Excerpt from Empress of Dorsa + building aquariums from scratch + The Umbrella Academy

Empress of Dorsa Update:

Total words today: 0 (but I’m about to start)
Manuscript total: 40,137

Longer Empress of Dorsa Update

Last week marked the “soft opening” of going back to work, by which I mean that I had professional development meetings Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday but still had Monday and Friday to myself. Next week, I have new hire training Tuesday through Friday, along with scheduled time to pick up my teacher laptop on Monday.

In other words, the school year is starting to ramp up.

And ironically, that means I’m getting back on top of my writing. It’s a strange truth that when my day is highly structured with a lot of must-do items on the to-do-list, I am actually MORE productive than I am when I have an abundance of time on my hands. Unlike the previous weeks in which I had zero obligations and mainly played Tomb Raider for hours each day, knowing I only had an hour or two in the morning and an hour or two at night to write got me writing consistently in a way that I haven’t in months!

The barest of Empress of Dorsa excerpts

So here’s what I’ve been working on — this is from Chapter 1:

Megs of Druet Village, who these days also answered to the ridiculous nicknames of “the Empress” or “Your Majesty,” crouched behind a fallen log, breath misting in the frigid morning air.  The log had not fallen naturally, of course, but Megs and her crew had been careful to artfully place the log as if it had fallen naturally.  

From her position behind the log, Megs peered downhill without showing herself.  The band of two dozen or so mountain men were nearly in place, wending around the curve in the trail to expose themselves directly below the spot Megs had chosen for the ambush.

It was a damned good spot, and Megs silently congratulated herself on the picking of it.  The trail below the log where they hid not only curved, it also narrowed, and on the other side, the ground dropped off steeply.  As the mountain men came around the curve, they would be forced to shift into a single-file formation.  

Perfect.  The gods themselves couldn’t have crafted a better place for an ambush.

For the third time, Megs slid a few inches of her shaman’s blade dagger from its sheath.  The runes etched on the surface were still dull and flat, which put Megs in an even better mood than she was already in.  Mother Moon must be with them:  The fact that the blade refused to glow meant that there weren’t even any shadow-infected amongst the mountain men.

A few years ago, the death she was poised to rain down upon the men passing on the trail would have bothered her, would have led to sleepless nights for weeks.  Now, it was just another day.

Beside her, Rom’s eyes were upon her, waiting.  She could feel his gaze, could feel the unspoken question in them, but Rom was a drawn crossbow with a sensitive trigger, likely to fire if she so much as glanced his way.  So Megs kept her eyes on the moss of the fallen log an inch from her face, counting her breaths and listening to the hooves of the mountain men’s ponies clomp, clomp, clomp along the trail below.  She’d counted seven ponies so far.  That was good.  Her men had been forced to slaughter one of the mares last week for food.  They needed new beasts.  And any who got injured in the fight… well, Megs had certainly eaten worse than pony stew over the past four years.  But she liked animals and hated slaughtering sensitive, intelligent creatures that were raised for purposes other than nourishment.  Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

It wouldn’t be long now.

But panic seized her then, the same irrational panic she’d had to fight almost every day since she first took the regal and became an Imperial soldier four years earlier.  Megs closed her eyes, forcing the panic down, transmuting the energy of fear into the energy of strength as if she was an alchemist.  It was a trick she’d had to teach herself, a trick a lot of soldiers never mastered.  There was a fine line between battle panic and battle readiness.  Those who didn’t learn how to let go of one and seize the other usually wound up dead.

Which was what had happened to most of the soldiers she’d met over the years, including Milton, her older brother.

She would do this for Milton, she told herself.  She would do this for all the farmer’s sons like her brother, who’d met their deaths decades too soon, who’d never gotten to know the simple joys of taking a wife, starting a family, inheriting their fathers’ farms.

The transmutation slowly took over, and in place of panic, Megs felt the familiar grip of rage around her heart.

Yes, that was what she needed right now.  The rage of a soldier, not the panic of a farm girl.

She began to count her breaths.

One… Two…

Except for the soft plodding of pony hooves, the mountain men were silent.  Not a cough or a clearing of the throat or even the creak of leather as they moved.  

Five…

Megs couldn’t help admire them.  She’d tried for two years to train her own men to move through the mountains with that kind of disciplined quiet, but they still sounded like hogs rolling around in a bed of dried reeds every time they moved from place to place.

Seven…

On twenty, she would turn to Rom and nod, and it would begin.

Thirteen… Fourteen…

She drew the shaman’s blade from its scabbard without making even a whisper of a sound.  The runes still didn’t glow.  This time, she didn’t slide it back in place but held it at the ready before her.  She hoped today’s ambush would yield a new sword for her.  It had been a pain in her arse to fight with only a dagger these last two weeks.

…Eighteen… Nineteen…

Clomp, clomp, clomp.  The ponies sounded like they were mere inches away to Megs’s heightened senses.

Twenty.

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(If you want to read the rest of Chapter 1 (plus chapters 2 – 5) and watch the book get written in real-time, swing on over to my Patreon page. Supporters get more excerpts than they know what to do with, plus they’ll get the book for free once it’s out.)

I might be writing more if Season 2 of the Umbrella Academy hadn’t just dropped on Netflix and if I hadn’t gotten obsessed with building an aquarium from scratch.

If you haven’t watched the Umbrella Academy yet, what is wrong with you?! (J/k) P.S. It has Ellen Page in it.

Season 1 trailer:

And then I started watching this guy build aquariums and suddenly I wanted to do it myself. I challenge you to watch without wanting one by the end: