After this, I'll be doing nothing but new text. The word counts will be a tad wonky as I'm working with about 5,700 words of embedded outline and text fragments. (Ie, the length of the readable draft right now is 58,200 words, the balance being the material ahead.) But still, I should be pulling a good, solid 2,500+ words a day going forward.
Since I'm back to new production, a WIP:
Imagine a cult dwelling at the edge of the desert. Mad-eyed prophets spring from the sere, heat-raddled ground like onions in a swamp, to wander goggling into the well-watered shade of civilization where they declaim their revelations found written on the underside of a locust wing or inscribed on a fossilized plastron which was later stolen away by a fire-winged angel with seven breasts. Somewhere on the boundary between sunlight and sanity is a fertile breeding ground for such men - and they are almost always men, even the feyest of women having better sense than to trek naked for months across the ground glass sand of such places - for such men and their divine ideation.
Still, even amid dross may gold be found, and a pile of straw may yet beget a stand of wheat. And when the very land beneath the bunioned feet of these prophets contains a sleeping secret larger than most countries, a very mountain dreaming great, slow, tectonic dreams of water and time's inexorable decay, some souls are bound to stumble upon truth.
| Originally published at jlake.com. |