I've been doing what I said I'd do with the writing. I now have a couple pages about a newly-admitted apprentice in the Guild of Colours, and another couple on the Dawnfolk and the beginning of their downfall. The latter will certainly not end up in any finished product, though there will definitely need to be allusions to the event, conjecture, perhaps even a few well-read scholars who know what actually happened. Getting all this stuff out (on paper, I want to say, but it's not true) somehow helps to solidify it. Even if I don't polish these things up and make them look like proper writing, they're useful to me in their current, crude forms.

Now I want to describe things, unreal places, magical times of day. You know when it gets foggy at night sometimes and if you're walking alone, you get the feeling that you're the only person left in the world? With all the lights out in houses, they could easily be abandoned and devoid of life. The mist mutes everything so that even if there were people nearby, you might never hear the shuffling of their feet. The world takes on this haunted look, an unreal quality, as though somehow you've stepped wrongward and out of the known realm of existence altogether. You're an interloper on a foreign plane, and any moment something will burst from the fog to banish you back to where you belong.

I want to write things like that.