The process of rebuilding Hidden is slowly but surely coming along, I have autosaved files on both the desktop of my semi-salvaged laptop, in a backup folder in my documents section, and my external hard drive. "Never again!" shall likely be my motto for the rest of my writing career. Regardless of what I lost in the great laptop crash of Summer 2019, I still want to be able to share tiny excerpts and sneak previews with you, my potential future readers and all three of you who follow my blog.
It's difficult to choose sections to share that can stand on their own, but that also won't give away any many major plot points or big reveals from the story. I want to tempt you, my potential future readers, with excerpts that will whet your appetite to read the rest of the book, but I also want to reserve the best parts for the completed book. Thus, time after time, I find myself drawing from the secondary story lines, the "supplemental scenes" as I like to think of them. I write them in a separate document from the main story line, and then add them in throughout the manuscript at the end, wherever they fit best in the spots I reserve for my cutaways.
This excerpt is no exception. It largely occurs inside Laria's head, giving you a glimpse of her mindset throughout the story, but hopefully without revealing too much about what the story itself has in store. Without further ado, enjoy!
The Fifth Spinner halfheartedly gazed at the images transposed across the Loom’s perpetually shifting fabric: a suburb outside of Chicago where a family crammed into a hatchback, a couple’s argument in an underground sierren settlement on the border, a grandmother collecting eggs on a farm in Slovenia, a nietheran colt sprouting its alicorn in the Origin grove in Faerie, an artist with lime green hair painting deer in her back yard. Laria fought the urge to try and call up an image of Dahrigek; she did not trust herself to stay calm if she saw the threads fail her once again. She was the watcher of the worlds. If she could not see a single part of a single world, she still had plenty of other locations that she could observe, that she should observe.
Although her primary role as the reigning Spinner was to guard the Loom and ensure the spirit of Antiln remained within, the unwritten secondary duty of each Spinner was to watch, to remember, to record. The history contained within the innumerable volumes of the previous Spinner’s journals paid worthy homage to that duty. Tarel, her immediate predecessor, had taken the role very seriously, leaving Laria a whole wall of bookcases stuffed with scribbled writings; her section of the annals of Spinners past took up nearly an entire room in the cottage. Yet Laria, however closely she forced herself to watch Earth and Aorea in the Loom, could not quite bring herself to record. Not yet. Not while her friends, the closest friends she had had in many years, the friends who had changed her life and showed her how much more there was to the universe, were in danger.
Especially not when she was the one who placed them there.