In which I do the First Line Meme
Sep. 30th, 2008 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lb...In the hopes this might aid my concentration, so to speak.
More like the First Paragraph Meme, but still.
Short stories
"And You Will Know Them By The Trail Of Their Dead" (a story of ghost hunting, exorcism, and failing to watch your back)
John never met a bar he didn't like. Which maybe isn't the best thing in the world for a thirty-five year-old conjure-man, but hardly unexpected.
"A Girl and Her Monster" - not its real title. A story of monsters, madness, sorcerers who experiment on people in the name of science, and getting your own back good and proper.
Stepping out of the shadows of the blood-smeared bridge into the wet silence of empty streets and soft autumn rain, Semma gathers herself close, wipes her hands on the stained twill of her undershirt, spits bile into the rainbowed curl of an oily puddle. Behind her the corpse is still, unspeaking: blood and snot and viscera seep into cracks in the pavement, gather in runnels spilling towards the river. The rain will soon attenuate them to nothing, ghostly streaks leaking towards the sea. She is cold.
The monster is gone, for now, leaving emptiness behind it like a bruise, and the breeze coming down the river with the twilight shivers her flesh through her thin damp shirt.
"After the War" - dunno what this one is about. It may need to cook for a while.
He brings her roses, after the war.
Ships aren't supposed to cry, to weep lubricant tears into the dark kelp-murky waters of their berthing. Ships aren't supposed to dream, and dreaming, sigh for the stars they should -- it's thought -- have forgotten.
Ships aren't supposed to grieve.
"Autumn is the season of her discontent" - my seamonster/My Little Mermaid/you can't go home again story
Autumn is the season of her discontent.
Pavements slick with fallen leaves and the aftermath of rain. The air is rich with the scent of salt and woodsmoke, and clouds gird the horizon with the promise of storm. The sea aches in Caillean's bones from a mile away, the pull constant as the tides, insistent as a salmon-racing spring, painful as fish-hooks barbed in the tender pink flesh of her throat.
"And his face was the face of an angel" - dunno what this is, at all.
She remembers him as plump, ivory bracelets on fleshy wrists and a rich man's ironic smile. But now he comes to her hollowed and thin, skin in folds slack and loose around his jaw, following late on the heels of the trade caravans he has in other times led. A sword-hilt mantles iron behind one lean shoulder. The calluses on his once-soft hands speak of practice and hard use.
"Blood Mirage" - perhaps a novella. Dead animal-headed gods, dead people, saving the world because the man with the head of a jackal says it's down to you.
When the jackal-headed god walked out of the sun-hot desert, Kleobis was afraid.
"The Twilight Isle" - wants to partake of Arthurian mythos. Bah.
The barge that carried the princess Sorrow came to the lee shore of the Isle of Dusk as the sun's last red gleam slid beneath the western horizon.
All of these need thematic coherence. Most of them need either plot or plot-substitute.
And finishing, of course.
So, if I was to pick a short story to work on finishing betwen now and the new year, which should it be? I ask you, because I'm incapable of choosing, myself. *indecisive*
Novels.
The duellist of Alusind, 27K. (Necromancy, duelling, politics, intrigue, criminal conspiracy, and will it never be done?)
Mornings were always the worst.
Iron-grey predawn light filtered through narrow windows beneath the salle's high ceiling. Light condensation slicked the boards under Santander's bare feet, chill and treacherous against her toes. Sweat stung her eyes, hot and wet on her spine, damp between her breasts. The weight of the nightmare still rode her shoulders
Vex the Dust (19th century alternate history vampire story, title stolen from Tennyson, "Come not when I am dead")
Stained-glass windows shed parti-coloured afternoon light onto the flagged stone of the nave. Dustmotes hung in warm, unmoving air still heavy with the scent of incense from morning mass. A bent, elderly widow in mourning black knelt in the foremost pew, murmuring a Latin rosary.
The Englishman knelt in the side-chapel, head bowed in front of the altar to Saint Judas Thaddeus.
The Queen's Necromancer - duellist prequel
Elenis kan Arovine knelt on cool, green-veined marble in the queen her cousin's private receiving room, her right-hand sweat-slick where she braced herself against the tiles, and prayed to be overlooked.
(not the actual first line, but the first line currently in existence. Considering this one may be an attempt at Epic.)
The Velvet Fist - duellist sequel
The Jade-Green Sea - duellist sequel
The Perilous Crown - duellist prequel
Citadel of Bones (ghost dragons! galleys! trying not to have a civil war!)
Dust and jasmine scented the night air through the latticed window. Sabila Eldivan scratched her signature at the end of the papiros scroll and laid her pen aside. I am not afraid, but her hands, treacherous, trembled, and an ink-blot bloomed on her thumb.
Red Hands (post-not-exactly-the-apocalypse SF, complete with revolutionaries and genetically-engineered (supposed) super-soldiers)
You're standing with your back to cold brick, watching the darkness, waiting. Smelling disinfectant and new paper and the ozone-warmth of working computers, hearing the creaks and sighs of an old building settling around you, the spatter of rain on the window at the corridor's far end. You're hungry, but that's nothing new: even the acid chill of fear in your gut can't drive hunger very far away, one of the consequences of living on rice or barley bread and lentils and not enough of either - a job working security at an underground club doesn't pay enough to have anything left over after you cover the rent on the one-room squat you share with your best friend.
Your best friend, the résistante. Who, if she's not careful, is going to get both of you killed before the night is out.
untitled space operatic
The merchanter drifted in space, a round metal carapace black against the stars save where external lights shed colour on its flanks. Charring marked where the Talon's second warning shot had scored her side.
untitled fantasy (aka the unmessiah story: You've been waiting for someone to show up and fullfil these signs and ring in the Republic of Heaven. What happens when they turn up, and don't really want to suffer and die for the cause?)
Dawn, red and soot-smeared, slid between the brickwork. Oily smudges on the canal's dark surface glittered iridescent under the haze. Water slipped and slopped against the bridge piers, shit and grease and the effluvia of the city's sewers eddying in the current that pushed toward the harbour basin and the morning's high, stinking tide, ships and screaming gulls.
Sira stood slantwise in the lee of the Tevern Bridge, damp, mossy brick slimy under her left hand, and listened to the water slapping on stone, heartbeat-slow. Three years. Three years in this stinking sty of a city, in the canalside's stagnant slums and the shadow of decaying brick tenements. Three years with nothing to show except the scars on her hands and new bitterness eating at her heart.
Baruch, I trusted you. But Baruch was dead. Nothing but hurt ever came of listening to prophets.
I know which novel I'm working on finishing. It might take me another year or more, but duellist will succumb. (I have too many other ideas I want to work on for it not to.)
(My major fault is being slow.)
But short stories? Please. Help me pick one! Because otherwise I'll just tap about picking at all of them, and getting none much closer to finished.
More like the First Paragraph Meme, but still.
Short stories
"And You Will Know Them By The Trail Of Their Dead" (a story of ghost hunting, exorcism, and failing to watch your back)
John never met a bar he didn't like. Which maybe isn't the best thing in the world for a thirty-five year-old conjure-man, but hardly unexpected.
"A Girl and Her Monster" - not its real title. A story of monsters, madness, sorcerers who experiment on people in the name of science, and getting your own back good and proper.
Stepping out of the shadows of the blood-smeared bridge into the wet silence of empty streets and soft autumn rain, Semma gathers herself close, wipes her hands on the stained twill of her undershirt, spits bile into the rainbowed curl of an oily puddle. Behind her the corpse is still, unspeaking: blood and snot and viscera seep into cracks in the pavement, gather in runnels spilling towards the river. The rain will soon attenuate them to nothing, ghostly streaks leaking towards the sea. She is cold.
The monster is gone, for now, leaving emptiness behind it like a bruise, and the breeze coming down the river with the twilight shivers her flesh through her thin damp shirt.
"After the War" - dunno what this one is about. It may need to cook for a while.
He brings her roses, after the war.
Ships aren't supposed to cry, to weep lubricant tears into the dark kelp-murky waters of their berthing. Ships aren't supposed to dream, and dreaming, sigh for the stars they should -- it's thought -- have forgotten.
Ships aren't supposed to grieve.
"Autumn is the season of her discontent" - my seamonster/My Little Mermaid/you can't go home again story
Autumn is the season of her discontent.
Pavements slick with fallen leaves and the aftermath of rain. The air is rich with the scent of salt and woodsmoke, and clouds gird the horizon with the promise of storm. The sea aches in Caillean's bones from a mile away, the pull constant as the tides, insistent as a salmon-racing spring, painful as fish-hooks barbed in the tender pink flesh of her throat.
"And his face was the face of an angel" - dunno what this is, at all.
She remembers him as plump, ivory bracelets on fleshy wrists and a rich man's ironic smile. But now he comes to her hollowed and thin, skin in folds slack and loose around his jaw, following late on the heels of the trade caravans he has in other times led. A sword-hilt mantles iron behind one lean shoulder. The calluses on his once-soft hands speak of practice and hard use.
"Blood Mirage" - perhaps a novella. Dead animal-headed gods, dead people, saving the world because the man with the head of a jackal says it's down to you.
When the jackal-headed god walked out of the sun-hot desert, Kleobis was afraid.
"The Twilight Isle" - wants to partake of Arthurian mythos. Bah.
The barge that carried the princess Sorrow came to the lee shore of the Isle of Dusk as the sun's last red gleam slid beneath the western horizon.
All of these need thematic coherence. Most of them need either plot or plot-substitute.
And finishing, of course.
So, if I was to pick a short story to work on finishing betwen now and the new year, which should it be? I ask you, because I'm incapable of choosing, myself. *indecisive*
Novels.
The duellist of Alusind, 27K. (Necromancy, duelling, politics, intrigue, criminal conspiracy, and will it never be done?)
Mornings were always the worst.
Iron-grey predawn light filtered through narrow windows beneath the salle's high ceiling. Light condensation slicked the boards under Santander's bare feet, chill and treacherous against her toes. Sweat stung her eyes, hot and wet on her spine, damp between her breasts. The weight of the nightmare still rode her shoulders
Vex the Dust (19th century alternate history vampire story, title stolen from Tennyson, "Come not when I am dead")
Stained-glass windows shed parti-coloured afternoon light onto the flagged stone of the nave. Dustmotes hung in warm, unmoving air still heavy with the scent of incense from morning mass. A bent, elderly widow in mourning black knelt in the foremost pew, murmuring a Latin rosary.
The Englishman knelt in the side-chapel, head bowed in front of the altar to Saint Judas Thaddeus.
The Queen's Necromancer - duellist prequel
Elenis kan Arovine knelt on cool, green-veined marble in the queen her cousin's private receiving room, her right-hand sweat-slick where she braced herself against the tiles, and prayed to be overlooked.
(not the actual first line, but the first line currently in existence. Considering this one may be an attempt at Epic.)
The Velvet Fist - duellist sequel
The Jade-Green Sea - duellist sequel
The Perilous Crown - duellist prequel
Citadel of Bones (ghost dragons! galleys! trying not to have a civil war!)
Dust and jasmine scented the night air through the latticed window. Sabila Eldivan scratched her signature at the end of the papiros scroll and laid her pen aside. I am not afraid, but her hands, treacherous, trembled, and an ink-blot bloomed on her thumb.
Red Hands (post-not-exactly-the-apocalypse SF, complete with revolutionaries and genetically-engineered (supposed) super-soldiers)
You're standing with your back to cold brick, watching the darkness, waiting. Smelling disinfectant and new paper and the ozone-warmth of working computers, hearing the creaks and sighs of an old building settling around you, the spatter of rain on the window at the corridor's far end. You're hungry, but that's nothing new: even the acid chill of fear in your gut can't drive hunger very far away, one of the consequences of living on rice or barley bread and lentils and not enough of either - a job working security at an underground club doesn't pay enough to have anything left over after you cover the rent on the one-room squat you share with your best friend.
Your best friend, the résistante. Who, if she's not careful, is going to get both of you killed before the night is out.
untitled space operatic
The merchanter drifted in space, a round metal carapace black against the stars save where external lights shed colour on its flanks. Charring marked where the Talon's second warning shot had scored her side.
untitled fantasy (aka the unmessiah story: You've been waiting for someone to show up and fullfil these signs and ring in the Republic of Heaven. What happens when they turn up, and don't really want to suffer and die for the cause?)
Dawn, red and soot-smeared, slid between the brickwork. Oily smudges on the canal's dark surface glittered iridescent under the haze. Water slipped and slopped against the bridge piers, shit and grease and the effluvia of the city's sewers eddying in the current that pushed toward the harbour basin and the morning's high, stinking tide, ships and screaming gulls.
Sira stood slantwise in the lee of the Tevern Bridge, damp, mossy brick slimy under her left hand, and listened to the water slapping on stone, heartbeat-slow. Three years. Three years in this stinking sty of a city, in the canalside's stagnant slums and the shadow of decaying brick tenements. Three years with nothing to show except the scars on her hands and new bitterness eating at her heart.
Baruch, I trusted you. But Baruch was dead. Nothing but hurt ever came of listening to prophets.
I know which novel I'm working on finishing. It might take me another year or more, but duellist will succumb. (I have too many other ideas I want to work on for it not to.)
(My major fault is being slow.)
But short stories? Please. Help me pick one! Because otherwise I'll just tap about picking at all of them, and getting none much closer to finished.
