on writing poetry again (a ramble)

I haven't written poems in years, not really. Oh, small scraps here and there, but mostly stories and novels in the past six years or so. At present, however, I am reaching my nadir period, wherein I don't write much for a month or two. It happens every year: I figure the brain needs to recharge.

I'll continue with Boy& Fox, at the slow pace I'm doing now, let other stuff marinate. And in defiance of that, slowly write more poems. I don't consider myself good at it -- I wouldn't subject the world to a book of them, for example (chapbook or otherwise) but it's a nice pov to throw my brain into, to tease out pure economy from words.

Also to dig up old stuff and revise it, which is always an interesting experiment.  Shall see how the next month goes.

Flash fiction Friday: Occam was an idiot

Because the monkey prompted me, and I am a sucker for prompts ...

In this case, it would be incorrect to assume Occam’s Razor. Mostly cuz Occam used to it to justify God as the simplest solution to near anything, when the Devil fits better. Thing is, see, if you have a problem the simplest solution is to no longer have a problem. And if you don't think it's easy to kill yourself, you've never given the matter much thought.

I had. It passed away some afternoons. A few evenings. TV shows helped: the amount of sick ways to off yourself shown on TV has to be some kind of suicidee paradise. Thing was, you know, I had other solutions to my missing phone. E-mailed a friend, told them to call me, found it. I didn't tell them they'd saved my life, because that sounds damn stupid.

But I had a game of Angry Birds to play, and Occam could go screw himself as far as I was concerned.

On magic and artificial scarcity (also politics)

Came across two interesting articles today. The first is about the world's oldest clove tree, and how the first multinational company (the East India Company) deliberately limited the market.

"All clove trees not controlled by the Voc were uprooted and burned.
Anyone caught growing, stealing or possessing clove plants without authorisation faced the death penalty."

And then I came across how "according to the Canadian federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada", and how said companies have sued publishers out of existence for trying to print books on the subject. On this, the internet becomes quite awesome.

It did get me to wondering about how one regulates and controls multinational corporations and at what point their existence clashes with ideas of democracy (though arguably not capitalism, if one defines it as profits before people). And also how interesting such situations can be in fantasy and alternate history/sci fi novels. Trade is important and making such things the cornerstone of a novel could prove interesting, if handled right.

Makes me consider a fantasy world were magic is a minable/renewable resource, corporations and artificial scarcity ....

Ogres!

The female ogre turned from the fire, tossing the rest of her half-burnt meal to her mate and surveyed Boy with more cunning than malice, which worried him all the more. “The other meal is a feisty one,” she said in a voice twin to her mates. “You will make a better meal while hunger and thirst soften that one up.”
Boy made a scared sound at that, unable not to.
“You didn’t think we’d eat you?” the ogre said, quite baffled.
“I don’t know what you are,” said Boy.
“We are ogres,” she said, though she named them without a morsel of pride.
The male ogre looked up from peeling charred flesh from bone and bristled, tossing the remains of their food into a fire and raising his voice in a terrible wailing chant.

”Oh, an ogre is a monster made of shadow, made of spite
Always in pairs of him and her yet only one is ever right!
An ogre is a creature that slow-hunts and stalks their prey
And among their many features is a desire (cruel!) to play!
Far and wide the ogre wander to seek prey with claws and teeth
If up to you an ogre saunters, death is something of relief!
For an ogre is a nasty beast, steeped in hunger, born of bile
But if made an ogre’s feast you’ll be cooked with vim and style!”

“Must you?” the female ogre said.
“It is our song, my darling,” he said, and Boy was certain the ogre had made it himself, so deep was his wounded pride.
“And if you sing it again today, I may have to kill you.”
“It is my fondest hope, poppet,” he said and they shared a ghastly smile.
“You’re going to eat me?” Boy said, more concerned with that than even how bad the ogre’s song had been.
“Of course!” The female ogre looked considerably surprised. “What else are humans for if not eating? You don’t even have any pesky fur to remove at all.”

***

“Are you a hero?”

“I don’t think so,” Boy said. “You have me tied to a chair,” he added.

“Real heroes are always in traps. That’s how you know they are heroes,” the other ogre said.

“Well said.” His wife smiled, and her husband drew himself up and smiled back in turn, the moment strange and private, as though smiles devoid of nastiness were foreign to them.

They were monsters, and they were going to eat him, but there was something so sad about them that Boy couldn’t bring himself to hate them. They were ugly, and they knew it even more so than he did and it is awfully hard to hate someone more than they hate themselves.

“Do you want a hero?” he said.

“Well.” The male ogre coughed. “We wouldn’t mind, as a rule. Heroes are good eating. Unless they kill us,” she added as offhandedly as they’d mentioned eating Boy.

The female – Poppet, as Boy decided to call her – let go of his chin and then tugged at the ropes binding his hands, loosening them a little. “You could be a magician,” she said. “We’d never have caught a witch, but a magician can work magic with their hands free.”

“I don’t even know what a magician can do.”

The ogre blinked a few times. “Excuse us?”

“I don’t.”

“It might not be worth eating his brain, Poppet: it seems to be very empty indeed,” the other ogre said with a sniff.

“Quite so. Quite so, indeed. But it wouldn’t matter: a magician is hardly a hero, but it would have been something. The other one just shouts a lot and claims that she is a hero, if you’ve ever heard of such a thing!” Poppet snapped her fingers. “Are you sure you didn’t drop a sword?”

“I had a fox,” Boy said.

“A fox is hardly a weapon,” she said with a sniff. “It was barely even a morsel of food.”

“What?”

“Scarely an apetizer,” the male said, waving a hand to the remains of what Boy had assumed to be cooked bird.

“What?” he said again.

“Oh, dear.” The female ogre rubbed her hands together. “Maybe you’ll be a hero now? There are so few heroes out this way, you know.”

Boy said nothing. They had cooked and eaten Mr. Fox and the knowledge sank into his stomach like lead. Whatever magic was in his clothing did nothing at all in response to ropes or chairs or ogres. It was hard to hate them more than they hated themselves, to be sure, but in that moment Boy was quite determined to try.

And then there was today ....

The current version of Boy & Fox is at almost 17K now as Bess, Boy and Reynard Fox reach the outer borders of the Kingdom. The last two major characters -- the king and his son -- will come into play soon and from there? From there we shall see where it all goes. 

I know how the story ends, or at least some beats of it. I don't know how it gets there and I know there's some plot things I need to change but so far the story is holding together. The only thing really slowing it down is that the scenes were Reynard (or Bess) offer up stories about him tend to lead to two days of not writing as I try and make up a story-within-the-story fairy tale. There have been two: I think there will be a third near the novel's end.

Aside from that, I have been able to make use of a little of the 66 pages I hand-wrote in Italy.  From it, a poem-thing I will not be able to use:

I have not walked beneath the hills
Where man nor iron dwells,
Nor seen the clash of sun-drenched wills
Twixt angels fair and fell.

I have not seen a dream lord's snare
Hold fast a night-borne bane,
Nor seen a sword of blood rent bare
Or felt a mist-gods tears as rain.

But I have followed the empty songs
Of nameless children in the Waste,
And held to duty weighted of wrongs
And truth still bitter to the taste.

I have walked paths long left untrod
To tame a dragon's searing flame,
And followed dreams and death where led
To shoulder love – and loss – and blame.

... and yes, even in that version of the story, I have no clue why I put it in :p

Facebook status updates part XX (Apr 2013)

"I love you."
"You bastard! A ring, now? Now?"
"But I love --."
"It's April 1st! YOU UNBELIEVABLE BASTARD!"

He was a magician,and that meant many things. But less with each funeral he attended.

His superpower was to set off car alarms just by looking at cars.

The seance was an ugly affair: a of a black goat was sacrificed, true Names spoken, awful forces bound to witness the act of her will upon the world.
"I don't understand," he whispered as he appeared beside her bed. Being dead hadn't been pleasant. Being dragged back into the world had been far worse.
"You died before me. We swore we'd be together forever. This way we will."
"But the living can't haunt the dead."
"You think so?" She smiled. "Just you watch me."

'Unexpected Pleasure': nickname given by the press to the world's most popular serial killer.

From WIP:
“You can go talk to him.”
“It’ll become politics. It always does and I’ll say the wrong thing and screw it up.”
“Just be yourself,” Bryce said. “Wait, that won’t help.”
I punched him in the arm and he just grinned and gave me a shove to the door.
“You’ve done fine so far, Wray. No one is dead yet.”
“That’s when politics breaks down?”
“No, that’s when it becomes interesting.

"True winter is being so cold that we forget what warmth is. Sometimes it is like that, with your mother and me."

"It’s all gone sour. All my plans, my goals, my dreams. The ugliness under my grand ambitions has swallowed it whole: when I try to join It, the Singularity just laughs at me."

"The day it stops raining will be the saddest day of all. If the sky no longer cries for us, we shall have to cry for ourselves."

"What kind of god judges and forbids judgement in turn?"

Her wit was so sharp that no one laughed when she finished the joke, too busy checking to see if they were bleeding.

"I am sorry I could not meet with you. I have been very busy not dying: it does take up an inordinate amount of time."

"I know humans can kill us but on their own, without luck and a really good weapon? It’s not going to happen. Your average high school student won’t have access to a rocket launcher or sniper rifle." She thought about that.
"Probably."

"We can’t find the truth if we’re too busy trying to escape out fears."
"What if they’re the same thing?"

Fake Fact: Las Vegas is really an alien theme park.

"You cannot hate me half so much as I hate myself."
"Maybe not. But I can give it a go."

You can make more money by giving something away than by selling it.

What if history was subject to peer review?

A story idea rummaging in the back of my head:
Re-tell Cinderella, from the pov of a boy named Ash, his wicked step-brothers and the princess at the ball.

From old novel notes: stuff I will probably never use.
STARVE: Society to Achieve Responsible Vampire Emancipation
GROWL: Grassroots Organization for Werewolf Liberation

"You can tell the truth and be kind," Boy said. "Or be silent."
"And that serves truth, does it?" Reynard Fox pressed, circling him as Boy followed the hints of the path in the woods.
"You think silence is better than lies, a world rendered mute better than one with song?"
"I don't know." Boy looked away from the fox. "I think, I think even if I was whole with memory, I still wouldn't know. But I bet a fox that everyone knows tells lies could get away with an awful lot of truths."
Reynard Fox let out a soft yip at that. "Oh, that is true as well," he said, because he couldn't not boast if given half a chance. "If you are clever enough, you never have to lie at all."

"You're going to eat me?" Boy said, more concerned with that than even how bad the ogre's song had been.
"Of course!" The female ogre looked considerably surprised. "What else are humans for if not eating? You don't even have any pesky fur to remove at all."

You never realize how fragile a story is until you tell it to others and it falls apart under their regard. Only the great lies can survive this.

"No one becomes a ghost unless they have something to hide, something so big that death itself cannot release them from it."

Evolution of a character ....

I am, at present, almost 8000 words into the current version of Boy & Fox. A good 3000 words of the previous version remain, edited and altered (mostly description) and things slowly come together. The previous version was a finished draft, but contained too much plot and not enough story. For this version, I am leaving much unsaid, trying to let the surface of the story mirror the depths without bonking the reader over the head with it. Shall see how it goes. I know the final act, but not precisely the ending.

And am going to write, later today or tomorrow, the introduction of Bess into this story. She is important to it as Boy needs a friend to help him come to terms with his life and Reynard Fox is many things but friend is stretching it a lot: even Boy knows that without knowing it. She explains the Kingdom to Boy and is both fun to write and essential to the story. Having said that, I never really had a handle on her as a character before. She's been everything from a werewolf to under a curse and even a quasi-assassin in various drafts.

For this one, I realized that I needed to establish boy Boy and Reynard Fox first before she came in and set up the basis of their own odd relationship and will come close to my rough idea of introducing her at ~10K into the story. She plans to use Boy, but at least will be honest about it. Much of her past will be unsaid in this version, just terse hints about the Academy though not really what the point of it is -- or why the Kingdom finds it necessary to have a place to train girls to be ladies. There's a couple of secondary characters I need to fix, but we'll see how it all goes.

Being the hopefully final version of Boy & Fox

Being the story of a king who holds love higher than his kingdom, how far one has to run in order to escape destiny, and how sometimes we have to betray ourselves if we want to survive. This is the tale of a boy and a girl, an alliance that could be friendship and the long, hard paths we take to return home, and the stranger routes some must take to find a home at all.

And it is a story about a fox, because every story worth the telling has a fox in it.

There are things about the Wasting everyone knows even though they have never been: that the trees are bleached bone, that the sky is not a sky, that the dead are drawn there to die. That it grows when dreams die is also known, and that lies make it strong, and a truth told to hurt makes it stronger still. It is north of everything, as near as despair and as far as hope. Anyone can reach the Wasting, and the holes in our hearts can draw it to us. It is all that is wrong with the worlds and no one who enters can leave.
        These are known things and believed things and, with one exception, all are true.
        There is a stream that separates the Wasting from everything, a trail scoured into the skin of the world; water once the colour of tears long since mixed with mud and sediments. A brave man could cross it, but no brave man would for it is not bravery that brings one to the Wasting but emptiness and darker things beside. The desperate cross it at times to find loved ones, to make amends, for forgiveness. Each gesture is as hollow as the last.
        The Wasting only takes.
        A forest borders the wasting, though to call it that is to insult even weeds: the trees are plague-grey twisted things, corpse-thin branches grown sideways rather than up, for the Sun cannot bear to shine down on such a place. Ruins can be found, if one looks: scattered rock and wood, echoes from ae past when men would built castles before the Wasting and roar defiance at it.
        It was a long time ago. Now men seek battles with other men, the Wasting a nightmare's dream left to stories and the quiet tales told long after the taverns have closed and the press of the night draws out such stories from tellers who should know better than to give voice to such tales.
        Because there are trees, the forest has insects. Because there are insects, small animals live even here, eating and being eaten, hunting and being hunted. There is an order to the chaos of things that not even the Wasting can wholly blight. The small animals that scurry about the forest are thin things, fur dull and matted and eyes duller still. There were few of them in any age, and in this one fewer still as a fox roamed the edge of the Wasting, and had done so for long enough to leave tracings of his passing even in such a place as this.
        The fox's fur was as deep and red as any fox who had had ever been, the legs of his feet as black as night, his chest white as mountain snow and the bushiest tail that was the envy of all other foxes and many other animals beside. His steps were light on the cold ground and he paced the brook that lined the Wasting without pause. If dwelling that close a land the colour of a widow's heartache touched the fox, he showed nothing of it in a smile almost as sharp and bright as his eyes, for he was the first of all foxes and coyote and raven mere echoes of his tales.         Days passed as he walked the edges of the worlds. Cold followed warmth and cold again, the changing of the seasons barely real in the deep north of the world. The fox heard men and avoided them since even his desire for tricks and games was blunted by the Wasting.
        Time passed.
        The fox, whose name was Reynard in all the worlds that were, waited.
        Even more time passed.
        Other men came, and other species beside: an army even, once, that flew through the air on the chants of magicians. The fox avoided them, and mourned them not at all. He moved south, slow but sure, as the Wasting crept deeper into the world, and still the fox waited with a sureness hinting at hope that can outlast even despair. One could have asked what the fox was waiting for, and perhaps he would have said – for there is no fox born that will not spin a tale for the asking – but the truth is a tale too precious for any fox to tell.
        This is all the truth we need to know: Reynard Fox waited until he waited no longer.

in which things are explained

<alcar> New blurb done:
<alcar> Being the story of a king who holds love higher than his kingdom, how far one has to run in order to escape destiny, and how sometimes we have to betray ourselves if we want to survive. This is the tale of a boy and a girl, an alliance that could be friendship and the long, hard paths we take to return home, and the stranger routes some must take to find a home at all.
<alcar> And it is a story about a fox, because every story worth the telling has a fox in it.
<Chaos`^> every story does? :p
<Chaos`^> what about your other stories without foxes?
<alcar> the foxes are in disguise :P
<Chaos`^> hahaha
<Chaos`^> that's cute

On the death of a draft

Sometimes a story works. Sometimes characters and plot and story mesh together and things work. Then there is the rest of the time. In two months. I've managed 40K on Ghoulish Trappings. I have fixed stuff for the series, discovered some things that didn't work at all and fleshed out the world a lot. So there's that.

But somewhere close to the 35K mark, I realized something: the story didn't need to be told. The first novel: very much so. The one coming next [which will probably use this same title]: yes. But this story hovered in a place between them that never quite fit. The characters worked. Even the story did, but the plot teetered along and a lot of things that needed to happen simply didn't feel right, entire connections making little sense. If I didn't do the the novel entirely in Wray's POV, it might work. But I don't think so. So for the time being it's going to become purely 'stuff that happens between novels'.

If, somewhere down the road, the series sells and works, I could revise it and throw it up for free online. A story needed something overarching to hold the disparate elements together and this story does not, at present, have that. It needs a serious degree of revision in tone and plot that would basically involve a 'rewrite from scratch'. Which I'm not up for doing right now.

Some of this is probably because March-April tend to be my normal dead months of writing in a year. I'm not sure. But I find myself wanting to write the novel that was to come next more and finding that this novel isn't adding much to the series. It feels like part 2 of the first novel rather than a story in and of itself. I think I will get back to it at some point, and fix things up. It is fixable, the plot is doable, but I need a mental break from the series.

What that break will be, who knows? I need to edit the first book of the series, and will likely begin that soonish. In the meantime, I'm thinking of giving Boy & Fox another hard look and reducing it back to the original concept. It might work. It might not. Won't know until I try.