OK, time to force the pilot light on my creative burner.

Yes, gentle reader, you got that right. As much as i hate forcing creativity, i'm going to do something which will look as if i'm doing just that. Here's my thought process: Work sucks and is stifling my creativity, so i'm not doing anything new, which leaves a backlog of stuff i've already done, so maybe it's time to vent some of that. Accordingly, about once a week (give or take, depending on how often i think of it) i'm going to post a chunk of the story/novella i've been wading through writing.

For those of you who don't listen to me bitch often enough to know what's going on with it, it's a slightly post-apocalyptic retelling of an old Irish tale called The Voyage of Maleduin's Boat (sorry, no Irish today, because i can't remember the whole title in Irish, and i'd probably get the fadas in the wrong places, which in turn would piss me off later), and has the working title Melpomene's Daughter. For anyone without a working knowledge of classical mythology, Melpomene was one of the nine Muses in Greek myth- the Muse of Tragedy- which fits in an odd sense once you hit the first page of the story. The title will undoubtedly change before it is finished, but this will do for now. Please- let me know what you think. This is an almost completely unedited first draft, and a bit rough in places, so your feedback is appreciated, even if it's "why are you bothering with this crap."

Anyway, without further ado, the first bit of Melpomene's Daughter

He cursed softly, almost under his breath, as he crossed First and Blanchard, heading toward Pike Place.

They always said it would happen. It was a geologic certainty- one of those things which simply couldn’t be avoided. Some seismic event, deep within the planet would one day pull the trigger and fire Rainier. That day was three days ago, and things were just beginning to return to minor functionality now.

Downtown Seattle was pretty quiet. It was almost as if everyone simply assumed that chaos would reign supreme there and simply stayed away.

There wasn’t a lot of visible damage, though, anywhere in the area. Belltown had a few cracked windows and some crumbled brickwork visible; as did Capitol Hill. Pioneer Square fared a little worse, but still sustained less damage than in the Mardi Gras quake of ‘01, and certainly much less than during the WTO riots two years earlier. There were still snow drift-like piles of blown ash, and the occasional breeze which swirled through the streets brought with it a fresh flurry of the grey stuff. The skies were still leaden and foreboding, but nothing more than threatening. All in all, it wasn’t significantly darker than a typical Seattle winter, and a lot less rainy.

Although the geologists and various Cassandras had been right about the eventuality of Rainier’s eruption, they’d missed badly at predicting the results of the volcanic event.

Sure, Issaquah, Renton, Kent, and Burien were pretty much eradicated from the map, and most of the area north of Tacoma was now home to smouldering lava rather than the periodic meth labs, but the swath of destruction, which had been predicted to have severely adverse effects on Seattle had veered southward instead. As a result, most of Seattle was spared, almost as if a giant hand had intervened to keep the lava and tectonic forces at bay. Even the venerable Alaskan Way viaduct was still structurally sound- the engineers had gotten there quite quickly to inspect the structures nearest to the Sound, since there was the greatest concern about some of the older buildings there. Harborview Hospital had a few cracked windows, and a partially collapsed brick staircase, but no damage to critical areas, and certainly not enough to have impeded the hospital’s ability to handle the influx of expected casualties, which had failed to materialize- the hospital handled only a hundred or so patients more than it would have on a typical day, mostly cardiac and respiratory cases.

Both the Times and the Post-Intelligencer showcased headlines reporting that, yet again, Seattleites by and large had dodged another bullet.

He was about halfway across the street when he first saw her. Crossing at the light, he couldn’t help noticing the striking girl in the forest green Jetta as she pulled up to the almost deserted intersection.

“Green limousine for the redhead dancing girl,” a familiar voice sang inside his head; and an intangible something made him decide to stop at the corner and wait for her.

Almost as if guided by that same invisible hand, right after taking the corner, her car pulled into the parking lot where he had parked, and she got out and started walking toward him.

As she crossed the street toward him, she skipped a bit, and giggled in a way he’d never heard before. There was something oddly lyrical in that giggle.

“So you waited for me,” she laughed. “I hoped you would. What’s your name?”

“Alexei. Alexei MacBride. Everyone just calls me Alexei or Alex, though. Damn- I’m babbling.”

Alexei stopped and looked at her- rather a bit more closely than his initial glance through the window of her car allowed. “You’re beautiful,” he stammered, rather a bit embarrassedly.

Again, she giggled musically, twisting a finger through a stray tendril of her marinara coloured hair, which hung in tiny ringlets and extended most of the way down her back. “No, I’m not. That’d be a silly and pretentious name to give anyone. Call me Nimuë.”
“Nimuë? As in...”

“As in the Lady of the Lake. In this case, it’s probably Lake Washington, but it’ll have to do for now.”

She reached out and took his hand, and started walking down the road, seeming to skip at every third step or so.