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I have spent this entire day so far answering stupid questions at work. I love my ducklings but once in a while they seem to all have an attack of stupid at once. These things are sent to test us, I suppose.

I have not given up nor forgotten NaNo, though I am slightly behind and haven't been posting about it. I've been waiting until I could eke out more than 800 words in a day to try and post some first-last-favourite, and I think I've finally got enough for a chunk, at least.

First line: We decamped to McDonalds after that.

Last line: "And if we hurt 'cause of our faith, if we put our faith in someone who maybe ain't so good, well. Christ went up on a cross; ain't many people can be so hurt by a simple act of faith."

Favourite line: "Look, I'm just saying, you have a life. And this is like...an afterlife."

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And here's today's excerpt from The City War, available for preorder from Riptide Press!

You can find yesterday's here -- eventually all of them will string together to form a completed scene from the novella.

***

By the time the servants brought in the pig - small but well-cooked, and stuffed with tender laurices and fragrant spices — Brutus saw the horse-boy watching the dancers as well, crouched in a shadow behind a tall window that let the breeze pass from the outer yard into the triclinium. He caught the boy’s dark eyes on the hips and breasts of the girls, and left him alone.

Brutus never overindulged, or at least not to the point some men did. Cassius sometimes did, but he was careful tonight, easy with his wine and delicate with his food. Aristus, by the time the end-of-feast offering to the house gods was complete, looked like he’d rather wander off somewhere to sleep. One of the girls had laid her head in Aristus’s lap, and Brutus knew a few others were licking their chops to try the same with him.

( A nice change from the jaded whores in Rome, eh? )