Otherwise known as the excerpt from the WIP. Writing is hard. Why didn’t someone warn me about this?

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the NaNo, which is going strong at nearly 30K. I’m on the other side of the hill now, in both NaNo word count and in the book itself. I’ve got a middle and an end planned out, the rest is just details. Difficult, fussy details. But I digress. This is mostly unedited. Theoretically, everything is spelled correctly. I do not think this is a final draft, but I think it’s a fun little piece of my raw writer’s delusional mind. Or something like that.

The man stood on the far end of the parking lot, illuminated under a single halogen lamp. He wore no clothes but for a length of cloth tied around his waist and covering his genitals. Light flashed in the Weir’s eyes, and his white teeth gleamed in the dark. The man was grinning a sick, mental grin. Intel hadn’t been bad—the man was covered in tattoos. No skin remained untouched apart from a small frame around his facial features and presumably the genitals although Iain wondered. His skin was a riot of color, bright and faded. The rough ground of the asphalt must have been grinding into his bare feet but he didn’t seem to register anything but Iain and the Lord arguing across the way. Tattoos of koi and samurais writhed in the yellowed light. They danced and bulged and twisted all over his skin like they could fly right off and become real. Iain realized with a start that the man had already summoned a demon.

He shouted to the Lord, he remembered that much, but then he ran. He ran as far and as fast as his body allowed. He was a servant then, still in training in a compound outside of Dublin, and in the best shape of his life. He ran without looking back. The pressure in the air changed—what had been a damp London fog became a hot, dry desert as he ran. His ears popped as the creature emerged from the Weir*. Still he ran, lungs burning and muscles screaming for oxygen.

He had no idea how far he ran. When he finally collapsed in an undignified heap on the pavement, people stepped around him. He’d run toward the city center, it appeared, which bustled with people. He dared to look behind him, and the convention center was long out of sight. The Lord was also nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he’d run a different direction. Cautiously, he made his way back, always looking for the demon sign—a smell of sulfur or a brightly colored smoke but none made themselves visible. He got nearly back to the convention center before he saw it.

From a long way off, he saw a smear of orange passing under halogen after halogen, disappearing in the dark in between. The Weir, an even smaller smear from this far away, seemed to be standing exactly where he had been. As Iain watched, the demon floated around lazily. His training told him the creature had consumed everything it would, sent all life around it to the Great Void for his fellow demons to feed on, and now simply waited to die. No demon could live long in the world, they were compelled to die once through. The Lord, of course, was gone. Iain held out a brief flicker of hope that the idiot might have run away, but his sinking gut told him the truth. The man was dead, consumed by the demon. Shit.

*Weir: a person who can open a gate with their body to summon demons from the Great Void.

Back to the salt mines! How are your NaNovels going?