NaNoWriMo 2021 - Day 1

I'm starting National Novel-Writing Month today... my twelfth year in a row participating, and hoping for my third finished project. I'm resurrecting a previous year's project (or rather a project I've resurrected twice before without result), The Lord of the Wanderwood, a supernatural/fantasy/romance outing involving an ancient fae and the last scion of the noble family to which he's been attached for centuries. I don't think I'll post my daily output here, but I will keep you updated on my progress. 

I actually did a little writing so far today, exactly 300 words in three paragraphs, which struck me as a good moment to stop and crow about it for a minute. And here it is!

The fae jolted awake to the smell of chocolate—such a delicious smell, rich and complex, both earthy and delicate, sweet and savory at once with a tantalizing thread of bitterness drifting through. So different from the usual scents of the forest, the dark acid rot of oak leaves and the deep green tang of moss, the metallic ichor of cold water over stone, the sharp punch of animal spoor and the dainty song of wildflowers; it was a scent that didn't, perhaps couldn't occur in nature.

Which woke the fae further to consciousness: how was there chocolate in his forest? Chocolate can only occur in conjunction with Man, like bread and liquor and chemicals. Concentrating his senses, the fae sought the source, and scented a man underneath the scent of chocolate. Not a very strong scent, the man must be very clean or very young, or both, with none of the luxuriant musk the fae associated with man. But the faint man-scent was there, fascinating and unexpected.  It had been a very long time since any men had come this close to the fae in his deep—he would have said impenetrable—fortress of oak.

It wasn't impenetrable, of course, the fae remembered his forest being penetrated: the last time he woke from dreams, when soldiers and fallen from the sky buoyed by great clouds of dark silk, seeking to take his Stones, the ancient gateposts that anchored his brugh on the border between England and Faerie.  He'd killed those soldiers, bidding the roots under the forest floor to entwine and entomb them in the rich earth, and taking flight to pursue the steel machine that had dropped the soldiers, interfering with its machinery so that it crashed into the Salisbury Plain in a foul explosion of stinking petroleum and hot metal. 

I'm going to go back to writing, now, and hope I can squeeze out the recommended daily 1,667 words. À bientôt!