March! Blogs!
Welp, March is here, and I have learned three things!
- Other people are doing blogs! Other people who are possibly Thom, Ale, and James!
- It’s difficult to make raw dialogue easily readable without context!
- I need better formatting options in this blog! What the hell kind of text editor doesn’t allow you to have indents on new lines?
Anyway this is a thing I have been working on. Tomorrow will be a prose version of the same scene, because I damn well need the practice. So hang in there, it might actually make sense by then!
—
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Nirri. She’s hell-bent on scrambling off East.”
“I don’t see why you’re complaining to me. I always said that girl would be trouble.”
“Don’t try to be coy. From all accounts, you’re the one who sent the damn priest our way.”
“And you really think he wouldn’t have found out from someone else anyway?”
“It might have given us one more day.”
“Would one day really have helped?”
“Every day we’re not North of the Barrier is a blessing.”
“Come now, the man’s not asking you to travel on the roads-”
“He’s asking us to go to Red Landing!”
“So you stay on the river until you hit the coast. It’s only a day’s walk from the mouth.”
“That’s a day too many.”
“You’re… Look, Cedar. I never wanted to say this to you, but you’re just being paranoid. You were taken, yes, but you were being foolish! You were alone, you were far too trusting, and you stuck out like a sore thumb. You were a perfect target, so it’s no wonder you got snatched. If you go in a group-”
“With my wife! With my daughter! With these marks on my arms!”
“Yes! Stick together, travel during daylight, and stay on the roads! Do you think the the whole country will be searching for you?”
“It wouldn’t need to be. It would only take one gang-”
“And I’ve told you a hundred times already: play the odds and you won’t meet any!”
“No, it will just make us less likely to fall foul of them. That’s not the same thing, Nirri.”
“You’re impossible. Why can’t you be satisfied with odds that are as good as certain?”
“Because I know what will happen if they prove false.”
I’m curious about the context for this! Enough shines through that I feel like I got the idea of the situation if not the particulars.
(Curiosity more than anything: is it intentional that you wrote ‘not North of the Barrier’ as opposed to just ‘south of the Barrier’? That capital made me wonder if there was more to it than a compass bearing.)
Actually, the capitalisation was a mistake on my part – I’d for some reason had it in my head that cardinal directions always get capitalised (they’re only done so when used to refer to locations, as it turns out, not directions). So nope, that was just my bad.
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