hawkwing_lb (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hawkwing_lb) wrote2008-09-30 11:04 pm
hawkwing_lb) wrote2008-09-30 11:04 pm
Entry tags:
In which I do the First Line Meme
...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.
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(If I were not working on duellist, I would.)
And thanks.
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"Trail of Their Dead", potentially. But it's straightforward, and potentially novellette-length, and while I know the high points I want to hit, I know the ending more in terms of tone than in terms of what actually takes place to hit that tone.
"After the War" and "Autumn is the season" have thematic arguments whose arcs I'm almost certain of (they don't have plot, as such. I hope to confuse people with pretty, instead). "Blood Mirage" has an ending but no worldbuilding and no arc of here-to-there, and "The Twilight Isle" has atmosphere, worldbuilding, and an ending, but again, no arc of here-to-there.
The others, not so much. Which is why I was asking lj where to start, because if I had a clear idea of how to approach any of these, I'd be doing that. :)
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Answer me a few more leading questions:1)Does you lead protagonist actively influence the course of events in the story or are they an observer?
2) Why do I - your arbitary, not terribly intelligent reader - care about your lead protagonist?
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(Not that I wouldn't give my eyeteeth for either Shakespeare or Marlowe's turn of iambic pentameter, you understand.)
(My sentences are long and shiny because I take a long time to write them. I will never earn a living at this game, even should I be lucky enough to build a career in it. Besides, most people aren't that into shiny sentences. :) )
Oh, twenty questions. Fun! I'll take any excuse to talk about my stuff. :)
Regarding TTI, in answer to your questions: Sorrow... starts out as an observer, I suppose. Then she figures out that what she thought was an exile is actually a test, and if she doesn't pass it (it involves a tower, a labyrinth, some monsters, possibly a grail, a half-brother she can maybe risk trusting and an aunt - think Morgan le Fay, and not sympathetically interpreted - she really can't) she's not going to live long enough to go home.
Most of my protags manage to act. Otherwise they're not taking part in a story, but merely a meditation on the nature of life. And really, I don't like thoughtful essays half as much as I like thoughtful stories.
And you care about my protags because hopefully I'll make them understandable or sympathetic, in each of their own terribly broken, cowardly, kind, brave, foolish, compassionate, human fashions. (I'm not really sure I can manage inhuman: I haven't read enough Lovecraft for that. :P)
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Anyway: the act part is important. I probably would quietly drop this and you if if that were not the case. And, agreed, essays (or as they usually turn out, sermons) are boring.
Look - what I am doing is running through a process Eric and I go through nearly every book. Eric asks hard questions. This forces me to really think deeply about the characters and story. Next thing I know I have a story. Please, you don't have to participate. But you haven't answered the second question at all (which -if I were answering it would be a sure indicator that I don't know. In your can it may just be that I am a bad questioner.) I didn't want to know what you would do. I want to know, specifically, what that protag has experienced/ feels/ wants/ is driven by/ is afraid of (or at least you must know. Do you?). And I want to know in terms I (and you) can relate to. When I wrote Cair Aidin I was basing him on one of the most notorious pirates - a mass murderer known for his cruelty - of the 16 th century. How did I try to get to like him and therefore to get readers to like him? By working out what made him into the flawed monster he was, and starting by showing his one (at that time) redeeming feature, and gradually building how that related to his childhood, his own betayals, and the man he could become -- with a nobility of spirit -- despite that. To do that I had to first understand the man I was going to write. How he thought, what had happened to him, and what motivated him. Core motivations, not superficial push-pulls. That was what I was trying to get you to think about.
This may not work for you at all, but at the heart of writing for me... it is not just about pretty sentences. It's about _why_. The character faces the obstacles, but unless they are shaped rightly they will not pass those obstacles. They will have no reason to do so in the way the author envisages. The author - at least the good one - is shaping both circumstances and character so that not only will the obstacle (labyrinth whatever) be conquered but that character will do so in such a way that the reader feels that is perfectly logical and plausible (even when it isn't) and natural.
This 'real' writing skill. Not merely the lovely words (and I adore sequipedalia - I just avoid it). Like the tiny stitches on a perfectly set seam - It's nearly invisible when it is done well. It's also very hard to do right. I wish I was really good at it. I can, however, see when someone else is good at it, because _I_ know what I am looking for. There are seat-of-your-pants writers who just do this instinctively. Others (Stephen King I suspect) who do this with with supreme craftsmanship. I believe they get more out of the words. I want to belong to that set of writers - but that is me. You must, of course, write as you want to.
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Which is not, eh. Half as easy as some people make it look. Rosemary Kirstein, to take one example. Mary Gentle. Chaz Brenchley.
(I would sacrifice innocent goats to small gods in order to have the writing chops of Kirstein and Gentle. And I'm talking prose, story, worldbuilding, the whole nine yards.)
That aside.
Ah. So that was what you were asking. I wasn't sure if you were being specific or not.
Now I know, I appreciate you asking the question. :)
Yeah, I can tell you, mostly, who Sorrow is and what makes her that way. And why she makes the choices she does and does the things she does.
I could talk about it here, but it'd run long. Because that's the iceberg, isn't it? The story is only the tip. Part of my problem is keeping the iceberg out of the story, and only showing the tip.
I'm not a very good story-teller. It's probably the thing I'm worst at in the whole writing process. Because I have the shape of the story in my head, but the details are always murky: it takes any number of false starts to start making the stuff I put down on paper match the feeling in my head.
I can't write mechanistically, or to outline. I've tried. I have to hit tone and voice and theme at just the right angle, or the plot-events and the characters come out wrong.
Which is why, I suppose, I'm still less than half-finished with a novel I started writing in early 2007.
(That and college, the necessary timesink.)
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Then there is my interpretation of plot. A plot is shaped around an obstacle or situation. It is firstly WHY your character gets around it, from which HOW naturally flows. And yes, characters develop and grow because of situations: but they would not be able to do so if it were not for the intrinsic character underlying. My method - which may not work for you at all - but I see traces of similarity in your working - is to write a short section -usually a start, and understand and feel that lead POV character. To put flesh and mind on the bones of the idea. Once I HAVE them - I put THEM in the situation or with the obstacle and work out what they would do - according to their internal logic. Work out why they would do things and what they would do follows. Sometimes when I come to write the novel/short the character gets more complicated or changes and the story does too OR I go back and change and add to the charcter. But my 'plotting' is based on several pages of 'why' (and some how, what which and who :-)) The process is a proactive 'game' between me and my characters. I know more or less where i am going. I know more or less who I have (and what they are like, and would do, and why). I then take my situations and the characters... and work out how that can lead to my end point. Sometimes I shift that end. Sometimes I change the obstacles. Sometimes (last choice!) I change the character. The end result is a 'plot'which 'feels' not only plausible but probable (so plot isn't this klunky set of mechanistic orchestration) it's just... there. Good plotting is near invisble ;-).
Not saying this will work for you, but it may help.
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