July Pico, Day 24

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Folks, have you realized that we only have a week left from this years double session? Where has the time gone?

Anyway, here is the daily post for your progress report, snippets and thoughts. May the magic be with us all!

And just in case it's too hot in your corner of the world:

Comments

[spikesgirl58.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, ice cream. I haven't done any writing at all. Been in the bathroom and it's just not cool to take the tablet in there. I hate intestinal viruses.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

oh yuck, so sorry to hear that. Feel much better soon.

Last time I got food poisoning (I know not the same thing) the sight of a packet of biscuits turned my stomach...

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear! Get better, soon!

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

The ice cream is very distracting indeed!

No writing yet today, but since I have hardly updated at all, here's an excerpt from last session, day before yesterday. Lucia is chasing a rather elusive lady.

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The rain was intensifying and I was shivering like something come back from the dead, but I wasn’t going to let her off. Not this time. With all the energy I had left, I ran across the road – to the indignation of the driver of the no. 25 omnibus to Putney Bridge, who hooted at me several times – and went in to the South Lodge entrance to Brompton Cemetery. There, I was once again lost. She had disappeared. I was alone in a place the like of which I had feared all my life.

Jamaican folk don’t have much truck with cemeteries. Too many duppies and bad air. I remembered how Merry had warned me never to point at a grave, or my fingers would rot and fall off. The only remedy was to bite the offending finger straightaway before the curse happened. I was so scared of pointing that at one funeral near my hometown, a man who had died in 1912 when an electricity pole had been downed in a hurricane and cracked his skull open, I had ended up stuffing all my fingers in my mouth and biting them all at one go. My mother yelled at me for being “disrespectful” and after we returned home hauled me in front of my father, who sighed and said, “Lucia did I teach you to be so ignorant? These are heathen beliefs. Keep a sure faith in God and read your Bible.” But the Bible was full of God sending floods and plagues of insects, as were my father’s Sunday sermons, and I had nightmares about all the punishments for weeks afterwards, as well as my fingers, which may well have pointed by accident sometime, I couldn’t for sure remember otherwise.

I swear sometimes if I look ‘pon my hand a bit blurred, I can still see the teeth marks!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

She is right. The Bible can be a scary read sometimes.
Great progress, even if it's a day or two old!

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thanks :)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I like the use of old beliefs... it fleshes out her background wonderfully and is fascinating (well, definitely to me!) in its own right :)

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Yeah, heard that from someone in NY that Jamaican people didn't like cemeteries. So I looked into that some more. And convenient that there happened to be one just up the road from where Lucia is living!

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

That is convenient :)

Research - especially about these esoteric and slightly dark things - is fascinating...

[ylla.livejournal.com]

I've gone to Lisbon where it's ridiculously hot, but I did write a bit on the plane!

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Oh, enjoy :) Planes are handy for writing, all right.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Really? I never tried. Of course, the only three times I actually had to take a plane I was so afraid that I couldn't even think straight, so I probably don't count.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

That's always something! Writing on public transport is a good use of time...

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh dear... I realised (round about word 1200!! When I thought it was finished) that the Chris and Radek dialogue was based on an idea that is awfully close to that Stargate story (the Rodney-Radek-Daniel one)... after fretting for several hours I though "I don't care, I'm leaving it!!!" and added another couple of hundred words and a dinosaur at the end :)

"Oh," Radek says, staring up, up and up, straight into the eyes of a creature that has not even been discovered in the time they have just left, but which he at least knows way more about than he does American gunslingers, and not just from repeats of bad science fiction, "this is not just bad, this is not just very very very bad. This is the worst."

The massive, flatly reptilian eyes of a duckbilled dinosaur - a dinosaur!!!! - seemed to him to agree.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Glad to see the dinosaur comes back. I'm sure he's equally dismayed by the site of the most destructive species on the planet!

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately the dinosaur I picked is one of the... not very bright one...

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear! Poor Radek! As if American gunslingers weren't bad enough, now he has to deal with flying dinosaurs, too?
I wonder though what he'd think about Torchwood's chocolate-addicted, time-displaced pterodactyl, Myfanwy. *g*

And now I'll have to look up in the dictionary what 'duckbilled' means. *sigh*
I'll never learn this language properly.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I checked what dinosaurs were in the area during the Jurassic... duckilled dinosaurs (http://ayay.co.uk/background/dinosaurs/herbivore/duckbilled-dinosaurs-2/) (proper name hadrosaurs) were among them, see the pictures for why they are called that :)