I should be sad, on behalf of tea bigotry everywhere.

However, you know those little wedding mints that look like chocolate chips in pastel colors with tiny white sprinkles on the bottom? Get some hot green tea, and drop a few of those in your mouth. Nothing melts so quickly…

I should be sad, on behalf of tea bigotry everywhere.

However, you know those little wedding mints that look like chocolate chips in pastel colors with tiny white sprinkles on the bottom? Get some hot green tea, and drop a few of those in your mouth. Nothing melts so quickly…

Phew. We can't possibly be dopplegangers. I prefer sweeter teas…even when I drink green tea I add more honey than I should.

… I may have a mild obsession with green tea. Especially loose-leaf greens imported from Japan… though I can also be led astray by an expensive white. No college minors, but my bachelor's degree in computer science was actually in multimedia, with lots of creative writing electives.

In any case, we'll have to band together, haha. Your post on the poor man's copyright was excellent reading. I've always wondered about that… one of my writer friends told me about it a year or so ago and was making fun of me for a) not knowing about it and b) thinking it wouldn't hold up in court. Good to know I was a little right to be suspicious.

Cheers!

I'm glad you've started commenting, Eliza, I checked out your blog and your story sounds very interesting! I'm always up for a good fantasy.

(By the way, we should start a club of computer science females who write novels on the side. It'll be the next big thing.)

Phew. We can't possibly be dopplegangers. I prefer sweeter teas…even when I drink green tea I add more honey than I should.

… I may have a mild obsession with green tea. Especially loose-leaf greens imported from Japan… though I can also be led astray by an expensive white. No college minors, but my bachelor's degree in computer science was actually in multimedia, with lots of creative writing electives.

Rylan is a high-ranking slave to a lady in a fantasy dystopian society. The lady is a political hostage to her uncle, the king, who is intent on bullying/blackmailing her into accusing her father of murdering her mother, the king's late sister. Ironically, because of his position as a hostage's slave, Rylan is the only member of his company to have any sort of freedom.

Rylan gets sent down into the bad parts of the city to negotiate with a nobility-hating mercenary to assist his lady under a false name. He gets caught, and they take his engraved ring so that they can track down who is trying to sneak around the king's secret police. Later that day, one of the king's favorites finds Rylan and provokes him into picking a fight, then manages to escape. Rylan returns to his lady's apartments, only to find that a common guard had broken into the room and is rifling through the papers on her desk, some of which Rylan knows includes sensitive materials that could get them all executed.

The king's favorite, since he didn't kill Rylan as he'd intended, went straight to the king to have Rylan disciplined for assaulting him, and they walk in on him just after Rylan's killed the intruding guardsman (who worked for the king, though he had no right to be in a noble's bedroom, hostage or not). His lady manages to keep Rylan from being killed immediately and is instead thrown into prison, where he is unable to tell his mistress that the noble-hating mercenary is now looking for her and uncertain if he's going to survive his upcoming trial.

How Rylan feels about all this… I'll describe it as a post-adrenaline crash coupled with a panic-despair mix and an inability to think clearly. By the time he gets down into the prison cell his nerves are so wracked that he'll be shaking for a good fifteen minutes before he finally slumps into a dazed exhaustion.