This week is the final week, I’ve decided, that I will battle the WordPress platform blog architecture. I’ve given it a month and I’m too old to want to spend more time on trying fruitlessly to get what I want.
I’m still having difficulty trying to put easy things in place. On this platform I have so far not been able to hyperlink either between different posts on the home page or, more importantly, between pages. OK, yes, I’m giving myself five more days to get positive outcomes in that problem.
My second problem I suspect will be due to my own too high expectations. Perhaps a blog is not the right sort of platform to serialize story-instalments set in a fictional world … that of the Eleven Islands; write about the process of worldbuilding involved; and to promote novels and other published material set in that world.
The various aspects of the blog are not melded yet
There is all sorts of good advice out there about not writing in strange dialects that I can quote you page and paragraph. But hey, it’s OK to experiment. This is the beginning of a short story. Does it work for you?
Scrim ate the rest of the day’s gleanings standing by the window of his high-up. Blue sky beyond with birds so free as Scrim and every other inside the hell was not. This morning he’d stole a pair of pigeon eggs and gulped them raw at the scene. He couldn’t be found with them on him. Later he found a crust, the whole top of a loaf of bread. What kind of fool drops that?
Yesterday, when I signed up for another project with an original user name — Arit Reede — I remembered a free-floating, nameless character I’d once invented for an anthology, and how this made-up name would suit her very well.
She was the carbon-knitter companion of a medic at a time when almost all the useful extras of modern life had for one or another reason disappeared. With my next thought, I wondered how to get her and her partner into The Eleven Islands scenario, given that the events for which she was invented, took place in the UK a hundred years from now.
With a certain amount of clandestine shipping still happening, that shouldn’t be too hard. Arit and Hellion like to be constantly on the move. They’ll be able to show us the islands from the point of view of a pair of foreign travelers. Future backpackers if you like, working their way round The Eleven Islands.
Despite the recommendation of ~NO TRAVEL~ to The Eleven Islands, the ship’s boat landed Arit and Hellion at the Southern Ocean end of the Red Sand Channel.
The Red Sand Channel where Arit and Hellion landed
The bosun at the tiller pointed to the island to the west. “Bight, the Isle of Wizards. The wizards leave neither flesh nor bones to be healed when they take their prey.” He changed hands to keep command over the tiller.
Pointed eastward. “Souzadelay. In the north of the island are four city states strung along the coast. A feudal overlord keeps three of them honest. The east south and west are agricultural lands in part, with fortified villages, and of course the delta. People trying to live peacefully. The Clay Faces rove and maraud. They enslave whoever they find on the road or out of their proper encampments.”
Go to my The Eleven Islands page above to read more …
Rita de Heer 