Since I’m too lazy to write a real blog post, I’ll start off the new year with another snippet from my WIP. I’m making slow but steady progress with the second draft—reached 5,000 words today!—and I think I’m finally starting to find the main character’s voice. Let me know what you think!

Resigned to my fate, I went alone and miserable into the atrium. The great room was empty, save for the little arched shrine that housed the figurines of the Lares and Penates, the household gods, and my feet slapped loudly against the floor tiles as I walked, the echoes rolling away like thunder over the rich mosaicked walls, up to the high ceiling, bouncing back again, so that I don’t think I could have made much more noise if I were Hannibal and had brought a squadron of my elephant-troops with me. There was a thin, curving sliver of pale lamplight coming out from under the curtain hung in the study doorway. I came up to the light and stopped there at the edge of it, the echoes of my footsteps falling slowly away to silence behind me. As wide and deadly as the sea, that little slice of light seemed to me. My resolve flickered. For a long moment I couldn’t make myself take another step, couldn’t make myself move at all. My feet felt suddenly heavy as iron, my arms limp and useless as cold sausages at my sides. When I did move, finally, I did it all at once, stepping into the light and flinging the curtain aside in a single fierce motion, because I knew if I let myself hesitate again that would be the end of it.

I’d only ever been summoned to the study once before. That was the day Felix had wagered with me that I wouldn’t dare take out Abraxas, Julius’ big pale-gray Spanish stallion, and jump him over the half-finished wall they were building round the courtyard of the new temple to Minerva, down at the city’s center. I’d done it of course—it had been too marvelous an idea to pass up, I was almost impressed with fat-headed Felix for thinking of it—but I’d been a fool to think I’d get any money out of it, because Felix, ever a sore loser, had gone and told it all to Julius—told him, in fact, that it had been my idea from the first. I’d got a beating for that, and a hard one, but that wasn’t the part of it I minded. The beating had been worth it. It was that I didn’t get my rightful winnings made me sore.