A small, silent and mutual regard teased out between the two of them then, but it twisted upon itself and became uncomfortable. Caewen felt self-conscious. She looked away, down at her feet, at the wet, dewy grass and the places where the night’s spiderwebs lay like jewelled nets over it. When she had gathered her…
Category: Writing
Illustration 14 (updates Thursdays)
Just a monochromatic watercolour pencil sketch today.
Fair Upon the Tor #25 (updates Mondays)
“In what way are you evil?” she said, putting playfulness into her tone. “Do not ask questions that will lead to unpleasant answers,” said Samarkarantha. “One way that we restrain the demons of the heart is to play our own little mind games, ignore the tempting voices, pretend the words are weak, or bare whispers…
A Dragon Made of Madman
So a friend of mine has taken a bunch of my novels (published and unpublished) and trained a neural network on them to see what it would turn out. The results vary from incomprehensible word salad to quite a decent parody of me, to (sometimes) quite lovely leaps of phrase. Here’s some selections. The soldiers…
Fair Upon the Tor #24 (updates Mondays)
Caewen slept late, awaking groggy, unsure, and squinting against the light. The morning sun suffused the roof of the tent, setting the ivory and off-red fabric alight, like stripes of white and red forge metal, glowing. Her eyes felt gritty with sleep. She yawned as she got to her elbows, looking around. Everyone else had…
Illustration 013 (updates Thursdays)
Just a sketch from the sketchbook today. Although this sketch predates the Clay-o-the-Green books, this is somewhat close to how I imagine the white writhen that come into the story in A Charm for the Nameless Child (book 4, work in progress).
Fair Upon the Tor #23 (updates Mondays)
The lightning that broke the grey sky was more of a dead yellow than silver. Each brilliance cracked and flickered further off, sneaking away behind ridges of hilltops as the storm passed into the westward and south. The rain that had poured for several hours diminished, faltered and ceased. Yet, for a long while afterwards,…
Fair Upon the Tor #22 (updates Mondays)
“Wise words from savage mouths,” said Pel, softly. She eased up with the roughness of her fingertips. The rain threshed over the tent roof. The cooling embers gave away a little more of their ruddy light and deep soft shadows grew. “I was a happy child. My home is away in the east, past the…
Illustration 012 (updates Thursdays) (kinda)
Just another sketch from the sketchbook this week. Apologies for the lateness too. The newborn, just four weeks old today, and some visiting family have been occupying time. This is my ‘faces in rocks’ page of sketches, which was a companion to the ‘faces in trees’ I posted earlier. Both sets of sketches were intended to…
Fair Upon the Tor #21 (updates Mondays)
It was difficult to find a mental path back to her cosy sphere of relaxation, with the biloko standing there, hissing their small sad noises. She supposed that she could have told them to be quiet, and maybe they would even have obeyed her, but the thought of giving them commands made her feel damp…