Sampling: The Beginning of Kingston

I promised there would be writing, didn't I?

This is the opening of a book I'm writing with the help of a good and dear friend-- who's also a fantastic writer and an amazing artist by the way! We do it in self-dubbed rigmarole-style, meaning we dubbed it ourselves when we were like twelve or something. That means she writes "entries" from certain characters' perspectives, usually first person, and I write from others. We've been working on this one book for some months now, and we both really love it and it doesn't exactly have a name yet or anything. For now, we're just calling it Kingston because that's where the first pages take place.

I lay on my stomach on the warm tiles of the smithy roof, looking down on the busy mid-morning activities in the street of Kingston below. It was always busy, night and day were basically interchangeable, so I would go to sleep late and wake up well into the day. Half-past ten was relatively early for me. But my day was already full: three ships were coming in, Navy frigates, none of your ordinary whalers or merchant vessels, and that always meant an uproar, whether you were eager for trade, desperate to avoid the press gangs, or in my case, which was not particular to me, looking for the opportunity for work. And by work I meant taking advantage of the hubbub in order to steal as much as I could possibly get my wicked sticky fingers on. I jingled the velvet purse I had cut off the girdle of some fancy lady giving her coachman orders to take her directly to the governor’s manor. Three shillings inside-- nothing to a fine lady like her. A lot of money for someone like me.

But I could pretend to be a fine lady if I liked. I could really pretend to be whatever I liked. A scullery’s brat, a Puritanness, a nobleman’s daughter, or even any boy from a wharfrat to a high-born midshipman. It was actually a midshipman’s shore-going jacket that I wore now over my stained shirt and breeches, and a cotton cap from a more successful whaler was slouching on my tangled blonde hair, slightly damp from perspiration. I took it off and fanned myself with it. My name was Liv, short for Olivia, but I hated Olivia. I was sixteen years old, fair, blue-eyed, with dark arched eyebrows and a red ironic mouth that quirked as I watched one small figure in particular darting through the crowd.


This was interesting because I wanted to describe my good ol' rotten little Liv and introduce her character and begin the story at the same time. No matter what, I always feel like I should let the readers know what my characters look like-- I can't help it! I feel like we hafta be on the same page about that, you know what I mean?

Writer's pun.

Anyway.

If anyone's read this, please comment and critique! Heaven knows I need it!

God bless!