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ysabetwordsmith has posted here (and on LJ) a discussion on this article on “What Do You Mean When You Say You Want ‘Strong Female Characters’?”
I had strong feelings about it reading Ysabet’s post, stronger ones having read the article, but… putting those aside for a moment, what do YOU think? What makes a strong character?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/118694.html. You can comment here or there.
For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “19) write a story in which something goes BOOM.”
Also for the Abduction Prompts: here
Cya/Cynara is a RP character from the Addergoole roleplay. Her Wiki page is here This takes place sometime post-year-9 but before-the-apoc.
June again. Cynara packed the boys off to school, called the younger’s father to remind him to pick them up afterward, then spent a good couple hours helping Hroderich move into his own apartment. He was a good kid, got along well with her sons, but, well, like his brothers, wasn’t really into girls.
Once she had him tucked in, with one last you-were-a-good-Kept hug and a now-be-a-good-man punch in the arm, she double-checked her packing and started driving.
It was a ten-hour-drive from Hroderich’s new place to the Village outside of Addergoole. Cya found it meditative, a way of spring-cleaning her brain of the cobwebs and trailed her most recent Kept had left, of sweeping out the dust of former loves and lovers. She slept at a motel halfway there – the old lady winked at her. Didn’t know what she was up to, but after four years of this trip, recognized her. Cya smiled back at her, left her the tray of cookies, and slept.
It was late morning on move-out day when she drove into the Village and started waking up her power. If she let it ride most of the time, she could push it, times like this, ask it to Find things that were esoteric and a bit vague. Find me the boy I can take home with me, she asked it. Someone who’ll fall for it, someone who might need it.
The tugging in her head was like a compass. This way. Down Main Street and up the hill, to the gate of Maureen’s house. Hunh. A linen shirt and a thatch of auburn, a bit untidy, khakis and no shoes. Leaning against the outside fence, staring in.
She leaned up next to him, studying the kid-pack playing there, picking out the girl that was probably his.
“She’s lovely,” she murmured. When his attention turned reluctantly to her, she offered a hand. “Cynara.”
“Pellinore.” His grip was firmer than his effete look suggested, and she swallowed a smile. Ambrus’ sons were fun.
~~
Pellinore had accepted Cynara’s offer of a ride; his mother’s home, the only place he knew other than Addergoole, was only a day’s drive from the school, and his mother, in a state of denial, it seems, had left him to find his own way home.
It took him about an hour to realize that something was up, an hour they spent cheerfully gossiping about Addergoole professors and ignoring any of the really uncomfortable topics, such as who’s the bitch who won’t let you get near your daughter? or so, who Owned you and how bad was it?. Mike seemed a safe topic, so they joked about cy’Linden, and cy’Luca, and how some things never changed.
And then he happened to notice (because she allowed him to; she had practice, by now, at very subtle Mind Workings) that they were going very fast down a road in the wrong direction to get him home, and his Addergoole-honed caution reminded him that she, too, had gone through the School of Hell.
He didn’t stop to ask questions, she gave him that. He began rattling off a combat Working as fast as he could speak, pointing at the road beyond the car.
Boom! A wall of force and earth began rolling towards them with a crack like thunder. Cya swerved to miss it while she muttered her own working, destroying the earth wall with another boom and then throwing in a fast mind-control while he was still trying to make her emotions twist.
“Stop,” she said, as gently as she could with his created panic twisting inside her. “Release the Workings.”
He stared at her sullenly, her control forcing obedience, his own panic clearly rising. Torn by his resemblance to another son of Ambrus, she patted his knee. “Look at it this way,” she offered. “It could be a lot worse.”
The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ)
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ)
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ)
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ)
15) prompt: ascension (LJ)
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ)
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ)
18) prompt: a step too far (LJ
19) write a story in which something goes BOOM.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/117884.html. You can comment here or there.
For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “18) prompt: a step too far.”
In the same world/ship as Evolution and All Green Dots. Short version: Alae is the ceremonial Queen on a generation ship; Eka is her partner.
“Trepp, Alae, it smells like stale piss.” They had both been on edge lately, vibrating with the tension of the ship, with the political maneuverings that threatened both of them, feeling crammed in even Alae’s larger cubic and not spending any hour aside from work apart. The perfume had been the cracked cog that had thrown them out of working order. “Do you own a scent that can’t be smelled in the next star system?”
It was a step too far, enough to send Alae storming out into the corridors, alone and without a weapon, stomping through the ship like a force of nature, ready to rip the panels off anyone who got in her way.
Jol Ruinson was the hapless fool who crossed her path first, a hydrologist from the upper port quadrant. “Alae, your Majesty,” he oozed. He always oozed, like he was half-liquid himself. “Have you come to recant your refusal? Have you seen the light?”
“Hardly,” she snapped. “Jol, I will marry you when the void is safe to breathe, when the ship stops moving, when our water falls from blue skies. I’ll marry you when myths are true, and not before.”
She could tell the moment the words were out of her mouth that it was too much, too far. She had been turning him down (and a half-dozen others) since she moved out of the crèche, but she had always been polite. Today…
“Your perfume smells like piss, your Majesty,” he snarled, one hand going for her hair and the other, holding a taser she hadn’t noticed, for her ribs.
She didn’t lose consciousness until he dragged her until the dark.
And for Eseme’s prompt wanting to see a rescue in this setting:
“You have got to be treppin’ kidding me,” Eka shouted, her voice echoing off the corridors. “It’s a finite space, a ship. How can you not find. One. Woman. In. A. Spaceship?”
The police squirmed uncomfortably under her barrage. “Engineer,” one of them began, another quickly interrupting, “Princess.” She turned to the third, waiting to see how he’d address her.
“Eka,” he said quietly. “There are seven hundred fifty thousand people on this ship, and the cubic to match. We are doing everything we can to find Alae.”
She stared at him levelly for a moment, then, reluctantly, nodded. Everything we can. “All right,” she agreed quietly, “but, perhaps, you’re not doing everything I can.”
It only took a few minutes to convince the beleaguered officers to go along with her plan, and another half hour to set up the scanners to do what she wanted. The planners of the Zimmer had taken great pains to limit surveillance to the large public-gathering sites, valuing privacy where personal space was inherently limited. But the life-support systems were fine-tuned, able to deflect the smallest variations. Eka doubted anyone had used the system to track their lover’s perfume before. It took the scanners fifteen minutes to isolate the trail.
The supply corridor had been blocked off in a remodel two generations past, the only access a panel that had been unscrewed. In the space behind – half the size of Eka’s apartment – Alae and her captor lay, dimly lit by the standby lights. The engineer princess dove forward, heedless of weapons, to gather her Queen in her arms.
“I told you,” she murmured, “your perfume was a bit strong.”
The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ)
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ)
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ)
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ)
15) prompt: ascension (LJ)
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ)
17) write an uncomfortable story (LJ)
18) prompt: a step too far
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/117747.html. You can comment here or there.
The writing has slowed, as paperwork continues to interfere, but still I continue. Since my last report, so many hours ago, I have written:
Two people, both abducting the other,
a warrior, who grows fond of her captor, and a former Addergoole student returning to her old stomping grounds.
The money in the pot has reached $45. If it reached $60, I shall be writing for quite a bit longer.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/117232.html. You can comment here or there.
For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “17) write an uncomfortable story.”
Faerie Apocalypse (LJ Link), Addergoole Year Nine, the day after “Say Yes.” (LJ).
Thorburn seemed jittery and uncomfortable on Wednesday, as if somehow he’d been the one to get the wrong end of Tuesday night. It grated on Ceinwen, set her teeth on edge. What right did he have to play the victim?
“I still hate you, you know,” she informed him, since he wouldn’t let her leave the room.
“Stop saying that,” he snapped, without looking away from his homework.
Bereft of even that pleasure, she pulled up a second chair and sat next to her Keeper, staring at him. He was Masked, handsome, his dreads tidy, his eyes improbably hazel-green. “You’ve never shown me,” she said abruptly. If she was going to be uncomfortable, she’d find a way to share it. “Even on Hell Night, you kept your Mask up.”
He frowned, closing his book, finally, to look at her. She plowed on, a little nervously.
“I know there are people without physical Changes, one or two of them, at least. And I know that some aren’t visible with their clothes on, but I’ve…” she swallowed hard and forced herself to continue, “seen you with your clothes off. No Changes. Why haven’t you shown them to me?”
He was still frowning, and she struggled against the urge to quail backwards. His orders last night left her uncomfortable with talking about what had happened, but this… if he wanted her to stop, he’d tell her.
“I mean…”
“When you Change,” he interrupted her. “When you Change, I will show you. I promise.”
The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ)
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ)
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ)
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ)
15) prompt: ascension (LJ)
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip. (LJ)
17) write an uncomfortable story
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/116889.html. You can comment here or there.
To lilfluff‘s commissioned prompt in my Call for Prompts: A story in which both parties believe they are the abductor and the other is the abducted.
Sections of 83 words, because it pleased me to do so.
“Come away with me this weekend.”
The words had sounded so innocent, and been so permanent under the surface. Spring Break. No schoolwork to worry about (other schools might try, but a state school knew better than to bother), parents who weren’t going to ask where their kids were going, in case they accidentally found out, and she’d lied to her friends about her secret plans for the weekend. By the time anyone realized they were gone, it would be way too late.
| “With you? Sure.”
That made everything both harder and easier. He’d been working out a plan, but hadn’t expected the opportunity to jump into his lap like this. He didn’t have all of his details in place; he was going to have to wing some of it. He came up with a lie for his parents and another for his friends, and packed his special bag inside his normal suitcase. He really hated winging it. It left way too much up to chance. |
“It’s just down this road.”
Away from everything, secluded, private. Far enough away that nobody would hear them. Far enough away that even finding them would be tricky, unless you knew what you were looking for. Her uncle had built the place. She had never asked him why; she didn’t really want to know. She’d bleached it roof to basement when she inherited, and waited for the family to forget about it, and him, and her.
They’d been more than willing to oblige.
| “This place is really out there, isn’t it?”
More than out there, it was the sort of remote he hadn’t known existed this close to the city. They’d been driving for half an hour since the last gas station (she’d filled up there, much to his relief), and the houses were few and far between, nestled into hillsides. Often, all you saw was the mailbox, lone and lonely-looking. He tried to memorize everything; he didn’t want to stand out, lost, when he left. |
“Now that we’re all alone…”
With her touch, the cabin had become pretty cozy. She’d pulled all the drapes and lit a fire, leaving them enveloped in wood-paneled hunting-lodge charm. Even a passing hiker wouldn’t nothing anything, which was good, on the rare occasion that things went sour. Uncle Thomas had really planned for everything.
(She’d left the flower bed alone. She didn’t want to know who was under there, any more than her parents wanted to know where she got her money).
| “Quite alone.”
The place reminded him of a couple of his bolt holes. It was well-situated, well-provisioned, and cozy, with what looked from the outside like a full basement. Somebody had put some money into this place. And now, here he was, locked in it (she hadn’t noticed when he pocketed the deadbolt key) with his quarry. Cuddled on the couch like the college kid he was pretending to be. The only trick was going to be getting out of here with her. |
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/116723.html. You can comment here or there.
Okay. So, for the Anthropologist sub-series of the Planners’verse…
The narrator. I picture her original clothing a combination of a British explorer – thus and Evie from the 1st Mummy movie – thus, or dollies.
Her look is something like this girl and this girl (here).
Okay. That’s the easy part. Librarians wear robes, see icon. They have textile production, at least small-scale.
This is 300+ years after the “Conflict,” which, as I can picture it, is a massive economic meltdown leading to total social collapse. Enclaves of “civilization” exist, along with tribes who have gone back to a nomadic lifestyle, who distrust the Tower(s), the villages, etc.
So. What do the Wild Tribes wear?
Also, why hasn’t more technology reasserted itself? *why* is so much of the country still wild?
But more importantly right now, what do the Wild Tribes wear?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/116408.html. You can comment here or there.
For the 30 Days Meme Second Semester, for the prompt “16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip.”
John Stollich never knew, when he got home from a tour, what would greet him. Sometimes he thought that was why he stayed on the road as long as he did, coming home only, really, to cut another CD. He’d come home one time, and Onyx would be wrapped around his leg, best-daughter-ever, happy to see him, chattering about what she was learning in school, don’t-ever-leave-again-Dad. The next time, she’d be distant and chill, or flat-out nasty.
The nannies weren’t any better. At best, they lasted a year, year and a half. It was either John that turned them off, or Onyx, or the sometimes-strange things that happened around her, or her insatiable and incorrigible curiosity.
Bringing her on the bus had, because of that curiosity, never been a good option. He did so for very short periods of time, when the bus had been well-scrubbed and censored. The last thing he wanted to do was explain to a prepubescent kid what condoms were for.
He braced himself, getting rid of all thoughts of condoms, groupies, and drugs, and opened his front door. Was this going to be good visit, or a bad one?
She wasn’t in the living room waiting, which was new – generally the nanny brought her down. Instead, his manager, Ray, sat there, frowning.
“What is it this time?” John dropped his duffle bag and waited.
“She ran off again.”
“Damnit, Ray, what is this, seven times?”
“Fourteen.” He paused, then added, reluctantly, “Her aunt called again.”
I present another reboot, for a setting written so long ago I can’t find the original (which itself was a reboot). Onyx-Black and the fanfic of doom.
The List:
1a) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
1b) the story starts with the words “It’s going down.” (LJ Link)
2) write a scene that takes place in a train station.
3) the story must involve a goblet and a set of three [somethings]
4) prompt: one for the road
5) write a story using an imaginary color
6) write the pitch for a new Final Fantasy styled RPG (LJ Link)
7) prompt: frigid (LJ Link)
8) write a scene in the middle of a novel called “The Long, Dirty Afterwards” (LJ)
9) prompt: mourning dead gods (LJ)
10) write a story set in three different time periods. (LJ)
11) Write a movie trailer style trailer for a story, existing or not-yet-written. (LJ)
12) prompt: sweet iced tea (LJ)
13) re-write a story that everyone knows (LJ)
14) write a vanilla story dealing with kinky subject matter (LJ)
15) prompt: ascension (LJ)
16) write a scene that takes place at the end of a long road trip.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/116122.html. You can comment here or there.
So, I have these two characters. Ceinwen and Thornburn
Ceinwen’s name means “blessed and beautiful,” loosely. She is a maternal cousin of Aelgifu – that is, she comes from the side of the family that provided the glowy light bits but not the horns. She looks loosely like the Meez in the DW icon.
Thornburn was apparently a typo *headdesk;* THORBURN comes “From the Old Norse name Þórbjörn, which meant “Thor’s bear” from the name of the Norse god Þórr (see THOR) combined with björn “bear”.” http://www.behindthename.com/name/torbjo12rn
I know about him that he is generally brown, and well-spoken. Also, taller and broader than Ceinwen.
They need Changes. Ideas?
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/115830.html. You can comment here or there.
Also, meeks has illustrated again, stryck‘s short story Starlit Rays.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/115296.html. You can comment here or there.
