NanoWri ay yi yi 1

Contemplating doing NaNoWriMo, but not in November. (NaNoWriMo--National Novel Writing Month, wherein you crank out 50K words. Plus or minus 100 pages. In a month.)

I've had a little tickle of an idea wobbling around--it's almost a one line joke insofar as plot and cleverness goes. So I don't have much invested in it. So it's perfect for NaNoWriMo because if it comes out as 100 pages of dreck, well, what did you expect? And if it's any better than that, well, that's gravy.

Bits of the world it's set in come floating along, and so I'll be dropping essays in here so they'll all be in one place when I cut up a month to do it all in. Take the hint, Gentle Reader, if you come across a post with a title like the one above, don't expect what follows to be purely sensible.

Red and gold apples taste of autumn, of cool mornings touched with frost that burst into warm afternoons that spiral down into chilly evenings by the fire. Red and gold apples taste of the fulfillment of spring’s promise and summer’s work; of the long luxurious stretch and ease of the harvest; of having plenty and then more. Red and gold apples taste of long slow cooking; of feasts in good company.

Blue apples, now. Blue apples taste of winter.

Not the cheery midseason, with the cold that brings forth the merry bloom of health, of festivities and candle flames dancing on the snow, of the welling enthusiasm that comes with knowing the longest darkest night is past, and the days will grow long.

Blue apples taste of February. Of overcast days where the sun hides for a week at a time, and when spring is a seducer’s promise (of course I’ll respect you in the morning, dearest; I’ll always love you as much as I do now) and rotten snowpack ice crackles underfoot, lumpy with the comings and goings of countless others.

Blue apples taste of winter’s midnight heart, when the woodpile is growing short and the stores are becoming thin. Down to grains and legumes and dried fruit, ham and sausage and bacon for flavor. Nothing fresh, nothing green, nothing that tastes of life. All of it dried, of the inevitable decay halted, and then reconstituted into soups and stews and mush.

Their flesh is like mangoes, custardy and fatty in the mouth. Flaccid. You won't find these in the market, no, the only places these grow are in the Mage's Garden, branches of blue apples grafted to the evergreen feathery branches of yew, with mushrooms at their roots.

There. That'll give me a few hundred on the word count when things begin to look hopeless.