aliaspseudonym | Entries tagged with writing

Ceriish lives on Beryl-4, a lop colony only a short hop from the syphid homeworld of Aurora, which she has never actually seen. Beryl is over 90% ocean, and the largest continent is buried under the ice sheet at one of the poles. Most of the population lives on the archipelagos in the tropical and temperate zone, clustered around the two space elevators. There are few accessible resources; the primary industry is as a tourism destination for the aquatic lops. The natives are sea dwellers and Ceriish has never actually met one.

The sylphid community lives in a ghetto on a very large island which serves as the surface terminal of the larger elevator. Treatment to make their implants waterproof is extremely difficult to obtain and power-field coverage is non-existent outside the ghetto and elevator termini, which makes it exceptionally difficult for the sylphids to travel except to the other space elevator. Sylphid ships almost never pass through the ports, and it is unpleasant for sylphids to travel in ships without supplies of their food or power-field generators. Transportation between Beryl and Aurora is extremely scarce despite the relative closeness of the planets; these measures were all originally put in place to keep the sylphid population captive and although the sylphids have now been officially free and equal citizens for over a decade, little has been done to address these social factors. It would be a lot more difficult for the planet to remain profitable as a tourist destination without cheap labour maintaining the elevators, and only the cyborg sylphids can operate most of the equipment that creates and maintains hypertensile alloys.

The sylphid community is about one and a half generations sylphid removed from its roots on Aurora, or about two lop ones. The elders were relatively young when they migrated but still clearly remember their homeworld. They have relatively little communication with other sylphids, however; it’s much easier to communicate with other lop colonies and even with the distant lop homeworld of Lapis than with Aurora.

Sylphids in general are not well liked by the other races. Lops and their other allies tend to be scared and suspicious of the Sylphid’s cyborg senses and advanced technologies. As for those on the other side of the Imperial Wars, all they know of the sylphids is blind terror of the Banshee shock troops.

Banshees were cyborg soliders drafted from the most desperate of Aurora and trained by the imperials. They had combat suits with minaturized reactors that plugged into their implants and allowed them to project force fields and attack with focused beams of radiation. It was incredibly difficult to penetrate the force fields with weapons that could be safely used on spaceships and because sylphids are resistant to radiation they could used deadly radiation-based attacks without particularly endangering themselves. A single Banshee could often kill the entire crew of a large frigate.

Dreaming.

There are no such things as train graveyards.

Trains do not need graveyards because trains are big machines of steel and iron, driven by steam and fire. They are not enormous segmented insects, like centipedes with round little legs that cling to the tracks and propel huge trails of hollowed carapace, carrying who-knows-what across the long, lonely tracks between strange, murky stations under black stars.

This is what I told myself as I walked along, stepping from one old railway tie to the next, carefully avoiding shards of broken chitin. I was looking for someone. In the distance another one of them limped in with a great crack in the shell of its first segment, leaking oily black ichor in spurts, pushing aside the exoskeletal husks of its forefathers before shuddering to a halt, letting out one last, low, mournful whistle. I paused and looked down solemnly. I felt I should say something, but there was nothing to say.

Something moved in the murky, windless twilight. Something crawling, skittering amongst the ancient husks. I was frightened, but also, I thought: this must be the one who called me here. I called out, softly: “Hello?”

I heard something in response, not really words but a string of connected thoughts: “entity:both -- here -- good -- knowing?”

“What? Who are you?” The skittering was closer, coming from behind or maybe within one of the bigger shells. I took a few steps toward it.

The creature crawled over the top of the dead husk; I jumped back and tripped over the remains of a wheel-like leg. It was at least six feet long and mostly covered in glossy grey-black plates, with many long insectile legs protruding from its sides at intervals. Its head, if it was a head, was small and bulbous, mounted on the end of a very long, thin flexible neck. The head and the underside of the neck were unplated and looked soft, rubbery; they pulsated unpleasantly in places as it moved. Small mandibles with little finger-like manipulators at the ends dangled from the end of the neck. It had no real eyes, but a pair of colourful, mismatched eye-spots had been painted on either side of its head. I was frightened, but also strangely drawn. Did it paint those spots itself?

It stopped approaching when I fell and took a few steps back. “entity:other -- fear/distress -- hurt? -- regret”

I climbed to me feel and brushed myself off. “I’m okay ... are you ... what are you?” I asked.

“entity:self -- being --- home/origin -- great distance --- entity:both -- knowing -- past -- bright place -- yes?” Its head moved from side to side as it ‘spoke,’ pointing one false eye at me and then the other.

“I’m not sure I understand. You’re asking if we’ve met before? I don’t ...” I trailed off.

“knowing:both -- bright place -- past -- good --- knowing?:other -- flat place -- present -- unknown --- entity:self -- present -- again -- knowing -- desire -- good?”

Except it wasn’t really talking and these weren’t really words, they were little wavelengths of thought that translated into ideas and then roughly into grammarless strings of words. I closed my eyes and drummed my fingers on the knuckles of my other hand.

“Bright place” was an incredibly alien image but also, somehow, familiar. An ocean of undimensional light, shifting, with no context to determine motion, direction, orientation, only waves of hot brightness and the patterns in those waves. Patterns that twisted and curled in on themselves, sometimes, forming rudimentary souls that swam through the white, called to one another with wordless words. I said “I think I remember ... something. A white ocean. Swimming, sinking there.”

There was a rumbling in the distance; the creature moved; my eyes shot open. A great dark cloud was rising over the horizon and growing larger rapidly. The creature shifted and skittered from side to side urgently. “dark/dream place -- near future -- not being -- become --- entity:self -- absence -- immediately -- fear/regret”

The cloud grew closer, sweeping across the entire horizon. I imagined I saw enormous legs or mandibles the colour of rusted metal within it. I wasn’t frightened -- it was only a dream. I was a little sad, though. “Goodbye, I guess,” I said. Then, as the creature began to skitter away into the distance, I called, “Wait ... will I see you again?” but it was already gone. I sat down and scratched at the dirt with a small shard of shell until the dream-eater came, and then I woke.

This is the first part of a story about fairies and other things.

A girl was walking in the rain, about halfway between school and the train station that would take her home. She wore a dull orange raincoat with the hood pulled tight around her head and walked slowly, dawdling occasionally to watch streams of water drain into the sewer grates. She didn’t mind the rain, not when it was warm and relatively light. She liked the sounds of water and the way the world looked when everything was wet.

Her name was Autumn. She was going to miss her train home, but that was okay; there would be another train in ten minutes or so. She was probably going to fail an essay in intro to philosophy, which was due at midnight and which she hadn’t started -- that was less okay, but she’d still pass the class, probably. Her boyfriend of four months had finally broken up -- by text message -- after avoiding her for two weeks; that was definitely not okay but there wasn’t a whole lot she could do without it besides cry, which she had already done earlier that afternoon and seemed redundant when it was raining anyway.

He had been following her for several minutes already by the time she saw him. He could smell her wistful loneliness, her lack of purpose or direction. He was still sizing her up when she turned, dark eyes raking across him. There was strength in that gaze, almost enough to rip through his glamours and charms like so many cobwebs. But not quite, not here in the rain between places. He stepped forward.

He was average height with a slightly rounded figure and wore a knee-length raincoat of a deep and vivid blue-green which hung open, showing an odd, patchwork vest of shades of brown. His pants and shirt were deep green, his hair was brownish, and the whole lot of him was soaking wet. His smile was radiant and there was a slow, fluid, confident sway to his walk. The word ‘beautiful’ rose unbidden in Autumn’s head. She was not used to applying the word to boys and men, but it seemed more appropriate than the alternatives for this odd person.

He said, “Hello,” and she replied,

“Hello. Why don't you put your hood up?”

He shrugged. “I like water.”

She nodded slowly. They were walking side-by-side toward the train station, now. “I’m Autumn.”

“You can call me Viridian,” he said. “I thought you looked lonely.”

“Yeah,” she said, and, staring into the rain ahead of them, she told him about her now ex-boyfriend, about his laughter and smile and his kind of funny-looking nose and how nice her hand felt in his, about how he’d slowly lost interest in her, drifted away. She told him about school, about her frustration with her written assignments, about the overall lack of direction that was slowly undermining her life. She wasn’t sure why she told him any of this--she was a habitually silent person and rarely discussed her own life even with close friends. Something about the rain, and the walk, and the warmth of his presence beside her, made the talking easy. It felt good, like the rain was washing her worries away even as she spoke them. Occasionally he would nod and say something sympathetic and encourage her to continue.

She realized, once she was finished, that she had spoken for at least ten minutes and that they must surely have passed the station by now. She looked around to try to get her bearings. The rain was coming down as a sort of dense, slowly descending mist, now, and she could hardly see anything.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?”

He stopped and turned to her, eyes twinkling. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I mean... the train station, but we’ve passed that already, I should go back...”

“We are on the threshold,” he said. “From here we can step backward or forward.” He touched her hand and she felt a rush of strange euphoria, like the mist around her had leaked into her head. “Will you come with me?” She didn’t really understand, but had a indistinct feeling that she was supposed to say ‘yes’ and follow him. But, on a deeper level, she knew that she didn’t particularly want to. She brushed his hand away and said,

“I’m hungry, I really need to get home and start on supper. I should head back before I miss the next bus.” He looked disappointed and a little hurt, but he shrugged and the fog in her head dissipated.

“Alright,” he said, “We can step backwards for now. Um... would you accept a gift, and perhaps consider accompanying me on a later date?” He fished something out of the pocket of his raincoat and held it out to her.

It was a bracelet made of green and red coloured wire, woven together intricately to form a network of tiny vines and flowers. Even under the overcast sky, it sparkled and gleamed beautifully. Her eyes widened. “Did you make that? It’s very nice.” Autumn herself made and sold small things like this sometimes, usually made from clay, but this was far more elaborate than anything she’d made. She traced the wires with one finger and shivered a little. There was something unsettling about that pattern.

“Yes,” he said, looking extremely pleased with himself. “Took almost a week, very tricky to, um,” he stopped himself. “Do you want to try it on?”

“Can I really just have it? Don’t you want something in exchange?”

He frowned. “Only a promise that you’ll come through the door with me at least once.”

Autumn stood still, staring at the bracelet and listening to the rain. It was difficult to think in this in-between place, but she was distinctly aware of a right choice and a wrong choice.

She made the wrong choice. “Agreed. I’ll take it.”

His eyes widened and he fidgeted nervously with the bracelet as if suddenly having second thoughts. “You’re sure?” She nodded and extended her arm. He fastened it soundlessly around her wrist.

The rain stopped; she was at the station. She stopped for a moment and looked around--for a moment, she’d been certain there was somebody following her, but of course there was nobody nearby.

She took the train home and made herself supper, and it wasn’t until she finally sat down to write her essay that she noticed the strange and beautiful bracelet around her wrist. She had no idea where she’d gotten it and couldn’t seem to figure out how it unfastened. After a few minutes of toying with it she shrugged and gave up. It was very pretty, and very comfortable for something made of little wires, and she was sure she’d remember where it came from soon enough.

The shining ones were the last to leave the blue planet. When the air was too dark to breath, they built the domed cities. When there was nothing left to burn they built enormous stations in the empty darkness to drink in sunlight and beam it back to them through the murky air. Only when Sol itself began to swell and burn strangely did they board the last of the miracle ships and set sail for the distant stars.

They awoke on a small, sunscorched, barren planet and they named it Aurora. The miracle ship gave them skin that drank in the harsh light and slim bodies that needed little sustenance, but as they spread they found their new star’s light shone through their buildings and their skin and burned their unborn children, so that many were born dead and deformed. They built lead houses for the child-bearers to hide from the light, but even then, the light burned away their virility and their population slowly dwindled.

The shining ones realized then that the miracle ship had failed them and took matters into their own hands. They built dark, lead-lined temples and, using the wisdom they carried from the blue planet, they grew their children in glass tanks from carefully cultured cells. As the temples rose the shining ones multiplied and built cities of glass and crystal until the once-barren Aurora was the most beautiful planet ever seen. The savage light of their star provided cheap, unlimited power, and they built great towers to broadcast that power into the air to be drawn on freely by all their machines and devices.

Slowly, then, the wisdom of the shining ones grew. They manipulated their own minds as they grew and implanted strange machines to better control their crystal computers. They grew tired of walking with their thin, frail bodies and gave themselves wings to fly about as they pleased. They turned their focus inward and learned to manipulate matter on the most fundamental level, to twist the very bonds between atoms to their augmented will. They built the Crystal City which was, at it’s height, the most glorious place in the galaxy.

As a young alien i read mostly to learn who i was,
which is the first use of stories--for the newly formed
to find what words in what order pulsates
through the fountanelle to resonate the zygomatic &
sphenoid bones--how else could they know
how they feel about spaceships & fairies
& monsters & dragons?

if i could be any bird i’d be
a magpie--if any animal, a hare
or maybe a cat. A magpie’s tail
is as long as the rest of its body.
These things are important &
worth thinking about.

i learned that i am someone
who wants to build inverted cities on the sky
& stare up at dusk at the streetlights as they
flare to life like newborn stars--i want to be
an architect of winds, of air, of thoughts, of playing cards,
of scrabble tiles each with a single letter, piling
up into words & sentences & paragraphs up into
the sky.

I am, i guess, one of the quiet ones--i knew
how to look through people, had to learn
how to look at them. It was, i think, in the stories
where i got the idea
to look inside them.

i love living things--i love things
that create themselves--i love
to play with them, to understand
how & where & why they grow,
& to gently guide them. The best stories
are alive too--a story, written, is only
a blueprint, a seed--a story, read, is a great tree of thought
that takes root slowly & springs up & branches into
who knows that kind of tree, or what fruit or what shade,
what shape & colour of leaves & flowers
you might find there.

The quiet ones have no spoken
language--though some are fluent
in human soundwords, they tire--we take shelter, sometimes
neath silent wordtrees with paper leaves that
take us to worlds where you can see
into the soul
without making eye contact.

I’ve learned i like words too much, i think,
to be a deconstructionist--for all their failings
you have to admire the brave little letters,
‘t-r-e-e’ for saying: i signify treeness--
look, i have seen many trees & they are
not all very much alike, and there is little of
t-r-e-e about them--yet, the wordchains can also
take you places: four letters can carry you away to
an entire universe of tree, which is surely
a sort of magic.

I’ve found the bad words, too, which bind & stifle
the growth of living things--names that burn brandlike
into the named, impose their meanings on the real:
weak or strong, natural or unnatural. The worst kind
of lie fights always to become true--look: i have seen
the sickly cities built from these lies; their supports are rotten--
they daily demand blood sacrifice
to oil ill-fitting gears & always they whisper:
“this is what must be done, there is no other way.”

I would be not just an architect, but
an arsonist of thoughts--i would build siege engines--
hurl flaming oil--sing firesongs. Bit by bit
the lies are burning. Piece by piece repair
the skycity. One by one the stars ignite
to light the way through the midnight gloom.

I want to burn it all down, & build a city
where it’s safe to be a boy or girl or
magpie, & to believe in everything or nothing, &
not even the quiet ones’
wordless language is drowned out. This
is what the stories taught me.

Alright. I was born about century ago, far away from here, but I spent the first half listening to a tree grow. Trees have a language of sorts, very slow and very quiet, easily drowned out. You have to let yourself slow down, to listen without thinking. I can't do it anymore. I've filled my head with the fast, flickering thoughts of creatures with heartbeats, and there's no going back. I tried once. I settled into the ground beneath a pine sapling and slowed my thoughts. Three days passed and I didn't hear anything and it felt like an eternity. I had to give up. It was hard to keep from crying, then. I worry, sometimes, that I'm losing even the memories of the things the tree and I talked about. The fast thoughts jostle and crowd out the slow ones.

One day men came with their logging equipment and chopped down my tree. I almost cried and I wanted to tear them to shreds or swallow them whole or something but my tree said something like, it's alright. I've been a tree for a while and now I'm going to be something else. That's alright. Don't hurt the heartbeat-creatures.

So I didn't, but I followed my tree and things happened incredibly quickly for a little while. It got turned into planks and the biggest part of it was made into a big, ornate cabinet and it was proud to be that. It ended up in a big house not too far from here and I watched it there for a while. I watched the heartbeat-creatures flickering around it a little too but I was so used to thinking slow, they were still too fast for me to follow.

I listened to my tree for another twenty years or so, maybe less, in that house. I slowly got better at keeping track of the other creatures. There was a boy who lived there for a while who sat still a lot and had a slow, quietness about his thoughts. I liked him best. Once he crawled right inside my tree and fell asleep and I tried to say hello to him in his dreams, but I appeared as a tree and trees can't talk to heartbeat-creatures, of course. He climbed me and played in my branches.

Eventually there was a fire and my tree burned to ashes along with some of the house, and that time I did cry, and my tears stained the ashes and the whole house and made strange things happen, like sometimes you could see my tree or the fire in reflections, and for a few years I haunted the spot and howled. The next owners made up some story about someone's lover being tragically murdered while waiting for him to pick her up and haunting the place forever, but really it was just me crying because my tree was gone.

After that I went halfway across the continent so that place couldn't remind me of my tree any more and I learned to speak to creatures with heartbeats and to walk the way they do, and a whole bunch of stuff happened that I'd really rather not talk about right now, but eventually the grief sort of faded and I made my way back here. And then ...

i believe in alien gods.
i believe in wrong reflections.
i believe in other ways.
i believe that kindness is goodness.
i believe people.

(or, to unpack those,
i believe that other people's gods are real and their experiences of them are real even if i haven't experienced anything like that or even heard of their gods for that matter (xeno means 'strange/foreign or of strangers/foreigners')
i believe that people sometimes are really very different from how they look or are shaped
i believe that there's no One True Way for anything.
i believe that 'goodness' means 'being who you are/who you're meant to be, which is the original/root meaning of 'kind' (as in 'according to your kind') also that kindness in the modern sense, i.e. caring for others, is good.
when people tell me things about themselves i default to believing them.)

(licensed CC-by-SA)

In the land of the blind the one eyed man
meets a girl with short hair & clever fingers
at a bus stop on the way to a concert, &
she teaches him to play the guitar --

they break up later when the band breaks up
but they’re still good friends, & sometimes
he calls from the palace just to ask if she
wants to walk the coast with him again, &

listen to the
ocean breathing.

See the footprints –
here, and then here
ten paces apart at least –
See how she moves
smooth-flowing leap-to-leap
her feet strike the ground like a mighty hammer –
the earth might shake – spin backwards, but
instead she flies on.

for, see, the hare does not run. She flies
across the ground
flies ten times her length and when
the earth reaches up to claim her
strikes it down and flies on still –
faster than winds, faster than talons
that ride those winds –
faster even than her own fear she flies
& one day maybe death will outpace her
but today see! it lags behind, and her footsteps
shake the earth still.

i wanna know what the poison tastes like

when it drips from thoughtless tongues

to hiss and burn at other’s skin, other skins —

i wanna know the taste of the words as they curdle

& ferment in the mouth, taste like rubber & white-out

all chemical & ground up erasers

to bubble forth & paint the world synthetic sterile

white —

i wanna know the taste so i can choke it back,

not to spit aside but swallow, drink & let it burn

to the core of me till my heart pumps poison,

till my veins burn with knowledge —

till the fire shines in my eyes and flashes out

to scorch holes in the false blankness & sameness

till i can meet the eyes

of people who don’t exist,

because,

it’s all the same blood & all the same poison

distilled in thoughtless skulls

behind eyes that will not see

delivered in tiny doses, pinpricks,

dripping from between numb lips &

pouring from selfish pens

coating every surface, saturating thought & word —

it deadens the nerves & seeps into the soul & worst

worst of all it reaches deep

deep into the dark corners

& finds primal & selfish & slimey

something that really believes

you should stop existing, because

you are making me

uncomfortable.

i wrote a poem about hope once before. it was about whispers and wings and open cages, and it was very pretty, but it was sappy and i think it was wrong. i want to try again.

deep underground far from sight of the sky
under miles of concrete & stone -- left to die
from the pain & the fear pressing down from on high
every breath breathing poison too sickened to cry -- yet
there's a sound -- far & distant
but steady & strong -- it's a pounding,
a drumbeat, a heartbeat, a song
full of banging & cracking & splintering wood
till the doors crack wide open
& walls fall for good -- let the logs beat the gates
till the earth starts to shake -- let jailors take cover,
let barricades break -- & until that deep fortress
gives way to the slam --
let your hope be the sound
of the battering ram

(ouch my head rhyming is hard T-T)

School's been on for couple weeks now. It's been going ok, i guess. I'm pretty used to riding up and back and there's only been one bad day. I'm not too happy about having to get up at 8:15 most mornings, particularly since the class i'm usually getting up for is mechanics, which is basically high school physics, but oh well.

Other classes have been going pretty good. Calculus is going to be work but it's not such a bad kind of work. I'm not overly fond of math, but i am good at it and it's nice to stretch those mental muscles occasionally, i guess. Also my calc teacher is awesome and wears cool hats and writes on the windows in whiteboard during tutorial class. Chemistry is going to be a much less fun kind of work. Lots of number crunching and ridiculously abstract stuff. I'll have to genuinely try in that one, particularly since the class itself is scheduled 1-2:15 after i've already had two morning classes including calc, and my brain gets worn out on me and tries to zone out >.> Women's lit is at the same timeslot, but it's a seminar class and half the time it's my only class of the day (the other half i have a chem lab) so it barely counts as work, really.

My main complaint thus far is that between school and work at safeway i haven't had a single day off where i didn't have to head up to the area where school and work are, and honestly i feel like it's starting to wear on me a bit. if it keeps going like this, i may have to ask for fewer hours, or saturdays off or something. I'm not sure they have my availabity quite correct anyway and they've really been piling on the hours, so if i do have to revise my availability i might actually do that <.< then they could still give me the 3:15-10 shifts when i'm up there for school anyway, and i'd have a definite day off. On the other hand, that'd mean more spending 7:15am-10pm up there, which is not a whole lot of fun either, so i dunno. <.< I actually do have this coming sunday off, though i'm working some on saturday. they did call me in for a awful lot of extra hours last week though... we'll just have to see how it goes. I have to admit i'm feeling a bit bleh right now so that's colouring the whole situation >.> in a better mood i'd probably be a lot more optimistic about things.

I think i'm definitely actually for real finished my little binge of reading half the WoD books now. Going to try to focus on writing projects, both for their own sake and cause i think i'll feel a lot better about hanging around home after school if i have something productive to work on! I really need to finish Cremation, but i've built up a TREMENDOUS amount of 'not working on it' momentum by now x.x i'm doing some planning for new stories to try to get myself excited about the world again, and i might do some prewriting and stuff just to get back into the flow of producing lots of words again (that's part of why i'm doing this entry as well.) I've been feeling kinda drained when i get home from school recently, but i don't think it's exactly that i'm tired <.< more that i need to find something to get excited about.

Speaking of which i'm been thinking of getting a proper desktop computer to do games and things on. I figure i've probably earned in with all these extra hours and whatnot, and it'd be nice to have a machine that things would just run on and not have to worry about it chugging along and overheating. Also i could pass on my current laptop to my lil sis, which would be cool cause she's the only kid in our family without a decent computer.

I guess that's just about all for now. I'll maybe try to post soonish with some interesting bits of prewriting/worldbuilding for stories, maybe. We'll see how it goes.

Current Mood: worn out

starting something new! i don't think i can keep up with Cremation and do schoolwork at the same time, so i've decided to put that on hold for a few weeks and work on something i'm pretty sure i CAN do and keep up with my schoolwork!

essentially i'm am planning this as a series of losely connected, lighthearted little stories about a bunch of very odd people, most of whom graduated from the Academy for Bright Children, or the ABC (which is very loosely based on my own experience at Westmount Charter, which actually was called ABC charter back when it was just a primary school)

The first story centers around eccentric prodigy Glen Chatreuse and random bystander Rose Winter, and their quest to rescue Glen's computer (and best friend) from an organisation (simply called F4) which is SUSPICIOUSLY similar to the SCP Foundation. And maybe discover a few interesting new things about the computer in question along the way. :P

You can read the first chapter here! http://www.furaffinity.net/view/6244505/

I had a bit of a burst of inspiration at work today about how writing works for me. All my life i've been fascinated by how things work, and how pieces fit together to make a whole. That applies to machines, buildings, stories, and even people. Which makes sense, considering my Myers-Briggs personality thingy is Architect. I tend to see the world as a set of ordered systems, and I want to understand how those systems operate.

A story is a system too. I visualise it as a tower, mainly because i'm rather fond of tall things and high places. But if a story is a tower, but words on a piece of paper or a computer screen are only a blueprint. Stories can only properly exist in the minds of people who can understand them.

Before i can write a story (or sometimes at the same time) i have to build it in my own mind. This is the prototype of the tower, so it's bound to be a slow, difficult process. I have to develop characters, order events and line up plot points so that the whole thing fits together neatly and solidly, keeping a careful eye out for cracks and faults. When i get stuck writing, i find its usually either because i'm missing the next piece, in which case i need to do more of the mental building stage before i can continue, or there's some flaw in the structure i've built, in which case it needs repair work or, sometimes, to be discarded entirely and started over. Usually in those cases i can at least recycle many of the characters and ideas for raw material for future work.

Once you've finished building your story and created the blueprint, that's only half the process. 99% of the work, but only half the process. Each person who reads your blueprint attempts to reconstruct a story in their own mind according to it. Each mind is different, therefore each story based on the blueprint will be slightly different, though the same in essence. Badly-constructed stories often fall to pieces in critically keen minds, and overly complex stories may crumble in simple or distracted ones. Really well-made stories, though, can generally be built up properly in most any mind.

Anyway, there's your laboured analogy for the week. I've written two chapters of Cremation, and i've got most of it built up in my head, so i should be able to get more written fairly soon. I just need to fill in the cracks as i go along.

With great reluctance and after a lot of thought, I have decided to shelve bluebird and work on a different alibi-related story. The trouble is that I started with a world-saving story that doesn't work with the setting, and even after removing a major subplot and changing the context around significantly, I feel like I am bending over backwards to force things to fit together when I could just be using things that fit together in the first place. I may or may not come back to the story, but at the least I'll end up using the good characters and story elements from it elsewhere. New story is provisionally titled 'railroad' and I have no idea where I'm going with it, but on the other hand that's how the only completed alibi story started too ^-^; I do now know, from hard experience, several places I am NOT going with it. Here is a preview.

They waited in silence. The station was utterly deserted. Fallen leafs migrated lazily across the parking lot in the autumn breeze. A streetlight in the distance decided it was close enough to night-time and flickered to life. Virgil eyed his watch.

“It’s here,” he said. There was no train in sight, nor even a faint rumbling to disturb the sepulchral silence of the station. The tracks were rusted over from disuse.

Daniel nodded and pulled a pair of brown cloaks from her backpack. They donned the cloaks, pulled the hoods down so their faces were covered, then together took a step off the platform, over the yellow danger line and into the hollow where, years ago, a train might have been. They disappeared.

(I may or may not have started this story entirely for a chance to use 'sepulchral silence' in a sentence >.>)

But his words, to my ears, were the whistling of wind
through the cracks in the rocks, where the foilage thinned
leaving only the moss speckled, snow-dusted stone
towering high o’er the trees so aloft and alone.
He’d have better luck asking the rock.

- excerpt from untitled long poem in progress

Alright then.

I have been distracted. I blame school essays; they create a situation where I strongly don't want to write the thing I have to write next, so I seek out a million distractions and establish bad habits that stick around after I've managed to force myself to write the things. Of course I'm also to blame for a lack of self-discipline in dealing with these essays, but ah well.

Time to make a conscious effort to write stuff. The longer I go without working on something, the more daunting the prospect of adding to it becomes. After a point there's a temptation to just start something new, but down that road lies a mountain of unfinished projects and a strong doubt about my ability to finish things at all.

On the bright side, I've been doing more art recently, partly to distract myself, and it's been pretty fun. I shall try to continue with that. Oh, also CreatorUnreal commissioned me to draw his RP character twice, and that went really well, so if anyone is looking for art commissions I am willing and able to oblige. More details at my FA account.

That said, my main point here is stop messing around, me. >:| You have cool stories to be writing. And one poem.

( Supplementary words. )

"Cory did not exactly like James, but the strange-looking fellow had yet to actually lie to him, give him bad advice or try to steal his car. So, he was practically a saint next to Cory’s last few therapists."

So, Bluebird (or Blue Wings Silver Strings, which I plan to use as the final title.) Wordcount as of writing is 9223 following a series of fairly savage cuts, and there are still a few scenes I need to rewrite for continuity. This story has been an interesting journey and I'm pretty proud that it's still happening ^-^ Literally the ONLY thing that has survived from the story I originally planned is... well... the bluebird. So what I have left is basically a bunch of stuff I made up as I went along. This is going pretty well for me, but it's a writing scheme that calls for an awful lot of editing. If I'm gonna be throwing stuff in freely, I've got to be just as ready to toss them out if they don't fit >.>

The story as it stands revolves around four central characters, three of whom are Lycans of some sort. And of course blue itself. Like my last story, I focus on the characters with their various character flaws and past trauma, and try to bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. Oh, and the world gets saved in there somewhere I guess (and lots of things turn into other things.) There's a darker tone to this one than the last one, mostly because my characters here have more problems to deal with. I'm not quite sure but I think I'm at least halfway done at this point. Maybe. I am pretty confident that I can finish this though. Don't know how long it will take but it will happen! Stay tuned.

By the way, I'm always looking for feedback on my last story >.>b Need to figure out what worked and what didn't. You're probably best downloading it either at FA or at the Crimson Flag Forum. It's call Dragon and Mask and it is about someone who claims to be a dragon on the internet because he actually is a dragon. So let me know what you think!

Well.

Well well.

Well what does that even mean? Well. Three o'clock and all's well? But why do we say 'well listen' or 'well anyway' or 'well if you come this way'. It doesn't mean anything really. It weakens the sentence a bit, to prefix it with 'well'. It says, 'well this is just what I'm saying,' it takes the edge off of a boldfaced declaration of fact. Sometimes its just a spoken punctuation mark to begin a sentence. Well. Well it seems to work just fine, anyway.

And that was your pointless creative-writing preface for this entry.

( This part is the actual journal post. )

Well, I had my first Advanced Writing and Editing class that wasn't just the intro, and I think it's gonna be a good course. Prof really knows what he's talking about. Lesson today was, basically, on how to start an essay. He had us read an essay by Atwood, then we discussed it as a group and picked out keywords, then we freewrote for about ten minutes.

To summarize the lesson itself: a lot of people have the wrong idea about prewriting, in that they think that it does not involve writing. All the stages of writing an essay require putting words on paper (or a screen) except the actual research. He suggested two styles of prewriting, both of which we did in class: the method where you go through and pick out ideas with keywords, and the freewriting method, and told us to use whichever worked best.

Prewriting is important because, the most important part of an essay isn't the language or the organization or style or whatever -- it's the idea. If the idea you're trying to communicate isn't original, well thought-out and sound, the rest is just noise. He also suggested that most 'smart' college students are actually better at figuring what the prof wants and giving him that than at writing their own ideas, and here's where he basically told them to be less neurotypical XD Then we went through criteria for a self-evaluation we're suppose to do (still need to fill that out >.>) One of the categories is 'flavour.' I am obviously mocha flavour ^-^

We've also got our first assignment already :o it's only 500 words though (I just wrote a blog post half that long XD), and not weighted very heavily. And it's on that Atwood piece we already did prewriting on.

ADDENDUM: Going swamping with eco class next monday :D Probably gonna be rainy though >.>

SECOND ADDENDUM: I picked Mocha kinda off the top of my head but now that I think of it it kinda fits :D It's a mix of bitter stuff that wakes you up and sweet stuff that tastes nice.

Well. This is, um, finished. I've never written anything even remotely this long or involved before... it feels kinda weird. I hope you like it...

Here we go.

( Long story is over 14000 words. )

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shady side of the moon

i'm the mooncat -- this is where the flying saucers stop for tea

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Note to self: Follow up on car-theft anecdote sometime

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A Dragon and A Silly-Looking Mask

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