Alice drawing

And here is a drawing of Alice, in her ‘draping, torn’ shirt.

Rough sketch of the Necromancer

The Necromancer, in her conquering-the-world outfit and her hair pulled back in a bun.

Vote for my video!

I’m a bit torn about posting this here, but I really want to win, so… I’m disregarding my ‘book-stuff only’ rule.

I’ve an entry in the Emily the Strange ‘Be All You Can’t Be’ costume contest. It’s a cute song. All I ask is that you have a listen, and if you like it, rate it, and/or leave a comment.  Come on, it’s got a singing cute brunette in a cloak. What’s not to like?

View vid here.

Thanks!

Chapter one finished!

So, chapter one is finished, at 4,321 words. Not much for like, 12 days in, I know, but I joined five days in and have the added handicap of having to study for my end-of-semester exams.

So. Assassins. In the last excerpt posted they came to try and assassinate peeps and blow up Squad headquarters.  Alice however showed totally unexpected ‘mad skillz’ – lol – and backstory, and they were incapacitated.

Kelly is kinda freaking out about how much danger they were all in now she has time to think, though, and knows that someone has to do something about the current situation, which sets things up nicely for the Necromancer’s totally accidental appearance next chapter as Kelly tries to help put herself.

Alice

 

And here we have a reasonable fascimile of Alice.

NaNoWriMo update

So, if you’ve been following what I’ve been writing on here, then you’re probably wondering where my last few posts have gone.

You see, I’ve had some advice from someone who explained that if I ever want to get this published, then posting it online is not the way to go.  An excerpt of your novel is usually acceptable, but post any great amount online and that counts as publishing, and no book publisher will be interested.

So, I’ve cut down the amount posted on here, and I likely won’t post any more.  I probably will post updates, if anything interesting happens, but no more of my fic will go online.

Sorry guys, if you were reading it.

NaNoWriMo temporary book cover!

So it’s not perfect, but I used the candybar dollmakers to create this little ‘book cover.’  At some point I want to draw one, but until then, this’ll do.

Kelly, the Necromancer – her expression is perfect – and Saladin.

The last two have not, of course, yet appeared in the novel.

 

NaNoWriMo Novel, excerpt two

In which there are assassins, and things go from bad to worse.

Takes place quite some time after excerpt one.

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Necromancy is Not The Answer, Excerpt two

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The next morning Kelly emerged from lessons to find that most of the Elemental Squad was absent. Together with Katie and Basil, who also lived at headquarters, Kelly began searching for its members.

She found Alice, Jay, Dimitri, Jasmine and Elisabeth in the ‘War Room,’ Jasmine and Elisabeth monitoring the wards, the others wearing telephonic headsets.

“What’s going on?” Kelly asked, while the two younger children trailed in behind her apprehensively.

Alice switched her headset off for a moment.

“There was an attack at the markets,” she said grimly. “Terror tactics. Basically appearing out of nowhere, attacking everyone in sight, then translocating out again, only we interrupted. It turned into a pitched battle when we showed up. There’s at least a hundred of the Dark Lord’s people there, and approximately five hundred civilians trapped at the scene. Total FUBAR. Us lot are the only ones who weren’t called in, coz someone’s gotta hold everything down here.”

“Uh, Alice?” Jasmine interrupted. Her tone of voice was filled with foreboding. “The wards have been breached.”

“What?” Alice asked sharply. “Show me.”

Elisabeth let Jasmine point out the changes in the wards while she used the laptop computer to bring up CCTV footage.

Standing in reception were six men and one woman, all dressed from head-to-toe in black and wearing sunglasses. Kelly could just make out some kind of design embroidered in red on the breast of their jackets, but the image quality for the camera was too small for her to make out what it was.

“Oh, bleedin’ hell. Assassins,” Alice said into the sudden still silence. “Just what we need.”

NaNoWriMo Novel, excerpt one

A.k.a., the beginning.

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Necromancy is Not The Answer, excerpt one

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Kelly August was feeling depressed.

Here they were, the best and brightest of the side of light and democracy and all that jazz, and they were standing around bickering like a bunch of kids.

It wasn’t even like they were fighting over something important. Oh no. What were they bickering about?

“I’m just saying, if you’d let me handle it –” one of the warlocks was saying angrily.

Personal ranking.

“Then you would have messed it up even worse,” Alice interrupted promptly. Alice was only four years older than Kelly, but she was already a rockin’ enchanter. She was also the totally antithesis of cool, in her black lace skirt, knee-high socks, torn draping black shirt and the giant black velvet bow half-buried in her mass of black hair. She was so far from cool that she redefined cool, and created a kind of anti-cool that was seductive and appealing.

Kelly totally wanted to be like Alice when she grew up.

Alice just raised an eyebrow as the warlock bristled.

“Come on, Gilbert, you just wanted to seize the spotlight. Ever heard of a character called Gilderoy Lockhart? Coz he acted a lot like you do.”

Kelly knew right then that everyone was going to call Gil ‘Gilderoy’ from then on.

Kelly’s Dad cleared his throat sternly.

“Quiet!”

At the commanding voice people mostly fell quiet, although there were a couple of witches in the corner discussing Brad Pitt’s relative hotness before and after getting with Angelina Jolie who didn’t shut up.

David August looked around severely, which Kelly reckoned was to mask his secret despair at the utter lack of usefulness of the secret magical police force.

“We are a force of law and order, ladies and gentlemen.” Uh-oh. “We are employed to protect those without the gift of magic from the unscrupulous, the malicious, and the downright evil among those with our gifts. We are not here to sit bickering over who takes precedence in a battle situation which, incidentally, went VERY BADLY!”

He glared around at the Elemental Squad.

“Can anyone tell me why?” There was silence. “No? No one? It’s not a particularly hard question to answer. Anyone?” He turned to Kelly. “Kelly, would you like to tell everyone what went wrong?”

Kelly sat up straight hastily, wide-eyed at being unexpectedly called upon.

“Um. Everyone was too worried about what they were doing instead of working together?” she ventured.

“PRECISELY!” her father bellowed. Alice sent Kelly a little amused and approving wink. “This is not a talent pageant, ladies and gentlemen. You are not here to demonstrate how flamboyantly you can conjure fire, or how the light from an explosion sets off your new suit.” David eyed Gil darkly, making Gil flush uncomfortably. “The lot of you are supposed to be professionals. You are the only things standing between the defenceless and those who would subjugate them. Act like it!”

Kelly made a mental note to look up ‘subjugate.’ Her Dad made the awesomest speeches.

With a sigh, David ran a hand through his hair, slumping slightly.

“You’re dismissed. “

NaNoWriMo 2009: Necromancy Is Not The Answer

So I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve been trying to write novels for ages, but they always seem to take so much time. My favorite has barely one chapter written, despite my working on it for like, a year. (In my defence, it’s a totally awesome chapter.)

So, I’m going to take this opportunity to belt out as much of a novel as I can, disregarding top-perfect quality. For the moment, quantity counts. My base-level writing quality is acceptable, and any polishing can be done later. Check out my NaNoWriMo profile here.  So, for a quick blurb of my new novel-in-progress:

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Necromancy Is Not The Answer

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Things are going badly for the Elemental Squad, the police force of the magical world. There’s a Dark Lord on the rise, and everyone is too concerned with personal prestige to work together.

Kelly is thirteen. Her parents are in the Elemental Squad, so she’s well placed to see how everything is going to hell. Determined to help somehow, Kelly finds a book in the Elemental Squad library that she thinks might be useful… and ends up accidentally summoning the Necromancer, the only true Master of Necromancy ever to have existed, and a powerful Dark Lord in her own right.

As though things weren’t bad enough before, the Elementla Squad now has to deal with a cheerful, chaotic, and surprisingly helpful Necromancer, who’s taken an inexplicable and rather worrying shine to Kelly.

The rising Dark Lord might turn out to be the least of their problems…