Okay, I'm going to start posting again. I've been really bad last week and not good enough this week to make up for it, and worse, I havent been posting. I can play catch up with the novel, but playing catch up here... well, I wont even worry about it. I'll do some talking about how far I am and how I'm feeling about this, and when I'm done, or at least at 50,000 words, I'll post the whole thing to that point one chapter at a time. For now, I'll do stuff like this, update my wordcount and post an excerpt that I like in particular.

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This magazine was from the early part of the war. It was maybe three hundred years old, he guessed. There was strong evidence that the federal government was winning the war, based on the spin by the magazine. It was strongly opposed to the uprising and listed strong offensive victories against the rebellion. There was even an interview with a soldier. There was something wrong with the picture of the soldier that they showed. He looked so very soft. He looked well fed, and he looked mean. But he looked, somehow, like people he’d seen torn apart.

It was a hard look to describe. It was a hard look to understand; he thought that he saw it in the eyes. The more pictures he looked at the more he realized that everyone looked that way to him, no matter what they were doing. One or two looked like they had something in them that didn’t seem so alien to him from the people of the world he lived in. However, they still looked fat. He didn’t know what he was feeling, but he felt like it might be contempt. On reflection it felt more like confusion, more confusion than he had had before he had read the magazine.

He wondered how John would take all of this. Out of all the people he knew, John had the most unique perspective. It would be very interesting to see what he thought of the pictures, or the articles that were in there. He put it away and pulled out another magazine from later on. Six months later, it looked like. He opened it up and was interested by what he saw as he turned to the cover story. The war had taken a turn for the worst. The rebels were protecting their ground and the military seemed more and more like it could not force them back down.

Food was becoming a problem; the disruptions had slowed down the food production throughout the states. People were furious because prices were rising constantly as scarcity began to appear where they had never had to deal with it before in their lives. Their eyes had changed. The soldiers more than anyone else had changed for the better in their eyes. Most of them still looked like people just waiting to die, but some of them looked hard, like they could survive. Ultimately, none of them would. Everyone dies eventually.

No better time to wax morbid than when you’re reading the death tolls for a war that was over three hundred years ago. There was irony that no one survived in the sense that they all died eventually.