Warm-Up . . .

. . . twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet floor.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet floor.

I'm still working on Blood on the Plain, but am starting to tire of it. Normally, I'd put it away and come back when the mood strikes me, but I gave my word to someone that it'd be complete by the end of the month. Someone wants to make the fucking thing so I'm left watching a kid I'm in no way able to care for.

I'm trying to nail the art of the long sentence. As a warm-up and to stave off the feelings of neglect for this blog, I'm going to work on expadning one passage here before you.

James Dodge enters one hovel and is met with a knife dug into his forearm. He stares at the hilt dangling from out his arm then takes in his attacker whose wife crouches in the corner, sobbing as she clutches their child. Three shots are heard.

James Dodge tears through and past the burlap covering into the single-bulb lit shack where a woman's sob is heard before the Mexican swings a long blade which is caught between the divining bones of wrist and forearm and pushed through like an arrowshot until the chipped blade tears out the underside of skin and the hilt presses full against the surface of arm which Dodge lifts to examine as if adjusting for a meniscus or some parallax perspective before dismissing the findings as inconclusive and raising his sidearm and firing into the chest of his attacker sending the screams of both the mother and the child she's carrying into a roar of agony and fear which is silenced by another pull of the trigger before finally a third.

I fucking love long sentences.