AatW – Dignity
Tag: reading
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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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.
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AatW – Behind the Scenes
I started writing Alice and the Warden back in February, when I was about halfway through my pregnancy with baby #5. Naturally, I was having *a lot* of dreams about pregnancy and babies at the time.
One in particular really stuck with me, about a young woman living alone in a tower, and I found myself thinking about it more and more. The pieces of a story started to come together in my mind, so I decided “what the hey” and went with it. Given the circumstances of my life at the time, I figured that it was going to be a “purely for fun” side project.
Aaaand seven months later, I’m 40,000 words in with a 3-month-old baby.
A little bit of trivia is that in the original dream, Alice had a brother who was friends with Damon. When Alice texted a picture of her baby to her brother, Damon saw it and put the pieces together that he was the father. However, once I started writing, I realized that the brother would function more as a prop than a character, so I cut him out.
Also, in the dream Alice and Damon broke up with a nasty fight after Damon replaced her with another girl. Again, a new girlfriend seemed more like a superfluous prop rather than a character, so I dropped that idea as well. Having her be flat out abandoned worked better with Alice’s neurosis, since she was still too “controlled” to suddenly blow up at Damon at that point in time.
Hackett was Hackett — basically no changes there. He fell in love with Alice the moment he caught her stealing his books with the intention of actually reading them.
There you have it, the origins of Alice and the Warden.
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Concept story – THEM
In the spirit of mentally changing the scenery to help stretch the kinks out, I wrote this concept story. It’s an idea that I’ve been playing with for awhile now — one o’ them scifi-fantasy hybrids. Anyway, it’s still very much a rough draft and needs a great deal more fleshing out before it can become a full blown story, but I think it has a good core.
Anthea grabbed Sebastian’s arm and pulled him underneath a nearby pine tree, holding him close as she pressed her back against the rough trunk. The bark made her skin itch through her shirt, but she kept her eyes locked on the gray clouds above them, barely daring to breathe.
After a minute, she whispered, “I don’t think They saw us.” Then she looked down at the four-year-old boy clinging to her leg and smiled. “There’s a great big house over there. If we can be quick and sneaky, we can hide inside.”
Sebastian nodded, his eyes huge with fear. Turning around, Anthea bent down to hoist him up onto her back, paused to loosen his grip around her neck, then darted from tree to tree, careful to remain underneath the branches as much as she could. It seemed as if the sky grew darker and more menacing as she went, but she didn’t dare pause to check if They were there.
There was a good 20-foot gap between the branches of the last tree and the stairs leading to the front door. Anthea took a deep breath before she sprinted, praying with every step that she’d reach the eaves of the house. It was almost surreal to discover that they were still alive as she pulled the door open and dumped Sebastian inside, and she hung in the doorway to stare out at the sky. The gray clouds churned and for a heart-stopping moment she thought she saw a flash of one of Them, but nothing happened as the seconds ticked away.
Sebastian’s hand tugged at her shirt. Anthea turned around, then compulsively pulled the small child against her as she let out a stifled gasp.
The sorcerer watched them from several feet away, he hand lax on his staff. He had very long, and very straight black hair that matched his matte black robe, making Anthea think he was more reminiscent of the ancient stories about vampires.
“It’s all right, Anthea,” he said with a smile. “I’m not dangerous.”
“Who are you? How do you know my name?” she blurted, then immediately felt foolish for asking such stereotypical questions. The sorcerer’s appearance was so unexpected her mind had turned itself off, and all she could do was default to cheesy cliches.
“To put it simply, we are betrothed,” he answered softly.
“Betrothed? You mean . . . marriage?” Anthea was feeling even more numb. “How is that possible? I’m not from . . .”
“Kyros brought you here from the past, I know,” the sorcerer said as he stepped forward. “And I am from the future. However, we must find our small pleasures whenever we can, and this night will belong to us.” He then knelt down next to Sebastian, who scooted to hide behind Anthea’s leg, and smiled as he asked, “Are you hungry? I have prepared a feast for us, with an assortment of sweets for dessert.”
Sebastian looked up at Anthea.
“I think it will be okay,” she told him, still struggling to process what was happening. “They didn’t see us come here, and we have to stay put until morning anyway.”
Anthea felt mesmerized by the sorcerer as he led them to the dining room, and she wondered if she had died during her sprint from the tree to the house after all – it felt too much like a dream to be the harsh world that Kyros had brought her into. However, Sebastian’s hand in hers felt solid, and the tantalizing smell of food was real enough. She hadn’t eaten that well since she had been yanked out of her previous life, and she couldn’t resist the urge to dig in and enjoy herself. Sebastian gave his serving of meat and gravy an obligatory nibble, helped himself to a pastry filled with whipped cream. Anthea almost scolded him for not properly eating his dinner, then stopped with the thought that he had likely never tasted whipped cream before in his entire life. If this truly was a dream, then it might as well be a good one, so she let it slide.
The sorcerer didn’t speak as they ate. He seemed content to sit and watch Anthea, and something about his eyes made her heart pound. He had said that he had come from the future, and it was strange to think of herself as the wife of someone who was quite literally dark and mysterious.
Anthea was a nanny. An important nanny who looked after the prince, perhaps, but still one just the same. The story that Kyros told her was that her older, original, incarnation had cared for Sebastian since his birth, until she had been killed protecting him when their settlement had been discovered and destroyed by Them. Kyros then journeyed into the past and brought the younger, current her forward with him, swearing to take complete responsibility for her afterwards. Anthea had assumed that meant she belonged to Kyros.
How could she end up married to the sorcerer?
When they were too stuffed to eat any more, the sorcerer took them to the den. There was a chest of toys for Sebastian to play with, and the sorcerer motioned for Anthea to join him on the sofa. He put his arms around her and pulled her against him, but Anthea remained stiff.
“I don’t understand . . .” she protested, attempting to sit back up straight, but the sorcerer didn’t let her.
“I wanted to see you,” he murmured. “There isn’t enough time in the future, so please indulge me.”
His words were even more confusing. “You make it sound like I’m going to die,” she said.
“No.” He chuckled slightly. “I’ll keep you alive.”
Anthea allowed herself to relax and watched Sebastian play happily with an assortment of cars and airplanes. She could hear the sorcerer’s heart beating inside his chest at a slightly quickened pace, and the thought of him experiencing some sort of emotion underneath that placid exterior was oddly comforting.
Was it love?
Sebastian was shrieking with delight as he played, behaving more like the four-year-olds that Anthea had known from her previous life – before They had arrived and driven humanity away from the surface. The sight brought tears to her eyes.
The sorcerer remained silent as he held her, his mouth slightly down turned as he stared at the floor. As the night wore on, Sebastian climbed up onto the sofa next to them and fell asleep with an airplane clutched in his hand, and the sorcerer produced a warm blanket that he spread over the three of them. Anthea couldn’t help but drift off as well, feeling oddly safe with that strange man who had so mysteriously appeared. She decided that when she met him properly in the future, she would fall in love and marry him . . .
*
Sunlight woke her up. Anthea’s muscles ached, and she felt empty as she sat up and looked around. Her movement roused Sebastian, and after a minute his small voice asked, “Where is everything?”
“I don’t know,” Anthea replied. The room was now empty and dilapidated, with no sign of the sorcerer anywhere. The only things that remained were the airplane in Sebastian’s hands, and the blanket that had covered them both. “Last night really happened, right?” she asked.
“I think so,” Sebastian replied.
She stood and stretched, hoping to shake off the dazed sensation that pressed against her ears. “C’mon, let’s get you home. Kyros is going to be mad enough as it is, without us dawdling.”
Anthea carefully folded up the blanket, and with it tucked under her arm she took Sebastian’s hand and slipped out the front door, casting one last glance back as they left.
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The Black Magus
By the way . . .
I didn’t forget.
So, before I disappear off the face of the planet for a couple of months, here it is:
By Autumn Rain
Available as a free Kindle download May 1-5
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Female Characters
Female characters tend to kill novels for me.
I think there was a convention some years ago, during which it was decided that there was only one acceptable personality type for all women forever, and it was to be: “independent and feisty.”
So it doesn’t really matter what genre you pick up, the main female character will inevitably be “independent and feisty.” And just like all the others, she’ll insist that she isn’t anything like all of the others. Dunning-Kruger.
And in a giant sea of endless independence and feisty-ness, the attributes lose all meaning and deteriorate down to a simple, “Wow, she’s a bitch.”
There wouldn’t be anything wrong with “feisty” if one also regularly came across female protagonists that were shy, compassionate, bitter, fanciful, neurotic, etc. Maybe I’m just too avant garde or something, but I really don’t think that women should all be pigeon-holed into one or two word descriptions. Female characters are capable of being more than the “independent and feisty” stereotype. Aren’t we supposed to be breaking out of stereotypes? So why is this one so deeply entrenched in fiction? Where’s the individuality in writing the same characters that everyone else is writing?
But every time I skim through a new book with the thought, “Maybe I’ll enjoy reading this one,” the monotony of endless repetition in female personalities inevitably makes me pass. I want to read about characters who are different; I can go out into the real world if I want conformity and sameness.
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Pet Peeve
A couple years ago I read Petals on the Wind by V. C. Andrews. I confess that her first book, Flowers in the Attic, is something of a morbid fascination for me, but the sequel was … excessive.
SPOILER: Every man the main character sleeps with conveniently dies at the perfect moment.
I suppose that there was something of a generation gap going on as well, because the incest didn’t bother me at all (it was the only relationship that was actually built on genuine emotional connection), but the pedophilia was extremely disturbing — especially because it was a contributing factor to one of the characters committing suicide — yet all the other characters were like, “Lol, whatev’s.”
ANYway, part of the way through the book the main character has a baby and is left as a single mother, because, you know, every man she sleeps with dies. In her determination to prove her independence, she gets a job and has her younger sister move in with her for daily babysitting.
Then her sister commits suicide and she finds another man to sleep with. All of those normally time consuming things like toddlers and work fade into the background so she can go catting around instead. Childcare and paying the bills? Pshaw! No where near as important as those sex scenes.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction: when activities that normally require massive amounts of time in the real world are completely ignored with no explanations.
Children in particular are often used as handy little props that disappear when they aren’t required, and as a mom, I find this irksome. In the real world, they are always there, calling for you, following you everywhere you go, watching you poop. Whenever you realize the room is unnaturally quiet, you panic and start yelling for them. THAT is the true nature of children.
As for jobs … it sure would be a fantasy if my husband could take time off whenever the whim struck him, but that would probably get him fired fairly quick. Work takes up enormous amounts of time and energy, and it’s necessary for things like food and shelter. You can’t just decide that you’re bored of it and not suffer any consequences.
Which is why it annoys me so much when fictional characters have it unrealistically easy for no reason — other than those juicy sex scenes I guess.
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Terrible Reader
I confess that I’m a terrible reader. Every time I pick up a book, I think, “This time I’ll read every word,” then sooner or later, I get bored and start skipping through.
“Why is the author taking so long to call the wagon green?”
“Meh, sex.”
“Okay, this character is stupid.”
“We get it already, they had a good time at the picnic.”
When I read out loud to the children, I adopt that bored, “Let’s get through this massive paragraph as quick as possible” monotone voice, and I’m afraid it’s pretty obvious that I don’t enjoy it.
It always feels like there’s a huge number of words getting in the way of the story, and I can’t remember the last time I found a book engrossing. Sometimes I could swear that authors actually want readers to skim over half of the novel, and throw in lots of filler just to look more impressive at first glance.
“In my book, it takes 800 pages for fifteen characters to make a single grilled cheese sandwich. It’s rich with subplots about running out of bread, taking bathroom breaks, and even falling in love. I also included numerous philosophical discussions about the merits of cheddar versus colby jack, and the different methods of toasting the bread. I included lots of poetry. There’s even a surprise plot twist where it turns out that half the characters are actually grilled cheese sandwiches themselves! The novel ends after the characters burn down the house and die because they tried to make it in the toaster.”
Oh wow!
No way!
The funny thing is, when I read my own stories with the same method I use to read other novels, I do get the whole, “WOAH this story is progressing crazy fast!” feeling. My style really isn’t best experienced by charging through. I do always “test read” my stuff before putting it out there, and following the natural flow of my mind without trying to speed up or edit anything feels good to me, so that’s how I keep it.
I skip writing the stuff that I skip reading. Which is a lot. But hey, that also means that there isn’t anything for you to skip over either, because I’m probably WAY worse than you about that.
Lol.
By Autumn Rain 