November Writing List

So this

is my current project list for November.

But I know me. I know that I do better with some fun stuff on the list. And I know my call-for-random-numbers people. I know that less than 7 items makes people less into the game.
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I need three projects to play with during November. What should they be?

1. Finish It
2. Arisse
3. Showcasing
4. Hurt/Comfort Bingo
5. Addergoole
6. Beekeeper
.

Thimbleful Thursday: Musical

In Tyeibon, at the height of the body-modification craze, they did not call it hourglass-shaped but violin-shaped, or, sometimes, cello-curved.

Women wore backless dresses draped low on their spine, and had installed strings running from neck to bottom, in imitation of violins. (Men, too, wore backless outfits, and their spines were decorated with ports and keys, but that is a story for another time.) Extreme examples would have tuning pegs worked into the decoration at the neck; the number of strings would range from three up to twenty. They would slide a small, arched bridge between spine and strings, to change the sound of the their music.

The strings were magical, of course. Human bodies, no matter how shaped, does not make the sounds that a hollow piece of wood does. But with these decorations, those bodies could be played like an instrument.
It had become the habit by this point for young rakes and old troubadours to carry their own bow around with them (as women carried their own reed and mouthpiece). Impromptu concerts might break out in the streets sometimes; a very clever musician knew how to create a song on the fly, to match the lady's sound and key, for every body made its own sound.

It was beautiful indeed. Tyeibon came to be known throughout the Empire for the beauty of their songs and the shapeliness of their women, the strangeness of their fashion and the elaborateness of their courting rituals. They made the highest music there, the songs played in the court of the Emperor himself.
And then an enterprising young farmer-cum-musician slid a flatter bridge between the strings of a would-be socialite, and flattened his bow just so across her strings, and drew from her lean and strong body a twang unheard of in Tyeibon’s more rarefied circles.

In Tyeibon, they did not say hourglass-shaped but violin-curved, or, in a later era, fit as a fiddle.

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Written to last week's Thimbleful Thursday prompt & part of my Things Unspoken 'verse

Worldbuilding for Preptober... Working out an Antagonist

First, a link - How To Vividly Describe a Setting That You’ve Never Visited: http://romanceuniversity.org/2016/07/22/how-to-vividly-describe-a-setting-that-youve-never-visited-by-angela-ackerman/

Okay, I have my character dressed (or I will as soon as I figure it out); I know where she starts out the story (with her mother, fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandmother, nieces, and nephews), what sort of schooling (loosely) she's had, and what sort of technology the world has. I know it's a totalitarian govern without the technological control to be as invasive as it could be. I know it's a poor nation, with far too much of its resources going towards war.

...Crap, I need a bad guy.

My preferred sort of antagonist, as many of you have noticed over the years, is the Setting Is the Problem: Tír na Cali, Addergoole, Unicorn/Factory, probably Things Unspoken. I mean, in The Tod’cxeckz’ri Paper, the main antagonist, technically, is a collar.

I should probably branch out a bit.
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