Good luck, everyone. I’m rooting for you.
Books
How far do you go into a book after you’ve realized you aren’t going to like it? I’m a hundred and fifteen pages into this thing, and none of it is working for me.
Twiligh in Heaven: Chapter 9
Chapter 9
The day was dark, the sky heavy, and the seas had no waves. Even the winds seemed hushed. What had been a perfect beach of endless sea and beautiful golden sand had become a cacophony of rock, deep pits, and broken shore. Mallens’s wrath had lifted the bedrock. Sand had fallen aside, sandstone jutted up into the air, and basalt plates rose from the lagoons.
I’d heard the five cousins perfectly though they stood about fifty feet away. A little hint of a breeze blew in my direction, so perhaps that helped, and the flat water had no waves to wash out their voices. I was trying to find an alternative to mugging them but nothing came up.
My thinking time ran out when the five of them turned and entered the shallow water between sandbar and shore. They were talking deliberately lightly about how great everything was going to be when they gave Mallens the sword, the one thing I absolutely couldn’t let them to do. That had to be stopped. Violence it must be. I crouched, Nurim walked in front of the rest and said something about Jesephene, before he vanished as if the ground underneath the water sucked him down.
The others screamed, and dark scaled hands grabbed them from below. Like a surge of little plops, the cousins plunged underwater. They struggled. Several propped themselves up on knees and elbows, but their heads were below the shallow surface. It’s said an angry nereid can drown you in a palm’s worth of water, and these had almost a foot to work with.
The cousins struggled. I saw their backs heaving, and the sea nymphs climbing on top of them: a pack of predators focused on their prey.
The heavens parted. Lights appeared. Inspiration sang.
This was a problem I could solve by hitting people!
I screamed Obesis, ran across the water, and they heard me coming. I wanted them to. There were more than a dozen of them, and they paid little attention to one, shouting idiot charging.
They should have noticed I ran on the water, not through it, but they learned.
“Obesis!” I shouted again and threw myself down and forward, skidding across the surface like an ice skater. A nereid rose out of the water to grab me, and I caught her in the face with a deep fist, the low swing you use on a grappler when he’s shooting. That’s a punch that has to hit like a boulder stopping a rhino to be any good at all. Mine sufficed.
Knuckles hit scales. I pushed through. My fist dragged her out of the water and threw her a dozen feet through the air. She landed on sand but hard enough it still splashed.
The impact stopped me. I sank. Water swirled around my feet. I shouted Obesis again, jumped to the surface of the water, landed on the splash, and when nereid hands reached for my ankles, I reached for them. I yanked him fully up into the air by his own wrists, and he gave me that look of shock that came with a hesitation. The utter comprehension of how bad this was about to be made it inevitable.
I spoke Raln, and all things were blades, even my fist.
I punched about half his head off, and all of him dropped.
Surprise gone, they stopped drowning the cousins and turned on me. I beat them down. Blood underwater is black, and nereids soon floated on the surface of the lagoons. The cousins lurched to their feet gasping, and when the sea people hesitated, counting their losses, I started shoving the big, solid cousins toward the sea.
“Out of the water! Run!”
He argued. “We can–”
I interrupted. “You don’t fight nereids in the water! Run!”
He ran. They all ran. The nereids attacked. I put down two but probably not fatally, and turned before the rest. Maybe they didn’t really want to catch me, or maybe I could run across the waves faster than they could swim beneath them, but I made it to the shore safely. The cousins stood there gasping, and the six of us ran uphill.
For a moment the spirits of the sea watched. Then they slipped beneath the waves. The one I’d knocked out of the sea had vanished, leaving beside just marks in the sand, and the forms I’d thought were corpses sank beneath the waves. You’d be amazed what a spirit can live through in their place of power, but I doubted all of them lived.
Whatever. It was over. I stood with the cousins, panting, and trying to get my breath back.
After a minute or two they asked the most reasonable question: “Who in death and darkness are you?”
And of course I lied. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Remus, and I am a finder of rare, exotic, and stolen weapons. I’m here for the saber.” And I pointed honestly at the sword Nurim carried.
“It’s not a saber. It’s straight!” said Zenjin.
“Yeah,” said Nurim. “Hold on. It says something here.” He peered at the butt of the handle and held it right up to his face. He could barely see through the gloom of the heavy overcast.
I couldn’t remember the handle saying anything, but since I was trying to erase all traces of it, I didn’t want anyone to know if it did.
“It is called a saber because sabers are weapons of the elite. They’re more expensive.”
Five confused, wary people looked at me. The one holding my forgery grabbed it. I think he wanted to look threatening, but all I noticed was he wasn’t inspecting any writing any more.
I continued. “The single curved cutting edge gives some justification for saber. Likewise, the shape makes it slightly point heavy to augment slashing. However the straight back, as noted, would normally bring it into the longsword category. All of this is missing the point. Curved swords are weapons of the elite. Straight swords are cheap. If the maker called it a saber, he could charge double for it. If he called it a longsword, he couldn’t. As such, it’s a saber.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Osret. “You can’t charge more for something just because you call it something it isn’t.”
I laughed at him.
“People who have enough money to buy it would know it isn’t a saber!” he yelled.
“Correct. But that is an extremely expensive weapon, so it’s not going to see a lot of use. It will be worn, not wielded. It can be called anything the owner wants.”
“When you say expensive, how expensive do you mean?” asked Apseto.
“Extremely,” I said. “It’s also extremely stolen, and those two extremelies are about equal. I’m authorized to pay you for it, and I’m authorized to kill you and take it. My customer doesn’t care.”
“Parasite, there’s five of us!” said Zenjin. He looked like he was holding a grudge.
I looked at them and the dark lagoon. “How’s that working out for you?”
I waited until the silence became uncomfortable and then began a slow, mocking clap. No one joined in. I stared him dead in the eyes until he looked away.
Creed
The surprising thing about the first two Creed movies is that you root for the main character. In John Wick, I’m rooting for action and spectacle. I’m not a big fan of John Wick himself. In Creed, I’m rooting for Creed.
Haven’t seen the third one yet.
KN Update
You’re occasionally writing along, slapping words on a page, when you come to a scene, and the little voice in your head says ‘this is a big scene.’ There’s no real reason for it to be. It’s A meets B or C gets to D, and the gut response is drive on. Slap the words down.
The kicker, the trick, the really hard bit, is that sometimes the voice is right and sometimes the gut is. Sometimes you should just slap words down and get through it. But sometimes you need to get things just right. Too much shaping means the story never gets written. Not enough means you run into huge problems later that sap all the joy out of it.
I’m at one such problem in KN. About nine chapters ahead of what’s published, I’ve run into a wall. The story doesn’t go anywhere, and I wound up putting it aside for six months or so. The problems are because of this one scene. If I don’t get this exactly right, I have no plot. And if it is exactly right, it won’t look like too much story.
Completely unrelated, I only learned a few months ago that in American English, the punctuation is almost always inside the quotes. Em-dashes are a weird exception. British English puts them inside and outside as situation warrants.
Sickness
The body is like a passive-aggresive partner with terrible communication skills. Instead of telling me anything, my body just hints in successively more inscrutable ways because I should know what it means.
This often concludes with death.
Kidneys, SAY YOU WANT TOMATOES!
Principal Component Analysis
Sometimes I just start doing a little PCA and lose all sense of time.
It happens more than you’d think, and while that’s probably a low bar to get over, it’s kinda weird that it crops up as often as it does.
Categories
What means what?
Writing: Me talking about the practice of writing
Fiction: Actual fiction
AI/Deep Learning: What I do for a living
Cool Things: Stuff I find interesting, apropos of nothing
Books I Read: Exactly what it says on the tin. I generally update my Goodreads, but back when I had free time, I’d put my notes here.
C&C: Comments and criticisms, me replying to other people’s amateur fiction. Only written when requested. Note: can be requested. Send me an email. I’ll read your stuff.
Fanfic: Fanfic I write
The Gloaming: The world of Pallas where Elegy’s stories and Twilight in Heaven take place. It’s my ongoing project.
Karesh Ni: One of my big novels in progress. Takes place in the Gloaming and the sequel to Bloodharvest
Kudos: Back when I published a lot of stuff on AO3, I’d thank people who sent me kudos.
Motorcycles: Two wheels go brrrr!
Twilight in Heaven: Primary work in progress, takes place in the extreme past of the Gloaming. Think Age of Trees from the Silmarillion, and Feanor is up to shenanigans.
Uncategorized: Posts that don’t go anywhere else
Site Nav
I finally have a bit of free time again, and I’m finishing the migration from AO3 I started a few years ago. I want to be able to put my stuff up in one place, keep original fiction with the fanfic, and make stuff I intend to publish generally available before publishing.
So what would make it better?
Loading ...If you have other ideas, let me know. I’ll add them to the poll.
You want more of the kid’s stuff? Fanfic?
I was lurking AO3’s subreddit and found a series of threads about readers who found stories they liked but had been discontinued. The OPs asked what they should do, and invariably, the responses consisted of other people telling OP not to bother the original author.
I find that response incomprehensible. Don’t give offense by telling the author you like some material and gentle urging them to write more? That sentence doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, don’t be a jerk about it. That, obviously. But don’t write, ‘Dear Besty, I love your story, and hope you find inspiration to write more,’ letters for fear of passing insult???? Knock yourself out.
Don’t call me Betsy, but that’s about the only concern I have. If I don’t find inspiration, I won’t write more. I won’t be offended if you ask.
Mind: if that’s etiquette, I won’t do it to others. Different strokes for different folks, et al.
My thinking runs toward making things easier to find. I like the regularity of deadlines, and while I’m not cleaving to them, I do generally like having targets to hit. That means weekly Twilight in Heaven updates, generally at noon, Sundays MDT. I’ve got some stability here.
Fridays of Karesh Ni, also theoretically at noon, take the first slot of flex updates. I do have a job, go to school, and go outside, and sometimes something has to give. I’m going to keep working on it. That’s certain. But it’s early enough hat I’m still making big changes, and every now and then the river changes its route. I was at such a point last week when I got sick. Thankfully, I got lucky and did well, but that took my feet out from under me. I went down in the water.
But that’s the joy of writing. It can’t actually kill you! It just takes a bit.
Between irregularly updating when I can or holding until I can put stuff forward fairly consistently, what do you think?
Loading ...Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 8
Chapter 8
“So we’re going to turn this in, right?” asked one of the men on the shore.
“Yes, we’ve decided to be stupid about it,” agreed one swimmer from the center of the water. It was the one who’d claimed to have gotten it before.
“Oh, the blight upon you!” swore the other swimmer in the dark lagoon, and he turned, pulling hard toward the shore. The blighted one followed.
I ran between dunes and broken trees. Knotted pines had fallen over. Rifts had been driven into sand and dune, and narrow rivulets crawled through them. I could see where the hills had sunk, and where they would level out as wind and rain would shave the sand bar’s rough edges. But I also saw huge shelves of black stone up on their sides like broken dinner plates dropped from a picnic. Mallens’s stomps had lifted the bedrock here, driven it down there, and hills like the Flatirons of Thango rose out of flat beaches. They gave me great cover.
Around a jetty I found the sandbar the five had stopped to rest on, but it wasn’t connected to the land. Between us was a submerged section of dark water, filled with silt and black weeds. It looked about knee deep. I could run across, but they’d hear and see me coming. Their spit of sand had no dunes.
I could wait and hit them when they crossed. If I timed it right, I could catch the few in front and put them down while the others were still in the water. That might cause problems depending on who had the sword, but it seemed better than bull-rushing the five of them.
I hid and waited. There was some argument I couldn’t catch, and I broke cover to get closer. They didn’t notice.
“I’m agreeing with you!” said the disagreeable agreer. “We all agreed to be stupid, and so stupid we shall be. We’re going to turn it in, because Mallens will give us a reward and certainly not just take it as his due. We aren’t going to take this obvious item of power to the mists and and make a party palace out of it! We’ll stay in our little house instead of making a mansion because all the partying would distract us from our complaining time!”
Someone sighed. “Osret,” he said, slowly and as if in great pain.
“What?” yelled Osret. “Who wants all that party sex? Clearly, not anyone here.”
“If this is one of the weapons used to try to kill Mallens, do you really think we should keep it?” asked another one. “Does that seem remotely wise?”
“Of course not. We definitely shouldn’t transform it into something nothing alike, because Mallens will clearly start watching the property market for mist palaces when he needs to find assassins. Blessings of feast and fortune, you’re so smart! There’s certainly no way we could hide a sword.”
Someone else sighed.
They all looked so tired except for Osret. He took advantage of their silence.
“And we certainly couldn’t do something worthwhile with it, like give it to the ghost. This is only exactly what she asked for, and then we’d get revenge on the man who killed your mother,” Osret almost screamed.
“You want to use a forbidden weapon to hire a ghost? Osret, what part of that plan could go right?”
“She’s a ghost! She disposes of things so they are never found. She’s a ghost!” Now Osret was yelling.
Another repeated, “You want to use a forbidden weapon-”
Osret said, “It’s not forbidden. Mallens doesn’t even know it exists!”
“Who cares?” interjected a third. “Are you going to argue with him if he finds out? Claim ex post facto rules don’t count? He’s the Lord of Creation! He’ll stomp you to death and unmake your essence. What will you do then? Be dead at him?”
“Osret, we’re decided,” said another. “No one cares what you think, so stop talking.”
“Death upon you,” said Osret, and I thought he would strike the other.
But he didn’t. The two of them glared at each other while the other three formed a silent, worried crowd. Then Osret looked away, and the rest spoke among themselves quietly.
One of them came forward. “Everyone. Osret, Zenjin–” he looked at the one Osret had cursed “–we have to live together. Can we all agree with that?”
No one agreed with that. Several muttered. Osret and Zenjin looked away.
“Now bless feasts,” said the one trying to still the conflicts.
Osret and Zenjin didn’t bless anyone’s feasts. Osret managed to look nauseated, annoyed, and tired at once, and Zenjin was looking at him like he’d just spotted someone he’d always hated and never been drunk enough to fight.
“Glad we’ve put that behind us. Now we–” He was looking at Osret when he sighed a deep, gurgling thing of bubbles in his throat. His entire attitude changed, and he turned back from the sandbar that separated us to fully addressing the others.
“Osret, it’s just us. You can stop performing. There’s no one here to see you. We’re cousins. Me, you–” he tapped his chest. “Nurim, Apseto. Zenjin–” he double-tapped the other on the chest too. “You’re wishing death on people! Osret, that’s not necessary! I understand, I’m with you, but we’re not trying to get you. We’re your family. Osret, it’s okay. Hesh, you with me?”
Osret wouldn’t look at him.
“Come on, hesh. Hesh, we go back from before we could walk. Before my Mom died, she used to tell stories of when you used to chew on me when we were crawlers. Come on. Please. I’m not fighting with you. I’m your cousin. I’m Aesthus. I’m a person, I’m family, not some enemy. Come on.”
And Osret still wouldn’t look at him, but he sighed.
“And Zenjin, you too. You had no reason to say that. It was disrespectful.” Aesthus held out an open hand, both warning and calming.
“Yeah, ye,” said Zenjin. He made an act of will. “Osret, I apologize I shouldn’t have said that.”
To Zenjin, Aesthus said, “Thank you.” And to Osret added, “See? We’re with you.”
Osret and Zenjin stood awkwardly for a moment, then shook hands like limp fish. But if they weren’t embracing like brothers, their shoulders held less tension, and their arms didn’t clench.
Aesthus continued. “We talked about this, and four of us agreed. But Osret, we’re not dismissing you. Yes, if things go right, making a mansion from the blade would be something, or giving it to the ghost. Yes, we could make a party house, and yes, if we didn’t have to pay rent, we could throw double bumps. I also heard you about giving the sword to the ghost. Feast and fortune, Osret, of course I want revenge. He killed my Mom!
“But she’s my Mom! And I think about her, the way she kept telling me to be smart and take care of myself. Mallens is mad. Not just angry, but mad with with fury. He threw Tollos into the sky! If he finds anything, anything about the sword, he’s not going to be calm. We’re not going to have a chance to argue our case. He’ll just start killing people.
“I’ll take the sword to him. I massage his feet. I know all of you hate it, so I’ll do it. I’ll tell him how wonderful he is and how loyal we are, and how everyone else is wrong and he’s right. I’ll give him the sword. And you’re right; he’s not going to reward us.
“But we’ll be made. And if we can talk him down, all of the other gods holding their breaths will remember. And if we plead–and I’ll plead, remember. You don’t have to say anything—he’ll take Tollos down from the heavens, and she’ll remember.
“You’re right, okay. If everything goes well, your ideas are better. But if anything goes wrong, we’re all going to die, and Mallens isn’t going to be calm or reasonable about it. But I’m pretty good talking to him, and I’ll massage his feet, get between the toes, and he’ll be okay. We win this way.
“But we have to stick together. We have to work together. You need to stick with us. Zenjin won’t say anything like that again, he apologized, and the rest of us will be a little more respectful. But if we, family, are fighting like this, Mallens is flipping plates. Come on, hesh. Stay with us.”
Osret made a noise like he’d eaten bad shrimp. He frowned at the sea and waves.
“Osret, agree with us,” said Aesthus. His voice was low but not soft. He insisted. “Let this be done.”
Osret looked away. The others watched.
After a moment, Osret tried to walk away, but Aesthus caught him and held him back. Another struggle of wills happened, and Osret obviously just wanted the others to drop it. But Aesthus wouldn’t, and while he didn’t contest with Osret, he didn’t look aside either. He stood peacefully demanding, and the other three cousins stood in a close circle around Osret. He wouldn’t be able to get away with shoving or fighting.
Aesthus repeated, “Agree with us. Let it be over.”
And Zenjin added, “I did apologize, hesh. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Finally Osret took Aesthus’s hand and shook it. “Fine.” He shook hands with the others, Zenjin again, and they were fast but tight handshakes. But it galled Osret, and I could see a deep banked fury in his eyes. It bordered on malice. His cousins must have seen it too or chose not to.
I felt like a pervert watching this conversation, so I looked down and away. The notion of running up on them and hard initiating to take the sword felt even worse. There didn’t seem to be any alternatives, but I stared around as if magic was hidding under a rock.
Instead I saw dark, quick figures like shadows slide through the shallow water. They moved without even rippling the surface, through water barely knee high. Nereids, fish spirits, the dryads of sea and surf, I thought.
All around me the wreckage of the beach rose in piles and towers. The nereids swam into the deep black water around the cousins’ sandbar and vanished. Nereids are usually peaceful, lazy, and they like to tease. But the shore had been ruined and disrupted by Mallens’s efforts, and the dryads had swum silently and fast.
They swam like predators, I thought. Suddenly I had something worse to worry about than Osret.