The Modest Knight

I completed the first draft of my young adult novel, The Modest Knight, this last month. (I'm proud, and surprised, to say I fulfilled my goal of finishing before the year's end - I had been working on it, whenever I had the time, for over two years). Now, I am entering into the arduous stage of editing. With any luck, I'll have an adequate version of it finished by summer, possibly in time for the Willamette Writers' yearly conference. Here is the very beginning, for those who are interested ---

Chapter One

Back in time when everything seemed to be painted in blacks, whites, and grays – and the most vivid colors were found in the trappings of nature, in blood and wildflowers – there was a boy named Daniel Pinkus. Daniel lived in a hard age, in a beautiful but difficult land where people scraped everything from the earth to survive. They built houses out of mud, planted crops in rocky soil. and burned sod for heat. As it happened, Daniel lived in one of these houses of mud with his mother, father, and younger sister, Naomi. Within the small village where they lived their house was the smallest, the very last of the huts on a dead end road. Daniel’s father was a rock driver, and for twelve hours a day he carted and carried stones from the quarry to the local mason who in turn built houses and property walls for wealthy landowners all around the surrounding valleys. While his father toiled in the quarry during the day, his mother tended herbs and vegetables in the garden and what they didn’t eat at home she sold at the local market. After Daniel would finish helping his mother in the morning and early afternoon, he and Naomi would make off into the fields behind their house. They made bows and arrows out of saplings and fallen twigs, and held target practice by a small stream. They climbed trees high, high into the tops and spied on the people in the village, going to and from work. Sometimes they ventured into the forest, though not far, and when they returned home before dinner – clothes often ripped, dirty, and muddy – their mother scolded them, fed them a quick dinner, and put them to bed early. They were regularly bedded down before dark. But their father went to bed early as well, exhausted from his day of hauling rocks. This simple, hard life was the way it had been for a long, long time – as long as Daniel could remember, in fact...