#WritingWednesday: In The Cities Of Cloaks And Daggers

Happy Wednesday! I’m using Wednesdays to share some short bursts of the stories I’m working on… because that way, I figure, I’ll be motivated to keep working on them

Right now (besides the Smith and Skarry adventures, which get quite enough attention in my other posts) I’m working on an LGBTQIA+ Mythpunk standalone novel called In The Cities Of Cloaks And Daggers whose central themes are identity, voice and power.

It’s based in a world where Time grows like grass and is harvested, where people of the four cities – Gnarl, Ash, Slain and Caligari – wear their whole lives on their backs in the form of patchwork story Cloaks. Those who don’t have a Cloak, have no clue as to who they are. Those who have Cloaks guard them jealously for fear of the desperate Daggers who would steal them for themselves.

The novel is divided into four books – The Book Of Bujo (which btw is a complicated word whose closest meaning would be heist/ joke/ prank/ trick), The Book Of Scales, The Book of Feathers and The Book Of End – but in the opening the reader finds themselves in a burned down library where the pages of all these books have been scattered, charred and disarrayed across the floor so the narrative has to be pieced together in fragments and the time line dawns slowly rather than being obvious from the start.

It’s ambitious, I’m scared about failing at the vision I’m aiming for, but I love pushing the boundaries of what I can do and I’ve done similar things with short stories so I really hope I can make it work, let’s see… This is the next extract, you can find the previous part here:#WritingWednesday: In The Cities Of Cloaks And Daggers

The Duchess felt the wooden boards behind her bow beneath The Magon’s measured gait, felt the cautious weight of their rough, scaled hand on her shoulder and the glass vial they pressed into her mechanical fingers.
She nodded and slipped it into her pouch, where it knocked gently against five or six others nestled there, and then she reached back, unfastened the buckle of her mask and let it slide away, revealing her warm olive skin and the black silk bandages which veiled her empty eye sockets from the elements.
The Kite stuttered over the rolling waves of compacted sea glass, now dry as sand-licked bone, and The Duchess felt the resonance of each frosted bead like a rosary drumming through her frame.
The Magon stayed, leaning idly against the mast, and let the wind blow back their long crest of silver hair and feathers from their dusk dark skin.
A comfortable silence slipped and settled down between them as The She Wolf slept and The Dragpie sulked and the Navigator steered and The Kesili strained and The Grass Temple begged and the twisted arches of Gnarl rose up ahead of them like a crouching spider on the edge of everything.

There you go, I hope you enjoyed reading the next little extract and thankyou so so much for taking the time to read along and for all your kind ‘likes’ and words of support and encouragement- they keep me going! 🙂 What are you writing at the moment? Feel free to share links to your own works in progress or Writing Wednesday posts in the comments 🙂

Blessings on all your writing endeavours!