The Girdle of Melian

sneak peak at Larksong ! I've been editing a few hundred words per day and rediscovering the story as I go. Here's the opening scene! Alice left Montreal on the afternoon of Granny Cunnick's funeral. Still in her funeral coat and hat, she picked up the carpetbag she'd stored the day before at Windsor Train Station and boarded the afternoon train to Knowlton. She hadn't wanted to draw attention to her abrupt departure, though in truth her parents at least were hardly likely to notice; neither had seen much of anything beyond the sickbed in the past few months. Not since Granny had first deigned to inform them of her illness. By then the TB had advanced past any hope of recovery, and Granny had known it, yet Alice's parents insisted on removal from one sanatorium to another, always seeking a new doctor, new nurses, new treatments. If Alice hadn't left the city, she'd have gone mad. Enough to start yelling, like the crazed man at the corner of Duke ...

uess what? I've gone back to Larksong , Alice and George's story! Their tale is from a NaNoWriMo some years ago: 2013! I've put off editing it for a while because, even though back then I made time to type it up, I did it very messily. Some scenes might still be in a notebook, and I hope I know where it is. Also, I emailed it to myself as I went but I don't know what was going on, I didn't save a compiled file as I went (or maybe it's in Scrivener and I need to recall the password to my ancient laptop?!) so the email chain is in backwards story order. Plus it's interlarded with semi-edited snips I used in writing exercises on thelitforum. Sigh. But I still like them, and their time period too (Canada, summer 1914, the last before the war). So here goes... The story (from a dream in 2010!) features two characters who think they know what hardship is. By the end of the summer they've learned that not only are they stronger than they believed, b...