“I am. I want to know. Everything. I want to remember what I left behind. The nightmares haunt me, even without my full memories. I can’t escape them by running. I think it’s time to see if there is enough love I’ve forgotten to outweigh the hate I might find.”
—Stephania (Heir of Two Kingdoms)
Today marks the end of the second week of the July Camp of NaNoWriMo!
Here's what my stats page looks like!
I wrote about 8,000 words in one week. It wasn't as much as I wanted to but it's been a long week and I hit a rut of depression somewhere in there and didn't do much more than eat Fudge Stripes and read. Which I'm not complaining too much about! It gave me the chance to read the Hunger Games Trilogy and Graceling which is a new favorite of mine! And as all good authors know, reading is vital to writing.
Even so, I'm still right on track for the 50k goal. Tomorrow, the 15th, is the middle of the month and I'm already over 25k words. According to the average number of words a day I write, NaNoWriMo's stats say I should be finished July 26th! I'm shooting for it, though I don't know if I'll make it or not. Fingers crossed.
Heir of Two Kingdoms now has 54,795 words rewritten!!
I'm making steady progress with it and am thrilled that I'm nearly halfway to my goal of 120,000 words total. It's definitely gonna be a much bigger book than Child of the Dragon Prophecy, that's for sure, but it's only to give the story the justice it deserves.
As promised, here is an expert from what I wrote this past week!
NO SPOILERS!
“I want them back.” She was surprised at her own voice, ringing through the trees, but it brought a certain peace to her.
“Are you sure?”
She met his gaze and nodded. “I am. I want to know. Everything. I want to remember what I left behind. The nightmares haunt me, even without my full memories. I can’t escape them by running. I think it’s time to see if there is enough love I’ve forgotten to outweigh the hate I might find.”
A poorly restrained grin spread across his face as he squeezed her hands. “Then let us continue, together.”
She took a deep breath and tried to smile back. “Okay.”
His hands slid over the vines, his blue markings glowing with a light that traveled from his heart to his hands and then into the vines. They rustled as if breathing before they parted, opening to a tunnel.
Fearlessly, Trojan stepped in, Stephania just to his side, her hand clenched tight in his.
With one step, she found herself in an entirely different world. The walls of vines and flowers she had spied from the forest looking in were no longer there. Replacing them shone thousands of stars and galaxies. She could see creatures moving around her, melding into the stars, and shaping themselves into images. She could see into the future where she saw herself astride a black dragon soaring over the Dragon Palace, the now, as if she were looking into a mirror as they walked through the tunnel, and years untold into the past with a young boy who looked strikingly like Thaddeus with another boy of black hair and blue eyes playing with him, of a beaten man and his dragon being bled out as a crowd cheered for death, of the waters rising and crashing over an empire of dragons and riders as they fled through a portal, and many more things she couldn’t begin to understand. Ten or twenty huge monsters dominated the images around her and every step they took either caused mountains to spring up, along with forests, plains, deserts, lakes and rivers, or they caused what already existed to morph, break, bend, and change into something else.
Slower and slower she walked, as if the tunnel had stretched to a mile and she was too tired to continue. Her hand reached out to the abyss beside her, and she wondered if she stepped out if she wouldn’t see infinity and be lost in its mysteries forever.
Something gripped her other hand tighter and pulled her roughly toward a bright light ahead of her and abruptly the tunnel was gone and she was standing in a large room.
For a few long minutes, she could do nothing save blink at her surroundings, trying to see what was around her, but failing, as if what she was seeing was too bland or common to hold her attention after what she had just witnessed.
Finally, she registered that it had been Trojan’s hand that had pulled her out of the tunnel. She started as his dark, tanned skin and slowly looked up his arm, to his face, and then lastly to his eyes. She could see the infinity hanging in them as if everything she had seen had been trapped in the sparkling blue of his eyes.
*All pictures used in the mood board are not mine. I found them on Pinterest.*
I'll be giving my favorite quote and excerpt from each week's work in my updates so don't forget to become a site member to get alerts about new posts!
Thanks for reading and may the suns smile upon your presence.
—Effie Joe Stock
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