Category: Stories
AatW – Worthy of Love
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AatW – Dignity
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Concept Story – The Goddess Mask
I had wanted to write a fun short story for Halloween, but that ain’t happenin this year.
I did come across this concept story that I had written in 2011, for one of my more surreal ideas, though.
Good enough.
Esriel shivered, holding the brick tighter in her hand, fearful that the rain could compromise her ability to use it. In a moment the girl would be close enough, and Esriel would fix her mistake. It had been wrong of her to descend to the lower realm, and unfortunate that she had been seen. It was disastrous for the girl, however, that she had chosen to follow Esriel.
Never leave a loose end.
The girl was clumsy. Her breathing was loud, and her footsteps louder. She kicked pebbles, and cursed when she unexpectedly stepped into a puddle, soaking her shoe up to her ankle. Then, just barely out of position, she stopped.
“I saw you . . .” she began, her voice quavering. “I want to know . . .”
For a moment there was a twinge. No, she thought, never back down. Never let a mistake go unfixed. It wasn’t guaranteed to be a killing blow at that range, but it would do enough damage to let the second one do its work.
“Please, come out . . .”
Closing her eyes, Esriel steeled herself for the task and began to slowly count down. Three . . . two . . .
The signal.
Esriel’s eyes snapped open, the urge to obey already tearing at her body. She couldn’t leave the girl here, not with what she had seen. Willing herself to believe that she didn’t have any other choice, Esriel bounded out of the alcove that she had hidden herself in and grabbed hold of the girl’s shirt, dragging her along as her form shifted and dissipated, taking both of them to the higher realm.
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Gud Riting
Outside, Damon kicked something or other and threw a major fit, picking up a lawn gnome and hefting it over the fence.
Miranda asserted, “Calm down! We can use this to our advantage!”
“No, we’re going to drop it,” Damon explained. “We don’t have a case.”
“What do you mean?” Miranda inquired.
“I kissed her first,” Damon confessed.
~OR~
Having egressed from the abode, Damon sulkily perambulated about the premises, seeking to obviate himself of his indignation, and finding outlet in his frustration through the act of kicking some object or other before truculently hefting a hapless garden gnome through the air with an ungainly heave of his torso.
Miranda ejaculated, “Calm down! We can use this disadvantage to our advantage!”
“I’m afraid that I must disagree,” Damon countered obstinately, “There are major show stoppers preventing us from leveraging the turnabout successfully.”
“I need your hot, throbbing elucidation,” Miranda desperately entreated the roguish dandy, her bosom heaving breathlessly.
“I must woefully confess that my passions overcame my better judgement,” Damon confessed woefully, “I kissed her before she kissed me.”
An explanation: I had a particularly stressful day, so I was too frazzled to think when I sat down to write. Instead, I jotted down the lamest thing I could think up.
When I shared it with my husband, his response was along the lines of, “Hold my beer.” He wrote #2.
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Miranda Grainey
Aged 34. Blonde hair, usually in simple updos, blue eyes, oval-rimmed glasses. Lawyer.
Miranda is a foil to Alice.
She and Hackett were together for about ten or so years, then broke up three years before the start of the story. As described, “It was a comfortably low-maintenance relationship, and Miranda never cared how many hours I worked, because she was putting in just as many herself. In retrospect, I don’t think that either of us put an ounce of our hearts into it, and we were only together to ease the strain of our careers.”
However, Miranda was the primary motivation behind Hackett’s career advancement, because she cared about prestige and image. They worked well together as long as he kept moving upwards, but Hackett’s satisfaction with his position as warden put a strain on their relationship. Eventually, his desire to switch gears and begin a family is what brought their relationship to an end.
Miranda’s main weakness is that her self-image is externally defined. She needs the fancy job, car, money, etc, to feel like she has worth, and any threat to those things is a threat to her as a person. She rejects the idea of motherhood completely, because in her mind it would rob her of who she is.
She views Hackett’s marriage to Alice as a huge personal insult. They were together for ten years without ever once mentioning marriage, then out of nowhere he up and elopes with someone 17 years younger than him. Worse yet, Alice is a high school drop out, with none of the education or ambition that Miranda deems valuable. She writes off Hackett’s marriage as a lapse in judgment brought on by a midlife crisis, and hopes that they’ll eventually divorce.
She also listens to too much modern music.
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Damon Rake
Obligatory link to Alice and the Warden
The night that I named all of the characters, I browsed through a database of surnames, came across Rake, and thought that it felt right for Damon’s character. The next day when I showed everything to my husband, he laughed his butt off and pointed out that one of the definitions of a ‘rake’ is: “a man who behaves in an immoral way, for example by having sexual relationships with a lot of women.”
Oh. Right. That’s probably why I thought it fit. Kept it anyway.
So yes, I know, but it wasn’t intentional.
Damon is thirty years old, straight auburn hair about cheek length, and brown eyes. He’s attractive, and deliberately goes for the ‘hot bad boy’ image, but his lifestyle is catching up with him and his looks are wearing out.
Damon’s background is fairly stereotypical: he grew up with a deadbeat mom and her steady string of boyfriends, many of whom were abusive jerks. Got into the party scene young and never made it to high school. Likes the freedom of a motorcycle, never thinks about the future, and has an almost narcissistic preoccupation with image. His moral structure is hedonistic and self-serving, and he’s full of a lot of anger and hatred that results in antisocial behavior.
Damon is smart. He’s good at reading people, and has an intuitive understanding of how to exploit and manipulate their weaknesses. He doesn’t make very many mistakes.
While he saw Alice primarily as an asset to manage and utilize, he was genuinely fond of her. In his mind, he rescued her from neglect, took her under his wing to provide for her, and gave her a purpose. Because of this, he kept her around for much longer than he ordinarily would have, until he thought that she was becoming too much of a liability for him to keep control of. He was aware that he was slowly destroying her, but was too nihilistic to stop.
He views Alice’s transformation as a betrayal of him and everything he taught her, but is secretly glad that she found somewhere stable and safe to land.
In about twenty years or so, he’ll have reformed enough to maintain contact with his daughter, Alicia. But that will be a long journey for him.
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Writing a three pronged love story
When I started writing Alice and the Warden, I decided that I wanted it to be a three pronged love story.
First, I wanted to depict Alice growing to love herself. The foundation is built on her learning that she has inherent worth as a person, and that she isn’t defined by her past mistakes. As she herself puts it, “I lived like I was disposable, so it was no wonder that I was used and thrown away”. She realizes that before she can move on and build a better life, she needed to accept that she has value.
Second is the story of maternal love. Alice’s main motivation is to be the sort of mother she thinks her daughter deserves, and all of the introspection and hard truths that she admits to herself stem from that desire. After her baby is born, she does her best to empathize and care for her newborn without complaint, even when she’s exhausted. As she says, “I’m her whole world. I’m the reason she exists, and I can never be replaced as her mother. When I think about myself from her perspective, it makes me want to be a totally different person – the sort of person who’s worthy of that love.”
Third is the marriage between Alice and Hackett. Their relationship is built on companionship and acceptance, as they skip past the stereotypical romance and dive right in to quiet evenings at home with the baby — but they’re still flirty and affectionate whenever they get the chance. They aren’t perfect, but they’re determined to love and support each other, especially when things get tough. Because they both come from painful backgrounds, they find refuge in each other.
Alice: “I feel like it’s okay to be damaged with you. My real dad abandoned me because my parents divorced, but now I can rely on you to look out for me instead, you know? And you’re so good with Alicia, that I never want you to leave me. I love you. Probably more than I would have if I wasn’t damaged.”
Hackett: “She wants to make sure that Alicia doesn’t grow up lonely and vulnerable the way she did, and she wants to make sure that our marriage never grows cold and distant. And you know what? It makes me feel safe. I can be myself without turning into a giant disappointment.”
In retrospect, my original plan of wrapping it all up in 15,000 words was pretty silly. The character development is more ambitious than that would have allowed for.
Anyway, I promise that I’m not being self-congratulatory or anything like that. This year has been stressful in more ways than one, which has made me more forgetful than usual, so I decided that it was a good idea to start compiling my thoughts and goals with this novel. Truth is, I’m not sure I’ve satisfactorily met my goals with this story yet, since it’s still very much a work in progress.
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The Black Magus free download promotion
The Black Magus is currently available for free until Friday, October 9th.
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Random notes about AatW
- I feel like I’m writing the baby too much like a prop. I’m always mindful to make sure that she’s present and accounted for (instead of simply not being there for some unexplained reason), and newborns really do spend most of their time sleeping, but I want to throw in more descriptions of her to make her feel more like a character.
- I want to flesh out the friendship between Kate and Gertie. I know how they’d interact, but I can’t quite figure out how to slip it into the story. My brain is being totally blah about this.
- Because I originally intended this to be a novelette, I’ve been typing it on the laptop. Right now, I’m really missing the ability to scribble notes in the margins. I have no clue if LibreOffice has a similar feature, because I never bothered to learn anything beyond the bare basics.
- I’m also really terrified of my laptop crashing and losing everything.
- I wrote a really sexy scene, and now I don’t know what to do with it. What’s this story rated anyway?
- I need to describe pretty much everything better, and figure out what the heck that English thing is. You have no idea how mortifying it is to publicly post a first draft.
- Nobody’s reading it anyway (except for you, of course).
- I’m starting to worry that the pacing is too slow, and I need to get on with it already. But, given the speed of the rest of the story, doing that might make the ending feel unpleasantly rushed.
By Autumn Rain 