Greetings all!
This is a combination post for both my Year of Accountability Project and my Camp NaNoWriMo Progress! I’ve been working on the novella pretty heavily over the last few days, and reached the first major milestone! 10,000 words! I’m excited to share a brief except from the short story in the novella below, but first I wanted to also share the goal for next week.
Goal for this week: Reach 10,000 words in the ‘Colonia’ book – Goal Achieved!
Goal for next week: Reach 20,000 words!
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Read on to discover more!
I wanted to share a fun resource I’ve recently discovered. It’s always really hard to ‘invent’ names for all of the Roman officers, sidekicks, additional characters that require a name, but not necessarily a fully fledged background. This website – Roman Fantasy Name Generator – is super useful! Sometimes I just need a first name, other times a full name, but it solves the problem without me having to do tons of research.
Oh, right. You wanted a snipped of the writing, yes?
The rocky coastline offered little shelter to our vessels, and we surged westward along the tip of the island. Massive bodies of ice and snow, the largest I’d ever seen, crowned mountains taller than the Alps. I hadn’t seen such rugged terrain since my travels to the northern Indus kingdoms, and those mountains pierced the sky. Lots of small rivers and streams broke the coastline, but there were no trees or villages in sight. A handful of sailors shouted that they had seen a mermaid, but I scoffed at them. Homopiscinus only exist in the warmer southern waters of the Atlanticum. These waters were much too cold.
As the rugged land pulled away to the north, I decided to follow the coastline. Perhaps the western side of this land would be more hospitable than the eastern side. For two days we traveled around land. It wasn’t until an eagle eyed man spotted the village that we laid down anchor.
The ruined village, that is. It was a most modest and humble thing, perhaps a dozen homesteads laid out on a rocky shelf, surrounded by moss and grass covered fields. I sent a party of marines ashore, and watched as they explored the village. I do not claim to be superstitious, but, to my experienced eye, I could immediately tell that there were no living occupants. There were no ships tied up at the small, damaged dock. The drying sheds looked empty, and even from the harbor, the place had an air of spooky abandonment. I resolved to ensure that my men took nothing from this place. No doubt Pluto would look down upon any who disturbed the settlement of the dead.
Modern Papyrus 