Stretch this out, Mark, please? I don't know what I'll do without your Reads to look forward to! Though Young Wizards is one of my all-time favorites! I can't begin to tell you how much this site and you and your readers have meant to me!
But before Meryem was rescued by Oswin she saw her family murdered by pirates and lived by scavenging on her own. All of Oswin's kids are rescued from pirate attacks. Meryem runs when she's frightened or she wants to say no because a brutal period in her life taught her that no one paid attention when she said no. She hasn't had a stable, secure family for long enough that she can work her way free of the behaviors she developed to survive on her own. Neither has Envy.
Mark, WanderingUndine & Co. are right. Glaciers grind big rocks, like mountains, like Himalayas, down to little rocks, like Appalachians and then to sand. And there's no reasoning with them--they know only forward or up (evaporation). But they prefer forward.
And then there's the sea . . .
Life is such a parlous thing, but the point is how we adjust to it, whoever (whatever) we are. And it's always what becomes of the parlousness and of our adjustment.
Mark, I'll make it up to you in a few years, if you find time to read what happens to Numair as a young mage. Or . . . on second thought, maybe it won't make it up to you, with the betrayal, and the crocodiles, and the assassins, and stuff.
Never mind.
}8-)
Based on my spouse-creature, who takes in abandoned and feral cats. And me. 8-)
That poem is so wonderful! (Envy is screaming and pounding my shoulder and shouting, "Yes! Yes! One of your people knows!")
Mark, thanks so much for your compliments about my writing! I sweat blood over passages like these, btw--it's a struggle to work out the magic in such a way that others can see and follow it easily!
Tammy
Only because Envy needs a way to think of them, to keep them distinct in her own mind.
As a side note, Mark, and one you and everyone else might like, I'd been tackling this book as a third person novel, still from Evvy's POV, but it wasn't working. Then we started to record STREET MAGIC with Full Cast Audio, and the moment I heard Grace Kelly (her real name) read Evvy, her voice put the hook in me. I tossed what I had and rewrote everything in first person, hearing Evvy's voice all the way!
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Contraption