Psstt!

I saw libwitch today at Wegmans with her significant other.

She was buying ice cream. Who's the badgirl!

Quiz

Update 1: Well, lots of responses. I'll just update the answers. I posted the first person who commented with the correct answer, although most of you got most of them in the long run. We're only missing one answer at this point: the last punctuation mark.

This might be fun. Or not. We'll see. I'll post the answers as soon as they appear in the comments, with credit to the answerer-er-er. I got about half of them correct. Just curious how other people do.

This is a quiz for people who know everything! These are not trick questions. They are straight questions with straight answers.

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends. Boxing tryslora

2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward? Niagara Falls meijhen

3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables? asparagus hkneale; rhubarb tryslora

4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside? Strawberry aeriedraconia

5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn't been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle? Place the bottle around the budding pear on the tree so that it grows inside iagor,

6. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters "dw" and they are all common words. Name two of them. dwarf aeriedraconia; dwell iagor; dwindle hkneale

7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them? Ok, so this one was easier because everyone was sitting at the computer and most of them are right there on the keyboard, but . . . Period aeriedraconia; Comma aeriedraconia; Semi-colon aeriedraconia; Colon aeriedraconia; Quotation Marks aeriedraconia; Apostrophe aeriedraconia; Exclamation Point aeriedraconia; Question Mark aeriedraconia; Hyphen aeriedraconia; m dash iagor; Periods of Ellipses iagor; Parentheses iagor; Brackets iagor

8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh. Lettuce aeriedraconia

9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter "S." Socks aeriedraconia; Slippers aeriedraconia; Shoes aeriedraconia; Stockings aeriedraconia; Sandals aeriedraconia; Sneakers iagor; Skates iagor; Stilts tryslora; Snowshoes/snowboots tryslora; Skis meijhen; stilettoes coolmajaka

Fun answers to questions that I didn't count:

6. Dweeb aeriedraconia;

9. Suntan aeriedraconia; Sleeping Cats aeriedraconia; spurs iagor; sabatons/sollerets iagor;

First Lines Meme

I've seen this done a bunch of times, so figured, WTH. Here are the first lines of some of my novels, both published and unpublished:

The Skewed Throne: Over one thousand years ago a great fire swept through the city of Amenkor. Not a fire like those burning in the bowls of standing oil that lined the promdenade to the palace, all red and orange and flapping in the wind that came from the sea. No. This fire was white, pure, and cold.

The Cracked Throne: I crouched down behind a pile of broken stone to catch my breath and gazed down the darkened narrow in the warren of buildings of the Dredge. In the moonlight, the alley was mainly shadow, with edges of dull light. Water gleamed in a thin stream in the alley’s center. No doorways, no windows here. At least none that I could see.

A sound came from behind, a rattle of stone against stone.

The Vacant Throne: I stood in the middle of a field of wheat, the bristly heads of grain pattering against my outstretched hands. The breeze that rippled through the fields tugged at my hair, at the folds of my sweat-stained shirt. In the moment before dawn, the world was quiet, expectant.

Sorrow: Carrion birds cloaked the early morning skies above the battlefields outside the walls of Yhnar. Their shadow roiled over the rumpled land, its edges ill-defined. They were the only sign of movement. No guards walked the battlements; no silhouettes passed before the torches along the parapets; and nothing but avian bodies moved on the ground. Everything was silent and still. Dawn was awakening.

Fever: “On August 17, 1965, at the end of a long, hot summer, I killed Beverly Amanda Reeves,” I began.

Writing Update

I've finished the final chapter! That doesn't mean I'm done of course, because I have an epilogue. But since the epilogue should be 1/5th the size of a chapter (maybe 1/3rd for this book), that means I'm SOOOOOOO close to being done. I like the ending too. Well, the ending, I like. The ending after the ending I'm not so sure about. The ending is emotionally fraught, which I like, and I think I made it heartwrenching for Varis, the other characters, and hopefully the reader. The ending after the ending isn't as satisfying to me because, even though it has to happen, it's tying up loose ends and my previous books don't really tie up loose ends. Pretty much book 1 and 2 end on the real ending, on the emotional high, and there's nothing much after that. This one, being the final book in the trilogy, can't do that. I need to clean up the house before I leave it for now (to be revisited later, I hope) and all that tidying just isn't as satisfactory to me as the emotional ending. I'm hoping the epilogue proves emotional enough for the reader that it will count as a second ending and leaves everyone (including me) emotionally satisfied with the trilogy. Which means of course that the epilogue is probably going to be a bitch to write.

But enough rambling on my writing high of the moment. Here's the word count, not expected to go much higher. I have to add numerous scenes in the rewrite, but hopefully I'll be trimming up scenes as well, so the book won't grow TOO much bigger. (My rewrites have never decreased the size of a book; and the rewrites suggested by my editor have never decreased the word count either.)

110,475 / 100,000 (110.5%)

The Vacant Throne