|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 11:38 pm
Alternately: 'Drea rambles on about themes that will probably mostly end up being about the weather (fictional weather, even). Because the weather is what I write about when I run out of ideas. Well, that and really terrible purple prose.
Anyway: I will probably post once a week with that week's worth of themes. Excluding this week because it is Wednesday, and I'm thinking Saturdays, probably. So I might rush seven themes into... Four days? Three days? (Gah, I can't count). And I need to find out if a theme is a complete story into and of itself, or if little bits and pieces of various things that fit the theme but don't actually go anywhere are alright.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu May 17, 2012 9:32 pm
I'm assuming it's okay to post? I'm posting, anyway. ninja
Little bits and pieces are most definitely alright. In fact, they might be recommended. I find it nearly impossible to write short snippets like that. Poems I can do short, but prose almost always turns into huge, beastly things, and that makes it pretty impossible to get out an entry every day. (Although I guess if you write several novels a year, you write much faster than I do. That probably makes a difference. XD )
Anyway, welcome to the challenge. cat_3nodding
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun May 20, 2012 11:43 pm
Okay, so it's Sunday. Personal stuff yesterday made everything horrible (I was up till about 4 am listening to the chickens die), and then things happened and everything pretty much went to hell in a handbasket.
Next week will probably be late too, because Fanime and Eurovision finals are happening on the same weekend, and this will be my last chance to go dancing before fall semester. (And we're visiting family at the same time, so that just makes it more likely I won't get anything (useful) done next weekend.)
Most of these don't really go anywhere. Most of them probably won't.
Week I
1.
This is Airi.
Properly, she's Airienne-Eija Pirkko-Miina Reijosri Väinämöinen , but that's a very long name for a very little girl, and so she is simply Airi. Mother, with brilliant red hair spilling into everything, is mostly a woman but sometimes a man (or perhaps that's mostly a man but sometimes a woman), but is always Mother, no matter what gender he wears, even when she leaves and doesn't come back for weeks, or as a horse or a bird or some other thing she does not have a name for, so that's alright. Father is always a man, and is always there, except when he isn't, but things are certain around him, the way they aren't around Mother, the way they will be around Airi. If she survives Mother says, one night when Airi is supposed to be sleeping but is counting slats in the roof instead, tucked into her trundle as Mother's loom clacks, sharp against the whisper of Father's knife against stone. She will Father says, but Mother ignores him. If she survives, she will rule She says again, and then she begins to weep, murmuring the names of the siblings Airi has never met.
There are things one doesn't mention in Mother's household, so Airi says nothing when she sits, patiently waiting for Mother to finish the daily fight with her flyaway hair. Today Mother is a woman, and her hair, for all its brash curls, is not nearly the hassle her daughter's is, so she leaves it down while she prepares them both for the day, letting Airi watch as she pins it up with shining gold, her marriage gift. Father is away, and so it is just the two of them. Airi feeds the chickens and brings in the eggs while Mother puts this morning's bread in the little oven Father had built, then milks the cow while Airi takes out the old straw and puts down fresh in the little stable.
Today is wash day, so after Airi has been fed new milk and what remains of yesterday's bread, they gather the week's used linens, taking even the hangings from the walls, and wash them, Airi holding clothespins while Mother hangs sheets on the line. They are drawing water from the well to scrub the floors when the men arrive, fierce and beautiful and armed to the teeth with fine steel and richly colored wool and leathers. The man in front has only one eye, the other socket empty and covered by a patch, and it is his appearance that frightens Mother most. She pushes Airi behind her, dropping the bucket, and slides into her most often used male form, the power gathering silently around his fingers making her skin prickle. Airi stays still, and pretends she is invisible.
“Well, Brother.” Mother says, his voice dry and faintly amused in a slightly malicious, condescending way that makes Airi's teeth ache, not the way it normally is at all, “If you'd told me you were coming, and bringing company too, I would have cooked. As it is, there's nothing in the house. What's so urgent you couldn't even give a little warning?” The one-eyed man stares coldly at him, and his warrior friends keep their hands on their weapons. Airi presses closer to Mother's back and continues to pretend.
“Another one, Brother.” It's not a question. Airi thinks of her siblings, dead or vanished or elsewhere, and wonders what she's done, what they've all done, to make this man so very angry.
“Another what?” Mother mocks, grinning, but Airi can feel the way his back tenses, and wonders if she's going to die.
The man doesn't answer, just gestures to his companions, and Mother, for the first time in as long as Airi can remember, is not in control of the situation.
“Please,” he begs, the magic at his fingers coiling around his daughter where the others can't see. “She's my daughter, she's never done any harm. She's just a child.” His voice breaks, but the man looks unmoved, and the sound of swords being drawn rings in the still air.
“Run!” Mother murmurs without looking at her. “Hide.” If they can't find you, they can't kill you lingers unspoken between them.
Airi runs.
2.
It's raining. It's always raining when things like this happen, but the rain seems worse, today. The sky is the ugly color of a bruise, or an over-ripe plum, and the hair on his arms lifts and crackles with energy. Something is happening. No one is sure what.
His sister, hunched miserably under her jacket, mutters incomprehensibly in a language he doesn't speak, glaring balefully at the sky in between whispers so derisive they have to be curses. Tom nudges him with an elbow, shooting him a questioning glance between him and his sister, and he shakes his head.
They're all soaked through by the time they reach shelter, half-frozen despite the dank humidity, and then, of course, Susannah can't get through, because some idiot has managed to trip wards that really shouldn't even be there, so now she's stuck outside while he's stuck inside, and separating them never ends well.
He flexes his fingers, his sister's face blank in the way that means someone is trying to sneak up on her, and wonders how many people are going to die before she sets something on fire.
3.
She looks like someone's dropped a building on her after getting in a truly vicious cat fight, which isn't surprising considering that's exactly what had happened. She hasn't woken up yet, but this seems like a small thing considering she's lucky to be alive. Harry sits beside her, dropping the flowers on the table. He doesn't take her hand, though he'd like to. Most people would misconstrue the gesture, and in a town like this, they'd practically be married by the end of the day, the way gossip goes.
4.
When Birdie is eight, her brother gives her a quarter and sends her to buy a gumball so she won't see the dead woman on the back porch. She finds her wedding ring instead, and never lets the fact that she got neither a quarter nor a gumball go.
5.
The Clockwork Princess lacks a heartbeat, the tick of her works a poor facsimile of the remembered pulse of flesh and blood. She is wound once a week by one of her ladies-in-waiting, the clicking of the key in her back an unwelcome reminder of time passing around her, but never with her. When the war comes, decades after her transference into this shell, and leaves her people slaughtered and herself untouched, she lets herself wind down. It's not like death, or dreaming. She just ceases. It's unnerving, and worse for the boy with his red-gold cap of hair who winds her up again. She's unclear as to why he's done this, but the look on his face when she opens her eyes says it's important. The fact that he can't introduce himself tells her why.
6.
All three of them have grown up with the stories of scholars who weren't careful about what they studied. Insanity, dismemberment, and true death are just the least of the consequences that can occur, and Mother herself... well, she sought the name. It ended badly.
John was 22, and well equipped to handle her descent into madness and self-destruction, but Elizabeth, thirteen if old for it, and Richard, still in nappies at just two years of age, didn't survive it as well, so it's with some trepidation that the boys watch their sister delve into the mysteries of the Correspondence, still wild with grief over Henry's death, no matter the risk. Even Mother's rages, howling and tearing apart the parlor with the encouragement of that godsbedamned thing, can't prepare them for what happens to Lizzie. She weeps while she studies, first ordinary tears and then blood, wiping her eyes irritably when the disgusting film gets too thick for her to see properly. Some nights she wakes, screaming, though it's hard to tell if it's because the language of Hell has gotten into her dreams or because she's reliving Henry's murder while she sleeps.
It gets worse, as the months go on. She's still sane, well, no less sane than she was when she started, but she's stopped eating and if she sleeps without the help of laudanum, it's fitful at best, assuming it happens at all. Then her hair starts spontaneously catching fire, and John begins to wonder if the tales of the blind astronomers in their observatory leading their fellows, muffled and bound and burning, into the Stolen River are true.
The most terrifying part of the whole process is that she's so much better off than all the other fools who study the Correspondence. She hasn't killed anyone, not even herself, nor has she gone raving, and her hair, though a little singed, is still lustrous and thick, not falling out in dull clumps, and the only destruction she's caused has been by accident, catching things on fire when she burns mostly.
Richard, having known for years that his sister is not only an avid Knife-and-Candler, but also very, very good at it, wonders if having the favor of at least one of the Masters has helped at all. After all, she can't play umpire if she's in the Royal Bethlehem, and if he knows anything about the Masters, it's that they hate replacing useful pieces in their subtle games for power.
Eventually it gets, if not better, more bearable. That is, of course, when Hell starts making less than delicate inquiries about her work.
7.
Lizzie takes the handkerchief everywhere with her, especially when she runs with her troupe, in the hopes that it will be rendered irreparable. It's a horrific, gaudy thing in a particularly eye-searing shade of puce that does absolutely nothing for her complexion, but it was a gift from a particularly affectionate devil, and one doesn't get rid of gifts like that lightly.
Destruction via Knife-and-Candle is an acceptable excuse, because she'd have to adore it to carry it everywhere, and blood is almost impossible to get out of silk. Not that she knows from personal experience; John still doesn't know she plays, and coming home with even a hair out of place is a surefire way to ensure he finds out, which would be unpleasant.
The good thing about writing so many terrible novels is that I have a lot of characters to play with. So, for this week, in order from first to last, characters presented are from the following pieces: (1)The first mythology mash up, featuring a tangle of pretty much every culture that the Norse ever touched (Further on you end up with Welsh, Scottish, Native American, Greek, more obvious Finnish, and German folklore); (2) the modern!AU of the D&D on crack 'verse, which features no research whatsoever, and only what I can remember from being a DM for three years; (3,4) the murder mystery in which I killed off an entire class of my peers; (5) the original fairytale sequence, put in the context of a modern short story; (6,7) the Echo Bazaar pastiche/fanfic/thing in which I continue to indulge my obsession with Lovecraft and 1800s fashion.
This week appears to be all about rewriting and/or expanding major plot points. Huh.
You'll probably see all these people again. Feel free to ask questions.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 4:28 pm
So I'm late. Really late. I'm just going to say that I was at Fanime, and Sunday night I danced for six hours in three inch heels after walking around for eight hours in four inch heels. And I didn't get to bed until two or so in the morning. And then we were on the train and nothing worked and there were drunk people and a couple that wouldn't stop necking until they nearly got kicked off the train. And then I basically slept for two days. So I'm posting this now. This week should still be on Saturday. Hopefully. Also it is almost June, so it will probably all be Junior Companion adventures for the next few weeks.
8.
My cousin is in love with his girlfriend. Their shipper name is Jam. The particular type of jam is marmalade, because candied orange peel.
(I am not in love with the boy who isn't my boyfriend, though I'm rather fond of him. I am in love with a boy I haven't seen in over a decade, and have recently fallen out of love with a girl who never knew I loved her, despite being one of my best friends. I am hoping that no one ever finds out about any of this, because any name my sister could give me as part of a couple would probably kill me with laughter)
9.
Once upon a time at the bottom of the garden, there was an apple orchard, though nothing remains of that now but the twisted stumps of long dead trees. The memory of that place is long, though, and so the boy comes home with apples every morning, crisp and cool with frost that hasn't existed in over a century. He never says who gives them to him, seems to forget they exist when they leave his hands. One morning he doesn't come back at all. The orchard remembers him.
10.
My father is not a good man, though I don't think he ever meant to hurt me. He forgets, sometimes, I think, that I am still a girl, small and wary and though strong no match for his grip. The bruises faded moths ago but I can still feel them, remember how they looked, a cuff of violet and green-gold, like a smeared, faded sunset before a storm wrapped around my bicep. He never saw the bruises. He never sees anything that doesn't fit into his world, and I worry that the next time I make him angry it won't end with a series of bruises and a wrenched shoulder, but with my blood in my mouth and my nose and on the ground, and he won't see that either.
There are still things we don't talk about in my family. This is one of them.
11.
There's a coffee shop on the corner of High street and Lincoln avenue. It's been there forever; some of the grandmothers and grandfathers remember when it was a tailor's workshop, and more remember the decades it stood empty, but most people only know it as it is now and has been for longer than most people can remember. It still reflects its origins, faintly; the rich colors and smooth lines of art nouveau sensibilities keeping it firmly in the past without stifling it, an eclectic mix of modern furnishings, chairs and tables and couches scattered haphazardly through the rooms anchoring it in the present. It's the sort of place that everyone congregates in, from new mothers to cool teens to the middleaged writers club who usually spends all their time cooing over grandchildren.
There's an English phone booth in the back corner, next to the doorway that leads nowhere, and the story is that it just appeared one morning, with no explanation, and that nobody ever could move it. The owners shifted the tables around it, and after a while it just became a part of the shop, and people ceased to think about it. There's a girl, a young woman, really, who comes and sits beside it every so often, occasionally patting it consolingly, as if it has feelings. This, too, is ignored; something about it radiating non-importance that only children can see through.
12.
The first night he comes the hall flies into a tizzy, half-drunk warriors reaching for swords and women reaching for children as the thing, shaped like a man in gleaming armor that catches the firelight and does not let it go, strides down the length of the room, a path emptying before him. The first attack is brushed off with little more thought than brushing away a fly; stupidly, the man tries again, and this time the thing reaches out one hand and touches his shoulder, and he begins to rot, disintegrating into dust in a matter of moments. Everyone retreats to the edges of the hall, pressing into the walls, several women weeping quietly in the sudden stillness. Only Annar, lord of this hall, has stood his ground, and the thing approaches him, coming to stand tall and indescribable in the space before his chair.
“My son requires a bride.” He says, and the flames in their sconces seem to dance with his words. “Where is she?”
One of Annar's warlords laughs.
“Why should we give you anything?” He sneers, hand on his sword, and Ilta realizes that whatever he is seeing is not the same as what she is seeing.
Annar, having already lost one of his best warriors and his formost tactician, reaches for one of the serving maids without hesitation. The girl screams and cries and struggles, but Annar is a warlord, and a warrior in his own right. She doesn't get away.
13.
The fire alarm goes off in the middle of second period. I'm in Welding, my hair twisted up with a spare bit of copper rod, covered in one of the big leather jackets we're only supposed to wear when we're arc welding, not gas. Mr. Pahl, having dealt with my continued adventures in Woodshop, where I would come to him almost every day for bandaids, having sanded all the skin off my fingertips, feels that in my case, more is more, and so I get to wear the jacket, no matter what we're doing. This is one of the reasons I am not on his favorite students list.
Thirty seconds later, just as we're all beginning to shut off our torches and put things back in the forge, the PA goes off, Rhonda, the secretary, stating that the Fire Department is testing the system and we should all stay put and go on with classes.
I finish shutting off my torch, and then sit and stare at the giant hole in my sheetmetal, bored out of my skull without anything to do until another five minutes have passed and we can all be sure none of us will level the building. Behind me, Barton, the slightly creepy kid with both aspergers and a large handful of learning disabilities, and a crush on me so intense it's freaky, is staring longingly at the back of my head, his third hand, still red-hot, gripped tightly in his tongs; he twitches, then grins perversely at me when I happen to look up and catch his eye in the mirror behind my station. I flick my eyes away before he can take it as an invitation to start talking at me, and stare resolutely at Cliff, one of my best friends and also one of the few people in class who isn't utterly terrified that I'll kill them in their sleep, who is messing around with a Mig welder, in the hopes that he might come rescue me.
No such luck. A quick glance at the mirror from under my lashes reveals Barton inching forward until he's only a foot or so away from me, and I try my telepathy on Cliff again with equal success. That is, none.
"Hey, Bart!" one of the other boys calls from the front of the room, and something knocks into my back. I don't register the heat for a second, but then the smell hits me, and I start screaming.
Have you ever smelled burning hair? Gross, right? Burning leather is worse, and I frantically throw myself out of my chair into the empty aisle between the gas welders and the arc welders and rip the jacket off me, throwing it to the ground and jumping on it until the fire goes out. I touch the small of my back, and then the nape of my neck; my clothes are fine, but my hair feels oddly frizzy, and I know I just missed having my head set on fire by a hairsbreadth, no pun intended.
Mr. Pahl has come running out of his office, his face a study in utterly terrifying fury. It gets worse when he sees me, jacket on the ground, my whole body shaking as the adrenaline finally kicks in, and Barton, gaping guiltily at me, his stupid project still clutched in his tongs.
"Dahley. Pack your things, you're out of this class." Barton starts to whine, but Aaron, sweet, dependable boy that he is, shoves him out towards the forge with an apologetic grimace at me.
Mr. Pahl comes over, but his face is less scary now, and I can see the real concern in his eyes. It's an odd look.
"Harper. You alright?"
"I'm fine." I gasp, and begin to giggle helplessly, still shaking. "I just. I'll be fine."
He puts one heavy hand on my shoulder and steers me towards the back room, kicking the jacket out of the way, which isn't really good shop behavior, but as I've just nearly been set on fire, I don't think he cares all that much.
"You want to sit the rest of this out?"
"Yeah." I manage to get out, and I'm beginning to cry. "I just need to sit down for a while."
There's not a lot in the back room, just a table and a couple of chairs, and an ancient poster of some band I don't know that someone defaced a long time ago. I collapse into one of the chairs and drop my head on the table. Mr. Pahl pats my shoulder once and leaves, probably to deal with getting rid of a student this far into the year.
"Jesus." I whisper, and start to cry in earnest.
14.
The twins hold hands as they walk up to the temple, and he tries not to wonder which one of them will come back. Either way will break them, but it might go a little better if he comes back, not she. Might being the key word. They're in the business of impossible choices, the twins are, and they've been tangled up in eachother for their entire lives. He doesn't think they would live long enough to learn to live without eachother, even if they had the chance, but they're just children.
The twins hold hands as they walk back out, white and shaking, and he doesn't ask what price they paid for this blessing, to grateful to have them both back. They never do explain.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
