#WIPpet Wednesday – Religion and magic

This was me last Sunday

I have a headache and I’m not in a great mood at the moment. As I briefly mentioned in my post on Monday, my car got rear-ended on Sunday. To my untrained eye, the damage didn’t look too bad, so I had her towed off to a smash repairs place and remained hopeful. Unfortunately, today I called them to follow up on it and it sounds like it’s going to be write-off. Apparently the damage is in the $3000-range, and the car is only worth about $2000 at most (it’s fifteen years old, my parents had it for ten of those and they live a long way from anywhere, so it has nearly 300,000 km on it). I want to clarify my options with my insurer, but I’m going to do that tomorrow when I’m hopefully less likely to cry at them. It’s not looking promising. Right now, I’m watching cat videos on YouTube so I don’t send angry text messages to the guy who hit me. Actually, mostly that’s because I’m far too nice to people and he’s been really quite cooperative and I would feel bad. But I’m still angry.

Did I mention my parents only gave me this car in mid-October?

Anyway. Let’s change the subject, shall we? I don’t want to bring down the normally delightful mood in the WIPpet Wednesday circle with my own woes.  WIPpet Wednesday is a weekly blog hop where authors share excerpts of their WIP that somehow relate to the date. You can join us here! Today is the 26th so I have added the 2 and the 6 together to give you 8 lines from my NaNoWriMo 2014 Word document. This story still doesn’t have a title, dammit. In this scene, it has come up that Josephine was religious in her previous life (five hundred years past), which piques Armand and Bianca’s interest. This is one of those bits of world-building that I didn’t plan, it just came out as I was writing and seemed to fit.

Armand tilted his head as he looked at Josephine. “Are you religious, Josephine?” he asked.

“I was… raised to believe that there is a power higher than us somewhere in the heavens.”

“Wow,” said Bianca. Josephine looked at her, confused by her incredulity. “Sorry,” she said, “once magic started manifesting amongst those people living in Esterfey in the early days all the religious systems started to fade away.”

“Yes,” Armand added, “While there were some who argued that their magical abilities were a gift from their gods, most people believed they had no need of their deities now that they could often answer their own prayers, or at least find someone who could.”

Despite the fact that I like this bit, it may not actually make it past this draft, since one of the notes in my “Notes for post-November” file is to make the magic systems a little more underground, rather than something everyone has and chooses whether or not to use. But we’ll see. December I am basically declaring a reading month and taking a break from writing, then I’ll come back to this and Unicorn Love in the new year. I can’t believe the new year is only five weeks away.

Anyway, I haven’t actually got my words down for today, so I probably ought to go work on that. Last night I wrote 2000 words in 55 minutes, but I don’t know if I can manage that two nights in a row. I’ll catch y’all later!

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