WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, Anna drives a crawler across the surface of a massive plant hundreds of meters deep, and is eyeing up a beacon she needs to retrieve over dodgy terrain.

=====

She checked the chrono. Plenty of hours of daylight left. “See you for supper. Charlie Tango seven niner, out.”

A quick scan of her surroundings. Glints in the distance reflected coppery sky from a network of catchpools. Beyond, grey shadows marked a series of ridges and a few clouds darkened the horizon, too far to be threatening just yet. To one side, the ground sloped up to merge with the bleached-bone swelling of a structural rib. Safe to travel on, but leading away in the wrong direction.

Anna pursed her lips. If she was going to stow that beacon, she’d have to fetch it the hard way.

=====

And continued progress with the cover art ...

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing the opening from The Long Dark, Anna drives a crawler across the surface of a massive plant hundreds of meters deep.

=====

Through the wraparound windows of the cab, Anna judged the distance to her goal. The marker beacon, standing two hundred meters away, had canted at an angle, and the smooth olive ground nearby had a mottled look confirming the grim picture from the ground radar. The upper layers here had thinned dangerously. She couldn’t risk the crawler any closer to retrieve that beacon, but the town needed to salvage all the working equipment it could for next season’s harvesting operations.

Anna reached for the bank of controls alongside her seat, and the short wave radio hissing and sputtering on top of the ground radar and inertial navigation screens.

“Serendipity Control, this is Charlie Tango seven niner, respond please.”

She scrunched her face and hit the volume button at the blast of static from the radio. She fiddled with the decoding controls, tuning the software that struggled to pluck meaning from the waves of electromagnetic interference bathing the atmosphere.

“Serendipity Control, this is Charlie Tango seven niner. Anyone receiving?”

=====

And (making use of the new rules) this scene continues ...


On the third try, a distorted voice answered. “Go ahead, Charlie Tango seven niner.”

“Got eyeballs on my last beacon for this run. Nearest end of the south-west line, but approach is tricky. Will be off grid for an hour or so.”

=====

Last week, I started creating artwork for the book cover. As the weeks go by, I’ll include some snaps of progress. Here is a snapshot from Monday and Friday ...

WeWriWa - The Long Dark

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

It’s been a year since I last posted on Weekend Writing Warriors. A year ago, I'd just finished the first draft of The Long Dark. Since then, it’s been going through intensive critiquing and editing and I’m on the home stretch to publication later this year. This week, I’m posting from the opening chapter.

=====

From the center seat in the crawler’s drive cab, six meters above the ground, Anna ’t Hooft studied the treacherous terrain ahead.

Ground radar painted a cross-section of the organic mass under her wheels. Labyrinthine chasms and crevices plunged hundreds of meters deep. Twisted columns and webs of plant tissue spread and interlocked to form a solid-looking surface.

On Sponge, looks could be fatally deceptive.

A tingle ran up Anna’s back, and she blanked the radar screen. She could read the surface details well enough. She could tell what they concealed, and in her mind could reduce the plant mass to safe, clinical labels: soft, brittle, strong, source of water, building material, harvestable tubers. All the treasures Sponge had to offer could be divined from the colors, textures, and contours up here.

She preferred to not actually see what lay below.

=====

Support our workers

All around our neighborhood, hearts have been appearing over the last month. Someone has been making plywood cut-out hearts on posts to stick in your lawn. Some have appeared on hydro poles and in windows. Someone down the road shaped a string of lights into a heart on their fence.

All this is to show support for our armies of essential workers, from healthcare professionals to delivery drivers, to the grocery store workers and many others who are in close proximity to the public all day long.

We combined this heart theme with another suggestion to brighten up Victoria with Christmas lights, and clipped a string of lights to our hedge facing the road.

To give a sense of scale, the hedge is taller than our camping trailer (parked behind, out of sight) and twice as tall as me. The heart is about 9’ tall. Standing on tip-toe I can barely reach the red light at the bottom of the “V” across the top.

Of course with the light evenings this heart isn’t visible until some time after 8pm, but I like to think it brings some cheer to people driving past of an evening.

Wedding anniversary

Twenty-eight years ago yesterday, Ali and I got married at home in our living room, with a registrar and about thirty close family and friends. We had lunch in a marquee outside (it just about fit on our back lawn ... just) with a buffet that we prepared ourselves. The day finished with a noisy, raucous knees-up for 150 people at a venue in town. No question of social distancing then!

Being our twenty-eighth anniversary, it was on the same day of the week (Friday) as our actual wedding day. A small discussion ensued about the twenty-eight-year cycle. There have been three other times when our anniversary fell on a Friday, but this is the first time it’s also been a leap year. With leap years in between, anniversaries on the same day fall at erratic intervals of five, six, or eleven years but they always come around again at year twenty-eight (except when the next turn of the century messes things up, but that’s another matter).

Of course, our celebration yesterday was of necessity a very small family affair. There’s a nearby Thai restaurant we like that’s still open for take-out. I checked the menu online and phoned through an order. I figured I should do that early and my hunch proved correct, it was a hour wait, but that was OK.

Looking for silver linings to all this, it was a quiet drive, parking available right outside. They were geared up to serve customers efficiently and I was straight in and out again, even though they were clearly busy with a row of bags lined up on the counter ready to be picked up.

And dinner was delicious. Thank you Sabhai Thai!