Blogging: a thought on writing the darkness ( #weblit #amwriting )

Feb6

I was just re-reading Time Travelers Strictly Cash by Spider Robinson, and there’s a note at the end of God Is An Iron (also part of his novel MindKiller):

    …while the character of Karen Scholz is not drawn from life and is whollly imaginary, the business involving her father is not fiction… Animals like her father are not made up by writers for shock value; they exist.

Every times I think I’m going a little overboard with the darkness in a story, the world surprises me with how dark it gets. Every time I think “no, someone would never do that to someone else,” the internet shows me pictures of someone who did it to themselves.

The world is awfully dark sometimes. I wish I did a better job of shining light on the roaches out there.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/5020.html. You can comment here or there.

Cool: a Sunday meme

Feb6

Stolen from [personal profile] recessional

Name a character I’ve written about, and I will tell you three things that I think are essential to keep in mind when writing that character.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/4855.html. You can comment here or there.

Resources for Online Fiction readers and writers #weblit #webfiction

Feb5

Recently I have been made aware of just how many barely-connected circles there are of fiction on the internet. I can’t connect the circles, but I can offer up a clearinghouse for resources, so that is what I’m doing.

If I’ve missed something, please tell me about it.

For readers and writers:
http://muses-success.info/ – rated & reviewed listings of online fiction
http://www.epiguide.com/forums/ – a community devoted to original online entertainment
http://community.livejournal.com/crowdfunding/ – a livejournal community for all things crowdfunded
http://crowdfunding.dreamwidth.org/ – Crowdfunding community on Dreamwidth, thanks [personal profile] clare_dragonfly
http://webfictionguide.com/ – rated & reviewed listings of online fiction
see also
http://novelsonline.info/ – Web Fiction Guide listings by rating
http://topwebfiction.com/ – Web Fiction Guide listings by reader votes

For writers:
http://weblit.us/ – WebLit, for marketing, promotion and cross-promotion for web literature

For readers:
http://www.ergofiction.com/ – ErgoFiction, a magazine for readers and fans of webfiction.

On Twitter:
Hashtags for finding online fiction include:
#weblit
#webfiction
#webfic
#tuesdayserial
#amwriting (for writers)
#fantasy (or #scifi, or #spec/#specfic and so on)

Most importantly: forums, blogs, twitter chats – other people. I have connected to more stories, and gotten more readers, simply chatting with other people online.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/4376.html. You can comment here or there.

15-minute Ficlet: Anger

Feb4

Originally posted here, in repsonse to the prompt:

“Anger is a killing thing: it kills the man who angers, for each rage leaves him less than he had been before – it takes something from him.”

I think it’s Tir na Cali –> Catpeople, but I’m not certain.

The rage was never as solid as it was that Wednesday, never as hot, never as silent.

The worst of it, for me, was knowing that no-one else would either see it nor care if they did. Anger, from one such as me, was /cute/, was adorable, pat-head and chuckle, like a kitten whose teeth aren’t a threat yet. No-one cared when I was angry, no one feared, no one worried.

I wanted them to worry, to quake, to run, but I’d learned to smile through the anger. I had learned, since my anger caused only amusement, to not give them the pleasure of being amused at my expense on top of whatever insult had angered me.

So I smiled. I smiled so they couldn’t see the teeth that their science had made sharp; I smiled so they couldn’t see the anger that they had bred, all unknowing, into me, the rage that demanded that I kill or be killed. I bowed, so very low, and I smiled, so very sweetly, and I did not acknowledge the insults with anything louder than a “yes, sir.”

That is what they expected, was it not? They expected a cute and defanged little pet, someone who would purr in their laps, someone who would snuggle against them and keep their bed warm, who would make cute little noises on cue. They had trained me for that. They had trained me to be domestic; they had forgotten, if they ever knew, that they had also bred me to be feral.

Though the smiles, through the bows, through the trained-animal dances that they put me through, through the day and into the night, the rage sustained me. Through the morning and the next day of the same. It had been, after all, a very great insult, and it would take a long time for the rage to build properly, while I bowed, while I danced, while I smiled.

When I slipped into his bed that next night, when my claws opened his belly from ribs to hip, I could see the surprise in his eyes as he gurgled out his last. I could see his confusion, that his good little pet had rebelled. That his kitten had claws that could rend flesh. That my anger was not to be head-patted and brushed off.

I left with his blood still wet on my claws, to find a master who would put no other pretty little thing before me.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/4344.html. You can comment here or there.

Mythic Thursday 50-word Fic #weblit

Feb3

He hadn’t expected the hooves; the searing, bone-breaking pain of toes, heel, and arch bending themselves all into hard, cloven, three-toed lumps. Next to the crippling agony of the feet, the horns curling out of his skull were nothing.

He’d asked to be a god. He hadn’t specified which one.

Drake-athon! – Feb. 19th & 20th 2011

15-minute Ficlet: Passing

Feb3

Originally posted here, in response to the photo prompt

Passing

They’d gotten out.

Sylvie turned to look one last time at the city. It looked so peaceful and benign in the setting sun, no sign of the hell it had become visible from this distance, nothing but the fence they’d had to get around, the fence that trapped the denizens of the city in there with each other.

She looked up, up, up at the fence, and then back at Jake, sighing softly. If they had gotten out, others would, too. Someone else would be less discreet, and then their captors would know that there were escapees. “We should get going,” she told him. “Before the hunt comes.” They would have to vanish into the world, before they were missed. It was their only hope of salvation, or survival.

He nodded, the ragged mess a gangster had made of his throat having muted him permanently. He took a long look at her paws, all four of them bloody and cracked with the work of digging them out of there, of filling the hole back in, and scooped her up in his arms.

“Ja-ake,” she complained, but she was grateful, and, when he shook his head at her in a silent scold, she fell silent and relaxed in his hold.

The dark had fallen, and nothing human would be within ten miles of the blockaded city. Jake loped off into the dark, Sylvie drowsing in his arms. By the time the sun rose again, they would look like just another couple, somewhere sixty miles away. By the time the jailors started looking for escapees, they’d have become nothing more than two more people out of billions, just a couple of humans in the crowd.

It was a nice dream, at least, and he let her have it, for now, while he ran.

Drake-athon! – Feb. 19th & 20th 2011

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/3780.html. You can comment here or there.

Carry On Tuesday Short Story: “Children’s Hour” #weblit

Feb1

Children’s Hour

It wasn’t universally recognized, of course. On a colony like Roan Oak, you were lucky to get people to generally acknowledge the direction the sun rose from every morning; you couldn’t normally get more than twenty-five out of any hundred people to agree on what year it was, and often a marriage group couldn’t settle on a last name so they all used something different. But the Children’s Hour was more regularly recognized than most “actual” holidays were, and, possibly, more enjoyed.

It was certainly louder than anything but the Spring-has-come festivals, a cacophonous clatter that echoed from one end of the settlements to the other. For, in that time when the sun had begun to set but there was still light out, across all the scattered villages, miners and carters, teachers and shopkeepers, farmers and craftspeople all put down their work and went outside.

And all of them, the gruffest miner, the sternest teacher, the most curmudgeonly shopkeeper, every single one of them, (of those who took part, of course, because there would always be some who did not participate), they all played. The brought out the balls, big and small, the bats and the nets, the mittens in winter and the sprinklers in summer, the toy trucks and the dolls, and, for an hour as the sun sank below the horizon of their new world, grown men and women acted like children for just a little while.

The children, too, played, of course, most of them enjoying seeing their parents and mentors acting silly, “acting like children,” (the children would say they were acting nothing of the sort, but they’d mostly learned not to disillusion their elders, and, by the time they, themselves, were grown-ups, almost all of them forgot that particular complaint).

Some said a teacher had started the trend, wanting to connect her students and their parents; some, a doctor, who wanted people to be more healthy, to be more active outside of repetitive work. A few, who were the closest to right and the least often listened to, murmured that it had been a miner, who just wanted an excuse to kick the ball around after work.

The miner’s wives, both of them grey with age by now, smiled to themselves, and kicked the bases into place for a Children’s Hour game of baseball.

For Carry On Tuesday; today’s prompt was:

    the first verse of Longfellow’s poem The Children’s Hour
    Between the dark and the daylight
    When the night is beginning to lower
    Comes a pause in the day’s occupations
    That is known as the Children’s Hour

This story takes place in the same place as my flash fiction The Colony, sponsor for $15

Addergoole
Drake-athon!

15-Minute Ficlet: Come the Dark

Jan31

Originally posted here, in response to the prompt: “The darkness holding me tightly / Until the sun rises up.” Faint shades of Cali, but rather faint.

Night had never felt so safe as it did in her little cubbyhole, so wrapped-in-cotton, so silent, and so entirely entrapping. Nothing could get to her, locked in her tiny, dark room, in her bunk with no sharp edges. She couldn’t even hurt herself, folded into the pod-bed as she was; there was nothing to use as a weapon, even her fingernails trimmed down, pretty and pink-painted and dull.

It was so soft and so surreal, the sheets so smooth as to have no texture at all, the bed like a hammock, sucking her in, that even emotions couldn’t seem to get through. There was the moment of panic, every time the pod closed, and then nothing but soft, comforting peace. Darkness wrapped around her with soft velvet fingers, and carried her in to sleep.

Only when the sun rose did her pod open, and only when her pod opened did she wake, and only then, with the sunlight trickling in through the windows high above, brushing over the long racks of pods, did she begin to fear again. Only when the overseer came, to hand out the day’s clothing ration, the day’s breakfast, did she find herself allowed to remember where she was, and only as her bare feet hit the cold concrete floor did she recall, for the briefest moment, who she had been before.

The sun may have been her friend, once upon a time, but here, it was an enemy. When the daylight shone, implacable on her chafed and chapped skin, she worked, she and all the others, the others she didn’t dare think too hard about. When the sun was in the sky, there was pain, and fear, and exhaustion that never seemed to end. Only when the darkness wrapped around her was there peace; only when the night held her close could she relax.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/2941.html. You can comment here or there.

100-word ficlet: Runaway #weblit

Jan30

Things were getting hot on land, so they took to the water: they stole a small pleasure yacht from an unguarded marina and vanished into the ocean before their pursuers could catch up.

The sea was cruel, but they were fast, and when they couldn’t beat her, they could trick her. She tried to kill them with her wild waves and sharp winds, but they clung to her back, like a cowboy on a bull. She bucked and kicked, but they held tight; in the end, she gave them what they’d come for.

Their pursuers never found them. Nobody did.

Based on eseme‘s prompt: “the Ocean!”

Um. 🙂