Echoes in a Hollow Space

Of course, I always have to do this whenever I see it making the rounds. Kind of a compulsion...



Here are the first lines of everything I am currently working on:


Venus in Transit

A lizard with a fleshy crest stared back at Sam Dunphy with red-glaring eyes.

[Boy, that first line was a long time ago. It's almost certainly going to change in rewrites.]

Blood Geek

Spotlights pinned him like a butterfly to a board.

"The Comfort of Stone"

Beatty couldn’t understand how the guy could cling to the side of the building like that.

"Band of Angels"

The sky is too beautiful on days like this, a razor-edged robin's egg that cuts my heart and blinds me.

"Loose Dogs"

"Gabrielle is such a night owl."

Mommy talked as if Gaby was not in the room, this time to Mrs. Krieg, the woman Mommy hoped would be the new nanny.

Time in a Bottle

Spring rippled wet and green across the hills of Somerset as surely it had done for millennia, bursting the flowers and gorse from the ground, the symphony of birdsong keeping time with the drip of rain, the shush of wind blowing through the new leaves.

[That's a working title, I think. I'm not that crazy about it.]

The Confessions of Thomasina

31st Meckellan, the Year of Our Suffrage, 1882

Dear Diary:

I believe that one should not set out to do a great deal of writing unless one has something to say.

[That title is subject to change, too, I think.]

Shivery Bones

Jolene's earthquake passed through her midsection, rolled along her limbs, then off into the grass beneath her toes to make the ground shake.

[A perennial entry. It just keeps coming back into play.]

I love anything that smacks of randomness, so I had to do this meme. In which you post your blog's first line of the first post of each month.

The year in review, as inspired by merebrilliante and prestoimp:

( Read More )

The Rewrite progresses.  I finished chapter 12 yesterday, and that leaves only 22 + Epilogue to go.  =:0  As is usually the case when I'm firmly committed to one piece of writing, other pieces start singing their siren songs to me.  "Oh, you'd much rather be working on me."  Usually I am able to regretfully but firmly decline—even though some of them grow quite insistent as time passes. 

When I was working on the last half of the first draft of Shivery Bones I kept getting insistent calls from a young woman named Hortensia, star of my novella, "Hortensia's Man," currently up on the Online Writing Workshop: http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/

She insisted that her story was important and needed to be told, and even though I agreed with her, I explained she'd have to wait her turn.  She wasn't satisfied with that, even when I did the historical research for the story hoping to appease her.  I begged off writing by telling her I couldn't start her story until I'd finished that research.  It didn't work.  She kept insisting.  I let her out of the box on weekends sometimes, but she never wanted to confine herself to weekends.  Still, over a six or so month period, her story did get told.

After I finished the first draft of ShivBo, I took about three months off.  The first month, April, I was busy getting ready for my trip or actually being on the trip, but I let the muse know that if he was so inclined, I was open to suggestions.  Nothing.  So I worked on stories from the trunk for about a month and a half, revisiting stories I hadn't looked at in over a year, refining and reworking.  I did another big chunk of work on a (still) unfinished story called, "The Green Ones."  Even so, nothing new tickled at my brain; none of the stories in my Ideas file decided they were ready for the next step.  I decided it was time to seriously launch into the rewrite.  Of course that's when all the new kids decided to move onto the block. 

First up was a story inspired by one of my own blog entries.  Which is somewhat like picking lint out of one's own navel, but whatever.  That story, "Green Horse Bone" gushed out about 1400 words in a few days, weaving in and out of the rewrite, before going on hiatus.  "Okay," I said, "you got that out of your system, now it's time to focus seriously on ShivBo."  I did, but GHB continues to weave in and out—dribs and drabs here and there when my back is turned. 

Then the Muse started playing an old, favored trick on me.  At night when I lay my weary head on the pillow—always on nights when I have to get up early for work the next morning—the Muse launches sneak attacks.  Just as I'm thoroughly relaxed and beginning to drift off, blam!  Into my head pops a great opening line for a story that's been sitting in the Ideas file stewing for awhile.  I'm just at that stage of tired where I really don't want to get out of bed again, but these openers are killer, the obvious gateway to the good stuff to follow.  And I know if I don't jot them down, they won't be there when I wake up.  I keep a bedside notebook so I roll over, sit up and jot.  Surprisingly, when I wake up the next morning, these openers read just as well as I thought they would.  I type them up and put them in the story folder for later when I have time to expand upon them. 

Last night was one of those nights, only it wasn't just an opening line, it was a whole opening sequence that presented itself for a story I've been cogitating over for a couple of years:  "The Story Shaman."  I groaned, rolled over, sat up.  Both sides of a handwritten notebook page is almost always about 250 words.  When I'd written both sides of the page and started on a new one I reminded myself that I had to get up early and it was getting late.  I was able to go to sleep then.  That reminder—and sleep—wouldn't have come unless I'd finished for the night because if I don't get it all down, I just keep coming up with new stuff and have to get up again and do more jotting.  The Night Muse does not care if work comes early and inspiration comes late. 

Fortunately, when I do sit down to write those stories, those openers (even if I don't use them for many months) open the door and let the story flow through.  Openers are crucial.  If I make them up with the forefront of my mind, they don't work.  If I let the hindpart loose, they usually work.  Sometimes I do have to rewrite those, but they are more likely to stay in the final drafts.  The forefront openers almost always have too much preamble, don't get into the story fast enough or with the right vision or voice.  Voice is a particularly key component of these hindpart-generated openers.  I know how to tell the story then, whenever I take it up and go forth.

Which is why it's worth getting out of bed.