'A Thousand Flowers'

I finished the first draft of the unicorn story today, and I'm very pleased with it. This despite the fact that it's definitely too long (9700 words), and made up of 3 internal monologues, one after another. There is bugger-all conversation, but lots of pictures, Alice. Here's one, where the midwife is sneaking up on the unicorn, not yet realising it's a unicorn:

At a certain point my breathing quieted and the night breeze eased to the point where the low noise issuing from my lady’s [tower] window reached me. That rooted me to the meadow-ground more firmly, her near-inhuman singing, her crooning, broken now and then with grunts and gutturals, something like triumphant laughter. I have often been thought a witch myself, with my ugly looks and my childbedding, but I tell you I have never evoked any such magic as streamed off that fine horse in the night, fainting me with its scent and eluding my eye with its gleams and glitters, the shifting and shivering of its muscles under its moonlit hide. I have never cast such a spell as trailed out that window on my mistress’s, my charge’s song, if song it were, that turned my bones to sugar ice, I tell you, my mind to sweet syrup and my breath to perfume.

And the ending just fell out, beautifully paced, and making my (3rd) narrator blossom in several different directions.

Happy day.

(Pic snuck from here.)