Writing

So I’m going to have to put my cur­rent project on the back burn­er for the time being. I need to do a lot more research, it looks like, before I set a sto­ry aboard a 17^th-cen­tu­ry ketch. What with being a child of the land­locked prairie, grow­ing up in the late 20^th-ear­ly 21^st cen­turies, who’d’a thunk it?

But that’s okay. It’ll give me a chance to return to a cou­ple of sci­ence fic­tion projects, Earth Fleet and Salyx (this last being my Nano project for 2005).

Off to write!

New short sto­ry (less than 1500 words)–Three Months and Two Days. I’ll be enter­ing this in the Man­i­to­ba Writ­ers’ Col­lec­tive short fic­tion con­test. If you have any com­ments, now’s the time; I have to have it post­marked no lat­er than April 3^rd.

Oh yeah, you’ll need a pass­word. High­light to see it –> tom­my .

Lat­er–The sto­ry is in the mail. Here’s the sto­ry that I entered a cou­ple years ago, which won me first prize: A Map to the End of the World.

It seems I have a great deal to learn about sail­ing ships in order to grant my NiP the desired degree of ver­simil­i­tude. Good thing I have the Non­such book from 1970ish. It seems to have a wealth of detail. And where it may fal­ter, Wikipedia can pick up the slack.

Off to write and do research!

Almost 1000 words today. Chap­ter 3 is begun.

See the whole thing over here.

Appar­ent­ly my web­host does­n’t like the word c‑u-r‑l*. That’s what was hang­ing me up from post­ing my new sto­ry. But that’s solved, at least worked around, and so: Every­thing That Nev­er Hap­pened. So far it’s ~5400 words spread across one and a half chap­ters, first draft. Enjoy, if you want to.

* Pre­sum­ably because there’s a soft­ware pack­age out there called c_url (with­out the “_”) that allows users to snarf entire web­sites and down­load them to their local machines. Appar­ent­ly it’s quite handy for build­ing up mas­sive col­lec­tions of pornog­ra­phy. Who knew? And here I gave Natasha Noir curly hair.

I’m try­ing to add a page with the stuff I wrote today–I did 2150 words in a new/old project, one that has its gen­e­sis in a Writ­ers’ BBS chal­lenge a while back–but Word­Press isn’t coop­er­at­ing. I’m not sure what the prob­lem is, and I’m too tired right now to work on fig­ur­ing it out.

Here’s the very beginning:

Riley had been sit­ting on the hard pew for less than a quar­ter-hour when he heard the door creak open at the back of the chapel. He glanced around at the oth­ers in the room, but none of them seemed to have heard a thing.

Foot­falls now, com­ing up the aisle behind him. The floor­boards creaked under the famil­iar, impos­si­ble tread. Then the dead man slid into the pew next to him and said, “After­noon, cap’n.”

“You’re not real­ly here, Charles” Riley hissed, not look­ing at him, not dar­ing. “You’re dead.”

“And don’t I know it, too, siah, that’s me body up there in the cas­ket.” There was a hor­ri­ble mirth to his voice. At the edge of his vision, Riley could see Charles’ pale hand ges­tur­ing toward the front of the chapel. The plain box hold­ing the body was closed, its lid adorned with a pal­try bou­quet of droop­ing white lilies in a chipped glass vase. “But here I am nonetheless.”

“Look,” said Riley, “what do you want?”

“Ah, siah, you can speak qui­eter. No one else in here can see me or hear me.”

“That’s because–” The woman in front of Riley turned and gave him an odd look, half pity, half fear. He smiled what he hoped was his sun­ni­est smile at her, and she turned away, look­ing not a whit reas­sured. In a whis­per, he said, “That’s because you’re not here. You’re a fig­ment of my guilt, a ghost of my imagination.”

“No,” said Charles, “not entire­ly.” He belched, and Riley winced, but the woman in front of him–of them–showed no signs of hav­ing heard. “I s’pose it’s pos­si­ble, cap’n, that you’re feel­ing guilt on account of me, but that’s not why I’m here in this par­tic­u­lar moment.” There was a shuf­fling sound from Riley’s right. In his periph­er­al vision, Riley could see Charles dig­ging in his coat, fetch­ing some­thing from an inner pock­et. The hand that held the card out to him was wan, more­so than it had been in life, and the nails were thick and yel­lowed like horn. “I have a mes­sage,” said Charles. When Riley did­n’t take the card, he motioned, mak­ing spas­tic lit­tle jerks with his hand that were entire­ly too much like his last spasms, his last gasps, aboard the ship. Riley snatched the card from that hor­rif­ic hand, clos­ing his eyes as he did so. “From a lady,” said Charles, “a right gra­cious lady.”

Riley kept his eyes closed, con­cen­trat­ing on the feel of the card, the rough weave of the paper between his thumb and fore­fin­ger, while Charles rose from the hard wood bench and creaked his way down the floor to the back of the chapel, out the door and into the world. Only once the door had slammed shut–and still no one else in the lit­tle room noticed–did he open his eyes.

The card was creamy white paper, stiff, fold­ed once. On the front it said

NATASHA NOIR, Esq.
∞ Dim Street

Black-hand let­ters crawled beneath the address, unread­able on this side of the grave. They made his eyes water just look­ing at them.

Inside, in per­fect cur­sive, it read

I own Man­dalay.
–Noir

He crum­pled the paper, whis­pered “God damn it” loud enough that the woman ahead of him turned and glared at him, then pock­et­ed the card, rose, and fol­lowed Charles’ foot­steps out of the dim chapel into the bright glare of after­noon of Littlesnow.

More lat­er, I hope, so I do.

…I wound up re-work­ing the out­line for my nov­el-in-progress. Now cer­tain things make a lot more sense, and I think I’ve removed all the things that felt hack­neyed and wrong. At least from one side of the equa­tion, anyways…

So I’m work­ing on a sto­ry, called Earth Fleet (ten­ta­tive­ly), and I want to make sure that I do a page* a day.  I have about 40 pages so far, and I want to set up a sec­tion on my site where I can upload the pages as they’re writ­ten. Which means I can either (a) find a tool that’ll let me restrict access to the pages, or (b) build one myself. I’m lean­ing towards (b); I don’t think it’ll be too dif­fi­cult, and it’s a lit­tle spe­cial­ized to expect to find some­thing pre-built in the OSS** sites on the Internet.

Basi­cal­ly this is a “com­ing soon” announce­ment. Once Earth Fleet is done, I hope to add oth­er projects.
____________

* A page being defined as one page of 12-point Couri­er type, sin­gle-spaced (I’ll blow it out to dou­ble-spaced before print­ing it for sub­mis­sion, when the nov­el­’s done and done), with one-inch mar­gins all round, or in oth­er words, about 400–450 words.

** Open-Source Software.