November 2005

I “won” Nano!

I’ve got good ol’ Rob in the CD play­er right now, and here’s the lyrics that were play­ing as my Win­ner icon came up:

knock it nice
and smooth
step back and
watch it flow yeah

nev­er gonna stop me
nev­er gonna stop
nev­er gonna stop me
nev­er gonna stop

scream if you want it
’cause I want more

—Rob Zom­bie, “Nev­er Gonna Stop (The Red Red Kroovy)”

And I did­n’t even have to put in a “Screw Flan­ders”, as per my Simp­sons-addict­ed bud­dy, the B‑man.

Now that I’ve crossed the 50,000-word mark (!), I guess I’d bet­ter fin­ish the sto­ry itself. I’m prob­a­bly 1,000 to 2,000 words from the ending.

It’s called Salyx, if you wants to read it.

47,700 words now. In the home stretch, word-count-wise. Sto­ry-wise, too, I think.

du-Razh was a pale cir­cle, swelling even as he watched. Igraine was snooz­ing in her chair. Part of him won­dered if she want­ed to be wak­ened for this pass; the rest did­n’t care. Let her sleep.

The dis­play shift­ed a lit­tle, auto­mat­ic cor­rec­tions to their tra­jec­to­ry. He’d puz­zled out enough of the drift­ed Englisch to be able to toy with cer­tain aspects of the dis­play. du-Razh’s moons were labeled now, all of them tagged with numer­ic iden­ti­fiers; the Earth ship did­n’t have the names built into its data­base. They’d passed by IX‑4 and VIII‑4 already, and VII‑4, known local­ly as Shi­va, largest of du-Razh’s satel­lites, was approach­ing. They would pass below its tilt­ed orbit, no clos­er than one hun­dred thou­sand kilo­me­ters to the moon at any point.

And now the gas giant was near enough to make out the bands of atmos­phere, the murky swirls of hydro­gen and methane, nitro­gen and oxy­gen. Storms larg­er than worlds crawled across its sur­face, some of them old­er than human set­tle­ment in this sys­tem. A thin band of rings orbit­ed its equa­tor, tilt­ed thir­ty degrees to the eclip­tic, made up, it was the­o­rized, of a shat­tered moon, or per­haps a comet that had long ago strayed too near the giant world’s grav­i­ty well.

A world three-quar­ters the size of Jupiter, in the Home Sys­tem. A world whose grav­i­ty could tear apart less­er worlds.

They dove toward it, the lit­tle navette mak­ing cor­rec­tions as they fell.

Shi­va fell behind them, and then scarred, stony ViÅ¡nu, Lax­mi with its sul­fur-diox­ide vol­ca­noes. They crossed the orbit of ret­ro­grade Prana, a lit­tle wisp of cap­tured comet, and still they fell, still du-Razh swelled.

The bands swirled, yel­low and brown, ochre and tan. The world was huge now in the dis­play, tak­ing up near­ly half the land­scape the dis­play had to offer. A minor course cor­rec­tion swung the gas giant to the left, a lit­tle bit.

He was struck with won­der and awe. Nev­er had he seen images like this. Even in text­books, the pho­tos of du-Razh and Perse­phone were grainy blowups of images from ground-based tele­scopes. There was­n’t a lot of mon­ey for an explo­ration pro­gram; they’d become a large­ly ground-based soci­ety, the cities on King Moon notwithstanding.

And now it was spread across three-quar­ters of the dis­play, the whorls of its storms sharp and clear, the black­ness behind it absolute. It was bright enough to blot out the stars.

Anoth­er cor­rec­tion, and anoth­er. II‑4 swept behind them, named Brah­min by the local stan­dards. The last moon, Naras­in­ha, anoth­er cap­tured comet, orbit­ed pole-to-pole, once every ten hours.

[…]

So close now that the dis­play was filled with a roil­ing yel­low-brown plain, the limb at the edge of the world almost a straight line, and every sec­ond there was a minute cor­rec­tion. The stacked dis­plays showed count­down timers, hull-stress indi­ca­tors, mon­i­tors on elec­tri­cal per­mit­tiv­i­ty and gaseous heat­ing, none of which meant a damn thing to Yak­oub. He watched, eyes wide, as the world grew larg­er and larg­er still.

[…]

And around, accel­er­at­ing, steal­ing momen­tum from the vast world. It swelled so large that for a moment all there was on the dis­play was a slab of yel­low cloud, and Yak­oub could see fine detail with­in it, minute vari­a­tions in col­or and shade that were invis­i­ble in his text­books. Igraine turned on the snif­fer, and the navette was filled with the hiss and pop of du-Razh’s elec­tri­cal fields. A bright strike of light­ning arced between two clouds, a tril­lion volts bridg­ing a gap two hun­dred kilo­me­ters wide, and the snif­fer howled and keened with the inter­fer­ence. It went on and on, the light­ning last­ing for almost twen­ty sec­onds, con­tin­u­ous and sustained.

And then they were around, reced­ing, and the sun set on the limb of du-Razh, leav­ing the flick­ers of light­ning as the only light in a plain, a disc, a dot, a tiny spot of dark­ness, receding…

So I haven’t been post­ing here much late­ly. Nano has kind of tak­en over.

Here’s a sam­ple, if you’re interested:

In the slice of time between heart­beats, civ­i­liza­tions were born, flour­ished, grew cor­rupt, col­lapsed into war­ring nation-states. Con­ti­nents crawled across oceans, met, rose heav­en­ward in himalayan mountain-building.

He could see the slug, could see the eye-sear­ing bril­liance of the expand­ing gas­es. Sir Edouard was com­ing to his feet, mov­ing slow, as slow as if he were embed­ded in hon­ey. Tiny sun­lets of flame and smoke puffed from the anti-recoil holes along the pis­tol’s bar­rel, swelling in excru­ci­at­ing slow motion.

He was embed­ded in a block of plas­tic, unable to draw a breath. Noth­ing would move for him. He want­ed to scream but he might as well not have had a mouth.

Sir Edouard had unfold­ed him­self from his seiza posi­tion. He was almost to his feet. His eyes were flat mir­rors, reflect­ing the flame of his pis­tol’s muz­zle. His mouth was set in a nar­row, lip­less line. His halo of snow had burst from him like a star­burst, a white cloud envelop­ing his head. It might have been com­i­cal but for the expres­sion on his face.

As Yak­oub watched, his paral­y­sis com­plete, the knight took a step, impos­si­bly slow, then anoth­er and anoth­er. Slow­ly, inex­orably, he closed the gap between them.

The snowflakes remained where they were as he approached, slow as a glac­i­er. One step, and anoth­er, and anoth­er. He stopped, heels togeth­er, two paces away from Yak­oub, and reached up with an arm.

With the speed of a con­ti­nent, he plucked the slug from the air. A chill smile spread across his face. His eyes glit­tered with reflect­ed flame.

Want more? Here’s the whole thing: Salyx. 38,000 words so far, by the word counter in OpenOffice.org 2.0.

How’s your November?

28,000 words so far in my NaNo nov­el. I’m hop­ing to get about 5,000 this after­noon, too, if all goes well.