I finished the chapter, I mailed it off to a few friends, I waited for their reaction.
One: "FUCK YOU RUZ."
...I guess that's good.
Two: *gapes silently, tears prickling her eyes*
...that's bad, but also good.
I never thought I could write anything powerful.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Chapter 5 nears the end...
Getting to a real tough point. Something I've debated over and over. I don't know if doing this to my story is the right thing to do.
Got a lot of editing ahead. Gonna try and get in contact with my old English teacher when I finish the draft, see if she can help.
-------------------------------------
“How deep does this place go?” Pal called, walking beside the boys.
“Till we hit L-A, I guess,” said Aus. “What’re you thinking?”
“Just that these are a lot of rooms just for storage.”
“Not at all. You never really want exploring back home, did you? Lots of places we weren’t supposed to be. But these can’t be storage chambers, not a chance. Doors too small, and you couldn’t fit any size container down this hall. No, I’ve got no idea what this place is for.”
L-B 1-30 went past without fanfare, as did L-A 1-30. The lighter sputtered and shook, and Alix watched it closely. She licked a finger and held it in the air, nodding. “Air somewhere ahead.” The corridor was coming to an end, and beyond it they could see an open chamber, the ceiling still awkwardly low, the furthest walls stretching out beyond the reach of the light. They entered and clustered together like chicks in a nest, turning in circles in search of the edges.
“Where to?” asked Alix, clinging tight to Aus. She was barely able to make out her companions face; the doorway through which they had come was already gone. “Shouldn’t we go back and follow the wall?”
“I’ll find the way,” Foster said. “Just stick by me.” He advanced through the chamber with unusual care, reaching up at times to run his hands along the ceiling, playing with the light fittings. He held the lighter beside one, inspecting the curved tube underneath the plastic. It all seemed intact, and when he rapped with his knuckles nothing inside rattled or shook apart. He pondered without slowing.
They reached the far wall, mottled with moss and red dust. Aus drew a circle with his fingertips, digging through to the concrete underneath. “How long has it been since anyone was here?” he asked. Nobody replied. He wiped his hand on his pants. “Before our time.”
Rei stepped up to the wall. “Long before,” she said, prodding at the wall inside the circle Aus had drawn. She added a final curved line at the bottom, making a comical smiling face. Aus looked at what she had left and chuckled. ”Where now?” she asked.
“There.” Foster pointed to a nearby doorway cut from the stone. “Or…” He looked in the other direction. There was another opening on the very limits of his vision, and he jogged over to have a look inside. “This one,” he decided. “Take a look. Up or down?”
They crowded around and looked through; behind the doorway was a stone stairwell leading off into darkness both above and below. Rei rapped at the wall, and tried to gauge the echo. “We could split?” she suggested.
“No, no, no.” Alix waved her down. “One lighter, remember? I say up, see if it comes out on top. Right Aus?”
Aus nodded and smiled, pulling her in to his side. “Going up’s a good idea.”
“We don’t need to find another way out,” said Foster. “Lets head down, find out how deep this goes. Get an idea of what it is. Hell, the answers always seem to be at the bottom, right?”
“Once, not always. This place could be huge, we could be here all night. We decided, we’d be back out tonight.”
Foster looked at him sideways. “Can’t settle your mind on anything, eh? Come down, go back out, stay, run… fix on something, alright? Shit, you’re worse than me.” He watched his friends eyes slip to Alix and back, and knew the problem.
“You know what?” Foster continued. “You choose.” He closed the lighter and fumbled it into Aus’s hand, listening to everybody shuffle around him. “You know where to go? Take us, I’m sitting out.”
Aus said nothing, opening the lighter and clicking it on. The flame rolled in his hands. “We’ll go down,” he said, toneless, and walked through the doorway.
----------------------------
Got a lot of editing ahead. Gonna try and get in contact with my old English teacher when I finish the draft, see if she can help.
-------------------------------------
“How deep does this place go?” Pal called, walking beside the boys.
“Till we hit L-A, I guess,” said Aus. “What’re you thinking?”
“Just that these are a lot of rooms just for storage.”
“Not at all. You never really want exploring back home, did you? Lots of places we weren’t supposed to be. But these can’t be storage chambers, not a chance. Doors too small, and you couldn’t fit any size container down this hall. No, I’ve got no idea what this place is for.”
L-B 1-30 went past without fanfare, as did L-A 1-30. The lighter sputtered and shook, and Alix watched it closely. She licked a finger and held it in the air, nodding. “Air somewhere ahead.” The corridor was coming to an end, and beyond it they could see an open chamber, the ceiling still awkwardly low, the furthest walls stretching out beyond the reach of the light. They entered and clustered together like chicks in a nest, turning in circles in search of the edges.
“Where to?” asked Alix, clinging tight to Aus. She was barely able to make out her companions face; the doorway through which they had come was already gone. “Shouldn’t we go back and follow the wall?”
“I’ll find the way,” Foster said. “Just stick by me.” He advanced through the chamber with unusual care, reaching up at times to run his hands along the ceiling, playing with the light fittings. He held the lighter beside one, inspecting the curved tube underneath the plastic. It all seemed intact, and when he rapped with his knuckles nothing inside rattled or shook apart. He pondered without slowing.
They reached the far wall, mottled with moss and red dust. Aus drew a circle with his fingertips, digging through to the concrete underneath. “How long has it been since anyone was here?” he asked. Nobody replied. He wiped his hand on his pants. “Before our time.”
Rei stepped up to the wall. “Long before,” she said, prodding at the wall inside the circle Aus had drawn. She added a final curved line at the bottom, making a comical smiling face. Aus looked at what she had left and chuckled. ”Where now?” she asked.
“There.” Foster pointed to a nearby doorway cut from the stone. “Or…” He looked in the other direction. There was another opening on the very limits of his vision, and he jogged over to have a look inside. “This one,” he decided. “Take a look. Up or down?”
They crowded around and looked through; behind the doorway was a stone stairwell leading off into darkness both above and below. Rei rapped at the wall, and tried to gauge the echo. “We could split?” she suggested.
“No, no, no.” Alix waved her down. “One lighter, remember? I say up, see if it comes out on top. Right Aus?”
Aus nodded and smiled, pulling her in to his side. “Going up’s a good idea.”
“We don’t need to find another way out,” said Foster. “Lets head down, find out how deep this goes. Get an idea of what it is. Hell, the answers always seem to be at the bottom, right?”
“Once, not always. This place could be huge, we could be here all night. We decided, we’d be back out tonight.”
Foster looked at him sideways. “Can’t settle your mind on anything, eh? Come down, go back out, stay, run… fix on something, alright? Shit, you’re worse than me.” He watched his friends eyes slip to Alix and back, and knew the problem.
“You know what?” Foster continued. “You choose.” He closed the lighter and fumbled it into Aus’s hand, listening to everybody shuffle around him. “You know where to go? Take us, I’m sitting out.”
Aus said nothing, opening the lighter and clicking it on. The flame rolled in his hands. “We’ll go down,” he said, toneless, and walked through the doorway.
----------------------------
Friday, May 4, 2007
Quick intro & Weathermen Ch4 snippet
Hey all. I have too many journals online, but I think I'll keep this one as a writing/art post area. A more professional blog, if you will. I'm working on a story at the moment called Weathermen, which has been moving very slowly for the past few years. I'm aiming to finish the draft this year, huzzah!
Just finished chapter 4 of Weathermen, working on ch5 already. Hoping for some critical feedback on a snippet. Italics and punctuation have all vanished :(
-----------
The lip of the crater grew wider as they approached and the hills on each side fell away. Perspective reasserted itself – no longer just a big hole, the crater stretched half a kilometre across. Its edges were steeper up close, as if physically scooped from the earth. If it had been situated anywhere else it would have been easy to ignore, but set in the middle of the vast grid of hills it demanded attention. Even Marissa stood silent at the edge until everyone had joined her. She put her sack down beside her and rubbed her eyes.
“Nice pick,” she admitted to Alix.
“I didn’t know about that,” Alix replied. “Too far away to see… call it luck?”
“Hard lucky,” said Marissa. “Just keeps coming your way.”
The crater was carpeted with the same brown grass and bushes that covered the hills, clinging to the sheer edges with all the typical tenaciousness of weeds. There was a sheen spread all across the funnel, the remains of the runoff from the previous night. But despite Aus’s hopes, there was no lake at the bottom. They had been unable to see the very bottom of the pit until they stood at the edge. Now, in the daylight, it was no longer just a dark patch. At the bottom of the dish there was, quite clearly, a tunnel.
“So, what?” asked Pal. “We go have a look?”
Foster hiked his carrysack up on his shoulder. “Well, keeping with a tradition of sticking our noses where we shouldn’t… yeah, sure. I’ll go first.”
“Don’t volunteer till you’re down there,” Aus advised. “Might just be a weird ditch. Might be a cave. Remember that time we broke into the school vents?”
Foster nodded. “Yeah. Fun times, until we got lost. Thought we’d die in there. I get the idea. Okay, we’ll check it out carefully. Rei, got the lighter?”
“Always,” she said. “You want it?”
Foster shook his head. “In a while. I’d just lose it now. Let’s go.”
They walked as a group over the lip of the crater, Foster leading and picking the easiest path. It would be more embarrassing than dangerous to fall – the grass was sparse but the dirt gave under their feet. Still, they all remembered the food lost last time they had traversed down a steep slope, and they clutched their supplies tight to their chests.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” Rei huffed as they progressed, “if there’s a deep cave, and we go inside, and there are things living in there, like underground animals?”
“Worms?” someone suggested from the back. Rei pondered.
“Not quite worms,” she said. “Maybe like them. But bigger, and they’d be so used to the dark that I could just blind them, and it’d be easy food. Yeah?”
“Anything that lives in a cave,” Aus said between breaths, “I do not want to meet.” His foray with Foster into the airducts that bridged their school and the local library was a memory he found himself unable to dispel. They had spied a vent with a loose covering and gone in on a whim, but by the time they had found their way out neither of them had been able to remember why it had seemed like such a good idea. They had crawled on their bellies, torches in hand and snacks in their pockets, believing they were in an exciting maze. Within an hour their expedition had stopped being fun, and an hour after that they had begun to panic. It wasn’t claustrophobia, more a terrible sense of misdirection, a fear that came with every turn and every stretch of duct looking exactly the same. They believed that they would never get out because it was impossible to tell whether they were any closer to the exit, whether they were retracing their steps or trapped in a circle. They believed that they would starve long before their torches ran out.
But there was another fear that Aus had kept private. Foster had thought only of the hopelessness of being lost, of only being found when the stink of their bodies wafted through the pipes into classrooms. But Aus had heard something echoing deep in the vents, a thrumming like a heartbeat, a colossal heart that plugged the pipes and was attached to… what? He didn’t know, he couldn’t imagine. Few animals lived in the tower; his knowledge of the rest came from books and holofilms, unreal representations of bizarre creatures from a world Outside. It could have been any of them, living in the airducts. It could have been a hideous conglomeration of things that buzzed and bleated and gnawed with claws and teeth and suckers.
Foster had been scared of starving, while behind him Aus had feared being eaten alive.
It was a childish fear attached to an event long past, he knew. Aus bit his lip and cleared his thoughts. “We got out anyway,” he said to himself. He hop-skipped down the slope, watching the dark pit at the bottom grow every larger. “We got out in the end.”
The pit was only a few metres across, a dirt funnel shooting into the ground on a sharp decline. It was three or four body lengths deep, terminating in a tight black hole beyond which they could see nothing. Foster stepped down onto the slope and then jumped back as an avalanche of stones and soil rolled down the funnel, reaching the end and vanishing into darkness. They stood in a ring around the tunnel entrance, considering.
Rei dropped to her knees, peering down into the pit. “It has to go somewhere,” she said. “Probably a cave, right?” She shouted, “Hello!” and waited for an echo. There was none.
“Won’t work, it’s not rock,” Marissa lectured. “And we’re outside. And I’m not going down into that.”
Foster bent to retie his boots. “I will,” he said. “Like I said.”
“It’s a hole.”
“An interesting hole. I’ll be fine.”
“You should be good down there, Marissa” grinned Aus. “It’s the furthest you’re gonna get from height.” He ducked as she threw a clod of dirt at his head.
Foster dropped his supplies on the grass and once more stepped into the funnel, trying to balance with arms flailing. It didn’t work - he slipped, landed on his back and slid towards the bottom with almost comical slowness. He dug in his heels, stopping a few metres above the hole. “Still can’t see anything,” he said, squinting. “Rei, you should probably toss me the lighter now.”
Rei fished it out from her back pocket and obliged, Foster catching it neatly and tucking it into his pants. “Tell us what you see down there!” she called.
Marissa and Alix were less cheerful, standing together with arms crossed. “You don’t need to go down,” Alix reminded. “I mean, I’d like to know… but you don’t have to.”
“I’m going,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“Be safe then,” Marissa said. “And I’m still going to worry.”
“It’s just a hole,” Foster reminded. “I’ll be fine. I’m only taking a look.”
Pal opened his mouth to offer advice, like don’t breathe in if the air smells funny, or shout three times if you get stuck, or his fathers advice in contrast to his mothers laments: don’t worry, dirt is good for you. Good for worms, good for trees, won’t hurt you either. But before he could speak Foster had lifted his heels and was sliding once more; his feet dangled over the edge of the hole, then his legs, both taken by the shadows, then his bum passed over the dirt lip and it was very sudden, he had time to exclaim “Hoooop!” and then he was gone.
Just finished chapter 4 of Weathermen, working on ch5 already. Hoping for some critical feedback on a snippet. Italics and punctuation have all vanished :(
-----------
The lip of the crater grew wider as they approached and the hills on each side fell away. Perspective reasserted itself – no longer just a big hole, the crater stretched half a kilometre across. Its edges were steeper up close, as if physically scooped from the earth. If it had been situated anywhere else it would have been easy to ignore, but set in the middle of the vast grid of hills it demanded attention. Even Marissa stood silent at the edge until everyone had joined her. She put her sack down beside her and rubbed her eyes.
“Nice pick,” she admitted to Alix.
“I didn’t know about that,” Alix replied. “Too far away to see… call it luck?”
“Hard lucky,” said Marissa. “Just keeps coming your way.”
The crater was carpeted with the same brown grass and bushes that covered the hills, clinging to the sheer edges with all the typical tenaciousness of weeds. There was a sheen spread all across the funnel, the remains of the runoff from the previous night. But despite Aus’s hopes, there was no lake at the bottom. They had been unable to see the very bottom of the pit until they stood at the edge. Now, in the daylight, it was no longer just a dark patch. At the bottom of the dish there was, quite clearly, a tunnel.
“So, what?” asked Pal. “We go have a look?”
Foster hiked his carrysack up on his shoulder. “Well, keeping with a tradition of sticking our noses where we shouldn’t… yeah, sure. I’ll go first.”
“Don’t volunteer till you’re down there,” Aus advised. “Might just be a weird ditch. Might be a cave. Remember that time we broke into the school vents?”
Foster nodded. “Yeah. Fun times, until we got lost. Thought we’d die in there. I get the idea. Okay, we’ll check it out carefully. Rei, got the lighter?”
“Always,” she said. “You want it?”
Foster shook his head. “In a while. I’d just lose it now. Let’s go.”
They walked as a group over the lip of the crater, Foster leading and picking the easiest path. It would be more embarrassing than dangerous to fall – the grass was sparse but the dirt gave under their feet. Still, they all remembered the food lost last time they had traversed down a steep slope, and they clutched their supplies tight to their chests.
“Wouldn’t it be great,” Rei huffed as they progressed, “if there’s a deep cave, and we go inside, and there are things living in there, like underground animals?”
“Worms?” someone suggested from the back. Rei pondered.
“Not quite worms,” she said. “Maybe like them. But bigger, and they’d be so used to the dark that I could just blind them, and it’d be easy food. Yeah?”
“Anything that lives in a cave,” Aus said between breaths, “I do not want to meet.” His foray with Foster into the airducts that bridged their school and the local library was a memory he found himself unable to dispel. They had spied a vent with a loose covering and gone in on a whim, but by the time they had found their way out neither of them had been able to remember why it had seemed like such a good idea. They had crawled on their bellies, torches in hand and snacks in their pockets, believing they were in an exciting maze. Within an hour their expedition had stopped being fun, and an hour after that they had begun to panic. It wasn’t claustrophobia, more a terrible sense of misdirection, a fear that came with every turn and every stretch of duct looking exactly the same. They believed that they would never get out because it was impossible to tell whether they were any closer to the exit, whether they were retracing their steps or trapped in a circle. They believed that they would starve long before their torches ran out.
But there was another fear that Aus had kept private. Foster had thought only of the hopelessness of being lost, of only being found when the stink of their bodies wafted through the pipes into classrooms. But Aus had heard something echoing deep in the vents, a thrumming like a heartbeat, a colossal heart that plugged the pipes and was attached to… what? He didn’t know, he couldn’t imagine. Few animals lived in the tower; his knowledge of the rest came from books and holofilms, unreal representations of bizarre creatures from a world Outside. It could have been any of them, living in the airducts. It could have been a hideous conglomeration of things that buzzed and bleated and gnawed with claws and teeth and suckers.
Foster had been scared of starving, while behind him Aus had feared being eaten alive.
It was a childish fear attached to an event long past, he knew. Aus bit his lip and cleared his thoughts. “We got out anyway,” he said to himself. He hop-skipped down the slope, watching the dark pit at the bottom grow every larger. “We got out in the end.”
The pit was only a few metres across, a dirt funnel shooting into the ground on a sharp decline. It was three or four body lengths deep, terminating in a tight black hole beyond which they could see nothing. Foster stepped down onto the slope and then jumped back as an avalanche of stones and soil rolled down the funnel, reaching the end and vanishing into darkness. They stood in a ring around the tunnel entrance, considering.
Rei dropped to her knees, peering down into the pit. “It has to go somewhere,” she said. “Probably a cave, right?” She shouted, “Hello!” and waited for an echo. There was none.
“Won’t work, it’s not rock,” Marissa lectured. “And we’re outside. And I’m not going down into that.”
Foster bent to retie his boots. “I will,” he said. “Like I said.”
“It’s a hole.”
“An interesting hole. I’ll be fine.”
“You should be good down there, Marissa” grinned Aus. “It’s the furthest you’re gonna get from height.” He ducked as she threw a clod of dirt at his head.
Foster dropped his supplies on the grass and once more stepped into the funnel, trying to balance with arms flailing. It didn’t work - he slipped, landed on his back and slid towards the bottom with almost comical slowness. He dug in his heels, stopping a few metres above the hole. “Still can’t see anything,” he said, squinting. “Rei, you should probably toss me the lighter now.”
Rei fished it out from her back pocket and obliged, Foster catching it neatly and tucking it into his pants. “Tell us what you see down there!” she called.
Marissa and Alix were less cheerful, standing together with arms crossed. “You don’t need to go down,” Alix reminded. “I mean, I’d like to know… but you don’t have to.”
“I’m going,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“Be safe then,” Marissa said. “And I’m still going to worry.”
“It’s just a hole,” Foster reminded. “I’ll be fine. I’m only taking a look.”
Pal opened his mouth to offer advice, like don’t breathe in if the air smells funny, or shout three times if you get stuck, or his fathers advice in contrast to his mothers laments: don’t worry, dirt is good for you. Good for worms, good for trees, won’t hurt you either. But before he could speak Foster had lifted his heels and was sliding once more; his feet dangled over the edge of the hole, then his legs, both taken by the shadows, then his bum passed over the dirt lip and it was very sudden, he had time to exclaim “Hoooop!” and then he was gone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)