"suddenly everything has changed"

Holy crap. Well, I'm getting ready for bed, nominally, and I thought I'd post about my writing status. I stumbled on the "zokutou word meter" today -- I'm sure many of you knew about this already, but be quiet. Anyway, here's my status, total:

6,336 / 80,000 (7.9%)

Ooh, shiny and the like. I did around 1600 words today, huzzah. That's five days of work there. The max. total on the meter is an estimate: I did around 77,000 words on the last novel, and I'm more comfortable with writing now, so I expect it to be a bit longer. I may even shop this one out, instead of hemming and hawing over it like the first. : p Anyway.

Here's a bit of today's work. I can't vouch for how interesting it is, I suppose. It's what I kinda consider the beginning of chapter two, I think. If you have anything to say, have at it. Anyway:

Derik stood in the doorway of a mausoleum, scrubbing his face with both hands, as though rubbing a layer of skin from his face would remove the promise he'd made from him, negating all his responsibility. Nope, he thought, still there. So I will have to lead my friend, who thinks of the world in terms of paragraph breaks, into a house that is not, in fact, mine.

He looked out over the scene stretched before him. This crypt hadn't been used in years, as the last surviving member of the Lofcræft family had moved to the capital ages ago. It was the sort of tarnished white only old marble attains, after years of rain, distant woodsmoke, and both ends of humanity's journey exuding gases from within and without. “So,” Derik said to the nearest shelf, plastered over with a relief of the person within carved as though sleeping on top of the repository, “at what point do you think Danielle will cock up the whole thing?”

He sighed and glanced out the door, which he'd broken apart a year ago with the aid of a large hammer – it was damn hard to make of without the smith noticing, Derik thought. There had been some sort of complex lock outside, of course, but it had been so long disused that only an act of divinity would have popped it open in one piece.

The cemetery lay in a patch of ground surrounded on all sides by housing, the kind of rickety, warren-like housing that shudders under light rain and falls over when thunder cracks above it. Even the most desperate of Floren's citizens didn't particularly want to sleep near the graveyard, and that made it an excellent staging point, as the few who lived nearby did so for the easy access it provided to one of several rich districts of town. They were servants, mostly, with the odd clerk or scribe among them. Derik could see the gleaming white speckles of manor houses splattered across one of the many large hills that rose from Floren, thrusting the well-to-do just that little bit farther from the people who made their money for them.

Danielle had scuttled off to her hotel, in search of clothes that didn't reflect so much light as to be incandescent. She'd also gone for what she called “necessaries.” Derik quivered, and his skin splotched with goose pimples when he thought of what she might deem necessary to burglary. Probably a how-to book and a lantern for reading in dark areas, like occupied bedrooms and hallways.

Derik spent quite a while staring at the hill, which was called Blackglass Abbey for some reason he'd never worked out. As he looked at it, with its flickers of white stone reflecting lanterns, fires, glowing light sources of more worrying origins, and the occasional torch, worry slipped from his shoulders like water from the back of a mud goose. His eyes roved from manor to manor, counting the lights wavering around them and calculating how many people were inside – the general manor house in Floren has a set number of servants and tenants, as the rick folk like to use their money for stranger spectacles, such as offering to improve the city's abysmal defenses, or fund and entire celebration in honor of some slack-witted wrestler or archer.