The Solarpunk Mammoths Novel: Part 2
Jan. 7th, 2019 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So I started on January 1st posting the alpha draft of an original novel I have in progress, and I'm collecting a list of people who want to be added to the privacy filter I'll be posting under henceforth, but I figured I'd do at least one more unlocked since I've been building up the follower list and such, and more people might be interested etc. So this is the continuation of that!
What's this about, you say? Intro Post
Missed the beginning? Well, Chapter 1 part 1 is here, and will remain unlocked; if you have a friend who you think might like this, feel free to link them to it! I'm still working out how subscription filters and such work, so like uh, join me on this journey, eh? (By which I mean, let me know if you want to keep reading, and I'll add you to the filter, and we'll figure out what to do from there.)
(And there's another snippet from a side story I worked on of this 'verse, here, if you want even more background, but it's not from the storyline of the main novel.)
Yeah in hindsight I should've posted chapter 1 as one 5000-word chunk, but I didn't. Next post will be a more discrete chunk.
Chapter 1 part 2, 2500ish words, in which our heroines arrive at the city:
From her higher vantage point, Ula saw the mills sooner than the others, so she had a moment to stare at them: Huge, long buildings, several stories high, set next to the millraces where the diverted water from the waterfall coursed, turning the wheels whose geared shafts turned long belts, strung all through the huge buildings. Ula had studied them in school, too, and knew how they worked, and she’d toured the mills as a child, had been shown the terrifyingly loud machinery that the water powered, and how many different kinds of machines could be hooked up-- drills, looms, grinders, saws, anything that needed power to move.
Most of the water wheels ran machines, but at least one of the buildings, also studded with solar panels, was a power generation facility, that made electricity to run the city. Enormous bundles of power cables ran out from that one, strung along on poles a distance before vanishing underground into pipes. It wasn’t that they didn’t have electricity, out in the hills, but they didn’t have all that much of it, and lived their daily lives without any great need of it. They had a little solar bank built into the south face of the ridge near the ancestor shrine, and made do with that and kinetic banks that the kids or some of the livestock could crank up. They’d had a wind generator but it had broken and they’d gotten used to doing without it.
“Sound,” Edurni buzzed, “what.”
“Hydro power mills,” Ula said. Edurni raised her head and extended her ears, looking at them with no apparent recognition. Ula knew Edurni’s herd wandered great distances over the course of the year, but it wasn’t surprising, on reflection, that they didn’t go near any cities. And to Ula’s knowledge, there weren’t any big manufacturing complexes like this anywhere there wasn’t a city. You needed people to work the machines, or there was no point in having the machines.
“What that,” Edurni buzzed finally. The translator wasn’t good at formulating questions, and it could only say words that were in it. If Edurni had never used the word hydro before, it wouldn’t be in there, and she wouldn’t be able to say it. It was one of their limitations. Bixenta, Ula’s great-grandmother, knew how to program the translators, and spent some time every year with the mammoth matriarchs discussing what new words needed to be put in. Ula had been studying with her for a few seasons now, and was more conversant than most with the way the translators worked, but she still had a lot to learn. It was yet another reason she’d been chosen for this trip.
“The mills are powered by the water,” Ula said. “The water runs in those channels they’ve cut for it, see, and it turns those big wheels. It’s complicated, but the rotation gets passed down through gears, and then travels along some belts, and goes into those buildings, and then the rotation spins things that make machines go, and they use the spinning machines to make all kinds of things. They spin thread, they weave cloth, they hammer metal, they cast plastic, they draw wire. All the stuff that humans need, they make it in those big long buildings.”
“Humans need stuff,” Edurni commented, nodding a little; she’d made that observation many times. It was the kind of thing that mammoths found alien about humans. Then her ears perked up a little. “Spin wool.”
One of the things that happened in the spring, just before the herds moved on, was that they shed their beautiful long, thick winter coats. And the tribes helped them do it, with their hands and sometimes with combs, and collected the shed fibers. It was a task that normally was mostly performed by the new mothers and the children, so Ula had many fond childhood memories of helping pull the mammoths’ coats. The winter hairs were very long, some of them coarse and some fine, and the summer coats underneath were always so smooth and soft, short and fine and so lovely under the hand.
Sometimes the tribesmen cleaned and spun and wove the hair themselves, but most of the time, they brought the raw fiber in big bales to the cities and sold it that way, and it was one of the ways they afforded to buy the things they couldn’t grow or make themselves. It was an important component of their relationship with the mammoths, but it was one Edurni had never fully been able to understand.
“Yes,” Ula said, “I’m sure they do.”
“See where,” Edurni said, tossing her head a little in enthusiasm. She jerked her head, gesturing with her trunk. “Want see.”
“Oh,” Ula said. “Maybe! We have to go into the city first, we can’t stop now, but when we’re there we could ask if anyone knows where they spin mammoth wool, if it’s in one of these mills. If it is we can find out if they’ll show us.”
“Want understand how,” Edurni said.
“I’ve shown you how we spin and weave,” Ula said. She had; Edurni had been much smaller then, and had been able to fit through the doorway to see the building where the looms were set up. They’d gotten yelled at, too, by the head weaver, but it had been all right; they hadn’t disturbed anything, and Ula’s mother had yelled back at the head weaver about it. Ula liked when her mother stood up for her, so it was a fond memory.
“So,” Edurni allowed, but gestured again to the mills. “Big. Big!”
Ula really wondered what the people here would make of a curious, full-grown mammoth asking to be given a tour of a factory. Surely they could make it happen. Edurni wasn’t going to forget about it, mammoths tended not to be very distractable if they set their attention on something. But the job they were here to do was important, so maybe they’d be able to avoid the issue.
Maybe.
They passed the mills, and then of course they came to the road between the mills and the city, which was a great deal more well-traveled than the road out of town. There was a train, to shuttle the workers back to their homes, and Edurni stopped stock-still to stare at it. It ran on electricity, generated by the mills. Ula knew that if the mills couldn’t generate electricity-- sometimes the river was too high, and the mill-races had to be shut off to protect the wheels, and they shut the factories down and everyone stayed home from work, there were lots of stories about it and people were always getting up to trouble when there was no work to do. Ula couldn’t imagine having no work to do-- the trains could be pulled by draft animals instead, but they didn’t have to run as often when there was no work. The trains went all through the city, though, to all the different neighborhoods, and people took them places other than just to the factories and back.
“What,” Edurni said finally, once the train had clacked past, mostly empty but with a few people’s faces pressed up in astonishment against the windows to stare at Edurni as she stared at them.
Ula had to explain what a train was, then, and Edurni clearly wanted to ask to go on one, but also didn’t have to be told she wouldn’t fit. It was pretty obvious. She put out her trunk and felt the tracks all over before she’d move on and continue to the road. Ula knew to point out the overhead electrical lines as dangerous, so Edurni didn’t touch those.
The train had stopped, a little ways ahead; there was a little station for it, and people had gotten off and were getting on, but everyone was mostly staring at Edurni. And Ula. Ula thought of waving cheerfully, but the frosty response of the caravan earlier made her hesitate.
The person driving the train leaned out the window at the front and solved some of Ula’s dilemma by shouting, “Are you for real riding a mammoth right here?”
Ula laughed. “Why?” she shouted back. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Lady, is that your mammoth?” a young woman asked, standing on the platform near the train.
“Of course not,” Ula answered, “she belongs to herself!”
“Is she tame?” asked a man standing next to the woman. Edurni flapped her ears a little, and remembered to sidle diagonally toward them, though she was so excited about the train Ula knew it was a struggle, could feel it in the mammoth’s body language that it was hard for her not to just run over there.
“Mammoths aren’t animals like that,” Ula said. “Hang on, if she comes closer she can talk to you herself.”
Edurni let out a little series of excited squeaks, reaching for the train with her trunk. She approached carefully, toward the window where the person driving the train was still hanging out. “Greetings,” she buzzed, when she was close enough, and vocalized along with it, an excited trumpeting noise. “Want touch thing.” She couldn’t say train either.
“She wants to touch your train,” Ula said. “Would that be all right?”
“Wow,” the train driver said. She was an older woman, her graying hair standing out in a puffy halo around her head. “Sure! Can I touch your trunk?”
Edurni chirped happily, and obliged by caressing the train driver the way she would any of the tribesmen, to greet them. The train driver looked enchanted, running her hands along Edurni’s trunk. Meanwhile the people on the platform were all gathered right at the edge, staring at Edurni.
“How do you steer a mammoth?” asked the man who’d spoken earlier.
“You don’t,” Ula said. “She steers herself.”
Edurni had moved on and was feeling all along the edge of the train window. “Don’t touch up at the top,” the driver said, leaning out to gesture. “Where the wires come in. That would give you a nasty shock.”
“Where did you come from?” the young woman asked. “Did you ride her the whole way?”
“No, no,” Ula said. “We’re from the Granite Cliffs but I rode a horse most of the way here. Just, this morning, when we ran into some traffic, Edurni was getting nervous and wanted me to be with her. She’s never been to a city before.”
“Wait, so you’re not, like, controlling her?” the man asked.
“Of course not,” Ula said. “She’s a mammoth, not a horse. Mammoths do what they want.”
“How do you get down from there?” the woman asked.
“I ask,” Ula said.
“How it work,” Edurni buzzed, fascinated.
“The electricity in those lines powers a motor,” the driver answered. “Then I can use a lever and some switches to make this train go. It follows the tracks, so I don’t have to steer it, I just tell it when to go and when to stop.”
“Fast,” Edurni said, nodding her head jerkily in excitement.
“It is,” the train operator agreed.
Ula looked over to see that Harki and the others had ridden up and were congregated in the road. She exchanged a look with Harki, who smiled at her. This was much nicer than the caravan had been, and was much more what Ula had been hoping it would be like. Edurni wasn’t moody, as mammoths went, but it was hard to tell sometimes how things would affect any given mammoth, even Edurni, and if people were too often rude she might feel the need to abandon their task. Which would be inconvenient.
Ula had, as a child, often forgotten Edurni wasn’t human, but now that they were both adults, she made a point of reminding herself, pretty often. Mammoths didn’t see things like humans did, and didn’t have the same motivations, didn’t enjoy the same things, couldn’t be predicted the same ways. You had to be careful, even if they loved you; there were things they wouldn’t understand were dangerous for you, and they’d consider some things betrayals that seemed innocuous to you-- and conversely, would think nothing of something absolutely devastating to you. They just thought differently, and it was crucial not to lose sight of that.
In a moment, the train operator regretfully said they had to go now or they’d be too far behind schedule, and everyone got onto or off the train as needed, and Edurni stood raptly and watched the train drive away before she’d let them move on, but then they set off down the road again.
There was more traffic now, people on foot and people on horseback and people with wagons drawn by mules. The mules were even warier of Edurni than the horses, but there were no incidents. At one point, there was a large group of children playing in a yard near the road, and when Edurni stopped to look at them, they all gathered around and the adult supervising them, after asking a few cautious questions, opened the yard’s gate so Edurni could come in, and then all the children swarmed around and petted her. She was delighted by this, and petted the children with her trunk in turn, and answered a lot of questions. There were a few things Ula had to intervene and say.
Finally Harki came to the gate and said, “Sorry, dears, but we have to keep moving.”
Regretfully, Edurni took her leave of the children, and they continued down the road, but her mood was much improved. Edurni was quite fond of children, both human and mammoth. From then on, plenty of people showed signs of surprise and interest in Edurni, but nobody acted frightened or hostile.
“It’s because it’s clear she hasn’t wandered in on her own, this far,” Harki explained, as they made their way along an open stretch of road between the power generation mill and the city. This stretch was mostly orchards, a kind of buffer zone between the noisy mills and the places people lived. It was peaceful, and at the moment, uncrowded. “Out there, people thought she might be wild or rabid or sick, or something, but in here they assume she’s clearly here on purpose so someone must know she’s here.”
“I mean,” Ula said, “we know she’s here, clearly.”
“Well, yes,” Harki said, but didn’t elaborate. Ula knew what he meant, though-- herders didn’t count as ‘someone’ to city folk. Not reliably.
“I too know,” Edurni grumbled, and Ula patted her neck reassuringly.
Riding on a mammoth was not quite as comfortable as riding on a horse, but Ula wasn’t going to ask to get down. Her feet had to dangle, there were no stirrups, and there was no saddle with the accustomed padding, but Edurni’s neck was less bony than a horse’s withers, at least. “Isn’t your neck getting sore?” Ula asked.
Edurni waggled her ears. “No,” she answered. “You stay.” And she chirped, as if to make it a question.
“Of course,” Ula said, “as long as you want me to.” Edurni reached back with her trunk and wrapped it around Ula’s lower leg for a moment, and Ula dug her fingers into Edurni’s hair as they moved over the crest of a hill.
What's this about, you say? Intro Post
Missed the beginning? Well, Chapter 1 part 1 is here, and will remain unlocked; if you have a friend who you think might like this, feel free to link them to it! I'm still working out how subscription filters and such work, so like uh, join me on this journey, eh? (By which I mean, let me know if you want to keep reading, and I'll add you to the filter, and we'll figure out what to do from there.)
(And there's another snippet from a side story I worked on of this 'verse, here, if you want even more background, but it's not from the storyline of the main novel.)
Yeah in hindsight I should've posted chapter 1 as one 5000-word chunk, but I didn't. Next post will be a more discrete chunk.
Chapter 1 part 2, 2500ish words, in which our heroines arrive at the city:
From her higher vantage point, Ula saw the mills sooner than the others, so she had a moment to stare at them: Huge, long buildings, several stories high, set next to the millraces where the diverted water from the waterfall coursed, turning the wheels whose geared shafts turned long belts, strung all through the huge buildings. Ula had studied them in school, too, and knew how they worked, and she’d toured the mills as a child, had been shown the terrifyingly loud machinery that the water powered, and how many different kinds of machines could be hooked up-- drills, looms, grinders, saws, anything that needed power to move.
Most of the water wheels ran machines, but at least one of the buildings, also studded with solar panels, was a power generation facility, that made electricity to run the city. Enormous bundles of power cables ran out from that one, strung along on poles a distance before vanishing underground into pipes. It wasn’t that they didn’t have electricity, out in the hills, but they didn’t have all that much of it, and lived their daily lives without any great need of it. They had a little solar bank built into the south face of the ridge near the ancestor shrine, and made do with that and kinetic banks that the kids or some of the livestock could crank up. They’d had a wind generator but it had broken and they’d gotten used to doing without it.
“Sound,” Edurni buzzed, “what.”
“Hydro power mills,” Ula said. Edurni raised her head and extended her ears, looking at them with no apparent recognition. Ula knew Edurni’s herd wandered great distances over the course of the year, but it wasn’t surprising, on reflection, that they didn’t go near any cities. And to Ula’s knowledge, there weren’t any big manufacturing complexes like this anywhere there wasn’t a city. You needed people to work the machines, or there was no point in having the machines.
“What that,” Edurni buzzed finally. The translator wasn’t good at formulating questions, and it could only say words that were in it. If Edurni had never used the word hydro before, it wouldn’t be in there, and she wouldn’t be able to say it. It was one of their limitations. Bixenta, Ula’s great-grandmother, knew how to program the translators, and spent some time every year with the mammoth matriarchs discussing what new words needed to be put in. Ula had been studying with her for a few seasons now, and was more conversant than most with the way the translators worked, but she still had a lot to learn. It was yet another reason she’d been chosen for this trip.
“The mills are powered by the water,” Ula said. “The water runs in those channels they’ve cut for it, see, and it turns those big wheels. It’s complicated, but the rotation gets passed down through gears, and then travels along some belts, and goes into those buildings, and then the rotation spins things that make machines go, and they use the spinning machines to make all kinds of things. They spin thread, they weave cloth, they hammer metal, they cast plastic, they draw wire. All the stuff that humans need, they make it in those big long buildings.”
“Humans need stuff,” Edurni commented, nodding a little; she’d made that observation many times. It was the kind of thing that mammoths found alien about humans. Then her ears perked up a little. “Spin wool.”
One of the things that happened in the spring, just before the herds moved on, was that they shed their beautiful long, thick winter coats. And the tribes helped them do it, with their hands and sometimes with combs, and collected the shed fibers. It was a task that normally was mostly performed by the new mothers and the children, so Ula had many fond childhood memories of helping pull the mammoths’ coats. The winter hairs were very long, some of them coarse and some fine, and the summer coats underneath were always so smooth and soft, short and fine and so lovely under the hand.
Sometimes the tribesmen cleaned and spun and wove the hair themselves, but most of the time, they brought the raw fiber in big bales to the cities and sold it that way, and it was one of the ways they afforded to buy the things they couldn’t grow or make themselves. It was an important component of their relationship with the mammoths, but it was one Edurni had never fully been able to understand.
“Yes,” Ula said, “I’m sure they do.”
“See where,” Edurni said, tossing her head a little in enthusiasm. She jerked her head, gesturing with her trunk. “Want see.”
“Oh,” Ula said. “Maybe! We have to go into the city first, we can’t stop now, but when we’re there we could ask if anyone knows where they spin mammoth wool, if it’s in one of these mills. If it is we can find out if they’ll show us.”
“Want understand how,” Edurni said.
“I’ve shown you how we spin and weave,” Ula said. She had; Edurni had been much smaller then, and had been able to fit through the doorway to see the building where the looms were set up. They’d gotten yelled at, too, by the head weaver, but it had been all right; they hadn’t disturbed anything, and Ula’s mother had yelled back at the head weaver about it. Ula liked when her mother stood up for her, so it was a fond memory.
“So,” Edurni allowed, but gestured again to the mills. “Big. Big!”
Ula really wondered what the people here would make of a curious, full-grown mammoth asking to be given a tour of a factory. Surely they could make it happen. Edurni wasn’t going to forget about it, mammoths tended not to be very distractable if they set their attention on something. But the job they were here to do was important, so maybe they’d be able to avoid the issue.
Maybe.
They passed the mills, and then of course they came to the road between the mills and the city, which was a great deal more well-traveled than the road out of town. There was a train, to shuttle the workers back to their homes, and Edurni stopped stock-still to stare at it. It ran on electricity, generated by the mills. Ula knew that if the mills couldn’t generate electricity-- sometimes the river was too high, and the mill-races had to be shut off to protect the wheels, and they shut the factories down and everyone stayed home from work, there were lots of stories about it and people were always getting up to trouble when there was no work to do. Ula couldn’t imagine having no work to do-- the trains could be pulled by draft animals instead, but they didn’t have to run as often when there was no work. The trains went all through the city, though, to all the different neighborhoods, and people took them places other than just to the factories and back.
“What,” Edurni said finally, once the train had clacked past, mostly empty but with a few people’s faces pressed up in astonishment against the windows to stare at Edurni as she stared at them.
Ula had to explain what a train was, then, and Edurni clearly wanted to ask to go on one, but also didn’t have to be told she wouldn’t fit. It was pretty obvious. She put out her trunk and felt the tracks all over before she’d move on and continue to the road. Ula knew to point out the overhead electrical lines as dangerous, so Edurni didn’t touch those.
The train had stopped, a little ways ahead; there was a little station for it, and people had gotten off and were getting on, but everyone was mostly staring at Edurni. And Ula. Ula thought of waving cheerfully, but the frosty response of the caravan earlier made her hesitate.
The person driving the train leaned out the window at the front and solved some of Ula’s dilemma by shouting, “Are you for real riding a mammoth right here?”
Ula laughed. “Why?” she shouted back. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Lady, is that your mammoth?” a young woman asked, standing on the platform near the train.
“Of course not,” Ula answered, “she belongs to herself!”
“Is she tame?” asked a man standing next to the woman. Edurni flapped her ears a little, and remembered to sidle diagonally toward them, though she was so excited about the train Ula knew it was a struggle, could feel it in the mammoth’s body language that it was hard for her not to just run over there.
“Mammoths aren’t animals like that,” Ula said. “Hang on, if she comes closer she can talk to you herself.”
Edurni let out a little series of excited squeaks, reaching for the train with her trunk. She approached carefully, toward the window where the person driving the train was still hanging out. “Greetings,” she buzzed, when she was close enough, and vocalized along with it, an excited trumpeting noise. “Want touch thing.” She couldn’t say train either.
“She wants to touch your train,” Ula said. “Would that be all right?”
“Wow,” the train driver said. She was an older woman, her graying hair standing out in a puffy halo around her head. “Sure! Can I touch your trunk?”
Edurni chirped happily, and obliged by caressing the train driver the way she would any of the tribesmen, to greet them. The train driver looked enchanted, running her hands along Edurni’s trunk. Meanwhile the people on the platform were all gathered right at the edge, staring at Edurni.
“How do you steer a mammoth?” asked the man who’d spoken earlier.
“You don’t,” Ula said. “She steers herself.”
Edurni had moved on and was feeling all along the edge of the train window. “Don’t touch up at the top,” the driver said, leaning out to gesture. “Where the wires come in. That would give you a nasty shock.”
“Where did you come from?” the young woman asked. “Did you ride her the whole way?”
“No, no,” Ula said. “We’re from the Granite Cliffs but I rode a horse most of the way here. Just, this morning, when we ran into some traffic, Edurni was getting nervous and wanted me to be with her. She’s never been to a city before.”
“Wait, so you’re not, like, controlling her?” the man asked.
“Of course not,” Ula said. “She’s a mammoth, not a horse. Mammoths do what they want.”
“How do you get down from there?” the woman asked.
“I ask,” Ula said.
“How it work,” Edurni buzzed, fascinated.
“The electricity in those lines powers a motor,” the driver answered. “Then I can use a lever and some switches to make this train go. It follows the tracks, so I don’t have to steer it, I just tell it when to go and when to stop.”
“Fast,” Edurni said, nodding her head jerkily in excitement.
“It is,” the train operator agreed.
Ula looked over to see that Harki and the others had ridden up and were congregated in the road. She exchanged a look with Harki, who smiled at her. This was much nicer than the caravan had been, and was much more what Ula had been hoping it would be like. Edurni wasn’t moody, as mammoths went, but it was hard to tell sometimes how things would affect any given mammoth, even Edurni, and if people were too often rude she might feel the need to abandon their task. Which would be inconvenient.
Ula had, as a child, often forgotten Edurni wasn’t human, but now that they were both adults, she made a point of reminding herself, pretty often. Mammoths didn’t see things like humans did, and didn’t have the same motivations, didn’t enjoy the same things, couldn’t be predicted the same ways. You had to be careful, even if they loved you; there were things they wouldn’t understand were dangerous for you, and they’d consider some things betrayals that seemed innocuous to you-- and conversely, would think nothing of something absolutely devastating to you. They just thought differently, and it was crucial not to lose sight of that.
In a moment, the train operator regretfully said they had to go now or they’d be too far behind schedule, and everyone got onto or off the train as needed, and Edurni stood raptly and watched the train drive away before she’d let them move on, but then they set off down the road again.
There was more traffic now, people on foot and people on horseback and people with wagons drawn by mules. The mules were even warier of Edurni than the horses, but there were no incidents. At one point, there was a large group of children playing in a yard near the road, and when Edurni stopped to look at them, they all gathered around and the adult supervising them, after asking a few cautious questions, opened the yard’s gate so Edurni could come in, and then all the children swarmed around and petted her. She was delighted by this, and petted the children with her trunk in turn, and answered a lot of questions. There were a few things Ula had to intervene and say.
Finally Harki came to the gate and said, “Sorry, dears, but we have to keep moving.”
Regretfully, Edurni took her leave of the children, and they continued down the road, but her mood was much improved. Edurni was quite fond of children, both human and mammoth. From then on, plenty of people showed signs of surprise and interest in Edurni, but nobody acted frightened or hostile.
“It’s because it’s clear she hasn’t wandered in on her own, this far,” Harki explained, as they made their way along an open stretch of road between the power generation mill and the city. This stretch was mostly orchards, a kind of buffer zone between the noisy mills and the places people lived. It was peaceful, and at the moment, uncrowded. “Out there, people thought she might be wild or rabid or sick, or something, but in here they assume she’s clearly here on purpose so someone must know she’s here.”
“I mean,” Ula said, “we know she’s here, clearly.”
“Well, yes,” Harki said, but didn’t elaborate. Ula knew what he meant, though-- herders didn’t count as ‘someone’ to city folk. Not reliably.
“I too know,” Edurni grumbled, and Ula patted her neck reassuringly.
Riding on a mammoth was not quite as comfortable as riding on a horse, but Ula wasn’t going to ask to get down. Her feet had to dangle, there were no stirrups, and there was no saddle with the accustomed padding, but Edurni’s neck was less bony than a horse’s withers, at least. “Isn’t your neck getting sore?” Ula asked.
Edurni waggled her ears. “No,” she answered. “You stay.” And she chirped, as if to make it a question.
“Of course,” Ula said, “as long as you want me to.” Edurni reached back with her trunk and wrapped it around Ula’s lower leg for a moment, and Ula dug her fingers into Edurni’s hair as they moved over the crest of a hill.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 04:20 pm (UTC)I don't either.
I think what's gonna happen is that I'm gonna post under a privacy lock so only people who've said they're into it can see it.
And then people who don't want to read other personal ramblings of mine can, I think, filter it so they only see things I've tagged with the tag I'm gonna use-- or like, they could not subscribe to me at all, and could just come look at that tag when they see fit, or something. Not sure. Gotta figure that out.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 05:53 pm (UTC)also: is it ambiguous what season it is? because it's ambiguous and i don't know how the timeline of this story has to work. I can't do the math to figure it out. I'm going to have to set an endpoint and count backwards and figure out how long the various journeys and such are going to take. And I didn't yet. So the seasonal details are all... off.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 08:32 pm (UTC)The whole Plot McGuffin is that they need something taken care of by The Winter Migration, so I have to actually sit down and figure out when that would be, and count back how long everything would take.
I guess more of a limiting factor is when The Plot Problem was discovered, and how long the whole thing took to organize themselves, and how long the next bit is going to take, and...
I just wish I were better at figuring out the Entire Concept of Time as a Thing.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-07 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 03:58 pm (UTC)And as I've tried to say-- i don't necessarily need any kind of feedback really! I'm just trying to be accountable so I write the damn thing.
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Date: 2019-01-07 11:10 pm (UTC)Fuckin' SOLD. I can't promise I can give regular useful critique but I desperately need it to exist.
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Date: 2019-01-08 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 09:46 am (UTC)(I really love infrastructure and babies, ok?)
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Date: 2019-01-08 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-08 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 09:23 am (UTC)Also: her very tactile approach to both investigation and affection. 😊
Also: Ula's memories of gathering mammoth wool and feeling the softness of the new summer coats.
Yay, you, and thank you for continuing this!
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Date: 2019-01-11 06:53 pm (UTC)There are a few first draft bobbles that I'm sure you already know about (i.e. two separate instances of Ula thinking about how mammoths =/ people).
Also, her description of herself is making me picture a sort of fantasy biker-looking chick and I'm definitely here for it.
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Date: 2020-08-25 03:10 pm (UTC)