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Starting a new story

Posted on by Patrick

This start­ed out as a short sto­ry, but I have a feel­ing it’s part of a much larg­er work. At any rate, here’s what I wrote tonight (re-wrote, actu­al­ly, since the orig­i­nal sto­ry has a quite dif­fer­ent beginning):

Glo­ria woke in the blood-warm water, feel­ing like clawed hands had rent her heart. She sur­faced, drew a breath, and asked the time. The house oblig­ed, pro­ject­ing blue numer­als onto the inner sur­face of the dome. Beyond the num­bers she saw the pale sweep of what her peo­ple called the Snake, or per­haps the Sky Riv­er. Her hus­band Man­drake’s peo­ple knew it as the Milky Way.

By the fad­ing num­bers pro­ject­ed by the house, there were hours yet till dawn. She should return to the bot­tom, try to sleep. She knew there would be no more sleep for her today.

Some­thing had gone deeply wrong. She felt it in her heart, her bones, in her liq­uid soul: a rift in the uni­verse, a wob­bling of the Earth on its axis that she alone in all the world could feel. She stared at the great and eter­nal Snake in the sky. A part of her won­dered how it could be that the stars had­n’t yet fall­en loose from their places in the fir­ma­ment, to rain down on the fens and the sacred marsh­lands like frag­ile sil­ver balls drop­ping from a shak­en Christ­mas tree. Each star, she felt sure, should shat­ter with a sat­is­fy­ing musi­cal sound. In their dying moments they would score a dirge, an end­less mourn­ful cho­rus for her late husband.

For Man­drake, she knew, had just died.

With­out giv­ing too much away, Glo­ria is an undine, Man­drake is was in the mil­i­tary, and there’s a war on.

Nanowrimo

Posted on by Patrick

I’m doing nanow­rimo* this year. My sto­ry’s title is Once I Was You. Here’s the first snip­pet, from the 1244 words I wrote in an hour this morning:

As if on some silent cue, the doors of the school across the street at the far end of the park burst open, and chil­dren boiled out, their laugh­ter too qui­et to reach me. The buzzer sound­ed then, delayed by dis­tance, and the joy­ful noise of hun­dreds of six- to ten-year-olds washed over me, a rau­cous burst of mirth and mer­ri­ment, and even I, cold now of heart and mind, had to smile.

More to come, but right now I have to get to work. Toodles!

____

* the NAtion­al NOv­el WRIt­ing MOnth.

Words Alive (3)

Posted on by Patrick

Part 1 | Part 2

Peo­ple kept ask­ing me all day — all week lead­ing up to the week­end, real­ly: “Are you ner­vous?” I’d answer “Yeah, some­what”, or “Not real­ly”, or “I used to read in church all the time”*. I was a lit­tle ner­vous, though.

Fri­day after­noon, after the screen­writ­ing ses­sion, I went home and — for the first time — read aloud the sec­tion I’d intend­ed to read. I timed myself. It took four min­utes to read the descrip­tion of the dream palace erect­ed by the gods at the far end of time. Four min­utes. I had fif­teen to fill.

Hmmm.

So I read the first half of the sto­ry aloud, which came to some­thing like eleven or twelve min­utes. That was more like it. The down­side was that it was, well, a lit­tle sweary. The view­point char­ac­ter is a trick­ster god, named Fox, and he’s … earthy.

Which would­n’t be so bad, but my mom was com­ing for the reading.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Words Alive (3)” →

Words Alive (2)

Posted on by Patrick

Part 1

[Oops. This is long over­due. Sorry!]

On Sat­ur­day, I went to two workshops.

First up, Ani­ta Daher deliv­ered a pre­sen­ta­tion on “Writ­ing for the Young Adult”. This intrigued me, since one of my back-burn­er projects (also my sec­ond nanow­rimo project), Salyx, neat­ly slots into the YA mar­ke­teer­ing cat­e­go­ry: it’s about a boy’s com­ing of age on a dis­tant colony world. It’s cur­rent­ly sit­ting at about 55,000 words, and it real­ly needs to have its end­ing cleaned up. It’s also got some heavy themes in it: teen preg­nan­cy, mur­der, reli­gion, the fric­tion at the edges of two cultures…

So it was good to hear Ani­ta’s advice: Don’t wor­ry about writ­ing to the mar­ket. Just write the sto­ry — write the truest sto­ry you can — and let the mar­ke­teers fig­ure out which slot it fits best in. (It was also nice to hear that 40,000 words is a nice sol­id num­ber for a YA nov­el — I was think­ing I’d have to add to it, and the sto­ry’s all told already.)

Next was Dan­ish­ka Ester­hazy’s ses­sion on Screen­writ­ing. I’m not a screen­writer, but almost every­thing she told us maps straight across, in my view, to nov­el-writ­ing. The inter­twin­ing of action, inter­per­son­al con­flict, and per­son­al growth; the idea that most movies fol­low a four-act struc­ture (though movie execs will claim up and down that they’re real­ly three acts, split 25−50−25); the con­cept of grow­ing a screen­play from a sol­id log­line into a hun­dred-or-so-page draft; all this fits very well with what I’ve learned about writ­ing long-form prose.

So here’s the log­line for my work in progress:

Every­thing that Nev­er Hap­pened is the sto­ry of a rud­der­less 17th-cen­tu­ry sea cap­tain, who must bat­tle his undead patroness to save the world — and his soul.

Tomor­row*: my reading.

____

* This time I mean it.

Words Alive (1)

Posted on by Patrick

This is the first of a three-part sto­ry about Words Alive.

When my short sto­ry “Heat Death, or, Answer­ing the Ouroboros Ques­tion*” was accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion in Tesser­acts 14, I was asked if I’d be inter­est­ed in doing a read­ing at the upcom­ing Words Alive fes­ti­val. The answer, of course, was “Of course!”
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Words Alive (1)” →