Category: WIP Wednesday

that boy you once loved so much

Hope ZaneWIP Wednesday

Excerpts from a new book, ch. 3

Far away, on the other side of campus, a man with long, slender legs and a head full of mussed blue hair stirs. He groans faintly, and the body beside him stirs with him, making an inquisitive sound while still mostly sunk in slumber, barely waking up.

Robin reaches out and pats him a few times with his eyes still slitted shut—

Nothing to see here, just go back to bed.

Robin groans as he dredges himself back to the land of the living. It hurts waking up. The sunlight stings his eyes, and he has to practically force them open.

“Where you goin’, baby?” a sweet voice slurs behind him.

“Nowhere,” Robin says. “Keep dreaming.”

It could come off a little acerbic, but the alpha in bed takes it as sweet pillow talk. He rumbles slightly and shoves his face back into his pillow. His hair is a sandy blond color, wavy and tousled with sleep, and his sheets are clean for a college student’s—Robin’s insistence. He’s not going to sleep somewhere with a dirty bed.

Blue-haired Robin touches his slender feet down to the ground, recoiling slightly at the chill. He looks like a towheaded swan as he glides around the small and messy room, unselfconscious with all of his smooth, clear skin on display—the slender and shapely line of his back, his smooth and clean limbs. It’s still dark with early morning, but Robin’s eyes have always been good. He fishes around in the pockets of the alpha’s pants until he finds a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

He opens the window, letting in a refreshing trace of early morning air that blows the haze of sex and pheromones away.

The sun is just starting to rise over the grand, old pine trees that line the campus, touching the dew-swept grass with orange.

Robin doesn’t pay any special attention to it. His eyes rove past it, settling on the horizon while he smokes his cigarette calmly.

He purses his lips, blowing another puff of smoke off the window. The white smoke rises, trailing lazily like a dragon’s plume up to the sky.

“Baby?” the voice calls when he’s almost finished with his cigarette, lightly wheedling with sleep. That tangled mess of sandy blond hair peeks up from the bed. “Baby, it’s cold. Shut the window and come back to bed.”

“Coming,” Robin says lightly.

He finishes the last of his cigarette before stubbing it out on the window sill.

He does leave the window open, but he goes back to bed to warm his companion with his body.

Not a Short Story

Hope ZaneGeneral

So the Illness that I mentioned last week continued. Woof. Somewhere in all that fever-brained mess, I decided to write a short story. It’s… not really turning out to be a short story.

Well, I have my hopes, but it seems to be turning into a novel, like all things tend to do. Fairytale started as ostensibly a short story, and now I’m 100k in the thick of it. It’s funny, this was supposed to be a quick smut fic, but as I started writing the characters, there was just so much more to them. I think I tend to write long because I get curious. Curious about who these people are, what happened to them, and what’s going to happen to them. You know how it goes.

Anyway, it’s interesting because I don’t think this is a story I could have started except when I was so sick that I couldn’t possibly give a fuck about anything besides clawing onto my continued existence. Talking about art school is kind of funny that way, and it is about art school—about two painters.

Here’s a little snippet of it. I’m thinking of putting it up on my Patreon for patrons to read, and that might be the only place it lives until I have enough short stories to put together a collection.

Heechul wakes in the night with his heart pounding. He doesn’t know what time it is. Kaoru’s room is an unfamiliar place, and there are no clocks. He could have been sleeping for a few minutes or a few hours.

He startles a little when he feels a warm, heavy body beside him, its heat leaching into his own.

Of course it’s Kaoru. Who else would it be? Even so, it takes a while for Heechul’s heart to calm down.

He doesn’t have nightmares, that he knows of. Or at least, not nightmares in the way anyone else can talk about them. Since he was little, he’s often woken feeling frightened. And how do you talk about that?

WIP Wednesday: A Ship to Lin’an

Hope ZaneWIP Wednesday

I already (sometimes, when I can get the courage) do WIP Wednesdays elsewhere, mostly on Discord and occasionally on Twitter. Since I’m trying to make a place for myself here, maybe I will start doing it here, too.

Here’s a bit I’m currently working on from a still-untitled book. It takes place in 1200 Lin’an, China (today Hangzhou) during the Song dynasty. In the timeline of my books, it’s set around the time of The Witchblood Heir, when the black and white fey courts in the West have been established.

The main character of this book, Laurel, shows up for the first time in Winter Sun, the 3rd book about Nice—which means he lives to be very old indeed. I liked him so much that I wanted to write about him even more, which of course meant learning about where he came from. I’ve been enjoying this project very much, although the heavy research has been stretching me in interesting and challenging new ways. So far I’m about 43k into this project.

Anyway! Without further ado, the snippet for today:

“Sleep,” Li Qiuyue says then, as though she’s just remembered that Laurel is still a child and needs rest. Her severe expression softens but only to become a little bewildered, as though she’s confused by this. “We’ll get to the capital soon. You should rest if you’re tired.”

“But I’ve already slept so much.”

“Are you tired?”

He feels the deep exhaustion in the heart of him, the weight in his bones. It’s true that he’s more tired than he has been in years, and he nods slowly.

“Then sleep.”

Laurel has forgotten some of this conversation as the years have passed, and he will forget many more. These words, however, have imprinted themselves, indelible upon his mind—Li Qiuyue’s picture of a fair world.

Maybe it was the way that she said them. There was a weight to her voice, as though she was condemning the world. There was a heavy, burning look in her eyes, as though she was seeing and judging all that she could see.