All two people who read/are reading the scene, here is the appropriate music for your convenience.

Remember when I said I wouldn’t post any extended bits of my novel on tumblr? Hahaha, those were the days. Most everyone who knows something and has read it says this thing’s unpublishable anyway, so whatever.

In which Irving gets fixed up.

“Good Intentions Paving Company” by Joanna Newsom.

“Would you hold the fuck still?”

Irving tried but wouldn’t. He was seated on the lip of an unfamiliar bathtub and Emily’s hand was, very literally, in his face. His eyes strained in their sockets to watch her fingers pull a shard of glass from his from his cheek. Controlling his urge to wince, he watched her set the bloody fragment on the sink and turn back to him. She placed a hand on top of his head and tilted his face back to inspect the cut. Irving sat patiently as her hands hovered away again. When they returned, it was with tweezers. He realized as she was working that he had done more swearing in the two weeks they’d known each other than in the most recent decade of his life.

He turned back toward her and she pressed a wet rag against his face. “How do you know how to do this?”

She squeezed the rag into the sink. The water that fell out was pink with diluted blood. “You run from the law long enough, you pick things up. First you pick up how to treat an injury, then you pick up how to not get it in the first place. And if this is an example of what you’re going come home with, then you’d better pick that up pretty quick.”

He looked up at her. “You would be a good mom.”

She stared him down. “Well, as long as you’re going to act like a child I guess I’m on the sink-or-swim curriculum.”

“Do you know what happened to me last night?”

“Yes. I’m doing everything I can to fix it.”

“You can do that now, eh?”

“Hopefully I can get into the Society systems and erase the record of the immigration. We’ve been through this, haven’t we?”

“No, we haven’t. It doesn’t matter anymore. Polly’s already gone.”

He started to get up and leave. She clasped both his arms, preventing him from moving. “Irving. You look at me right now.” Her voice carried an authority that comes only with the surge of latent instincts. He wouldn’t be taking his earlier comment back. “She is not gone. You remember her. I remember her. And we have a fucking time machine.”

I have written myself into a scene where I have absolutely no idea where, or in what time period, my characters are. They’re just in some totally unknown bathroom and I think they’re supposed to be somewhere specific but I have no clue where that is.

“Irving’s experience of the rest of that night—the night Polly died, it had to be designated, although the night spanned several dates in several decades and that, that awful thing that hadn’t even really become real yet, seemed oceans away—was a rapid succession of nondescript rooms, briefings on who he was and what he was doing there, and periods of sitting quietly off to the side while Lucy paced around ranting about how Emily, Jack, himself, Polly, or some combination of the four was, were, had been, or were about to be (a) complete idiot(s).”

0u0 

Oh stop it you

I’ve filled my 10 bookshelves and still have stacks and stacks of homeless books. Just bought 3 more shelves; we’ll see how it goes.

Guys, my graphic novel’s a thing that exists…except it kind of doesn’t. But it’s trying to really hard.

#2 in this “my characters spouting Joanna Newsom lyrics” series I’m apparently doing, or something.

The difference being that in this case the song actually has something to do with the project, and she actually does say this line. Not only that, but it makes perfect to contextual sense.

I mean, to the extent that anything ever makes perfect contextual sense in my graphic novel.