This will almost certainly be the only post I make to this blog this month, but after a titanic work like this... I can't even imagine what next month's will be. Some lesser piece, to be sure... (maybe something else from the LOTECH comp) but I will nevertheless believe it to be worthwhile, ultimately. In the meantime, you have a lot to occupy yourselves with here.
. . .
A Dark and Stormy EntryCopyright (c) 2001 by Lord Lobur-Bytton
Release 1 / Serial number 010415 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/10
Blank
A blank page. Virgin. And it could go anywhere, couldn't it? The words are waiting to drip from your mellifluous pen...
First you need a setting. That's it. Action has to take place somewhere, after all...
- Scotland
- Io
- Tied to a Kite
- Somewhere completely imaginary
- Wait, back up a second. Why start with setting?
. . .
It's so mundane, isn't it, to begin with a milieu. Stories can form themselves, like mother of pearl, around any kind of grain at all, and deciding what to decide first is perhaps the most important decision of all.What then? (You ask yourself, doodling spirals at the corners of your page.)
- Moral. Figure out what the story is going to Say.
- Let's first think of an object to get things rolling.
- Doodle more. It's fun and maybe something will come to you.
- Get the first line down and the rest of the novel is written.
. . .
That first sentence really sets the tone for the whole thing. If you can just get it right, you'll win out big. Your mind turns over options, some torrid, some delicate.
- "It's so close."
- "She turned, incredibly furious, and set the pencil down."
- "The woman stood in the room."
- "Amazingly, the varnished bagel still had not rotted."
. . .
It comes back to you in a flash like summer lightning: the art project by a friend of your roommate, the varnished plain and onion bagels that littered your dormitory; the disgust of the janitor, and the derision of the engineering students; the impassioned defense she gave; the columns in the school paper; the weird way the whole thing ended up, with her getting into an argument with the dean over the choice of vocabulary in some posters she put up, her suspension, candlelight vigil and the odoriferous pyre of the remaining bagels -- all but one, a blueberry bagel, left behind, like a single sad token,
still varnished, unrotting, in the dorm kitchen.Or were they muffins?
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
And could it get any more lifeless? How about some adjectives? What would your creative writing teacher say? Describe, describe, describe!
. . .
Booyah! Better already!
Though perhaps some additional detail would be good.
- Find an excuse to describe the woman even more fully.
- Find an excuse to describe the room more fully.
- "Alene lay in the corner, miserably dying."
- "The alien, in robes of zplr, stood sipping its mrplxx."
. . .
You ponder this a while, your brain a fervid fester of gleaming tentacles and squidlike beaks and unpronounceable names for the parts of the body -- and of course, the ravishingly beautiful earth women who will be ravished by these creatures -- and the next line takes its eerie, inevitable form:His companion spoke. "D'glk blorb, glulx!"
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
And indeed who wouldn't be miserable?
. . .
You can picture her now: the dark spreading pool of blood that mingles with the pool of her black hair, and her gown; her arms flung out; the light dimming from her eyes.
. . .
Alene lay in the corner, dying of a gunshot wound. Mark and Brian were in another corner, both suffering the rapid ravages of the Ebola virus. Carol had a knife through her gut, probably two minutes to live.Revenge, I thought, is really really sweet.
But let me back up three months and five days, to that fateful afternoon in the Wendy's parking lot...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
There we go. Something different...Her laugh rang silver as her blood ran out. Already the insects gathered round her, and the air was bright with her imminent passing.
You're not sure where you're going to go with this, but it's certain to be an unusual destination. Perhaps a world where the afterlife is a known and desirable destination. Perhaps one in which reincarnation is possible, and Alene's death is an escape into some much more desirable existence. But for now you must stop and think a bit.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
The tall, dark-haired woman stood alone in the long empty room, where oak beams ran exposed under a recently whitewashed ceiling and leaded glass sparkled in tiny diamond panes in the windows.Like a spectre out of the darkness, your teacher seems to speak to you: "Yes, my dear, you've put in details -- but why do I care? They're irrelevant!"
. . .
The room reeked of cleaning solution and recent renovation. Between the oak beams, the soot stains had been whitewashed away; the old gaps in the windows filled with fresh glass.So someone doesn't like the renovations. But why not...?
. . .
The room reeked of cleaning solution and recent renovation. Between the oak beams, the soot stains had been whitewashed away; the old gaps in the windows filled with fresh glass.For her, presumably. Alene wondered what she would say to old Perignon when she saw him. "'Thank you, but you've destroyed every scrap of character about the place'? 'When I asked you to clean up, I was mostly hoping you'd get rid of the larger rat corpses'?"
Nothing to be done now, she supposed. The aura of the place had faded beyond recall. It was useless to her now. And she would have to begin again.
There we go. Now we're going somewhere. There are a thousand possibilities -- magic of the old castle, lost; ghosts she wished to contact, driven out; its usefulness as a backdrop to the movie she is producing, ruined...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
The tall, dark-haired woman stood alone before her pier-glass mirror, in the long empty room. With grey-green eyes, she surveyed her own form, taking in the sharply angled eyebrows that declaimed her Russian-elvish ancestry; the pert curve of her lips; the lift of her lovely breasts and the slenderness of her hips, all accentuated by the elegant fashion stylings of her favorite modiste, Madame Perignon. She had been wise to take in Madame when she came in exile, now three years ago; the woman had a touch with sheer silk that made Alene [that is the heroine's name] look like no other of her caste. And the
delicate color of the imported dye also brought the bronzey highlights of her hair out.Impatiently -- for there was no time to be wasted -- Alene turned toward the door.
And now, you figure, it's time for Alene to encounter some second character. But what will be the tone of their interaction?
. . .
"Miss Alene," murmured Madame Perignon, bursting forward out of the dressing rooms and sweeping a magnificent curtsy that would have removed all the dust in a fifteen foot radius around her in the voluminous train of her own extensive (and expensive) gown, if the floor were not cleaned and waxed daily by a maid named Girlene, and thus completely devoid of any dust to sweep, which was fortunate considering Alene's distaste for dust. "I am so honored to be visited by you this day!"
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
"I might have expected to meet you here." Alkir slammed the door without so much as a hint of polite greeting, and strode forward, his magnificent boots gleaming with polish against the polished gleam of the parquet floor."You might," she replied, tossing back her hair, "if you had had the least foresight." They looked daggers at each other.
Your readers will surely know true, predestined love when they see it...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
"Oh, my DEAREST Alene," declared her mother, Vanesse. "I am so glad to see you here at last.The older woman moved forward to embrace her daughter, the heavy velvet trailing behind her magnificent form as she walked. "I have been so worried about what might happen to you out there in that wicked wilderness."
Alene tossed her head delicately. "I am not a Priestess of Thoth for nothing," she remarked, with a bit of pettishness. "Any wild animals that attacked us I just turned into a bloody maggot-eaten skull. It was easy."
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
You tap your own pencil against your teeth and wonder why this falls short of the effect you had in mind.
. . .
She turned, furious. "Damn you, Muldoon. I should shove this pencil through your eyesocket and into your brain for what you've done!!""What??" he demanded.
"You've killed the baby," she hissed.
The whole thing, it strikes you, is not coming across quite the way you had in mind.
. . .
She froze, her fingers cradling the tiny head, but the body was stiff and cold in her arms. Around the baby's mouth was the faint residue of his last meal, a sticky film of greyish pap...She closed her eyes, and knew. Jack had put the rat poison on the wrong shelf again.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
She turned, incredibly furious, and set the pencil down in a gesture of great upsetness. "Damn you, you blackguard bastard Jack Muldoon. You've killed the baby.Well, better. Sort of.
. . .
You stop, staring at the words. They convey urgency, imminence -- but of what? It needs expansion, elaboration.
. . .
Better, but a cliche. It still gives you no idea where the story is going. What you really need here is a striking, metaphorical kind of thing.
. . .
Your fingers cramp with frustration, your grip on the pen so powerful that it's a wonder you don't snap the sad little Bic in two. Yes, yes, but WHAT is so close?And then you have it. Inevitable.
. . .
There you go. Dollars to donuts no one has ever written THAT line before. You throw down your pen and do a little dance of victory around the room, and as you go the rest of your idea pour itself into your brain like a waterfall of slurried Concept: the story is about a writer, a writer with writer's block...- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
You frown at the words. (The earth's distance from the sun, you remind yourself, varies to a really negligible degree over the course of a year. Perihelion and aphelion are less important than the tilt of the Earth in the
production of seasons...)Your fingers recommence to write.
The sun is so close in that part of the world that you can, in fact, reach up and touch it with your bare fingers.
(Science be damned.)
. . .
In the tallest part of the world is the tallest mountain of the world; and if the tallest man in the world were to climb that mountain and reach up with both hands, he would be able to catch the sun in his bare fingers.Outside the deep-birds swoop and gather, fighting over a ragged scrap of moon. You rub your eyes with one hand, and begin again upon your Natural History.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
What comes to you is a full sheet full of wends and warples, that's what. Little vine leaves and flowers, blossoming fruits, a monkey face peeking out from behind an abstract spiral, as though the Garden of Eden had been drawn by someone with only a French curve and a 2H pencil.But, well, it was fun.
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
Interesting. Build out from around a small center, a thing.
. . .
Something animate, but not a protagonist (you're not into that children's writing kind of stuff, much less fable.) So many things you can do with a chicken. Live, dead, cut up into pieces and broiled...
. . .
Mm, yes. The notion simmers in your mind, redolent of past feasts.
. . .
Two cloves of garlic resting on the clean oak board. One was peeled; the other still retained the sheen of its innermost skin. In the late sunlight they glistened with the intensity of a still-life by Claesz.A few feet away, the pot sat on the stove, and inside the broth boiled, stirring up a froth of thick bubbles that gathered and popped, the herbs moving on the face of the water. The steam rose in rich clouds, blanketing the walls above with heady condensate.
You look over what you have written and realize the strange irony. You began with the idea of chicken, but there is no chicken here: there are only the things that you associate with chicken, the preparations for chicken, chicken's harbingers and companions. The chicken itself is too significant to be squandered in the opening sequence.
And you have the dim inkling now of the system of symbolism, the intricate language of signs, that will underpin your masterwork.
The Chicken is God.
- *** You have to go lie down. ***
. . .
The preparations for some kind of boiled chicken dish are in progress: garlic on the board, boiling water with herbs floating in it. It smells good.All right, so you haven't eaten all day. Is it any wonder that your mind is running along these tracks?
- *** You drift off towards the kitchen. ***
. . .
Garlic, two cloves, peeled6 cups broth, boiling
Bay leaf
Pinch salt
Well. Your genius may not be literary, but at least you'll eat. (Surely more garlic than that, though, you think, and scribble over cloves to replace it with "heads".
- *** You drift off towards the kitchen. ***
. . .
A toaster. And what has a toaster got? Slots, yes, it has slots. And levers, there are levers to raise and elevate the pieces of bread. (You sketch this too, a manic diagram pulsating with eerie energy, about to spring on its curled cord.)You've never been much of a toast person -- prefer Cheerios, on the whole, though you never got your good buddy Adam's taste for putting Cheez Whiz on them -- but you do know what a toaster looks like.
. . .
You cluster the other appliances around the manic toaster with a few jagged-but-sure slashes of the pen. A ferocious stove, faced flames leaping from every orifice. A melancholic fridge, its doors sagging a bit, its inner bulb dimmed. A blender with a frizzy hairdo -- too many quick slushies..."Hey, whatcha drawing?"
You cover the paper adeptly with one hand, turn with your body blocking it, but he leans across you and gets a look anyway. Then he turns to you and shakes his head. "You are one weird guy, Palmer," he says. "I hope you realize that. What happened, you see 'The Brave Little Toaster' too many times as a kid?"
You open your mouth to explain -- the concept, where it was going, the toaster as a symbol of individuality in an uncaring and unfeeling world, but he's already gone, laughing with the others.
Slowly you ball the picture into a wad and drop it in the trashcan on your way out.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
The first line sometimes comes to you like that, fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus."Potential," my father explained to me, when I asked him about this phenomenon. And he went on to tell me about coiled springs, and fuel, and rockets, and falling objects, until my mind was ablur with the collage of a thousand Science Fairs, and still I was no closer to understanding the thing I had really been asking about.
Come to that, what had "I" been asking about? You know the way the story goes in real life, of course, but you're not writing your memoires here. You pause, sketching lightning bolts around the perimeter of the page, waiting for inspiration to strike."
. . .
"There's tension in a secret," I said -- trying not to sound as though I was correcting him. (Not that path, father, but this one: this is what I want to talk about.)He understood what I meant at once. "The desire of the hidden thing to reveal itself, you mean," he said.
"Yes."
"The mask that exists only to make the moment of recognition more powerful."
"Yes, that too," I replied, pleased that he seems to have understood.
And here you are again at the fork in the road. Maybe it goes on in this philosophical vein for a bit, meandering around amongst concepts of narrative and foreshadowing and the effect of language on thought and the question of whether literary analysis can usefully be applied to the events of everyday life. That's how you'd like it to go, because it's interesting, if only to a small, theory-drenched segment of the population.
And then there's how it did go, the actual story, which you promised yourself you did not have to write. (This is fiction, and fiction does not have to be about you.)
. . .
The pen guides itself, granting you a curious distance.I stood awkwardly on one foot and looked away. "Secrets do that," I said. "They want to come out even if you don't want them to."
He looked at me. He was a shrewd man, my father, and he knew what I was trying to get at. A kind of wary light came into his eyes. I expected him to be harsh about it, for he was often unforgiving of other people's failings, particularly their failings to speak to the point, directly.
"Is there something you're trying to tell me?" he asked. "Perhaps it would be easier here than in front of your mother."
The vision chokes you: your mother's face, what she'll think, what she'll say. That will have to be faced too, soon enough, but--
"Well, you see." I couldn't seem to get my mouth around the words. "I-- that is, Ryan and I-- Dad I'm in trouble."
"Well," he said. "As usual you've picked an unarguable example: pregnancy is certainly one of those secrets that tends to reveal itself."
I looked down, both grateful and furious that he'd uttered the word before I had.
But that's not how it really happened, of course. Not how it really really happened. You've taken refuge in a cliche.
. . .
You crumple a page and begin again."Secrets do that," I said. "They want to come out even if you don't want them to."
He looked at me. He was a shrewd man, my father, and he knew what I was trying to get at. A kind of wary light came into his eyes. I expected him to be harsh about it, for he was often unforgiving of other people's failings, particularly their failings to speak to the point, directly.
Is there something you're trying to tell me?" he asked. "Perhaps it would be easier here than in front of your mother."
The vision chokes you: your mother's face, what she'll think, what she'll say. That will have to be faced too, soon enough, but--
"Well, you see." I couldn't seem to get my mouth around the words. "I-- that is, Ryan and I--"
"Pregnant?" he asked gruffly, granting neither of us the luxury of a way out, a euphemism.
"No!" I said. "No, sheesh. I'm not stupid."
His mouth tightened and he threw his cane away into the bushes. "Yes you are!" he shouted. "You're damned stupid if you think that the only thing that needs protection in sexual matters is your body. There's also the question of your mind! and your heart!"
He jabbed his finger at me twice sharply in a way that would have been comic if he had not been so short and so angry. Later I would tell the story for friends and they would laugh insanely, but to me the old man's passion would never really become amusing.
You let go a long breath. This could be a long story, and it doesn't really have a happy ending, but it would be nice to write a happy ending for it anyway.
. . .
And I haven't seen my parents since that day. Sometime in the middle of the shouting match later on, I got up and got my things and went to my friend Kristy's house, and I stayed there.Ryan and I broke up eventually, of course, but this is not the point...
It rings false, doesn't it? But the reality doesn't lend itself to a story: how you came in silently by the picket fence, how you overheard him say a few words to your mother while you were in your room that night; how they had an argument in raised voices that ended in her blaming him for permitting you to stay out until all hours. And then a long slow ice around the dinner table that did not fully thaw until several years of college had elapsed. It was as though in a single moment you shattered everything they thought they knew about you, and they had to get to know you all over from scratch, and when they did, they didn't like you as much. But there's no narrative arc in that.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
"Why did you tell me?" he asked me, several days later. "You didn't have to.""It was a secret," I replied. It was demanding to be told."
"Lots of people live with secrets," he said, sipping his brandy. "They rename them to things like 'No one else's business' or 'things that won't hurt you if you don't know them,' or whatever label they need to in order to keep everything well oiled and running smoothly."
"Then I guess I don't know," I replied. "It just seemed like a secret."
"That's because you're my daughter and you're honest," he said. "And I'm proud to be your father."
It rings false, doesn't it? But the reality doesn't lend itself to a story: how you came in silently by the picket fence, how you overheard him say a few words to your mother while you were in your room that night; how they had an argument in raised voices that ended in her blaming him for permitting you to stay out until all hours. And then a long slow ice around the dinner table that did not fully thaw until several years of college had elapsed. It was as though in a single moment you shattered everything they thought they knew about you, and they had to get to know you all over from scratch, and when they did, they didn't like you as much.
But there's no narrative arc in that.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
"Don't you think, though, that that is all a form of words?" My father walked along, hitting every third tulip in Mrs. Phelps' border with the end of his cane. I didn't have the gumption to discourage him. "We call it a secret, and it becomes something that needs to be revealed; we call it a mask, and it becomes something to be stripped away. Until then it might just be... clothes that I wear on my face.""Don't you think there's more to it than that?"
"No, I don't," he replies. "We so often define things in terms of negation. If I refer to someone as a girl, she's just a girl, but if I call her a virgin, then she's a girl to whom something hasn't happened yet, and suddenly this whole story hangs over her head, an expectation of the future."
You toss the pen down. Your father would never have said that, never never: words involving or implying the existence of sex did not occur in his universe. He probably would have made use of the stork legend, if it had not been beneath his dignity. Until-- the story twists itself against your will.
. . .
"It's not clear which kind of future, though," I said insistently."True. It could be that she's going to marry some nice young man and settle down, or it could be that there'll be a sordid incident in the back of her boyfriend's car. You never know."
I bit my lip.
Ack. This character is as perverse and persistent as your real father, spiralling insistently towards the most improbable and undesirable topics.
. . .
Dammit. This story isn't about toasters and it never was about toasters; it's not about philosophy either. Irritably you go back to the top and scratch out the false start, the silly business with slots and levers and springs and potential contained, and instead you write the new title:"How my father found out I was sleeping with Ryan."
- *** You achieve a sort of exorcism. ***
. . .
(The earnest voice; the child's voice. The plaintive innocence that appreciates the Spring.)"There's potential in a seed," I said, hoping that this will clarify things.
"Yes," my father replied. "Grain is a kind of food, and food has chemical potential--"
"No!" I stamped my foot, tired of his failure to comprehend. "Flower potential."
Oh, ook. You crumple the page, irritated. This faux innocence isn't interesting even to you.
. . .
Good point. You might as well know that. It'll shape the plot, the milieu, the characters, everything.The only difficult decision now is which of various possible causes célèbres you would like to espouse. What pet peeve you desire to air. That kind of thing.
. . .
Yes. Cheese.And then you sit there for half an hour thinking. When you're not thinking about the creamy taste of chèvre on water crackers (lox is a good accompaniment for that) or the sharp tang of a good Cheddar or the rich complicated marvel that is a ripe Stilton (on the verge of being offensive, but not quite) -- when you're not thinking about all these things, you are trying to think of a plot.
. . .
You sketch him quickly at the side of the page: the strong chin, the bright eyes, the lock of hair that falls endearingly over one brow. And then his costume, a long cheese-colored cloak; a scabbard for the cheese-knife he wears at his side; the fondue-fork, large as a walking stick, that he holds in his other hand.
. . .
A pretty, retiring fresh Mozzarella, gowned like a dairy maid. Her eyes are wide and bright, untried and unaged in the world, and she frolics playfully in innocence with her companions Fresh Tomato and Balsamic Dressing.
. . .
That's easy enough. Bright, garish, unnatural orange are the trousers of your villain's suit; plastic are his coat and vest; waxen his skin and dull his eyes. He is Processed Cheez Food, a would-be, a usurper, bastard and unworthy, coveting the Prince's throne and crown.In the sketch, he leans, nonchalantly, against a microwave oven, and from his mouth comes a bubble: "Melts like a Dream!"
. . .
A pretty, retiring fresh Mozzarella, gowned like a dairy maid. Her eyes are wide and bright, untried and unaged in the world, and she frolics playfully in innocence with her companions Fresh Tomato and Balsamic Dressing.
. . .
That's easy enough. Bright, garish, unnatural orange are the trousers of your villain's suit; plastic are his coat and vest; waxen his skin and dull his eyes. He is Processed Cheez Food, a would-be, a usurper, bastard and unworthy, coveting the Prince's throne and crown.In the sketch, he leans, nonchalantly, against a microwave oven, and from his mouth comes a bubble: "Melts like a Dream!"
. . .
You bend your head to your work, truly inspired now. The story unfolds easily, frame after frame of delicious setup and more delicious escape, and along the way are other fantastical figures introduced: the Prince's aged and clever advisor, Lord Parmigiano; the somewhat dubious figure of Roquefort, whom one never entirely trusts; the Irish magician Ardrahan, who goes about in the guise of a shepherd...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Building a world from scratch is always fun, right? Random ideas bombard you out of the ether.
. . .
Sure, why not? Throw out Physics; it is a Chain and a Fetter. Suppose a world with six faces, sharply delineated edges, a separate celestial body designated to shine upon each. So one side might have a sun, another a moon, a third some stars; but as for the fourth, fifth, and sixth, they would be illuminated by yet other sorts of bodies not yet imagined; the qualities of light alone would be a fitting topic for pages and pages of lyrical description.
- What would the architecture on this world be like?
- What would the politics of this place be like?
- What lights govern the other sides?
- What animals dwell on the face of the Cube?
- What of the numerology of such a place?
. . .
Indeed, it's hard to imagine that there wouldn't be, in a cubical world, some importance given to the numbers four (for the number of edges which are accessible from a side) and six (for the total of faces) and eight (for the number of edges in toto); three, which has such mystical significance on earth, being narrowly different from pi which is the definer of circles and spheres, would lose entirely its spiritual power, and the perfection of nine be disregarded.
. . .
Yes; what sort of Creator would Create such a world, and how would it be in Its image?A fourfold God suggests itself, or a six-fold, or an eight-fold. A faceted deity, containing opposites within itself, both man and woman, black and white, aged and new, good and bad, strong and weak...
But the thing is, on the whole, gods are not very interesting to write about. Particularly not balanced, abstract ones. In disappointment you set the whole project aside for another day.
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Small cardboard boxes might breed there; their pelts fuel the moving industry to this day. Refrigerator boxes, on the other hand, once roamed free, but now have grown so rare that their remaining ecological preserves are sequestered. Further poaching is punishable by severe fines.
- What lights govern the other sides?
- Where do egg cartons come from, in that case?
- Come to think of it, what you should really write about is Styrofoam Peanut World.
. . .
They grow on trees, for a start. Clusters of them that blow down in the spring like some weird unmelty snow. And then the children of that place go out and gather them up in buckets, or rake them up like leaves, and the piles are shipped off to another world...- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
You just want all the answers, don't you?
. . .
Some sort of light that winks on and off, viz, a string of Christmas lights, or a neon tube. Whole nations rise and fall under the blinking sign: COLD BEER.
. . .
Very well. Why not? This is the story of a world on the surface of a die. A loaded die, perhaps. The loading would subtly unbalance the moral fabric of the imagined world...- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Some sort of light that winks on and off, viz, a string of Christmas lights, or a neon tube. Whole nations rise and fall under the blinking sign: COLD BEER.
- So perhaps the cube is actually in the parking lot of a bar.
- What animals dwell on the face of the Cube?
. . .
Perhaps -- no, more than perhaps, it is even likely -- that each face of the world, possessing different light-sources and thus different needs for shelter, would develop a different sort of architecture.But, at the same time, you muse, it is likely that in such a universe the perfectly rectilinear would be seen to be a natural form; the curvature that appeals to dwellers of a spherical Earth would seem less pressing to their consciousness; indeed the whole division between man's logic and nature's exuberance would be in part erased if nature herself took to expressing things in straight clean lines.
- So what if the plants grew like that, too?
- And people? Would they also be rectilinear?
- What lights govern the other sides?
- What animals dwell on the face of the Cube?
- What of the numerology of such a place?
. . .
You can think of a few, of course, that more or less already do. Reeds and grasses seem fairly straight; bamboo has a particular linearity.
. . .
You can think of a few, of course, that more or less already do. Reeds and grasses seem fairly straight; bamboo has a particular linearity.
. . .
A garden of columnar trees and wirelike flowers with single, pointy blooms. Life in such an environment would be troubled by a grievous conceptual severity. And there isn't, really, much you can think of to say about it...
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Well-- that does seem a bit farfetched. You imagine a stretch of dialogue: ("Oh, my dear, your shoulders are so Square!" "Darling, I love your angles!")
No.
- So what if the plants grew like that, too?
- Something good could be done with a ruler for a protagonist, though.
. . .
Well-- that does seem a bit farfetched. You imagine a stretch of dialogue: ("Oh, my dear, your shoulders are so Square!" "Darling, I love your angles!")
No.
. . .
A whole social hierarchy of geometrical implements unfolds itself in your mind: the protractors, distracted, fickle creatures who always have an angle; the compasses, poised and slightly aloof; the T-squares, the stencils, the bawdy French curves. Forget whatever might lie on the other sides of the cube. Theirs would be an existence purely on the face of paper; an existence paradoxically free and expressive, a state in which life itself would be a continuous drawing out, a long, unfaltering line from birth to death...
. . .
"So what is that, then?" he asked, looking back over his shoulder as they came away from the surface of the page."That is the line you made in life," said the angel.
He looked back at it sadly, with all its changes of course, its uncertain waverings, and then its intersections with other lines-- and the tender, unfulfilled promise of certain asymptotic approaches-- and he felt terribly sad that it was over so quickly, and spent with so little design.
"Come," said the angel. "Look at it from a little further off."
And so he did, and saw for the first time the real shape of it, and the shapes of the other lines beside and around it, and then all the shapes scrawled upon the great flat surface of the world; and he was so stunned by its complexity and perfect beauty that he asked the angel whether this was what God saw.
"No," said the angel. "This is what God IS."
A very silly, metaphorical conclusion, and theologically dubious besides. (One wonders whether this piece of writing makes especially more sense when compared to all the other things you could have written today than it currently does on its own. But your guess would be No.
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
Well -- it is easy to imagine that each face is naturally its own country; is even inhabited, perhaps, by its own race or species. For if the light is different on each face, it is natural enough to suppose that the different sorts of humanity would have developed differently, or would not have developed at all, presuming a basic evolutionary model.So then there would be, on the faces of the Die, scattered people unique in form, in language, in polity, in science and religion.
. . .
Nomads and mystics on a desert face; wanderers on a delicate dune. Their skin would be a deep sweet indigo that they would never be able to see, and their songs would be lilting and sad. In that eternal wind and shifting sand there would be nothing they could call geography on the face of the ground. Stable shapes would be always, only, in the sky.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Ah, the liminal spaces, the uncrossable lines, the spots where one gravity gave up and another took over. One might step around in a moment, peek over the edge of the world; it would be like coming to the face of a cliff and looking down, of course, and then realizing that one could walk straight down that face without fear, because it was ground of its own.
. . .
Houses built on that edge space; manned walls, and gates; perhaps a whole city as long as the world and as narrow as a knife's point. The image unrolls before you, and you see how it must be: not a book but a scroll, something that the reader would roll along, looking first into one house, then into another...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
A concept half image, half raucous soundtrack: clash noises coming down and being stuck behind rocks, the speeding clatter of cymbals, and the higher notes floating on the top, clear and sunlit.Of course, that in itself does not make a story.
- Well, maybe not sound. Maybe communicative chemicals.
- There's a city on the delta of this river.
- Not a real river, maybe, but a communications trunk line.
. . .
Maybe the river concept is just the metaphor that someone has made up, to describe what it's like to listen to a constant piping of voices from some kind of communications line. What it would be like to monitor, for instance, a random sampling of conversations coming through a cell phone satellite.
. . .
...but the listener perceives himself as this character not trapped in a room of instruments and tracking devices, and certainly not as a sordid peon of an uncaring governmental structure, but rather in this fantasy universe, gifted with the ability to hear and sort the same sounds that travel unnoticed past everyone else every day.
- Is it merely a fantasy? Or is he, in fact, mad?
- If it is merely a fantasy, perhaps he has a reason to retreat.
. . .
Not simply to cover in his mind the fact that he is doing an essentially unsavory thing -- spying, destroying privacy -- but because the process of listening like that might be so detrimental. Here he would be, locked in a room like a box, with feeds of hundreds of thousands of lives coming in, but at the same time totally isolated, unable to act, unable to involve himself in anything.
. . .
What could possibly make him consent to so joyless an existence? Extreme patriotism, perhaps; that might be part of it, but it seems that a more personal loss would be involved, something else to shove him out of reality. Perhaps terrorism in general has recently been on the increase, and he lost through a horrific bombing or similar random event all the family that he has to care about. A wife, if he's relatively normal; but if he is handicapped or otherwise too socially peculiar for that, then maybe a sister, mother, caretaker. Someone whom he regards as vulnerable. Someone he valorizes in
retrospect.
- What role would that character have in his fantasy world?
- So how sane is he, really, then? Does he know what he's doing?
. . .
Are there others like him? Is he really associated with the government, or is he a nutcase vigilante with goals of his own?
. . .
A small, dedicated cult of near madmen, who have spent their lives in listening to conversation scraps pulled in this way, twiddling frequencies, their attentions drawn whereever the computer software notes and flags irregularities. Certain words; certain tones of voice; certain (undesirable though it is to say it) accents. These are fed through to them in their tiny podlike listening chambers, and they shut their eyes and concentrate moment by moment just on these single threads. Able to, at the push of a button, mark something as exceptional, trace the call, identify the participants, record and
file the whole conversation under Suspicion. Or to decide to ignore. And these judgement calls, to suspect or not to suspect, would be the whole of their job.
- There would be someone higher up who listened to the Suspected files.
- One of the listeners goes a bit bonkers and begins to follow his own agenda.
- The listeners start to sympathize with the listenees.
. . .
Tired of listening for information that he never definitely finds anyway (since all he ever really has are these same vague suspicions), he begins to record other things. He listens until he finds people that interest him, and he records *their* stories. No one catches him, because he is effectively a statistical blip in the operation. And he builds up a cache of recorded phone calls from and about various people, which he listens to over and over again even offduty, following the lives of strangers with curiosity and tenderness...
- Until one day one of his favorites is murdered.
- Until he learns that one of his listenees has died of cancer.
. . .
Out of sympathy for the man's wife, who is torn apart with grief, he collects all the man's phone calls and sends them to her anonymously -- which she finds both consoling and horrifying. In the resultant fray, the secret government project is revealed to public knowledge. Also, the widow falls in love with the gentle listener who already knows her so well.
. . .
You crumple the metaphorical paper of this concept and toss it away. Somewhere along the way any real vision was derailed by cliche; but some bit of it still lurks, the muddy juice of music, the dripping of expressive voice, and sometime or other you may have something to make of that. Just, like, not now.
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
At which point he is forced to overcome his extreme social inadequacies -- and the rampant paranoia that has come to define his daily life, even now that he's not really listening for terrorists any longer -- and track down the vicious killers responsible.As ideas go, it's a little derivative, but there are still places you could go with it...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Someone who stood above the human filters as the humans above the machines. Someone who begins to have a small enough pile of data that he, or she, or perhaps they (but only a few of Them, now) would be able to piece together a solid picture.
. . .
They must know it's all nonsense, that there's not much really to be paranoid about; sure, they catch a few things, now and then, prevent a few bombings, break up a few groups that seem to be tipping towards danger. But on the whole they must realize how ridiculous is the scale of their operation compared to the actual number of real organized criminals out there. The vast majority do their work at home, unpredictably, without giving anyone any particular warning.And so inevitably they yearn for an even better spy device: a device that works in the mind, a telepathic listener. They are developing this, to be distributed subtly. Perhaps a kind of nanotechnology to be put into the water, the pieces of which will accumulate in human bodies slowly and then assemble themselves in the brane. No one nanobit would have the whole plan; no one would be large enough to be detected, or complete enough to be understood on its own. Without surgery, without even any physical ill-effect, people would be growing these little monitors deep in their branes. And the monitors would transmit perpetually...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
What if in all this endless listening They actually do hear the beginnings of something sinister? Something massive and coordinated, the most incredible, ingenious, and well-developed conspiracy in the history of time; more sinister and threatening than Cataline, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Illuminati rolled into one; something for which the stage has been setting itself for hundreds of years, something so fierce that if it comes to pass it will mean the certain destruction of the State, if not of humanity as a whole; and yet something that, to each of the participants, is not even visibly a crime. A manipulation of dozens or hundreds or thousands who suppose themselves to be lone gunmen or solitary prophets, who cannot be reached or dissuaded by a single form of rhetoric.You shiver, chilled. The book itself should have this form: individual notes of just this sort, that, pieced together, reveal to the patient reader, between the lines and beneath the encipherments, the shape of a shady religion, the hints of a vile plan. It would take skill and dedication to read; it would be more game than book; it would seem, in its indirection, as though it had no point at all, as though it were about a thousand different things. But there would always be, for those with eyes to see, pointers back to what the story was really About.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Because their time was entirely taken up with these suspect groups, the people they most listened to, the ones they came to understand and appreciate as the whole world, are the very groups most under suspicion: the disadvantaged, the foreign, the religiously fervent. Some of them might even begin to build a kind of identification with the so-called suspect groups.
. . .
At which point they turn against and try to subvert the project. They begin reprogramming the computer to pick up what members of the government are doing; they listen to, Suspect, and record instances of fraud and public deceit among people who otherwise had supposed themselves to be protected by a kind of automatic immunity. Revealing this to the populace at large -- along with the nature of the project itself -- they are able to bring down a system of massive corruption.
. . .
The results, in fact, are so sweeping and so detrimental that it winds up more or less ruining all established government in the country in question. The political parties are in shambles, alliances are broken, there is no understood forward motion. Businessmen, smalltown lawyers, entertainers and sports figures find themselves getting elected, and what comes of this is a sudden return of naivete and chaos -- a governmental regression, in effect, to a time when corruption was not unknown, but was both less common and less skillful. Some of the results are good, but there is also massive confusion...
But that can all go into the epilogue.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
In the end, the project is dismantled, except for a small (unofficial) group which remains as a self-appointed monitor on the new government. [Sequel to follow, perhaps.]And that's all she wrote.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
He quits his job and tries to join one of these communities of -- well, who knows what. Whatever this world's politics would make the equivalent of immigrants from Iraq, or some such thing. But of course he is himself the equivalent of a WASP; his attempts to join in the community are regarded with mockery and suspicion. He can't go home again, but he can't manage to carve himself a place among people who are consistently reviled and doubted by the nation at large.
Rather a sad conclusion, but those come easily to you these days.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
In his fantasy existence -- the one where he is a noble if somewhat grubby creature with magical powers, living on the delta of a muddy river of sound -- in that reality, she is still alive. He's kept her alive in his mind. But he can't see her; that would be too painful. No, she's somewhere else, his lost love or his remembered family, and if he listens very carefully, he can hear her voice sometimes from upstream. Turns of phrase, tones of voice, that are exactly hers. There's no way to answer, but at least he knows she's still alive.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
The woman who acts as the go-between between this troubled soul and the real world, the person who has to talk to him and convert his fantasies into actual information useful to the FBI (or whatever equivalent but unAmerican entity we have put into the backdrop of this tale?)(She appeals to you much more than the listening lunatic, when you think about it; she probably grew up on fantasy stories herself, but she has a firm grip on reality, a family, a life. Perhaps even children. And there's something to her romantic about the madman's delusion, but at the same time she recognizes him for what he is: a cracked, damaged human. A loss.)
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Too much listening might make a person mad. An excess of stories cluttering in his head, and the concentration required to sort out what was important from what was not. He might have been a little bit unusual to start with, gifted and retarded, autistic or something like it, to have the attention necessary to listen for that thread of information about terrorism and
destruction and bombs through all the grocery lists and whispered love affairs.
. . .
Okay, recast this as something a little less fantastical. An alien race with the ability to send out controlled chemical emissions. They trade information that way, sending messages downstream; when the older ones go back up to spawn and die, their death songs wash from their bodies, and the ocean is a great library, layers upon layers of scattered tales...
- This race, achieving the ability to travel in space, comes to earth...
- Humanity, achieving the ability to travel in space, comes to their planet...
. . .
...where it tries to swim in our grubby streams, and finds them full of bitter nonsensical poetry. To them the pollution of the chemical industries comes through as a grating, staccato plea, and we seem to them like a race of troubled, brain-damaged children, unable ever to speak, perpetually trapped in the middle of a scream.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
...where it bottles and sells this liquid as an unusually salubrious drinking water. Coca-Cola makes billions. The Great Library of the Strangers is drunk in a hot Atlanta afternoon.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
The noise would go everywhere, would hang humidly in the air, sounds from upstream, even to the words whispered on a mountainside a thousand miles off.The houses would be soundproofed, of course, the way there are dykes and containment walls built against rivers now, but it wouldn't be enough. Nowhere there would be wholly quiet. You'd wake up in the morning and find the floor slimy with the night's jazz, the ceiling a dripping backbeat.
. . .
It would be a kind of sensory overload to come down to the delta and hear all that music rushing down, torrents of styles and flavors, intermingling. One might sit out on a terrace over the water and sip coffee and be overloaded, until the music took over all one's senses and seemed to be something that you could smell and taste as well.
. . .
Intolerable, for anyone of musical refinement, or anyone discerning; there would be the deaf, the desperate, and those who were so determined to make a buck that they managed to disregard the simple searing exhaustion of hearing all this nonstop."
. . .
Someone living in the relative silence of the surrounding world, in a sound-desert, where sound has to be imported by aqueduct. But the memory of home would make him glad of this parched state. He could hear himself think. In the absence of all that noise he might be able to become something of a musician, and people would come to hear him, as no one, of course, ever would in the delta town.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
Someone who is not, in fact, deaf to the music; someone who likes it and came to hear it as the tourists did, and now stays on for the purpose of earning some money on the tourist trade; but the constant flow of sound, interrupting even his dreams, conveying such turbulence of moods and thoughts, is wearing at him slowly.He is afraid. He doesn't sleep enough. He only dimly remembers what silence is like -- the way someone who moved to the face of the sun would remember darkness, when he couldn't find it even behind his eyelids.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
Intolerable, for anyone of musical refinement, or anyone discerning; there would be the deaf, the desperate, and those who were so determined to make a buck that they managed to disregard the simple searing exhaustion of hearing all this nonstop.
- What tourists would come?
- So the story would be about living there.
- So the story would be about someone who came from there.
. . .
It would be a kind of sensory overload to come down to the delta and hear all that music rushing down, torrents of styles and flavors, intermingling. One might sit out on a terrace over the water and sip coffee and be overloaded, until the music took over all one's senses and seemed to be something that you could smell and taste as well.
. . .
Yes. There we go.
Driving rain. Heather. Bagpipes.
You sip at your coffee. You're on your way, yup... On your way to writer's block. You have no voice. No edge. You need a style, an edge, a voice-- and you need it now.
- Purple Gothic. Nothing is more fun than gloom.
- Cyberpunk. All that chrome and plastic...
- Stream of Consciousness
- Pseudo Dr. Seuss. Why not?
. . .
Into your mind with the subtle insinuation of the Grinch's smile, it comes: your thought: novels for grownups in a child-book voice. Why not? It's clever, it's Modern, so Modern it's post-; it rolls in your brain. Nostalgia? Terrific. Old memories sell. And the smiles of grandmas are certainly swell...
...
This is heinous, horrific, horrible, sad: no rhyme-schemes for haggis are here to be had.
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Then ten years gone by with no one in the scullery and that wasn't right, sculleries need a maid, even in the highlands, how else can the haggis pot be cleaned? ... Raining harder now, the sky looks ripe to split in half and haggis and maids bedammed ... what you wouldn't give for a little skirl of bagpipes, a little twirl of skirts, the men sure look fine in their dress kilts and tartan none more so than fine Jamie Dougal that was your sister's betrothed ere he jilted her. And the family been poor and bastard children are just as hungry as any other, if not more.
Outside the castle the sound of neighing horses and they sound hungry let them starve...
Sighing, you tear up the page. You can't maintain this kind of thing; it makes you irritable. Structure may be restraining but it also gives you something to work with, know what I mean?
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Your blood thins as you think of it (oh sweet how it seems to you): Ann Radcliffe's redoubtable prose, brash Bronte thunder, the pallor of Poe.Cluster'd flank to flank for the bare comfort of each other, seven horses: there was no shelter on the heath.
The clouds gathered low on the horizon, blocking the late steep ingress of the waning sun. A cold breeze brought the stench of the Loch full over stony ground. Only the castle, and the jagged peaks, prevailed in this murk...
Yes. Going nicely, this. Now you could do with a main character. A viewpoint for this lurid tale.
. . .
One of Macbeth's crones, perhaps. She bends and scrapes her way across your stage, a lump of cloth so doubled over it is hard to believe her real. One shaky hand clutches a staff...Yes, yes, a fine character-- viewed from the outside. Frightening, and strange, and faintly smelling of unpleasant herbs. But to take her on from within her own mind? You're doubtful for a moment. But the challenge is good. And you begin to write.
Ten years a heath witch ages a woman fast. One feels the low winds that sweep over the land; one feels the stone underfoot; and it ceases to be bracing. The longing for home and fire is strong; both are lost.
She knows these things, Valeraine does. Sitting on a bare boulder with her staff beside her, watching the clouds creep over the distant mountains to gather around the castle (her handiwork, the weather; it comes when she calls it.) She fears how swiftly life has slipped from her. Her hands have done more of hard work than she could ever have dreamed, when she was a young woman, comely, and under the eye of the Baron.
Her eye lifts. Someone outside the castle is stirring. Fools -- they would be wiser to stay inside tonight, and guard their windows well...
What now?
. . .
Something not quite satisfying about that. Perhaps the menace would be stronger, the tension better, from the other side. Or from no side.
. . .
He comes to you in a flash of eyes, and a breadth of black cloak. Fine dark hair he has, matching his steed, and boots of black leather, and he rides like a madman, taking the wind in his teeth. A heroine's hero.
Dougal's horse stood too still in the arch of the castle. Listening.
He too could taste it in the air, the heaviness of brooding thunder, and the taint of metal. This was no ordinary fury of weather; this was a made storm, the artifact of someone's calling. Some devil or devil-tamer without had sent it against them, the coward's way, an unanswerable attack.
He turned his horse to the gate and rode out. Whoever it was might still be near by, and it would be the storm he cut or his own throat.
What now?
. . .
Dougal spotted her easily enough: little more than a scrap of black cloth, from a distance, a small malevolent figure on the heath. Anger surged, and his spurred his horse to approach her.He could not know that she regarded him with more fear than he did her. Even as he approached, she gathered what remained of her spent powers. To call on weather was no light matter, or she would more often have turned the wind from her own back. And now she had little reserve against a difficult meeting.
"You!" he called, still far off. "Witch! Withdraw your dark enchantment, before I withdraw your life from you."
"Do you think," she whispered, and her whisper was audible in his ear, though he was galloping hard and she stood some distance off. "Do you think that if I have the power to command the weather, you have the power to command me? One thing is master of another, as king of lord and lord of servant."
You pause to contemplate. Something odd is obviously afoot here, but it's hard to say what. You have the feeling that the witch doesn't actually have any malice towards the castle -- or at least not towards the human inhabitants -- but only the dimmest reckoning of what it is that she is truly fighting. And why can't she be straightforward with the man?
As for him, he has a dark past of his own. He was a highwayman for a time; you saw that in the dark glint of his eyes when first your imagining summoned him, and you cannot banish it. There is blood on his hands. And yet he regards himself as innocent, a just man.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
She watched him come, and gathered what remained of her spent powers. To call on weather was no light matter, or she would more often have turned the wind from her own back. And now she had little reserve against a difficult meeting."You!" he called, still far off. "Witch! Withdraw your dark enchantment, before I withdraw your life from you."
"Do you think," she whispered (into his ear at a distance of many yards; such tricks are slight, the smallest breeze will serve if it be aimed aright). "Do you think that if I have the power to command the weather, you have the power to command me? One thing is master of another, as king of lord and lord of servant.
You pause to contemplate. Something odd is obviously afoot here, but it's hard to say what. You have the feeling that the witch doesn't actually have any malice towards the castle -- or at least not towards the human inhabitants -- but only the dimmest reckoning of what it is that she is truly fighting. And why can't she be straightforward with the man?
As for him, he has a dark past of his own. He was a highwayman for a time; you saw that in the dark glint of his eyes when first your imagining summoned him, and you cannot banish it. There is blood on his hands. And yet he regards himself as innocent, a just man.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Down below, two specks are particularly agitated. One, moving inside the walls of the human fortress, but soon to emerge, with his horse flying beneath him (after the fashion of land creatures to fly, of course.) And then the other one, stiller, compacted fury: the heath witch.But the clouds are gathering -- clouds of her sending -- and you have no wish to be here when they clash at last, as they must.
There. Different.
. . .
He spotted her easily enough: little more than a scrap of black cloth, from a distance, a small malevolent figure on the heath. Anger surged, and his spurred his horse to approach her."You!" he called, still far off. "Witch! Withdraw your dark enchantment, before I withdraw your life from you."
Then her whisper came in his ear, so uncanny that he flinched to hear it. "Do you think that if I have the power to command the weather, you have the power to command me? One thing is master of another, as king of lord and lord of servant.
You pause to contemplate. Something odd is obviously afoot here, but it's hard to say what. You have the feeling that the witch doesn't actually have any malice towards the castle -- or at least not towards the human inhabitants -- but only the dimmest reckoning of what it is that she is truly fighting. And why can't she be straightforward with the man?
As for him, he has a dark past of his own. He was a highwayman for a time; you saw that in the dark glint of his eyes when first your imagining summoned him, and you cannot banish it. There is blood on his hands. And yet he regards himself as innocent, a just man.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
He comes to you in a flash of eyes, and a breadth of black cloak. Fine dark hair he has, matching his steed, and boots of black leather, and he rides like a madman, taking the wind in his teeth. A heroine's hero.
Dougal's horse stood too still in the arch of the castle. Listening.
He too could taste it in the air, the heaviness of brooding thunder, and the taint of metal. This was no ordinary fury of weather; this was a made storm, the artifact of someone's calling. Some devil or devil-tamer without had sent it against them, the coward's way, an unanswerable attack.
He turned his horse to the gate and rode out. Whoever it was might still be near by, and it would be the storm he cut or his own throat.
What now?
. . .
Something not quite satisfying about that. Perhaps the menace would be stronger, the tension better, from the other side. Or from no side.
. . .
He spotted her easily enough: little more than a scrap of black cloth, from a distance, a small malevolent figure on the heath. Anger surged, and his spurred his horse to approach her.He could not know that she regarded him with more fear than he did her. Even as he approached, she gathered what remained of her spent powers. To call on weather was no light matter, or she would more often have turned the wind from her own back. And now she had little reserve against a difficult meeting.
"You!" he called, still far off. "Witch! Withdraw your dark enchantment, before I withdraw your life from you."
"Do you think," she whispered, and her whisper was audible in his ear, though he was galloping hard and she stood some distance off. "Do you think that if I have the power to command the weather, you have the power to command me? One thing is master of another, as king of lord and lord of servant."
You pause to contemplate. Something odd is obviously afoot here, but it's hard to say what. You have the feeling that the witch doesn't actually have any malice towards the castle -- or at least not towards the human inhabitants -- but only the dimmest reckoning of what it is that she is truly fighting. And why can't she be straightforward with the man?
As for him, he has a dark past of his own. He was a highwayman for a time; you saw that in the dark glint of his eyes when first your imagining summoned him, and you cannot banish it. There is blood on his hands. And yet he regards himself as innocent, a just man.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Down below, two specks are particularly agitated. One, moving inside the walls of the human fortress, but soon to emerge, with his horse flying beneath him (after the fashion of land creatures to fly, of course.) And then the other one, stiller, compacted fury: the heath witch.But the clouds are gathering -- clouds of her sending -- and you have no wish to be here when they clash at last, as they must.
There. Different.
. . .
One of Macbeth's crones, perhaps. She bends and scrapes her way across your stage, a lump of cloth so doubled over it is hard to believe her real. One shaky hand clutches a staff...Yes, yes, a fine character-- viewed from the outside. Frightening, and strange, and faintly smelling of unpleasant herbs. But to take her on from within her own mind? You're doubtful for a moment. But the challenge is good. And you begin to write.
Ten years a heath witch ages a woman fast. One feels the low winds that sweep over the land; one feels the stone underfoot; and it ceases to be bracing. The longing for home and fire is strong; both are lost.
She knows these things, Valeraine does. Sitting on a bare boulder with her staff beside her, watching the clouds creep over the distant mountains to gather around the castle (her handiwork, the weather; it comes when she calls it.) She fears how swiftly life has slipped from her. Her hands have done more of hard work than she could ever have dreamed, when she was a young woman, comely, and under the eye of the Baron.
Her eye lifts. Someone outside the castle is stirring. Fools -- they would be wiser to stay inside tonight, and guard their windows well...
What now?
. . .
He spotted her easily enough: little more than a scrap of black cloth, from a distance, a small malevolent figure on the heath. Anger surged, and his spurred his horse to approach her.He could not know that she regarded him with more fear than he did her. Even as he approached, she gathered what remained of her spent powers. To call on weather was no light matter, or she would more often have turned the wind from her own back. And now she had little reserve against a difficult meeting.
"You!" he called, still far off. "Witch! Withdraw your dark enchantment, before I withdraw your life from you."
"Do you think," she whispered, and her whisper was audible in his ear, though he was galloping hard and she stood some distance off. "Do you think that if I have the power to command the weather, you have the power to command me? One thing is master of another, as king of lord and lord of servant."
You pause to contemplate. Something odd is obviously afoot here, but it's hard to say what. You have the feeling that the witch doesn't actually have any malice towards the castle -- or at least not towards the human inhabitants -- but only the dimmest reckoning of what it is that she is truly fighting. And why can't she be straightforward with the man?
As for him, he has a dark past of his own. He was a highwayman for a time; you saw that in the dark glint of his eyes when first your imagining summoned him, and you cannot banish it. There is blood on his hands. And yet he regards himself as innocent, a just man.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Neon glares through the window on the seamless barrel of your black pen. An antique chronometer clicks over on the wall as you think.A hundred yards off the ground grew too steep for the hoverbike. "Fuck," LordDougal said, getting off.
From here castle looked as craggy has it had seven hundred years ago. That look was deceptive, however. LordDougal knew its defenses, and reviewed them now: what appeared to be protective sunglasses could throw up a complete blueprint, holographically projected over the castle's walls, the weak points highlighted in amber light. Laser beams crisscrossed the moat, and reserves of nanoguards -- capable of injecting a neurotoxin that would disable a man in .037 seconds and kill him in .041 -- filled the crevices of the arrowloops.
CHIRP. LordDougal's earphone sounded again, insistently. "What?" he sent. "I'm at the castle now."
"Don't get cocky, Dougal," said Murisawa. "There's been a change in plans."
Right. Now where to take this?
. . .
"Fuck, man," said LordDougal. "Change of plans are not a good idea in a situation as intense as this."Murisawa was silent. Dougal got the message. He hadn't been the first choice for this mission, and if he fucked it up, he'd be floating home in shark-bite-sized chunks.
. . .
At the same time on the other side of the world, the underground research station at Torino, Italy was experiencing an unsettling rise in neutrino activity. Something was happening, out there: someone was trying to communicate.On second thought, that doesn't really work. Too many things going on at once. You can introduce this other background some other time; here it'll just make things messy.
You crumple a sheet of paper and discard it.
. . .
Someone watching the castle security cameras would have seen two interesting things at that moment. One would have been the descent of Spiridion the robot-butler, not to the basements for the Tokay he'd been sent to fetch, but to the front door, where he deactivated the castle security system.The other would have been the death of the castle's only human inhabitant. With a swift motion he swallowed the blue pill, and .041 seconds later was face-down on the floor. He did not even have time to choke on his vomit.
All right then.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
At that moment, the inhabitant was watching LordDougal's antics through a long lens."Spiridion," he said.
"Yes, master?" The robot butler was a piece of old-skool tech, a toy built before the true power of ai was fully understood.
"Spiridion, bring in my bottle of Tokay, please. And email Valerie the key."
Spiridion bowed smoothly at the waist and went out. And the man in the wingchair took out a pair of pills from a packet in his pocket, and regarded each one thoughtfully. Red or blue?
All right then.
. . .
At the same time on the other side of the world, the underground research station at Torino, Italy was experiencing an unsettling rise in neutrino activity. Something was happening, out there: someone was trying to communicate.On second thought, that doesn't really work. Too many things going on at once. You can introduce this other background some other time; here it'll just make things messy.
You crumple a sheet of paper and discard it.
. . .
Spiridion descended the stairs, but before he reached the basement he received an unexpected override command. Moving slowly on well-oiled tentacles, he approached the door, and slowly switched off all the security systems...All right then. It doesn't really catch the anguish of Spiridion as he fights against the override command, but if you got into that now, you'd give too much away. Later. Tomorrow, maybe. You've at least positioned the eight-legged antique robotic butler as an important character with a Point of View, and that's what matters.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Oooh. A space story. But avoiding the cliche of Mars (overdone) or Alpha Centauri (long trips make you carsick.) But...You need more than just volcanoes and low gravity to make it big. Sure, your technical prowess might impress the geek crowd (when you have it, that is, but it's just a matter of research, right?)
But to make it big big big, you need an edge. A style. A distinctive, new, rich, pure, previously-unheard-but-soon-to-be-sung-in-the-New-York-Times Voice.
- Purple Gothic. Nothing is more fun than gloom.
- Cyberpunk. All that chrome and plastic...
- Stream of Consciousness
- Pseudo Dr. Seuss. Why not?
. . .
Your blood thins as you think of it (oh sweet how it seems to you): Ann Radcliffe's redoubtable prose, brash Bronte thunder, the pallor of Poe.The angry eye of Jupiter stared out of half the sky: the red spot that storms without ceasing, the great god's implacable rage.
Huddling into a bare space in the rock, Galla Placidia Research Station 3 quailed under that eye as though it were a thing more fearsome than the volcanic wrath of this, its native soil.
Sighing, you tear up the page. I mean, it's fricking brilliant, but you know what sells, and this isn't it. Publishers are going to whine and whinge about 'what's your genre' and 'what's your target demographic' and if you could somehow convince them that there are people out there who transcend the categories of 'romantic woman' and 'teenage boy', you might get somewhere with your artistic efforts but--
No. Forget this. For right now you'd best drown your sorrows in a few dozen reruns of Cheers.
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Into your mind with the subtle insinuation of the Grinch's smile, it comes: your thought: novels for grownups in a child-book voice. Why not? It's clever, it's Modern, so Modern it's post-; it rolls in your brain. Nostalgia? Terrific. Old memories sell. And the smiles of grandmas are certainly swell...Er, on second thought, maybe you've painted yourself into a bit of a corner here. There aren't a lot of words that rhyme well with Io. And how can you Seusserize technowhizgiggery? There's no magic in plastic, no meter in pressure-pneumatical chrome-plated-fantastical android-robotical mining machine...
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Thought thought thought no expression more pure more fresh more steaming from the pen, speedy expressive, untrammeled by conventions of punctuating, grammarless, free--
Little, they call me, and firey, tempest-in-a-pot, and Father Planet laughs, but I'm not to be disregarded. I've got my purpose. I've got a place. I've got more to say than Europa, cow-faced bloat--Damn there I blow again.
Sighing, you tear up the page. You can't maintain this kind of thing; it makes you irritable. Structure may be restraining but it also gives you something to work with, know what I mean?
- *** So you're stuck. Oops. ***
. . .
Neon glares through the window on the seamless barrel of your black pen. An antique chronometer clicks over on the wall as you think.The research station was the shape of a human skull, sawn off at approximately the temples. It was covered with panels of heat-resistant thermal plastic, and deep pylons secured it as well as anything could against the constant seismic disturbances. Living quarters inside were the size and shape of coffins, and the only touch of personal decoration possible was the choice of color (soothing grey or soothing beige). Food came in cube form, and a piece the size of a sugar cube could keep a person going for three days.
It was the closest Sgt. Himmel had ever been to heaven.
Right. Now where to take this?
. . .
The only problem now was how to get in. He'd been dropped outside by the cruiser Murisawa, but there wasn't enough air in his suit for a prolonged stay. The airlock doors were locked, though: even out here, a million miles from anything, they'd thought to lock the doors. Because they knew what was inside would bring visitors over almost any distance.
. . .
Someone watching the station security cameras would have seen two interesting things at that moment. One would have been the sudden automatic deactivation of the station door locks.The other would have been Valeri's selection of the red pill. For the next forty-one minutes she lay face-up on her bed, her eyes crystalline with the images of home.
All right then.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
At the same time, the station seismic counter was going off the map. Something was happening, down there under the crust. Something down there was stirring. And it wasn't magma.On second thought, that doesn't really work. Too many things going on at once. You can introduce this other background some other time; here it'll just make things messy.
You crumple a sheet of paper and discard it.
. . .
Valeri Wrax felt rather differently about that. Ten years on Galla Placidia had gone from exciting opportunity to penal servitude to something resembling the lowest circle of hell. She'd long since lost interest in doing anything, anything at all, unless she could somehow find her way aboard a ship and back to Earth. She had a theory, and it went like this: people are not meant to be separated long from their mother planet. If they are, some spiritual link is cut.Ten years had made Valeri a mystic. And a drug addict.
She sat still now, regarding the two pills in her hand. Which? Red or blue?
All right then.
. . .
What happened next would always be a bit vague in Valeri's memory. She chose the red pill, stowing the blue away in the crevice of the damaged paneling of her quarters (soothing beige, but dirty enough that it was much the same effect as soothing grey in the end) and drifted off into a sea of hallucinogen-induced pseudo-memories. There was something about swimming in a river, and something about steaks grilling in an immense outdoor clearing with pine trees on all sides, and through it all the faint, insistent whine of the doorlock system, trying to tell her that it had been breached.All right then. It doesn't reveal Valeri's secret yet, but that's all right. Later. Tomorrow, maybe. You've at least positioned the ennui-ridden junkie xenoseismologist as an important character with a Point of View, and that's what matters.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
At the same time, the station seismic counter was going off the map. Something was happening, down there under the crust. Something down there was stirring. And it wasn't magma.On second thought, that doesn't really work. Too many things going on at once. You can introduce this other background some other time; here it'll just make things messy.
You crumple a sheet of paper and discard it.
. . .
She took the blue before her nerves could take her. A fine neurotoxin, she'd been told; the kind that kills instantly. So she waited to die.Waited, but lived.
There are things that she hadn't been told, most chiefly of all about her own origin: and one of them was this:
Your pen halts. One of them is what? What secret could it be? She's not really human, perhaps, but an android. That fits, but it's also been done. You're not doing Blade Runner here.
. . .
Now that could be interesting. She's homesick for earth, but, irony of ironies, she doesn't belong there. She's actually the child of some other race entirely; she's been seeded on the blue planet as part of an experiment, or even by accident, left in some Roswell-like mistake. Her physiognomy adapted itself with the natural mimicry of her kind. Even her soul made itself human.But she lacks the ability to die.
(That's why, you realize, that's why Sgt. Himmel is here. He knows she's immortal, and he wants to discover the secret of her immortality for himself. Or--)
He found her there in the dull hallways clawing at the walls, screaming. "Damn you damn you damn damn--"
He caught her in his arms, restraining. "Calm down," he says. "Calm down."
She screamed in his face, her breath fetid with malnutrition. "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE CALM WHEN I AM IN HELL AND IT LOOKS JUST LIKE IO??"
And he dropped his hands, and frowned into her upturned face. "Then you're not the one," he said.
Because what he's looking for is the creature of ultimate adaptation, the one who could find herself on Earth and make it perfectly her home. Because he expects her to be at ease on Io too -- and anywhere -- a nomad of interstellar distances for whom homesickness is unimaginable. This, not immortality, is what he seeks, the boon he looks for for humanity. The end of loneliness, of angst, of psychological difficulties...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Now that could be interesting. A space-opera with pagan deities running around in it. Athena wounded with a laser blast. Venus in a mining colony, bringing simple joys to the long labors of the oppressed. Dionysus captured and thrust into some holding brig, only to rend the hull with the straining of vines...
And who is Valeri Wrax, then?
. . .
He had come to her in the guise of cosmic rays, against which her space suit was no protection; in this way he possessed her, and she bore his daughter, Valeri.But Juno, of course, will not be pleased with this turn of events; she will haunt and harry Valeri all the days of her life. It's this haunting and harrying that has put her all the way out here at the edge of everything, in this pathetic undesirable job, doing research that no one back home cares about. It would be preferable to be doing asteroid mining, even; that at least earns a steady check. But no...
. . .
An agent of a god, perhaps. There's always someone arrayed against Juno; she's easy to hate. Perhaps Mercury has taken up the other side, this time. He likes tricks, after all, and a clever deceit; and so he either himself is, or has on his behalf sent, this handsome character Sergeant Himmel, to see that Valeri is protected. More than that, to see that she performs the destiny set out for her by the Fates."
. . .
To found, of course, the capital of the new empire: a colony on some foreign world that shall in years to come become greatly important, and, moreover, send up sacrificial smoke for the enjoyment of the Gods upon Olympus. (They still go for that sort of thing. Never grow up, really, the gods.)So here he is. He's come to rescue her. He has a box of dried moly in his bag and a look of divine wisdom on his face, and the pathetic lock on the door is not going to hold out the God of Thieves for long...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Well... so it's more of a situation than a setting, exactly, wouldn't you say? But a vibrant one, full of danger and possibility. Or perhaps some kind of surreal exploration, like James and the Giant Peach, or something by Calvino, where the protagonist spends the whole of the story bobbing from cloud to cloud, the prisoner of infinite freedom.Gotta make up your mind though. Which? Flip a coin if you have to. This, this is the stuff of the creative process...
. . .
The bird's-eye view really is the best one from which to tell an informative, geographic tale, wouldn't you agree?If you were floating, boys and girls, on a kite high in the sky, somewhere above the Amazon river basin...
"...you'd probably choke on the fumes of the desecrated rainforests."
You whirl, moving protectively to stand in front of the computer screen. "How did you get in here?" you demand. But she just smirks, looking gothic and pale in that black smock.
"I don't really know why you bother," she says, stubbing out her cigarette in your potted ficus. "There's not going to be anyone around to read it by the time you finish."
"I'm not convinced we're that close to the apocalypse," you protest.
"Speed you write? Sure we are."
"She approaches you slowly, languidly, like a cat in molasses. "Come on, Palmer. Eat, drink, and above all have sex, because tomorrow we may die. Just-- like-- this." And she yanks out the power cord, and your words are lost, and her mouth is warm on yours with the taste of cloves."
- *** The End. ***
. . .
All right, then. Tied to a kite, and it's dangerous. Things are about to go really wrong, you know. But that's okay. You've got a buff attractive hero (or heroine) who is fully up to the challenge of the situation. (Let's leave that question of gender aside for a moment. People do get so hung up over details, don't you agree?)So the situation. It's a big kite, then, and it's been launched off the back of a... a speedboat, okay. And... and you never watch enough of the right kind of movie to know how this is supposed to go. You shrug it off.
. . .
He's a philosopher, then, you realize. Your protagonist. (Who else would tie himself -- it's got to be a he -- to the breast of an enormous kite? But not an explorer; an explorer might want to get down again.)He floats, then, this protagonist of yours, over hills and trees, over farms, out of the comfortable prospects of his hometown, into odder and odder locations.
And then something happens. Some event.
. . .
Well. Your high flights of fancy certainly landed with a bump there, didn't they? I mean, if you're going to do surreal, it's acceptable to ignore the normal requirements of the human body, or stipulate that your protagonist is a Breatharian and survives without meat or drink, only the pure fresh air.I really don't think you're taking this project in the kind of spirit necessary to get anywhere.
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
Never underestimate the virtue of the unexpected conclusion. He gets to the moon on his kite. Was he intending to get there all along? Perhaps; perhaps this is the end result of a long love affair with the moon, a kind of Cyrano romanticism that led him to lash himself to bamboo and canvas and soar, a hopeless pilgrim, as close as he could; and then the last little distance (it is only a little distance in the heart, all those cold lonely empty miles of vacuum) -- the last little distance he crosses by her grace.And there he is. Landed on the moon. But what will he, the philosopher-poet, do now?
. . .
Death it is, then; but in death (let's give it a sickly happy ending, shall we? Since the rest of the plot heretofore has certainly been so) -- in death he is in a sense united with his beloved. All around him she glimmers, bathing him in the glow of her beauty until he turns the same perfect white, until he too is bleached and flawless, bones...
Aw hell. You neglected to write any of this down. Another time, maybe: right now you are busy weeping over its severe beauty.
- *** You've run out of time. Oops. ***
. . .
Aye, there's the rub. He's tied; and unless we've made him an escape artist, he's likely to stay tied. Which makes the whole romance considerably less romantic. Drat and blast.
. . .
The interesting thing about that, of course, is that the peasant girl wouldn't ever have seen anyone like him before in her life; anything like this in her life at all. He would be a complete and total bolt from the blue (like lightning -- remember to use that). And perhaps he would begin to plant in her mind and in the minds of her simple, worthy kin the seeds of education, of spirit, of rebellion. Under his guiding touch they would see past the bonds that made their lives a daily wheel of misery; they would rise against their oppressors...And then, as swiftly as she came, your Marxist Muse abandons you. I mean, really, you've got too many things going on here at once, right? There's this surreal beginning, the man in the clouds: only one author in a thousand could really pull that off to start with, and it would help if you were Italian or Argentinian or something, and generally magico-surrealist. So there's that. And then there's the problem that it doesn't really go with this ending, and also the problem that if he ever saw anything like that in print your old grandpa would call up his pinko grandchild and --
Rightio. I mean, you stand to inherit more than you could ever make writing.
So just, you know, have a daquiri and try to relax.
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
Yes! Someone on the mountains or the fields below sees this long, shimmering tail trailing along the ground and can't help-- er-- herself. Make it a she, since we picked a he last time. But what kind of she?
. . .
A bluestocking, probably, when you think about it. One of those outspoken clever girls who reads science journals intended for men, and keeps a collection of poisoned butterflies, and is the despair of her father and governess, as she will never make the Brilliant Match they desire for her. That would be why she was out in the fields (catching butterflies) when the
Kite came soaring by overhead.But did she actually grab hold of it, or did it just snag in a tree?
. . .
Yes, okay. That's really the more sensible option. No reason she'd go grabbing for random things trailing from the sky -- at least, not unless they resembled butterflies. So it snags in a tree. Now, question is: what kind of tree?
. . .
Research time, then, because it is precisely this sort of thing that, at core, distinguishes an author who cares from one who doesn't. The willingness to get your hands dirty, elbow-deep in a card catalog (always assuming you can still find a place with a card catalog.) The willingness to go out of your way and be precise and thorough. Yes. And that's the sort of author you are.
- *** You spend the rest of the afternoon with the Britannica and a notepad. ***
. . .
Right. That's how you can show modern readership that she's an active young woman, strong, athletic, and not constrained by the ethics of her age (or, maybe, common sense either.) Still you need to provide her with SOME kind of period-based motivation for such an odd course of action.
- She thought the streamer resembled a rare butterfly.
- She was waving to a friend and her hand happened to grab it.
. . .
Ah, well, if it has bows tied on it (and in pictures kite streamers always do) then that makes a certain amount of sense. Though the question remains how she'd make so drastic an error considering that she's supposed to, well, know what rare butterflies LOOK like.
. . .
A friend, eh? Well, very well, but then we need a name, gender, family, and motivation for the friend.
. . .
Only natural result of reading so many books.his idea resonates for a moment in the hollow of your skull: so many books many books books books books. Always reading, always writing, your whole life pressed between one page and another, and you never get out. Have nothing else to do, nothing else to think about. Who was it who said that if you have no other life the wellspring of your writing will dry up as well? Someone in those million pages...
You press the palm of your hand into your eye and try to stop thinking. You've been at this too long, you're going a bit nuts...
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
No need to get testy. I'm just trying to help.
. . .
Uh er well um.Your turn again.
- *** SCHIZOPHRENIA ***
. . .
And here is where it hits you, the actual beginning.The moon shone on the pleasure gardens of the Queen Vatheqa, as she stood in her tower on the verge of midnight. No one stirred in that hour; it was still, by royal decree; even the guards were indistinguishable from statues. The cinnamon scent mingled with the scent of oranges, and the Queen was for a brief time at peace.
And then it struck her -- quite rudely, even, a trailing ribbon from the sky. On instinct she caught it, and with great strength and fury began to pull, angry to have been disturbed.
It gave her considerable trouble (the Queen had no experience with fishing, naturally, but if she had, she would later have likened the experience to grounding a really significant fish), but she was a robust woman. The ribbon went taut, and then tauter, and then the thing at the other end began to come into view.
It was a man.
You lean back and set your pen down. There are so many directions this could go from here. Romance, debate, execution. It's all in your hands. You haven't even said yet for certain whether the queen is a lovely young woman, or someone a bit more on the matriarchal end of life.
. . .
In all her sequestered life the Queen had never seen a man who was not one of the Court Slaves, and they tended to be, on the whole, of dubious masculinity. (Her father, before death, gave certain orders. He was a protective man, not a sane one.) And here was this kite-borne creature, for long years nourished only on rain and kissed by thunder. She did not wholly recognize him as one of her own species.He on the other hand did not suffer the same trouble. He knew her at once, and fell at her feet (in small part in recognition of her status, but in larger part because of the total atrophy of the muscles of his legs that might otherwise have permitted him to stand.)
So far it has flowed freely; now your style begins to cramp a bit. You've got decisions to make. Romance? An easy road. Perhaps too easy. Or does the Queen execute him, angry at his intrusion, and then wonder all her days at what she had destroyed? Or do they engage in intellectual debate, a meeting of masterful minds?
. . .
Aye. It grieves you but you draw up a fresh sheet of paper, breathe deeply, and begin again."Guards!"
He heard the knell of her imperious voice and knew it for what it was. They came for him and bore him away, and he could not resist, as weak as he was. His dry lips mumbled imprecations to the gods he'd met up there among the clouds, but they could not (or did not choose to) hear. Six weeks he spent a crumpled heap in the corner of her sturdy prison; in the seventh week when the holy festivals were over, he died.
They laid his limbs out for her to see, separated like the limbs of an animal to the slaughter. And she observed, thoughtfully, and was dismayed, touching each of the weathered wrists with her lily-white hands.
"What have I done?" she whispered to the gods she knew on earth. But they could not (or did not choose to) reply.
And there your hand stops. Short, and you'd be hard-pressed to say what it means, if anything (aside from the rather obvious moral, "Don't execute strangers," but that, on the whole, has been better treated in other contexts.
Still. There it is. A done thing.
- *** The End. ***
. . .
Romance it is, then. (You consider, then discard, the notion of swapping to your fountain pen with the rose-colored ink. Your agent tends to get annoyed.)Between the black of her velvet eyes and the steel of his grey ones, a certain understanding flashed. "Good gentleman," she said, in the courteous language of her people, "you seem to have made a long journey. Come within and be refreshed.
Then she clapped her hands, and at her summons servants came, and bore him away on a pallet. They bathed his body and poured unguents on him [note to self: do research to find out what an unguent is]. They gave him sweet wine and spiced meats to drink. They furnished him with clothing fit for a prince of that realm, and girded him, and gave to him a dagger inlaid with onyx, which it was reserved only for nobility to carry, and with it a sheath finely worked. And when he was refreshed entirely, they led him back to the Queen, who bade him sit down, and tell to her all the history of his travels.
You stop, a bit appalled. The path to true love never did run smooth, but you've got him here set up for the thousand and one nights, and who knows how much you will have to write before they finally and gratifyingly fall into each others' arms?
- Erase that and start over: less talking, more smooching.
- Press doggedly onward. Persistence is yor frend.
. . .
You crumple a page, begin again.Between the black of her velvet eyes and the steel of his grey ones, a certain understanding flashed. "You," she breathed, her breasts heaving. "You are the manliest of men."
The words signified nothing in his language, but her glance told him all he needed to know. Clasping her beautiful body in strong arms, he rained ruthless kisses on her upturned face...
You blink down at the finished page, trying to gather your thoughts.
. . .
Yeah. Well, you know, the slope of cliche is, as they say, a slippery one. You sweep the whole heap into the recycling bin and give a heavy sigh.Tomorrow. Tomorrow you will write your pièce de résistance.
- *** You've lost your inspiration. It happens. ***
. . .
Oh, come on. Not even you can seriously believe that.
. . .
With a sigh that only you hear, you turn over a page and go on."Good Queen," he said (for he had learned her language from the servants during the course of his bath), "I have much to tell you. I have flown many thousands of leagues and boy are my arms tired."
Whoa, where did that come from?
. . .
So."Good Queen," he said (for he had learned her language from the servants during the course of his bath), "I have much to tell you. I have traveled many thousands of leagues and seen many strange things -- the hills at the first touch of rosy-fingered dawn, and the sacrifices that men make to the gods when they take auspices from the livers of sway-bellied oxen, and the tall cities of men. I have faced monstrous demons of the sky, who have foul shapes, and also the strange beasts of the ocean.
You pause for breath.
. . .
"But before I tell you the tales of these things, for they are long and may take many nights to hear, I have a great thirst, and would drink of that substance whose name is yet unknown to me in your mellifluous tongue--"Then the Queen wondered greatly at what he could mean, and cast her mind over all the content of her storerooms and her deep cellars, for the strange nectars men drink in the distant corners of the world, and she thought that she knew what he asked.
For in the deepest nether regions of her farthest basements, she possessed a bottle brought to her by an emissary from the most distant court with which she kept a royal correspondence. And in this bottle was said to be the sweetest of liquids, in its own tongue called Tokay.
Hrm. That was unexpected. Your hand aches from the grip you had on the pen, so you set it down as gently as you can and rub at your temples. At least if the Queen gets him liquored up, maybe this will proceed along the lines you originally intended.
- Make three dots here and cut to the good part.
- At this rate there isn't going to BE a good part. Switch genres.
. . .
The night was now far progressed, and their glasses lay discarded on the back of the tigerskin rug, and as for the fire, it played gently on the stranger's skin, casting strange shadows and stranger lights in his steel eyes."Stranger," said the Queen (and she seemed to herself not to know what she was saying, for she was as a woman possessed: never had she taken strong spirits before.) "Stranger, you are a most attractive stranger, and I hope you are not affronted that I say so, though it be mayhap beneath my station to make such statements to a stranger..."
"Hush," said the Stranger, placing a gentle hand across her ruby lips (for she bid fair to continue speaking without period, did not someone intervene.) "There is better use for that than speaking."
And so bending his head he kissed her full on her queenly mouth.
Finally.
. . .
One chaste kiss he pressed to her lips; then regretfully he drew away, looking deep into her bottomless gaze."I have sworn myself to a terrible oath," he said, "and may touch no mortal woman more than this until I have performed three terrible tasks."
The Queen frowned, for what he was saying displeased her.
To tell the truth, what he is saying displeases you too. A complication. Plot before smoochies. But, feh, you have done enough for today. Tomorrow perhaps things will go better with them.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
One sweet kiss he pressed to her lips; then to her cheek; then to her brow. Then she stirred herself from the rich lassitude possessing her bones, and drew his mouth back to hers, and tasted him more deeply.At last regretfully he drew away.
"I have sworn myself to a terrible oath," he said, "and may touch no mortal woman more than this until I have performed three terrible tasks."
The Queen frowned, for what he was saying displeased her.
To tell the truth, what he is saying displeases you too. A complication. Plot before smoochies. But, feh, you have done enough for today. Tomorrow perhaps things will go better with them.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
The taste of his kiss startled her, redolant though it was of the same Tokay that she had herself been drinking. Her head swam and all her senses buzzed with curious warmth. She felt the ghost of his touch along her collar, tracing the brocade there; freeing her neck from the undesirable confinement of its buttons. With gentle hands he parted the fabric, and kissed the top of her breasts, as none had dared before now.Then with a cry he drew back. "I have sworn myself to a terrible oath," he said, "and may touch no mortal woman more than this until I have performed three terrible tasks."
The Queen frowned, for what he was saying displeased her. "I will find Terrible tasks for you and plenty," she said, in a darkling voice. "I know not what manners may obtain in the land from which you have come, but in this place it is considered the mark of an unwise man to trifle with the affections of a Queen; and the mark of a slacker to begin a project which he has no intention to finish."
"Truly you are magnificent when you are angry," he replied, startled, "and unexpectedly lucid, too."
"In this land," quoth the Queen, "grammarians carry whips."
Hmm. Your glasses have steamed up. You take them off, glance over at your leatherbound Strunk & White, and listen to the pounding of your heart.
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
. . .
Then the servants brought in the dusty old bottle of Tokay, and she uncorked it with a practiced hand. But what happened then was not at all what she expected; for from the bottle issued forth the sinuous form of a genii, and
the air was full of blue smoke.Nice. Plot twists. Maybe you can come back to the romance theme later, but at the moment at least you finally have something resembling action. Now what?"
. . .
(It should not, Gentle Reader, be surmised at this point that the bottle of Tokay was intended as a trick or any kind of deception on the part of the emissaries who came to the Queen. It had come into their possession, in turn, as a gift from someone even farther distant; and this dubious and unscrupulous person had stolen it from a magician, supposing it to be a thing of great worth. It was a thing of great worth, but not the thing he imagined it to be. You know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men.)Which is nice but advances nothing, so we're back at square one.
- Exposition is Good. 100% of authors named Herman Melville agree.
- What we need now is a shift in viewpoint.
. . .
(As for the genii, he had not come to be in the bottle by the magician's coercion, but because he was exceptionally fond of Tokay. A hankering after mortal things is often the downfall of higher orders of being, which genii are, standing, as they do, somewhere in the infinite chain between God and his fallen creation. So this genii, smelling the scent of Tokay, squeezed himself exceptionally narrow through the neck of the bottle; and upon being enlarged by a quantity of Tokay was unable to remove himself again [which is a lesson to anyone who would go into very narrow cracks, or very crowded restaurants, to eat.] Over time the liquor within eventually dissolved again, and he resumed his unstuck format, but he was by then Corked, and there was not much he could do, other than press his cheeks to the glass and make obscene noises.Two hundred years elapsed.)
Which is nice but still advances nothing, so we're again back at square one.
. . .
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Caucasus, a man on horseback was riding at a furious pace. In his saddlebag were three very important messages. Without one, war would break out on the northern frontier of his homeland. Without the second, famine would strike and cause terrible deaths in the city of his birth. And without the third, fever would overcome his son, who would perish from the absence of feverleaf.You stop, looking at what you have wrought, and cannot entirely evade a certain sense of confusion. Strands aplenty, now, but how are they ever to come together again?
. . .
Doggedly lowering your head you begin to scribble furiously.As it happened, the magician in whose house the genii had formerly resided was the only owner of feverleaf. By a coincidence equally peculiar, the Stranger was possessed of a divine secret which would prevent famine in any land in which the ritual was properly performed. And by a chance truly startling, the Queen's kingdom was that which lay to the north, and it was to her that the man now rode, driven by the furious demons Fear and Desire.
There. Nothing an author can do that an author cannot again undo. All is now well...
- *** The novel will write itself at this rate. ***
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