#WIPpet Wednesday – April 25, 2018

Hello and welcome to WIPpet Wednesday, a blog hop wherein writers share an excerpt from their current WIP that somehow relates to the date.  To join in, simply click the blue linky up there to the right.

I didn’t have much of a chance to write last week because my parents were visiting, but I am slowly getting back into it. All the new ideas I had while I was travelling were all fighting for attention and for a while I didn’t know where to start. But I’m slowly taming them all now and I’m getting some words down.

Now it’s time for the WIPpet. I have 8 paragraphs, which is 2+5 plus a bonus one because it works better to finish it there.

This is a scene from chapter one, which I rewrote yesterday. Letting Kathmandu inspire a lot of my world-building has also helped me work out things like the currency in Racharan. I am a useless haggler and mostly didn’t bother (particularly as I was doing most of my shopping on the last day and needed to get rid of the cash anyway because it wasn’t worth changing back), but the guy currently in Clara’s shop has more skill than I. They’re haggling over a ceramic vase. Clara’s initial figure was two thousand slivers, a heavily inflated figure. The customer countered with seven hundred.

Clara used her best offended expression. “Sir, a man spent hours of his life crafting this piece. He deserves at least seven hundred slivers for his commission. And then where would we be? We’ve got to stay in business, you know. How about seventeen hundred?

“How about a thousand?”

“Fifteen hundred.”

“Eleven.”

“Twelve-fifty.”

The man paused. He looked at the vase agan and then at Clara.

“That’s the best I can offer,” Clara added. She nearly had him. Now the hard bargaining was done, she softened her expression into something more imploring.

Finally, the man nodded. “Twelve-fifty.”

The fact that Clara’s employer, who also owns the shop, made the vase and doesn’t require a commission is beside the point, right?

Advertisement