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, we are still with Jennifer’s point of view.

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Jennifer glanced at the three other members of the Company’s senior negotiating team before finally eyeing Simon Galloway coldly. He was no part of her team, and yet he’d invited himself onto her private shuttle, claiming to carry a message of vital importance from the President.

His green velvet jacket screamed extravagance. That, she could forgive, but worn over the top of a cream brocade waistcoat, silk cravat, with silk ruffs at the wrists it was ... over the top. Foppish.

Ice blue eyes regarded her patiently, destroying any illusion of whimsy.

“Well?” Better have this out in the open before her own simmering resentment got the better of her.

“I apologize for the unplanned intrusion.” His voice held no trace of contrition.

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


“My orders were to bring this to the senior team only once we were off the longship.” He offered a slim white envelope, pinched delicately between thumb and forefinger, pinkie cocked like he was about to sup from a bone china teacup.

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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, we leave Anna’s point of view to introduce another major character.

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Jennifer Steel glared at the beige-green orb of Elysium with mixed feelings. She loved the Company’s princely income from this soggy plant-covered rock, but as for the planet itself, it was hate at first sight.

“It’s going to get bumpy in sixty seconds.” The pilot’s voice held just the right blend of deference and warning. He’d suffered her presence with little sign of the simmering resentment she knew she evoked. She was well aware of the rules about passengers in the cockpit, but she’d been curious to see first hand her reluctant home for the coming weeks. She also liked toying with underlings, a privilege that came with her executive rank.

Even Jennifer, however, knew better than to argue with physics. She turned from the cockpit window and drifted, weightless, back to the luxurious confines of the cabin. She took her seat and strapped in before they hit thick enough air to light the scramjet.

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And continued progress with the cover art, snapped on the last two Fridays. Progress slowed down this month because I was struggling with the world news recently as I blogged about last week.

Get a grip!

This is a hard post to write. I keep coming back to it, wanting to say something, to vent some feelings, but then hesitating because it feels too self-indulgent. This blog is usually focused on externalities, not so much on inner feelings, but these are not normal times.

Simple truth is, I’ve not been doing too good these past few days.

The realization came during the week when one of my team leads talked about their regular team check-in that day. One of the team mentioned having difficulty sleeping. The events in America dragged up memories of personal experience of racial abuse. In talking it through, other members of the team opened up and shared their own stories. It turned out every single one of them, in one way or another, was struggling to process what is going on in the world at the moment, especially in the US.

At the team leads level, we wondered how much more distress was lying hidden beneath the surface among ourselves and our colleagues. In discussing the emotional impact of extraordinary stories, one after another, day after day, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion.

And I realized, I’m not okay.

That feeling of being overwhelmed and helpless persists. It reawakens with every new story of someone somewhere getting hurt or abused. I am fortunate that it’s not affecting my sleep - yet - but I struggle to focus on anything productive during my waking hours, and tears are never far from the surface.

I am struggling with anguish at the scenes of violence, both on the mob and the individual level. I despair at the peaceful protests turning ugly, often through deliberate instigation of people who have no interest in the protestors’ message. And I am brimming over with anger at the attempts by the powerful to bully a population into submission.

The world has gone mad.

Underlying that is a long-held fury at the systemic abuse of power the 1% “haves” wield over the 99% by the open manipulation of levers of power in their favor, whether it’s passing legislation that favors their rich donors, healthcare and other benefits they award themselves while denying others the same, gerrymandering and manipulating election practices to hamper voting by those they don’t want to have a voice, and a host of other dirty tricks.

This is a bubble that has been waiting to burst.

There is no excuse for the many acts we’ve seen the police commit over the past week.

Equally, there is no excuse for rioting and looting.

Then again, there is no excuse for the deeply-entrenched attitude that the color of a person’s skin entitles one person to set themselves above another. That is the real pandemic that bedevils the world.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.