Sarah Connell > Recent Status Updates

“‘I am broken,’ she replied. Her throat was dry. Did she have a fever? Her head was too hot. ‘But broken things can still kill.‘“

“I love the garden and the garden loves me, but it isn't mine, not really. I will always share it with the woman who began it, who arrived in a sun-dress to a newly built council house and cared for this garden all her life. I don't know where she is now, but her bulbs are buried here. The first morning I walked through her garden, her daffodils' buttery hellos were easily translated: they nodded. I nodded back.”

“My bellybutton grimaces there, the invisible cord that will always connect me to my mother, just as hers connects her to her mother, and on, and on, and on. I study this body of mine, just one more in a long line, and feel no revulsion, only pride. This is a female text, I think. My body replies in its dialect of scars. Ta-dah! it seems to say, Ta-dah!”

Getting bogged down a bit now.

“Fast, I clapped my hands, and fast, fast, I galloped, fast as ever I could have, until I found you before me, murdered… with no Pope, no bishop,
no clergy, no holy man to read your death-psalms, only a crumpled old hag who'd draped you in her shawl-rag.
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades, and I couldn't wipe it away, couldn't clean it
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.”

“In writing their lives from this distance…in recounting this horror I must inflict it all over again. I wish I could stop the pain this telling will soon cast over Eibhlín Dubh, but I can't. The past never ends. Or, worse, the past tells us how it ends. Over, it says, over and over again.”

“I wonder what I might learn of Eibhlin Dubh's days were I to veer away from the scholarship I have simply accepted thus far. I think again of all those blunt, brief sketches presenting this woman in the thin roles of aunt and wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women she knew instead?”

“the element I cherish most of all in Eibhlín Dubh's work does not lie in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over. No, my favourite element hovers beyond the text, in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere.”

Very confused. This may need to be 👀 read and not 👂 read.

“No poem arrived in praise of the man who slept next to me as I wrote, the man whose moonlit skin always drew my lips towards him. The love I held for him felt too vast to pour into the neat vessel of a poem. I couldn't put it into words. I still can't. As he dreamt I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark.”

Okay….twist

“Sometimes, when she was sailing with her mother, the air would change in some imperceptible way and they would know that a storm was coming – perhaps it would be hours or days away, but it would always come. In a room crowded with people and no ocean in sight, Wydrin felt that same sense sweep through her; a change of atmosphere that promised some oncoming disaster. It was never wrong.”

Next book in my cozy sci fi series is coming out Sep 1!! The Failsafe, book 4 of Project Awakening. Pre orders now available on Kindle and Barnes and Noble paperback 📖📙📚
Blurb:
Explore the domed cities of the KayTwo nebula. After the generation ship, the Servitor, crash lands on an asteroid belt far from their destination planet, they must build a new home within the pull of twin suns.

I like how he’s taking his time building up this book.

“Within the globes are teams of mages, casting spells to monitor the gods and their movements. They are very difficult to track, and can shield themselves easily, but it is possible to pick up traces of Edenier from their actions. Those traces increase significantly when they target us, or a city, or a village. Sometimes it can reverberate back towards us, and then the lights go out.’”

“Five huge white domes dominated the building, shining dimly with their own inner glow, while all around it were twisted spires of black rock, reaching up towards the shrouded sky almost as though they had caught it in some moment of terrible cataclysm and frozen it there.”

“You can’t look around every time you think you’re not alone otherwise you may never stop”

“It wasn’t right, she mused, to know so much of someone else’s future. No one should have such knowledge.”

Not what i was expecting.

I swear this author 1. Wants the villains to win and 2. Is trying to give me a heart attack.

That’s a bit of a stretch.

I’m still wondering, why is everyone afraid of the 8 gods returning?

“The red moss covered the left side of his face, completely obscuring one eye and colonising the inside of his nose, and for the last hour or so he had been shouting random phrases, gibbering as though in the grip of a terrible fever. He quietened for a moment, and Augusta pushed a damp cloth against what was left of his forehead. ‘It’s in his eyes, I’m telling you, it’s getting in their brains.”

Hmmmmmmmm

wooo glad we made it out of that throne room scene. 80 pages is a LONG prologue. This new character seems much more interesting.

“Sometimes no power is the wisest choice, he reminded himself. Power led to a knife in your hand, a series of empty rooms, and blood. Always blood.”