in no way approves. For a moment Peter blinks in surprise; Oreius is a centaur, isn't he? And the bulk of the troops that had come from the High Reaches are centaurs too; most of the rest had been dwarves and a pack of lean, fast wolfhounds. But like most of the Narnians with Peter, Oreius is from the south; there's some kind of rivalry between the north and the south that Peter hasn't quite figured out yet and that he's tried to avoid asking about.
the horse-racing fic (early Golden Age, untitled)
"You want me to do what?" Aihara exclaims. "No! Absolutely not! By no means! No! No! I am a free Narnian citizen and you can't make me do anything of the sort! No, no, and no!"
Lucy holds her hands up placatingly. "I'm not going to make you do anything, Ai. Of course I'm not going to make you do anything, I just thought you'd like to prove that a free Narnian horse is better and faster than a dumb Calormene slave horse. But if you don't think you're up to it --"
Aihara half-rears, her expression completely insulted. "If I think I'm up to it? Your majesty, I know I'm up to it. I can outrun a dumb horse any day of the year and twice on festival days! And I can run a Calormene horse into the ground we all came from and then stomp on its bloody corpse until there's not enough of it left for the gluemakers --"
Dust in the Air 18
...yeah, I haven't started version 9 of this yet. Sorry!
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Date: 2009-07-16 11:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 11:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-17 01:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-07-17 07:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-17 07:48 am (UTC)*searches* Here. Immortal!Susan 'verse was this 'verse where Susan, in regular canon, hit the age she was when she left Narnia and just sort of stayed that way for the next sixty years or so, eventually becoming an American FBI agent, and then the descendants of the Telmarines who left Narnia during PC bring Peter back from the dead and Susan has to go rescue him. There is some fighting and some trauma, and eventually Peter also becomes an FBI agent. Then there is a Batman crossover.
Oh! Here we go. (This is the Batman crossover, but I think there are explanatory links.)
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Date: 2009-07-17 11:40 am (UTC)Like... highlander!immortals. 'Cause I think she'd get on very well with Amanda.
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Date: 2009-07-17 06:42 pm (UTC)