A Snip Of Upcoming Work

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Some very nice people have sent me guest posts, but since today is my double-blog day it didn’t feel right.  OTOH I’m so exhausted I’m not even going to try publishing work tonight.  I slept about 5 hours last night.  So, instead, I’m fobbing you off with the new opening of Noah’s Boy.*

Chapter One

 

The sun was setting in a splendor of red and gold over the Rocky Mountains, glistening like a fire over the remaining snow on the mountain tops when the young woman drove into Goldport in a brand new red pickup truck.

No one watching would have been particularly struck by her or by the pick up truck.

Nestled against the peaks of the Rockies, Goldport had once been a settlement of miners and frontiersmen and it was now a city of students and computer technicians, with a Victorian core forming the center of a town that was gentrifying and growing, acquiring a few spectacular glass-fronted highrises and a vibrant art and tourism scene.

In that environment, a college-age woman driving a four wheel vehicle was the most common of sights.  That she was Asian or partly Asian would startle no one since Golport was host to a vibrant Asian community.  And no one would have thought anything was particularly strange when she parked outside a low slung building atop of which a neon sign blinked the words Three Luck Dragon.

Someone might have thought it a little odd, though, when she entered the shiny red lacquered door  and a hand reached out to the window and turned the Open sign to Closed, right at the beginning of the dinner hour.

* * *

Beatrice Bao Ryu, better known to her friends as Bea Ryu, didn’t find it funny, when they closed the restaurant as she came in.  She found it distinctly unsettling.  But she managed a small smile, striking a pose of nonchalance as she said, “I don’t actually intend to shift and start a battle with Himself in here, you know?”  Her warm GeorRya accent drawled out onto what seemed for a moment to be the uncomprehending server – a skinny young man with Asian features.  But he bowed to her, looking scared.  “No,” he said.  His accent less obvious but no more Asian.  But he didn’t flip the sign to Open again.  Instead, he led her to a door next to the one marked “restrooms” and  knocked politely, then said something in rapid-fire Chinese.

Bea didn’t understand it.  Her maternal grandmother was Chinese, but her maternal grandfather was tall, blond and of Germanic ancestry.  As for Bea’s father, he was the great-grandson of Japanese immigrants to the United States.  Bea’s parents spoke English and their daughter had never learned either Chinese or Japanese till college, where she’d taken two years of Japanese – which meant she could catch the occasional word and say almost nothing.

A curt Chinese word answered from inside the mysterious door.  The server opened the door and remained bowed while Bea went in.

If she’d thought about it, and she’d never done so in so many words, she’d have expected the room into which she was ushered to be a sort of throne room, perhaps with some ancient gilded chair in the center.

That would have fit with what she’d read in the letters in her father’s desk drawer.

Whatever this criminal organization was, it dressed its leader in very pretty words: “Himself”, “Revered One.”  “Ancient One.”

Instead, the room she entered was small – only big enough to contain a desk-like table and two chairs, one on either side of it.  It might have been an interrogation cell, except that the person on the other side of the table had a Ryant metal bowl in front of him into which he was shelling peas.  With a pile of unshelled peas to the right of the bowl, and a pile of shells to the left, the sleeves of his white button-down rolled up to his elbows, and his hands working busily at the homely task, the man could have been any of a hundred middle-aged Chinese employees at a hundred different Chinese restaurants.

Bea cleared her throat.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “I think I’ve come to the wrong room.  You see, I was came to talk to The Ancient On—”

The man looked up and Bea took a step back and caught her breath, not scared exactly but startled, because the eyes were older than the middle-aged face.  They were older than any face.  Looking out of barely creased features, they appeared old as time and twice as deep, as though he’d existed through the uncounted ages of mankind and kept track of every slip, every error humans had made on the way to civilization.

“Oh,” Bea said.

The man said three brief words in Chinese and then his eyes widened, as though in shock.  He closed his eyes a moment.  “You don’t speak Chinese.”  It wasn’t a question.  He raised an eyebrow.  “Japanese, then?”

She cleared her throat.  “I–  No.  You see, I took a year in college, but—”

He shrugged, dismissing the matter.  “It’s of little importance,” he said.  “Our people have spoken many tongues, throughout the centuries.  What we speak doesn’t matter, except for comfort and a sense of heritage.”  His own English was almost unaccented, save for a faint hint of something British and very high bred.  “What I need from you requires no great linguistic competency.”

Bea swallowed hard.  She’d rehearsed this, all the long drive from Atlanta, and the nights in motel rooms, but somehow, suddenly it seemed very hard to say the words she’d planned.  It was the look of immense age in the man’s eyes, she thought.  But she swallowed again and said, her voice sounding strangely wavering in her own ears, “I don’t care what you require from me.  I came to tell you to leave my parents alone–  To leave dad’s business alone.”

The man looked up and frowned a little.  His hands resumed his work of shelling peas.  “Your parents,” he said at last.  “Finally saw the light and sent you over.  Now they have nothing more to fear from my people.”

She shook her head.  “My parents did not send me over.  Not that it matters.  I have no intention of doing whatever you want me to do.  And why you think—”

“Sit down,” the man said, gently.

Bea shook her head.  Those soft words had sounded like an order, but she had no intention of obeying.  In fact, despite all her best intentions and everything she’d intended to tell this creature about himself and his criminal organization, face to face with him, she found the best she could do was disobey.  Just – disobey and hold on to her rebellion with every fiber in her being, even as she felt him trying to bend her to his will.

He raised his eyebrows at her.  “Surely,” he said.  “Your parents have told you what you owe me.”

“No,” she said.  “Owe you?  I don’t even know who you are except someone who has been messing with dad’s business.”

“Truly?  Then you don’t know we’re an organization of dragon shape shifters?”

“Sure,” she said.  “I know that.  But the only reason I even knew you existed and that you wanted something with me was that I overheard mom and dad talking.  I found out you were the reason dad’s office got vandalized and about the calls to his clients.  The reason dad has had so much trouble keeping afloat as a veterinarian.  And that to make it stop you wanted me to come and…  And do something.  I wasn’t sure what.”

“I see.  Well, you came.  That’s what matters.”

“I came to tell you it must stop.”

The man looked up at her and smiled.  “Ah.  Spirit will serve you well, but do sit down.  I have a long explanation to make, and I despise having to look up to do it.”

She hesitated, but the truth was she wanted to know why anyone, even a criminal organization of shifters would require her presence urgently enough to interfere with her father’s business to get it.

She knew she was attractive.  She had a mirror.  She knew that the combination of her varied heritage had resulted in an oval face, large green eyes, and a pleasant combination of other features, all of which looked striking with her long, glossy black hair.  Since about the age of sixteen, she’d become used to looks of admiration from the male half of the species.

But the truth was too that she had no illusions about the full extent of her beauty.  She was pretty and striking, but not so out of the normal leagues in attractiveness that dreams of modeling had ever occurred to her.  The campus of the college where she studied art could count at least a hundred women more beautiful than her.

None of her other characteristics were any further out of the ordinary.  She was smart and talented, but was not going to set the world on fire with either her intellect or even with her art talent.  So why would this criminal organization want her that badly?

She knew it had something to do with her turning into a dragon, but it was just now and then.  Occasionally.  Truly, hardly ever, since she’d turned twenty and learned to control herself.

“So?” Bea asked.  “Why is it so important that I come here?  And why do you think I should obey you?  Or that I owe you anything?”

The man smiled.  It was a surprisingly engaging smile.  It seemed to her as he narrowed his eyes that a sense of amusement touched them too.  “I think,” he said, softly.  “That I’m about to shock you very much.  However, I trust you’ll let me explain my motives before dismissing them.”

She swallowed, wondering what he meant by that.

“Forget what I said about owing me.  That was…  You see, where I come from, it is assumed you owe your ancestors unusual respect, and I’m the ancestor of most of the dragon shifters alive today.”

“That is hardly likely,” she said.  “I know all my grandparents, and I—”

“I am not your grandfather.  Not even your great grandfather.  It’s much… older than that.  Thousands of years.   How many, I’m afraid I’ve lost track.

“But that’s imposs—”

“Please, Miss Ryu.”  He paused, his hands holding a pea pod over the bowl, looking at her.  Then he said, “Hear me out.”

It wasn’t a command – or it shouldn’t have been, spoken in that voice as soft as crackling flame.  But she stopped and listened.

His nail ripped the pea pod apart and his finger swept down the green envelope, trickling glistening little globes into the bowl.  “I have…  that is…  I don’t suppose your parents told you that I am your ancestor in—” He seemed to be counting in his head.  “Your mother’s mother’s side and your father’s mother’s side.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.  “My father is Japanese and you—”

“Oh.”  He dropped another spent pea pod on the growing pile and made a gesture, either dismissing that restaurant or the entire world.  “This is an identity of convenience,” he said.  “I told you my people predate most such things.  Dragons—Dragons belong to the whole world, even if our type is mostly of Asia.  There are other types—”

He resumed shelling peas, now very fast, as he spoke.  “It is the immutable rule of our people that the Great Sky Dragon must be a descendant of the previous Great Sky Dragon in the male line.  Unbroken male line.  And that he must be a Dragon shifter. We don’t know why but that’s how… that’s how it works.”  Peas tinkled into the metal bowl like falling rain.  A green smell filled the room.  “That was me, the many times grandson of the Great Sky Dragon, growing up on the banks of the Yalu River at a time when—”  He shrugged.  “It doesn’t matter, except to say that in my very long life, and sometimes I forget how many thousands of years it is, exactly, I’ve had wives, concubines and lovers, but—”  He looked up and smiled at her.  “There is no reason to blush.  In a life as long as mine, well, there will be friendship and love, and, occasionally, less honorable associations.  But what I meant to say is that of all my connections with human and shifter, many daughters were born.  My line is threaded through dragon kind, Ryus and Lungs and many other family names are honorably descended from me.  But in that time, only one son was ever born to me.”  He looked up again, and amusement pulled at the corner of his mouth.  “He was not born of a normal marriage.  It was more… a treaty and a ritual pairing.  Years ago, there was a … another dragon tribe.  Near the frozen… ah… I believe what is now called Scandinavia.  Their ruler was a woman, a female.  She was called the Queen of The West, as I was the King of the East.  We made a treaty, to keep our people from fighting each other, and..  There was a symbolic marriage.  Which resulted in a son, who was not a shifter.  I thought our blood didn’t work together, that we’d never have children who were shifters from that line, so I ignored it.

“Until someone stole the Pearl of Heaven and I found that while I could touch his mind, I could not control him as I could other dragon shifters.  And it wasn’t just because he had dragon-blood from the tribe of the west, for I could sense he had my blood too.  I had people trace back through his ancestry and found that he was descended from that long ago forgotten son.  And he is my only male descendant on the unbroken male line, the only one with a power close to my own.  The only one who can carry my burden.  The one who will carry my burden.”

A fleeting poor bastard crossed Bea’s mind, but she did her best to look attentive and blank.

“His name is Tom Ormson and he is…” The man she was now sure was The Great Sky Dragon shrugged.  “Very young.  I think in his early twenties.  He lives here in town and owns a diner, the George.”

“Yes?” Bea said.

“I’d like you to marry him.”

For a while, Bea was speechless.  She’d heard of arranged marriages, of course, particularly in Asia, but her parents were American and thoroughly modern, and they would no more think of contracting a marriage for her, than they would think of binding her feet. When she found her voice, she said, “And he’s agreed to this?”

“Oh, no.  He doesn’t even know about it.”  A frown pulled at the old dragon’s mouth.  “In fact, I think he has plans of marrying a panther shifter.  At least he’s living with her.  Completely unsuitable, of course.  Her people are not our people.”

“But you think he’ll agree?” Bea asked.

“I think he’ll tell me to go to hell,” the old dragon said, and looked up with a faint smile.  “And so will his girlfriend.  She’s feisty enough, and she has no fear of me.”

“But… you want me to marry him?  You said you can’t make him do what you wish, so…”

“No.  You’ll have to find how to make him do what I wish.”

Bea stood up.  Her legs were trembling.  She couldn’t let her father lose the business he’d worked for all his life, but neither could she agree to this.  The elderly man-dragon wanted her to seduce a total stranger one who was in a serious relationship.  No.  There were limits to what she was willing to do, even for her beloved father.  They’d get tired of trying to force his hand eventually.  They’d leave them alone.  Bea couldn’t sell herself for life for the sake of her father.  That was prostitution and slavery, combined.

Standing, she glared down at the Great Sky Dragon.  She could feel power rolling off him, though she could not have explained what type of power or how she felt it.

And anyway, though she didn’t have a boyfriend, she’d be damned if she was going to be thrown at this stranger and make him marry her even though he was living with someone else.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “You’ve got the wrong person.  I’m sure there’s someone else you can call on, who will be willing to do it.  I don’t want to trick a man who is in love with someone else into marrying me.  I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

There was a long silence.  “I’ll let myself out,” Bea said.

“Stay!”  It wasn’t so much an order as a sudden plea.  She’d turned to leave the room and now turned again.  The Great Sky Dragon was looking up at her, and his eyes held an expression she’d have thought impossible: raw, undiluted fear.

“Don’t you understand?” the Great Sky Dragon said, his voice low.  “Do you think this is something I’d want, throwing an untrained girl at a stubborn boy and hoping for the best?  Compared to me you’re nothing but babies.  I thought he could have his panther girl and be happy, and when it dissolved in a century or two, then I could guide him towards a marriage that will produce dragons.

“But there is a trial coming and I’m not sure I can–  If I’m not here, he’ll need to be married to one of our own, recognizably our own.  He doesn’t look like our kind.  My people will rebel at his orders.  And it will need to be known that he will have dragon children, to rule after him.  In the battle ahead, there might not be thousands of years to spawn.”

Bea didn’t realize she’d sat down, but her trembling legs were about to not let her stand up anymore.  “Why would he be giving orders?”

“My grandfather told me of the dragons-beyond-the-stars who could—who would one day attack the Earth.”  The Great Sky Dragon shrugged.  “I always thought it was a legend, nothing more.  But–  Lately I’ve had signs that it is not.  There is a great power out there, encircling, trying to remove me, trying to…”  He frowned.  “I think trying to attack my people.  I’ve lived very long, and death doesn’t scare me, but—”

“But?”

“But when I go all my power, and the destiny of my people will fall on the head of Tom Ormson, a stranger, raised outside our traditions.”  He held up a hand to keep her from interrupting.  “Oh, I know, you also have not been taught our traditions, but everyone knows your parents, both of them, are descended from my first-born daughter.  They will fall in line.  And you can help your husband through the trial to come by winning for him the respect of our people.”

110 thoughts on “A Snip Of Upcoming Work”

  2. Sarah, I’ve always liked your writing but that is the best I’ve ever seen. In fact, for delight, and grabbing my interest, that ranks right alongside “Number of the Beast.” And, that, dear lady, is the best opening I’ve ever read.
    Ron

    Like

    1. Seen now maybe Rafiel will fall for her and we will have two lines of Dragonkitties to terrorize the evil invaders with their fluffy scaly rage.

      Like

        1. Might any (hypothetical) children end up with two alternate shapes instead of just one? No strane chimeras of dragon/cat, but the ability to use either shape?

          Like

        2. Can you imagine how badly a kitty dragon would shed? You’d have scales and hairballs clogging the plumbing. On the other hand, a dragon that coughs hairballs at its enemies could be truly terrifying.

          Like

          1. In another group we were talking about how terrifying it would be if we had a drunk shapeshifter. (I know others explain it as having a super-efficient immune system and the alcohol only affects them for a moment– but what if that isn’t true?) Would a drunk shapeshifter changes shape after every burp?

            Like

            1. Would it shift shape every time it hiccoughed?

              How many shapes would a shapeshifter shift if a shapeshifter would shift shapes?

              Like

        3. Yes, but see we are not in denial. It is just that you as the author are supposed to tell us it isn’t going to happen so that we are pleasantly surprised when it does. :D Resistance is futile even if you will not be assimilated.

          Besides what is more awesome than scaled armor kitties with wings? I’m just sorry that Kittysharks didn’t work out. That is almost as cool a Dragonkitties.

          I didn’t think about it, but if the gene combination come dominate depending on parent(either male or female) we have both a Dragon/Cat pair and we could have a Cat/Dragon pair. Either way both sleek Dragonpantherkitty and brawny Lionkittydragon so either faction could be happy. ;)

          *sigh* Though I still don’t belive it is one or the other. When Tom and Kyrie finally give in will they have dragons or kitties?

          Like

          1. Well, Tom’s FATHER thinks it will be kitteh dragons — he brings in a reinforced net and a top-netted fireproof playpen just in case.
            Tom’s father is, of course, a friggin’ lunatic.

            Like

            2. lol now I totally have pictures of that bounding around in my head. I hear:

              “Quick get the net! That one is getting away.”
              “Well I did say the playpen was fire proof not chew proof. Now you see why the net was a good idea.”

              I think he is just a realist. :D

              And now thinking about it I wonder how Not Dinner would feel about fire breathing kitteh dragons.

              Like

              1. That is a fun image, but they would have to be particularly precocious. If I have read correctly, the onset of shifting co-insides with adolescence.

                Like

                2. Ah, yes. However the first book does show a precedence for different kinds of shifters to shift differently. You have to admit a Dragonkitty/Kittydragon combination would be different. ;)

                  And yes I’ve been told I must be part Bulldog.

                  Like

          2. Dragons of course. Dragons are “superior” to panthers. [Wink]

            Seriously, IIRC Sarah has said that the odds are that their children won’t be any type of shifter.

            Like

              2. Nope, in the sense of “who’d win the fight, a dragon or a panther”. [Very Big Grin]

                Mind you, if Kyrie gets really mad at Tom, he’ll let her “win the fight” (without letting her know he did). [Wink]

                Like

            3. That is why I call them Dragonkitties instead of the more popular Kittydragons.

              And beside they have to be shifters. It is their destiny(borrowing from Sarah’s post today). It is shifter Krull! I’m sure of it. Together they will rule and their children will rule the galaxy…..and all that stuff.

              Then we can get book 16. Darkship Dragonkitties! The awesomeness will never stop.

              Like

              2. You guys DO realize you’re probably insane, right? CHARMINGLY insane, but nuts, all the same.

                Like

                4. I didn’t think there was any doubt you collected crazies. Heck I know just for dipping into the Diner off/on that I have to work much harder to be collectable.

                  Like

  4. A fleeting poor bastard crossed Bea’s mind

    Well this explains a great deal, works entirely, even if you think it is a genera hi-jacking. It also opens a Pandora’s box worth of possibilities.

    I really do hope that the baka interpreters of the Mayan calendar are wrong. The Daughter has already informed me they are, at least their math is, for the world should already have ended. Maybe it has, and that would explain a whole bunch of things as well…

    Like

      1. I would say I am speechless, but I see words here, so I must not be.

        BTW: You do know, there are few things that you could have typed that would made me more inclined to check out Phillip K. Dick?

        Like

          1. At present my reading through February is pretty well laid out, so after that. It will give me something to do while I wait for Summer 2013.

            The Spouse assures me we have a copy. He is now going through book boxes, having said, ‘Having and finding are two different things.’ Why, it’s a Berkley!

            Like

            1. This to me is a wonderful advantage of the kindle, and I’m finding myself buying old favorites on the kindle, because we have SO MANY books that finding the particular one I want to read can be maddening.

              Like

              1. And then, of course, there are all those books you find while looking for the one that, seeing, you remember you want to re-read as well. ;-)

                Like

                1. Well, that’s a bonus, but as I get older and busier and reach the point, to quote Pratchett, where I can put an object down in a completely empty room and never find it again, I’m also buying books and FORGETTING I bought them. This is less trouble on the kindle, because I will eventually go into the folder and start going through titles looking for something to read and find these forgotten gems when they match my mood. Like the one on the tavern/brothel used for passing info/sedition during the revolutionary war. (By revolutionaries.)

                  Like

                  2. Was that “Liberty Tavern”, or another story? I remember one or two others vaguely, including one in Boston. I think “Liberty Tavern” was set in Maryland, but I won’t swear by that.

                    Like

                2. Last time I had one was in mom’s house, and it was so my brother and I could keep joint track of our library and avoid double purchases, because we couldn’t afford that. Between moves, how much of it is packed and put away, kids… there just is no chance. We used to have a sign-out sheet for lending books too. I think we last used it before kids were reading.

                  Like

                  1. We use LibraryThing.com. It took weeks, but every single book we own is now cataloged. We can both access it from our smartphones wherever we are – including in bookstores. “Oh, no. We already own that. In fact, we own two.”

                    There is a similar one for comic books that my wife has those in as well, but I can’t remember what it’s called. I can find out if there’s any interest.

                    Like

                3. I have an electronic “card catalog” (ie an access database) of my books both dead tree and e-versions. The problem is keeping it up-to-date *and* remembering to check it before I purchase a book. [Wink]

                  Like

                  1. See above. Incidentally both databases,while cloud-based, can export to a local file, which we do on a regular basis. Even if LT went byebye tomorrow, we wouldn’t lose any data, just convenience.

                    Like

                  2. I built an Excel spreadsheet for my books, and had about 800 of them cataloged. Then I had a crash without a back-up, and lost it all. I don’t have the time now to rebuild it. I’ve also added several hundred books since then… Oh well.

                    Like

              3. That is what I try to do with mine. Sadly success has been greatly hampered by availability and slightly hampered some times by the ridiculous cost since the publisher can set for the price. 9.99 or more for a 10 or 15 year old book out of print for years is generally excessive when I’m buying an eBook.

                Like

                  1. I bought one that I returned.* It was just a poorly scanned copy. You could tell because more than half the pages were tilted way to the left. I’m not paying 9.99 for that. Still I agree there are some books I would pay more for even though they are old.

                    * I don’t often return eBooks. I feel bad because technically even though I didn’t read them I could have and you don’t rent books you buy them.

                    Like

  5. Well, that’s going to make explaining the alligator by the dumpster seem like a piece-of-cake . . . And now I have this mental image of the Ancient One holding out one forefoot and telling Tom, “It is your destiny” in a wheezy tone of voice.

    Like

      1. Channeling Emily Litella? Avoiding giving something away? Tom seems the type to take the attitude of ‘destiny be d*mn*d’ and see himself dead first. In fact … never mind.

        Like

  6. Excellent!

    More of the Goldport series which is probably my favorite series of yours (though the Heart and Soul series may edge it out because I like your writing style better in that one – it seems more polished).

    Why didn’t you mention this sequel on your sarahahoyt.com site? I was furious when you ended GTAC without explaining why the great sky dragon was protecting Tom and there didn’t seem to be a sequel that would ever explain it.

    Now I’m happy.

    Like

    1. Because I NEED to update the stupid site and change providers… in my oh, so very copious spare time… It will get done. Might be after the election, though, because in my other persona, as a friend mentioned “This is like Christmas in a candle factory.”

      Like

    2. Well, if this works out and sells well, there are… uh… 15 or so other books in the series, though I must say by the end of the book, Tom’s status will be markedly changed, and not in a way you’d expect, not even from that opening.

      Also, all my female characters seem to be going through a fertility thing. (If my males catch on, we’ve crossed over to icky icky sf)

      Like

              2. Glad you did because I was going to second the request. ;-) (O Bother! now I want to have to re-read it.)

                Like

        1. Well, from what I gather from various noises, I should send one a quarter to Baen — between these and the two SF series. I don’t think I can go faster until I can afford a housekeeper!

          Like

          1. Ah, the Red Queen’s dilemma.

            Alice looked round her in great surprise. “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”

            “Of course it is,” said the Queen: “what would you have it?”

            “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

            “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. ” Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

            From: Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

            Like

                1. We’re going to have to. We need to find a way to squeeze the money out of our FIXED income, while still paying the constantly-increasing amount for gas, food, utilities, etc. We can more or less keep up with most things, but young boys make messes faster than Zeus could take care of.

                  Like

          3. What you do is find a conveniently available Superman and stand next to him during a lighting storm.* Assuming you survive the process(which you better because then we can’t keep reading) you have super speed and you can write faster. That is until megalomania totally sets in and he has to get his powers back.

            See simple.

            * I have not been re-watching Lois and Clark on the Hub.

            Like

            1. And then she’d have to find a word processing program that can keep up with her speed. Even I can lock-up Word so badly that it crashes, and I’m not that fast (for a touch-typer).

              Like

              1. I kill keyboards at my normal 220 wds per minute typing and the three days I exceeded that — because I had to — I POUNDED MY JOINTS TO SHREDS.

                Like

                1. Okay now that’s fast.

                  Have you tried one of the mechanical-switch keyboards? They cost three times as much, but that might actually be money well spent in your case. I want one bad.

                  Like

                  1. Sigh. Not until we have more money.

                    Okay, I have no idea what that averages to, but my fastest was 80k (revised, half the last day was revision) typed in in three days of 14 to 16 hours each. And at the end I felt a century old. And yes, I can reveal what the novel is — Plain Jane, under (house name. The other books aren’t mine) Laurien Gardner. We went away for two days after I finished, because I wanted to take bubble baths and sleep. It’s pretty much all I did for two days, too. And the reason I had to do it in three days was that I’d postponed so long, because I didn’t WANT to write it. But it was under contract.

                    I had joint issues for weeks after, though.

                    Like

                    1. As Dean Smith has pointed out, you actually don’t have to be a fast typist to write a lot: you just have to write a lot. If we assume you typed 100K words total in 45 hours that works out to less than 40WPM.

                      However, based on my own ratio of typing to sitting and staring at the screen/thinking about what to type next/going back and changing something to make it fit the sequence, I would guess you averaged about 120WPM or more when you were actually typing. :)

                      Like

                    2. Well, there was also eating, bathroom breaks and bathing. (My husband insists on it.) Although my memory of those days involves sitting around in a robe a lot.

                      Like

                    3. At one time, when I was typing a LOT, I typed at about 120 words per minute, with three or four mistakes – mostly reversing letters in some words. I still type fast, but not that fast – maybe 80-90 words per minute when I’m “in the flow”. I, too, have locked up MS Word, but that’s not that hard to do. I have found that Open Office document writer is harder to lock up. I only use Word now to convert formats for both Nook and Kindle. They don’t recognize Open Office.

                      Like

              2. Holy crap. Either you are that fast for a touch-typer, or you need a new computer (or a malware clean, or something.) I can lock up my iPad, which is no great feat, but I’ve never got so far ahead of Word it didn’t catch up instantly when I stopped. And I used to flirt with triple digits.

                Like

                1. er… in the new computer it’s harder. The stupid thing reacts faster. In the old on… er… it’s not hard.

                  Like

      3. Though I could handle 15 more, you really know how to get me excited and worried for the next book all at the same time. I kind of hope Tom or Kyrie do something rather unfortunate to the GSD for meddling.

        Like

  8. I’m intrigued about the “space dragons”. I’ve had a partial plot banging around in my head for several years now about a group of creatures that live in the space between stars, and frequently feed on matter near the outer edge of the Oort cloud. There’s still a lot of work to do just on the plot before I can do anything else. I eagerly await “Noah’s Boy”.

    Like

    1. Space dragons would help explain the “missing mass” that led to the idea of dark matter in space . . .

      Like

          1. Or possibily quite dense. Himself is very old, very experienced, but seems to have no comprehension of the effect that growing up Ameican can have.

            Like

      2. I’m trying to keep from starting on a critique of this notion, as I would undoubtedly wind up posting a comment well over 1000 words in length, describing why this would not be, or else what insane reasons would have to be in effect for it to be true. You are causing me stress here.

        :-)

        Like

          1. I really wouldn’t know how to begin something like that as its own article. Or else maybe I don’t quite understand how you mean that.

            Like

  10. Ya’ll know, it would be great fun to have “Café George, Goldport, Colorado” tee-shirts. Maybe with a dragon wearing a chef’s hat and a cat with a waitress’s apron and order pad, glaring at each other?

    Like

    1. I’m working on the zazzle shop this weekend.

      I’m also working on a collection of short stories called “At the George” to come out sometime in the next couple of months.

      Like

Comments are closed.