Nov
2017
From
this morning's output:
“I
love you too.” I pause. “Like a sibling.”
Writing
fun of the morning:
With
the canopy of trees dissipating, the shape of the flying creature
becomes visible again. At least thirty feet, long and serpentine
without any sign of wings. A sound fills the air, and I imagine it is
mourning and fury both but in the moment it somehow sounds more like
a tugboat being molested.
You
know things are going oddly when 16K into the story you realize you
needed to rename the main character for plot reasons ... shall see
what today brings.
from
WIP:
“Those
who abuse others with their power always seek more power. Fear does
not allow you to do otherwise.”
“You
– all of us – could just be distractions to confuse others. If
we’re more than that, it’s good, but perhaps we don’t need to
be. You don’t get to be as old as Minou is by needing to rely on
others, so we’re here but perhaps not needed?”
“That
might be true for you,” I snap, “But *I* am the POV character of
this story, which means I am the main character and clearly
important.”
“And
what have you done that’s important so far?” Druup demands.
“I
added words. I must have done that. I – must have more purpose than
that, surely?”
No
one responds. I have at least 20,000 words to prove them wrong.
I never walked away. I was only ever
brave enough to run, and coward enough no never look back and not
once listen to those who screamed my name.
From
WIP:
Everyone
is working, on their way to work or thinking about work. I don’t
even have to try to use my magic to feel that. This is a court of the
fae, and it feels like I walked into bad Dickens fanfic that was
pro-industrialist. I shiver a little, not meaning to.
From
WIP:
“It
is something I often think about. How much weaker I would be if I
could do more than I can. It is a difficult concept to explain.”
Start
of second nano:
It
was a dark and stormy morning, the kind that the government had
mandated for the last two weeks. Thunder rumbled through a sky
without rain, lightning arcing in random bursts that almost hid the
vast shapes far above, almost was enough to make you believe a war
wasn’t being fought overhead for the sake of the world.
From
WIP:
My
sister looks up at me for a long moment, then sighs. “That’s the
problem with this family. We’re all too damned good at acting. I
can play the martyr as easily as you can, but no one has to”
And
she leaves my room before I can think of a reply.
Writing
a sci-fi novel off the seat of your pants is ... an exercise. In
insanity, but definitely an exercise.
From
writing from late last night:
“Aswag.
I haven’t had a headache since the night the car fell off of the
tram.”
“I
already told you, cars don’t fall off the tram system,” he
screams.
I
jerk back into the pillows behind me.
“Shut
up, Jeff. Shut up and don’t talk. You haven’t had a headache
since that day because people whose head explode tend not to have
headaches ever again.”
Per
some thoughts last night: Star Trek TV series seem reluctant to forge
into the future OF that franchise (Post Next Gen, DS9 etc.), which on
the face of it is very odd since all that's left is bad retcons and a
more limited time/space to work in. But one problem is that the ship
designs etc. reflect a far more 20th than 21st century idea of how a
starship would work.
Which
is why I propose the following: given their mandate is just to
explore, and the existence of holodecks, bars and the like on the
craft, the Federation ships used for their various exploratory
missions are really repurposed pleasure yachts.
From
tonight's output:
I
stand, walking out of the ship’s rec room and leaving the others to
talk. A silence follows me that words begin to fill as I round the
corner toward my room. You can’t talk about a dead person when
they’re in the same room as you. Not when they can talk back.
From
WIP:
There
are many kinds of cowardice, but I could not afford to be the kind
that hides from the truth. No matter what it would cost me in the
end. No matter that I knew the cost going in. I’d like to think
that made me brave, but desperation wears many faces.
From
last night's odd output:
"To
die so that your enemy may someday know defeat is a poor victory but
there was at least some glimmer of glory in dying as bravely as they
could against impossible odds. There are defeats that can be as
glorious as victories.”
From
WIP:
“You
are holding an energy rifle with enough firepower – according to
the guides – to reduce a forest to atoms in a single shot,” Tanya
says dryly. “What, precisely, do you plan to shoot with that?”
“Hah!
You’ve never seen a rhinobear, have you? Fast as a tram car and
tougher than the hulls of some space craft. I’d be lucky to kill
one with a single shot, girl. This is Lethsea. There is game to hunt
here that you can’t find anywhere else. Not on Earth, not on any
other colony. Dogs. Cats. Cows. Chicken. Pigs. Oh, they have some
cats and dogs on Earth and Mars still but they are rare and tame, not
the feral beasts our ancestors hunted.”
Energy
flares out in a million shades of red, writhing tendrils of energy
twisting into space from where the red shiplet crashed into the El
vessel. Each looks like a baker tearing wounds into the darkness
between the stars.
...
typo from autocorrect on a phone or! adventures of a celestial pastry
chef: you decide!
From
WIP (characters acting out a scene from a play I might have to
eventually write out...):
“You
are my compass. Every compass I know is false that points north, but
my heart is a compass that points only to you!”
From
WIP:
My
father smiles, and the smile is closer to my mother’s than I’ve
ever seen from him before. “We’re actors, Captain Bluth. We can
decide what story you are in, and how that story is told. Stand your
people down, cease trying to break into an alien craft that is liable
to get annoyed soon and we can discuss this. There are solutions that
can benefit everyone, if we take the time to truly talk. Please.
Pretend there is more to war than making civilization a poorer
thing.”
From
WIP:
I
try to hate Merideth over the next seven hours, but hate is too hard
to hold onto. It’s not strong, not compared to the deaths of
everyone aboard the Delegation Five. Briin’s death is strong, in
its own strange way that’s mostly sadness over a father I knew
never. Merideth is right: we don’t have time to mourn, not
properly. I wonder if there is ever a proper time for mourning, or if
we all just carry our ghosts with us until we drop them without
knowing.
From
WIP:
“It’s
hard. Sometimes you’re so used to being hurt that you refuse to
admit you’re healing.”
“But
the problem with stories is that we make them real. We turn them into
books. We bring stories to life in order to reason with them. That is
what gods are, at the core of it: a bargain. With death, the
universe, with ideas and concepts. Once something can be reasoned
with, everything changes. We bargain with miracles and magic, to gods
and death and entropy and even the ending of all things.”
The
clouds stopped pretending to be rain clouds, but almost no one
noticed.
I
said I was too scared to be with you; now I understand that it was
bravery all along.
I
thought I had words but all I had was language.
We
erased the past as though it would lead to a future free of chains.
You
wanted to be discovered too much to be a secret. Not even from
yourself.
Dec
2017
The
tragedy pretended to be a comedy.
And
fooled no one.
I said I was too scared to be with you;
now I understand that it was bravery all along.
You wake up one morning wearing the wig
of the president of the united states. And it whispers things to you.
Secret things. Terrible things you were never meant to know...
You said forgiveness wasn’t a drug.
And yet. And yet.
Just so.
“Better? Heh. You aren’t interested
in making things better. You’re just interested in being right.”
You pretended that smiles could never
be wounds.
It was sometimes hard to remember that
this, too, was not a gift at all.
“But what if I am not the villain?
What, then, are you?”
Once upon a time, there was a
changeling child who tried to take over the kingdom in the sure and
certain knowledge that no one knew what a DNA test was.
The cold iron test proved effective in
the end.
“Books? Books are no longer my
sanctuary from the world: you are.”
“That’s too much. For me, for us: I
can’t bear that weight.”
“Please. I burned my library card
because of you like it was the library of Alex -.”
And that was when I knew it had to end.
Because I could never be everything that novels were to him. No
matter how hard we might try to make it so.
*
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You ran away.”
“I did. Sometimes it’s the only way
we can survive.”
“The funny thing about it is that
some run away. Some run to. But we’re all running. I think some
days the only time we get smart is when we stop.”
“How did you get to be so wise?”
“I got myself a library card. Read
all those books you used to. Other ones too. It doesn’t have to be
like that, not again.”
“What do you mean?”
“We could get Blockbuster cards.”
“… Blockbuster went out of business
a while ago.”
“I’ve been busy reading.”
“Netflix. We’ll get Netflix.”
I think my life might be going fine if
I’m ever charged with being an accessory to happiness.
I erased every song off my playlists
that reminded me of you.
It is almost soothing to be free of
music again.
Typo of the day:
Power crawls about him like a cloak and
moose both.
“You told me to have a lovely day
last week. I did not. That was a geas, a promise and it failed. And
that is why you have to die.”
“I’m a barista. It’s my job to
say that!”
“I know I can’t destroy you.” The
villain smiles. “So I won’t. But my people are destroying
everyone you know, every person you care about, every cause you
champion. Even as we talk, everything in your life is falling apart.
And you will get to discover how powerful you really are.”
Your fingers dream against my skin, the
sky whispers clouds to us and I am struggling towards words
Melting in your
I am burning with the cold and every
leaf that falls tells a story we wish
was not real.
“For you I can pretend anything
Even -
that I am a poet
but for every word I lose when you ask
me
anything at all.”
Cashier: *attempts to ring though
zucchini of the customer ahead of me; scanner refuses to accept code,
speaks garbled words*
Cashier: “It spoke. I didn’t know
it could talk.”
Me: “Let’s all just back away
slowly.”
Cashier: “And now the screen’s
frozen. All over a zucchini.”
Me: *continues to back away*
Everyone is terrified of clowns, but
all small children fear Santa Claus. They understand what the rest of
the world has forgotten: the Santa is the next stage of the clown,
just another disguise clowns wear to hide their nature.
Older adults learn the same about
politicians, which are the final form.
The history of folklore is a long
campaign of informational warfare.
We
opened doors like they were windows, leaped through expecting a long
fall to the earth.
I
found the present under the tree. The one you said you hadn’t
wrapped. And neither of us know whose heart is in it.
It’s all games of pretend. The trick
is knowing it is a game, and just how far you’ll go to play a role.
I erased my greetings and the last
message on my answering machine as if it meant no one would ever call
me again.
His imaginary friend left him for
someone else.
He stood, swaying, eyes like discarded
suns.
Sometimes we almost pretend enough to
make it matter.
How many poems have you lost? How
desperate are you to find them again?
Nothing was broken, but everything was
bruised. And somehow that was worse by far.
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