It begins!
Nov. 2nd, 2004 02:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_dreamsRight. I really need to crash now.
Plus side; I've gotten 1240 words down. I wrote an introductory bit (twenty posts back) in September, but since it was written back in September, it doesn't count. May tack it on in December, though. I don't expect this to be polished by November 30, just 50,000 words long and hopefully complete. Revising can naturally happen afterwards.
Downside; oh dear Christ someone strangle me or my keyboard now, my prose is so fucking florid it's going to bloom and clog up my computer with tiny, sickly-sweet flowers.
Anyway.
Additional note: some people who I know to speak to face-to-face occasionally read this LJ. I am really kind of nervous about this whole trying to write a novel thing. If you have feedback, I don't care who you are, I don't care how well I know you or how sure you are I will handle what you have to say calmly or even happily, put it in a comment and I'll read it when I'm ready for it. I am just so not confident in my ability to take criticism with good grace right now.
That said, I'm tossing up an excerpt.
========
He came in the cold space between sunset and night.
Daylight was too harsh, and far too vital; it knit itself into the landscape with a thousand twining fingers of warmth and heat and highlight. And the nights had grown warmer since last he'd walked; the blackness that should have swallowed up the details of the land was sliced by warm light and sound, rushing past in steel cages. Even the sky was marbled with a sepia glow, a dull rippling effect that dripped from horizon to horizon like laudable pus on a swathe of blistered skin.
But the mid-time, the gloaming, was perfect. The muted quality of the air blurred the chiaroscuro intensity, erasing boundaires to meld day and night, land and sky. Twilight was a cheating time, that did not love itself or the space it lived in, and the world hardly noticed as he slipped in like a thief. Seven blades of grass withered at his feet and an early-sleeping sparrow fell dead from its branch, nothing more.
He stepped forward. The dying false light played across the space he held, and he wrung reality out of its reluctant touch. The highlight touch on nose and brow dipped and spread to form a face; dull glimmers on fingernails swept up to shape fingers and then hands as fine and sweetly made as any that ever strangled a lover. He turned to watch the light dying in the west, and the rest of him took form from the shadows of his partially made self.
The hammered surface of the road glimmered like a frosted river, and swept away to left and right before him; as his eyes fixed to his left, into the west, a smile split his newly formed face. He could feel the city's heat even at this distance, the thrumming pulse of its history and inhabitants and the echoing strength of its bones. It called like a watchfire, waiting for him to slit the guards throats and warm his hands as he sat amongst their sudden corpses.
He could walk the distance, he knew, but time was difficult if not exactly short.
========
Angela Paxton's booted foot lifted hesitantly off the gas. There was something, she was sure, but this damn half-light was such a bitch for anything except watching the road...
Quick glance in the mirror; no cars behind. She slowed a little more and brushed loose strands of short black hair out of her black-lined eyes. The shape by the side of the road wouldn't quite come into focus; its edges danced the way something will when you can't quite focus on it for lack of light. I need glasses, she thought. Her brother's profile, gazing abstractly into the middle distance, swam in front of the figure by the roadside as the car glid forward.
"Danny," she took one hand off the wheel to gesture away from the windshield, "move back."
Her brother blinked and then leaned back. Reclining, she noted absently, did nothing to make him look more relaxed, and neither did the worn jacket over the new black jeans and shirt, but at least it got him out of her line of sight, and he did it without so much as a question. Obliging as ever. He was not going to get anywhere with Kelly, she reflected, and it wasn't that you needed to be an asshole to get somewhere, it was that Danny was always obliging, and it was because he was always a doormat. Kelly was a goody-two-shoes, but she didn't go with people who were missing a spine.
She tried to focus on the figure by the side of the road, but its outlines swam like shadows behind a half-shut closet door at three in the morning. A dead tree, maybe? A... a bobcat, or something, hit by a car and lying there crushed, with its shadow thrown behind it onto rising sod by the carlights? She shook her head and returned her gaze to the road. They had to get to the show by nine-fifteen; Suney wouldn't hold seats for them any longer. Hard enough convincing him that she'd meant it when she said she didn't want him sniping at Danny all night.
The things I do for my brother --
Angela took a last look in the mirror to make sure no cars had come up behind her while she slowed, and was lost.
Eyes -- sharp, bleached, ice-grey as a corpse's after a long slow steeping in the waterlogged leaves of an autumn river -- stabbed into hers, and sudden panic seized her heart. Her fingers snapped tight on the steering wheel; four nails snapped off, two sank in deep enough to draw blood, and the last was ripped down to the quick. Sweat sprang out on her skin, and sour adrenaline seethed across her chest. Her neck flexed as she tried to turn back to the road, but the eyes held her own -- pain arrowed in like fine steel needles, sinking through her own eyes and into the runneled folds of the meat that held her mind -- and she felt something tear by the side of her throat as muscles wrenched against themselves. Her foot slammed down on the brake pedal, and the tired engine shrieked as metal peeled off metal somewhere deep within. There was a thumping to her left as Danny was thrown forward in his seat.
From a great height, she heard his voice, quick with fright. "What the hell're you -- "
"run. Danny. run. go. run" Her voice wasn't loud enough, it should be pealing out screams. The thought that had struck her less than a moment ago, of a shape shifting and turning in a child's closet past midnight, rang horribly true. The thing at the side of the road was all the night terrors she'd ever had, the source of bedtime rituals and blanket sanctuaries, the heart of every terrorized moment in the dark of the night, and she was about to see its face.
She felt Danny's hands slapping at her, releasing her safety belt. Her hands were still welded to the steering wheel. The eyes were coming closer. She had wet herself and tears were streaming down her face -- more than simple fear or pain, it was a desperate attempt to wash the sight in the mirror from her eyes, as if it were an actual piece of grit slicing into soft tissue.
"Angela? Angela? Come on, please? Hello?"
"run. please. run go go go" She could smell sweat, and blood, and piss, but she still couldn't take her eyes from the mirror. Her stomach clenched and bile burned up her throat.
The eyes were much closer now. They must be barely a yard from the side of the car. She felt a dim and filthy gratitude that Danny was between her and the owner of those eyes, that it would get to him before it laid hands upon her.
My baby brother --
They'd just been going out. Club. Music. Her to see friends, Danny to try and meet the girl he'd been mooning after for nearly a month.
She heard the click of a car door unlatching.
Plus side; I've gotten 1240 words down. I wrote an introductory bit (twenty posts back) in September, but since it was written back in September, it doesn't count. May tack it on in December, though. I don't expect this to be polished by November 30, just 50,000 words long and hopefully complete. Revising can naturally happen afterwards.
Downside; oh dear Christ someone strangle me or my keyboard now, my prose is so fucking florid it's going to bloom and clog up my computer with tiny, sickly-sweet flowers.
Anyway.
Additional note: some people who I know to speak to face-to-face occasionally read this LJ. I am really kind of nervous about this whole trying to write a novel thing. If you have feedback, I don't care who you are, I don't care how well I know you or how sure you are I will handle what you have to say calmly or even happily, put it in a comment and I'll read it when I'm ready for it. I am just so not confident in my ability to take criticism with good grace right now.
That said, I'm tossing up an excerpt.
========
He came in the cold space between sunset and night.
Daylight was too harsh, and far too vital; it knit itself into the landscape with a thousand twining fingers of warmth and heat and highlight. And the nights had grown warmer since last he'd walked; the blackness that should have swallowed up the details of the land was sliced by warm light and sound, rushing past in steel cages. Even the sky was marbled with a sepia glow, a dull rippling effect that dripped from horizon to horizon like laudable pus on a swathe of blistered skin.
But the mid-time, the gloaming, was perfect. The muted quality of the air blurred the chiaroscuro intensity, erasing boundaires to meld day and night, land and sky. Twilight was a cheating time, that did not love itself or the space it lived in, and the world hardly noticed as he slipped in like a thief. Seven blades of grass withered at his feet and an early-sleeping sparrow fell dead from its branch, nothing more.
He stepped forward. The dying false light played across the space he held, and he wrung reality out of its reluctant touch. The highlight touch on nose and brow dipped and spread to form a face; dull glimmers on fingernails swept up to shape fingers and then hands as fine and sweetly made as any that ever strangled a lover. He turned to watch the light dying in the west, and the rest of him took form from the shadows of his partially made self.
The hammered surface of the road glimmered like a frosted river, and swept away to left and right before him; as his eyes fixed to his left, into the west, a smile split his newly formed face. He could feel the city's heat even at this distance, the thrumming pulse of its history and inhabitants and the echoing strength of its bones. It called like a watchfire, waiting for him to slit the guards throats and warm his hands as he sat amongst their sudden corpses.
He could walk the distance, he knew, but time was difficult if not exactly short.
========
Angela Paxton's booted foot lifted hesitantly off the gas. There was something, she was sure, but this damn half-light was such a bitch for anything except watching the road...
Quick glance in the mirror; no cars behind. She slowed a little more and brushed loose strands of short black hair out of her black-lined eyes. The shape by the side of the road wouldn't quite come into focus; its edges danced the way something will when you can't quite focus on it for lack of light. I need glasses, she thought. Her brother's profile, gazing abstractly into the middle distance, swam in front of the figure by the roadside as the car glid forward.
"Danny," she took one hand off the wheel to gesture away from the windshield, "move back."
Her brother blinked and then leaned back. Reclining, she noted absently, did nothing to make him look more relaxed, and neither did the worn jacket over the new black jeans and shirt, but at least it got him out of her line of sight, and he did it without so much as a question. Obliging as ever. He was not going to get anywhere with Kelly, she reflected, and it wasn't that you needed to be an asshole to get somewhere, it was that Danny was always obliging, and it was because he was always a doormat. Kelly was a goody-two-shoes, but she didn't go with people who were missing a spine.
She tried to focus on the figure by the side of the road, but its outlines swam like shadows behind a half-shut closet door at three in the morning. A dead tree, maybe? A... a bobcat, or something, hit by a car and lying there crushed, with its shadow thrown behind it onto rising sod by the carlights? She shook her head and returned her gaze to the road. They had to get to the show by nine-fifteen; Suney wouldn't hold seats for them any longer. Hard enough convincing him that she'd meant it when she said she didn't want him sniping at Danny all night.
The things I do for my brother --
Angela took a last look in the mirror to make sure no cars had come up behind her while she slowed, and was lost.
Eyes -- sharp, bleached, ice-grey as a corpse's after a long slow steeping in the waterlogged leaves of an autumn river -- stabbed into hers, and sudden panic seized her heart. Her fingers snapped tight on the steering wheel; four nails snapped off, two sank in deep enough to draw blood, and the last was ripped down to the quick. Sweat sprang out on her skin, and sour adrenaline seethed across her chest. Her neck flexed as she tried to turn back to the road, but the eyes held her own -- pain arrowed in like fine steel needles, sinking through her own eyes and into the runneled folds of the meat that held her mind -- and she felt something tear by the side of her throat as muscles wrenched against themselves. Her foot slammed down on the brake pedal, and the tired engine shrieked as metal peeled off metal somewhere deep within. There was a thumping to her left as Danny was thrown forward in his seat.
From a great height, she heard his voice, quick with fright. "What the hell're you -- "
"run. Danny. run. go. run" Her voice wasn't loud enough, it should be pealing out screams. The thought that had struck her less than a moment ago, of a shape shifting and turning in a child's closet past midnight, rang horribly true. The thing at the side of the road was all the night terrors she'd ever had, the source of bedtime rituals and blanket sanctuaries, the heart of every terrorized moment in the dark of the night, and she was about to see its face.
She felt Danny's hands slapping at her, releasing her safety belt. Her hands were still welded to the steering wheel. The eyes were coming closer. She had wet herself and tears were streaming down her face -- more than simple fear or pain, it was a desperate attempt to wash the sight in the mirror from her eyes, as if it were an actual piece of grit slicing into soft tissue.
"Angela? Angela? Come on, please? Hello?"
"run. please. run go go go" She could smell sweat, and blood, and piss, but she still couldn't take her eyes from the mirror. Her stomach clenched and bile burned up her throat.
The eyes were much closer now. They must be barely a yard from the side of the car. She felt a dim and filthy gratitude that Danny was between her and the owner of those eyes, that it would get to him before it laid hands upon her.
My baby brother --
They'd just been going out. Club. Music. Her to see friends, Danny to try and meet the girl he'd been mooning after for nearly a month.
She heard the click of a car door unlatching.
