[K'shirah's Scrapbook] Desert Paintbrush

[K'shirah]

Rules: I would appreciate suggestions if I seem to be faltering within my notes. I will probably use this to experiment with BBcode. This is mostly just notes and freewriting while I'm at work.


My bank account is making me sick to my stomach right now, but that might just be hunger. We'll see when Jax brings my lunch.
They tell you in every (decent) writing course that it's best to sit down at a certain time of day or night and write at that time every day. Your brain picks up on the routine and creativity flows more freely.
I want to finish K'shirah's backstory tonight, and I want to talk about imagery.

The most difficult scene, for me personally, will be the blackening of her palms. I've got plenty of tattoos, I know the gut-knotting terror the moment before the gun hits your skin, but somehow I need to blend that with the kind of shame and outrage that she'll feel at being marked for nothing that she has truly done. Now, tattooing in Judaism and Islam are both forbidden (Torah states that thou shalt not "incise any marks in thy flesh") and I want to emphasize her feeling of being forsaken by Yahal (which, of course, I don't think she has been) and I think I want to discuss the smell of the ashes being used to blacken her palms (need to figure out a reasonable type of wood ash, structure a ceremony, look for any other characters that may have gone through this IC) and I definitely want some "crowd reaction" - this will be a public shaming of sorts, in a perfect world. Perhaps the priest will use cactus needles to do the tattoo itself, or the stinger of an insect (hmm).

I also need to write a conversational scene between her father and the Rapa, probably post-Masha, with some input from Myrha, and pleading on her behalf by Li'an. I'm uncomfortable writing conversation right now because not only do I not "know" these characters well, I won't be using them in the future as far as I can tell. I want to emphasize the dances, the storytelling, and the general sense of familial comfort with the Masha and contrast it heavily with K'shirah, who has been confined to a solitary tent.

I'm having a hard time construing emotions without "telling," or at least I feel that way, with this backstory. I feel like I need to show more, but with my time constraints, it's getting difficult to put the amount of energy I want into the history (two days for two scenes, which totaled something like 1200 words, is not impressive) but I don't want to skimp on the backstory because it is in essence her concept. Time for a balancing act, which I am rarely good at.