After bandaging up her hand, Jenny brought up a point that Andi hadn’t even considered. Had Morris–the old lady who owned the bookstore where Andi had originally found the book–known about it?
Had she had anything to do with the book showing up in Andi’s bag?
It turned out that the more powerful the demon was you were trying to summon, the more complicated the summoning became. This was going to take hours of prep work and the better part of half an hour just to do the summoning. Honestly, she would have liked to take longer, but she didn’t know that she would be able to. The new chapters of the book had laid out what she’d expected–the more you tried to add to a summoning, the less time you had to do it in. That seemed to set a hard limit on just what could be done, but it was hard to calculate. Perhaps there were exceptions.
The next morning, she didn’t even glance at the book on her way out of the apartment, instead opting to grab her own breakfast on the way rather than chance waiting in the kitchen. The idea of using her newly … enhanced burner was there in the corner of her mind, but she wasn’t quite sure hot to deal with that just yet. Yet the summoning having been done had rather an effect on her. She felt lighter than she had in far longer than when she had just first seen the book. She felt lighter than she had in months. It was a great feeling.
The last ingredient that Andi had to track down was the blood. She had a few ideas how to go about it, but none of them particularly appealed to her. Her best options at the moment were to go to a butcher and just flat out ask if they sold blood–she thought that they might, to make certain sausages and other foods out of.
Alternatively, she could just a cut of meat and hope that enough drained out that she could get by that way. She honestly didn’t know how pure the blood would have to be. It would be a pity to go through all of this effort and not know if the summoning hadn’t worked because it couldn’t possibly work or because she hadn’t quite followed the directions. Just the same as she knew that she had to try it, she knew that if she didn’t give it her all, she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it.
Andi awoke the next morning, sure that the entire night’s activities had been a dream. Sure, she couldn’t particularly remember how she had gotten to bed–or even how she had gotten home, if her memories of the bookstore and the train were not to be believed.
But it had all been too ridiculous. A book that had somehow followed her home. The feeling of falling, even if it hadn’t come back. The man on the train; had he even been related to all the rest of it? A book that her cat irrationally hated–and she couldn’t even read. Writing that wasn’t writing, at least until it was.
And that title.
Computational Demonology
It all started with a book.
It didn’t look terribly out of place–it was a book store after all–and Andi’s eyes just slid right over it at first. But something drew them back.
Yup, I’m doing it again. And this time, I’m doing it while finishing my PhD, working a full time job, and adapting to life two thousand miles away from where I was born. Should be interesting. 😄
During the month of March, I wrote 46,625 towards my newest novel. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing this one by hand, so it’s a bit slower going than typing, albeit with less distractions. So falling less than 10% shy of the (admittedly pretty arbitrary) NaNoWriMo target isn’t too bad. And I did hit my own goal of six hand written pages per day (I got 6.01). So none too shabby.
Where do we go from here?
Two weeks (and change) ago I started writing a March version of NaNoWriMo ((Yes, it’s not really national, but it is a novel writing month, so I guess just NoWriMo?)), written long hand in a notebook rather than typed. I thought I’d just give a quick status update for that, since I haven’t actually been posting it daily this time around.
Back when I finished my last NaNoWriMo, I said that I’d be starting a new writing project within a couple of weeks. Well, here we are. It’s more than a couple of weeks later–a bit short of two months actually. Unfortunately, I haven’t really written much. There was a short story and a few other blog posts and that’s about it. But that’s not what I want to do. I want to write.