Total Word Count: 47,522 Today's Word Count: 3,015
This chapter came out feet first, kicking and screaming....
Looking West from the village of Santa Carmen Here is a fragment from the beginning of Chapter Seventeen. It is the New year of 1936 and Kit Brown is in Andalucia. There is a risk of war. He must decide whether to stay and fight or head for home before the fighting starts.
The Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936. Kit stayed to fight Fascism alongside many other foreign combatants who made up The International Brigades.
I struggled with this chapter and it came out feet first kicking and screaming but I finished the chapter today and am heading on the home run, downhill very fast towards 50,000 words. This will be the mid point, more or less, of the book and then I will pause and regroup and make an assault on the final 50k.
The year tips into winter, without drawing attention to itself, unlike the long Autumn days of Kit’s native England, which preen in livery of gold and red. Here, it happens swiftly and quietly, until you realise one day that the sun is less fierce at noon and the mornings and evenings are cooler. And then the rains come and wash away the tracks to the mountains and refresh the earth and on the other side of the rain waits winter.
Before the church clock struck twelve, Kit swallowed the last fragment of the twelfth grape and raised his arms in the air alongside his friends. They cheered because this was going to be a lucky year; had the grapes not been eaten on time, 1936 could be disastrous.
This New Year, his life feels like the pause between a breath and a heartbeat; he can’t ignore the political rumblings which stir an undercurrent of discontent; it blows in on the cooler breezes of winter and is stifled in the cold and hostile breaths of passersby. The streets are no longer languid with heat and the tension is palpable. Change is coming and war is all but inevitable.
The Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936. Kit stayed to fight Fascism alongside many other foreign combatants who made up The International Brigades.
I struggled with this chapter and it came out feet first kicking and screaming but I finished the chapter today and am heading on the home run, downhill very fast towards 50,000 words. This will be the mid point, more or less, of the book and then I will pause and regroup and make an assault on the final 50k.
The year tips into winter, without drawing attention to itself, unlike the long Autumn days of Kit’s native England, which preen in livery of gold and red. Here, it happens swiftly and quietly, until you realise one day that the sun is less fierce at noon and the mornings and evenings are cooler. And then the rains come and wash away the tracks to the mountains and refresh the earth and on the other side of the rain waits winter.
Before the church clock struck twelve, Kit swallowed the last fragment of the twelfth grape and raised his arms in the air alongside his friends. They cheered because this was going to be a lucky year; had the grapes not been eaten on time, 1936 could be disastrous.
This New Year, his life feels like the pause between a breath and a heartbeat; he can’t ignore the political rumblings which stir an undercurrent of discontent; it blows in on the cooler breezes of winter and is stifled in the cold and hostile breaths of passersby. The streets are no longer languid with heat and the tension is palpable. Change is coming and war is all but inevitable.
