Writing Progress: Shadow Academy

 Last week was an absolute beating, with about eight major thing all falling on me at once. I finally managed to take a day off on Friday, and even then I wound up jumping in to get a couple of things done. So writing progress in general has been minimal, and writing progress with my Magical School For Monsters projects has been even more so. (I'd really meant to put in at least a couple of hours on that day off -- that was sort of the point -- but I blew about half the day catching up on non-work stuff like oil changes and then took a nap and then had to pick up Secondborn from school and after that I was just done. With all that cleared away, I could use another couple of days off to actually do some writing, but... well... {{insert the sound of bitter laughter here}} Yeah.)

Still, progress is progress, however small. Darian and his group of proto-friends have arrived at the school, and Natalya is taking steps to keep them together long enough to see if they could really become friends. Which is good, because Darian is fairly well worn out from what he's done so far, even if confronting a jerk and making introductions to a bunch of strangers doesn't seem like all that much. 

The Sunhaven Academy of the Midnight Accord doesn't have the sort of formalized division of houses that appear in a lot of Magical Schools (and other YA dystopian setups), but it still has its groupings and alliances and rivalries. The ghouls, for example, stick together and help each other out; what they lack in status, they make up in reputation. And they're tough, too. The vampires, on the other hand, have the benefits of early education and training, but they're frequent spoiled and rely too much on their prestige and status. Even the ones who are really, really good -- and there are quite a few -- are arrogant and hard to work with, and don't see that as a weakness. The ogres don't keep so tightly together; they aren't high-status, but they aren't reviled either -- and they're strong. Shapechangers, meanwhile, are a mixed bag; some come from powerful families or clans, some are personally powerful, some are both, some are neither.

The personal rivalries are just as bad as the social groups. Darian has already managed to insult one of the vampires, Dominic Chaddock, before they even reached the Academy; Chaddock and his cousin are absolutely going to want to put the no-name peasant in his place. And the one witness to the exchange, Nadia Gheata, has told Darian that as much as she enjoyed watching it, she can't be friends with him until she sees how their interactions play out. Darian, who comes from a low-status family and grew up in the hinterlands of the Empire at the edge of the Great Forest, isn't prepared for any of this. He has no status and isn't interesting in building a reputation, he just wants to make peace with his shadow so that it quits disrupting his life. 

Life is about to get very, very interesting at Sunhaven.