Blog Bolts

I’m working on changes to my blog. I’m not happy with it yet, so expect to see further futzing around with the template.

Yo Ho Yo Ho

I think I’ll make my heroine a pirate.

Fantasy WIP Excerpt-Chapter One

I’ve rewritten the first chapter of the fantasy WIP I mentioned. Here’s the new opening. I’m not sure about the first line.

Chapter One
The Pearl Diver

Jivad had been watching the boys all morning, which was why he saw what happened. When he and the other Demaitrian slaves arrived, around mid-morning, at the wharf, the boys were already on the raft further out in the bay. The boys ranged in age from six to fourteen, all of them with skin like resined teak, all slender, graceful and full of laughter. Each had a stubby pigtail sticking straight up on his head, and each wore a black-and-white checked dhoti. They were pearl divers. By turns they plunged into the water, though the younger boys spent more time roughhousing on the raft than diving. Two little ones waved their arms and kicked their feet, mock gladiators from the arena. Their shrieks of laughter reached the slaves on the wharf, faintly, mingled with the cries of the gulls.

The slaves unloaded a Thedrosian galleon tied at one of the piers, each slave shackled to a partner. Jivad’s companion-in-chains today was Makel. Grotesque gargoyles engraved on the prow scowled down at them while they worked. As for the Thedrosian sailors, they couldn’t wait to disembark and get drunk. They left behind a single sentinel on the galleon. He kept to his cabin most of the morning.

The overseer, a Thedrosian, carried a whip and a sword on his belt, but at the moment he was looking away from the slaves, ogling the fishwife who ran the mackerel stand across the road. The whole row of shamble shacks across from the docks sold food – strings of roast fish, guavas and cantaloupes, ale spiked with coconut milk, chocolate soup served in gold filigree cups no bigger than a thumb. Jivad drank the smells, his only breakfast.

The slaves hummed Demaitrian songs or gossiped. Speculation centered on which girls would bed easy, and who among the slaves played sneak-tongue for the Thedrosians. Tiny crabs crawled over the barnacles that mottled the underpinnings of the pier. Two slaves caught one to eat raw.

The slaves sweated as the sun climbed. The pearl divers out on the raft broke off their dives to share a meal — fish-mixed rice and dumplings, from the look of it, and they ate it unworried, as if they had time and servings to spare. Two boys who finished early began to swim, apparently racing.

One of the littler boys jumped in after them. The older two didn’t notice him, or were too absorbed in their race to concern themselves. Arm over arm, they ploughed the water, long legs splashing behind them, until first one, and the other right behind him, slapped the side of the galleon. The Thedrosian sentinel leaned out of a porthole to shout at them, but they just laughed, flipped underwater and swam back toward their raft.

He was a good swimmer too, the little one, but by the time he neared the galleon, his stroke faltered. The boy’s legs stopped splashing behind him. He treaded water for a moment, apparently trying to turn back toward the raft, but the waves frustrated his efforts. An expression came over the boy’s face Jivad had seen before in slaves faint from exhaustion: pinched cheeks and drawn brows above a panting mouth.

Casually, Jivad checked the wharf. The overseer had crossed the street to flirt with the fishwife.

With each swell, the boy bobbed close to the posts of the pier, before the undercurrent tugged him back. The boy’s head tilted back. His eyes popped, like a frog’s, glassy and unfocused. Though he gasped whenever his lips emerged from the water, he did not cry out. He did not splash or kick. The motion of his hands under the waves resembled someone trying to climb a ladder with no success.

“He’s drowning,” Jivad told Makel.

What’s the Opposite of Self-Deception?

I was contemplating the lofty topic of Theme. A character in one of my wips has the major flaw of self-deception. I wondered what the character would have to do to overcome this flaw. (Suggestions are welcome, btw.)

What is the opposite of self-deception?

I wondered this aloud at dinner, and my husband replied without hesitation. “Regular deception.”

Better

I’ve been working on the re-write for the first chapter of the fantasy novella. I notice a habit of mine, to cut myself down while I’m writing. “This doesn’t have to be good.” It’s a defense, a way to warn myself, “This won’t be too good.” That way, if I finish and it’s not, in fact, good at all, I can say, “I wasn’t really trying.”

The defense is not without its charms. I have other projects I would like to work on, but can’t, because my expectations paralyze me. Those are projects which I want to be good. To fall short would crucify me. The result is that I write nothing at all.

Surely there must be some middle ground between these extremes. I would like to hold myself to a high standard for every project, and not just toss out shoddy writing because I am “saving” my “real” efforts for something better — which I never do anyway, because having to keep my own promise intimidates me. I aim to do better.

Photo here.

Never Let Me Go

I just finished reading Never Let Me Go, which apparently, though unsurprisingly, has now been made into a movie. It’s of particular interest to me because it’s a crossover genre: science fiction, but clearly literary. In fact, it starts from the same premises as The Island.

The Island is not as bad as the trailer makes out (kick! kiss! crash! bam!). Despite appearances, it’s not devoid of deeper philosophy. And frankly, if I go see Never Let Me Go, in the theatre, I may rent The Island the next day to prevent myself from committing suicide, because, I can tell you, I was crying so hard after reading the book, I really needed a helicopter chase scene to cheer me up.

I think Kazuo Ishiguro is amazing. I have a love/hate relationship with him. The reader in me loves his books. The writer in me hates him because he is racing a unicycle in the Tour de France and I am still using training-wheels on my 3-speed.

So in between sobbing into my cheerios as I finished the story over breakfast, I attempted to absorb writerly lessons from the book. I’m still trying to distill it, so pardon the painfully obvious notes below. (Training wheels, my friends — and aren’t you glad I didn’t use the potty training analogy? When you have toddlers, infantile scatological jokes are an ever-present temptation.)

Mystery: A good deal of the tension in the book comes from the slow unfolding of the mystery. I knew nothing about the book before I read it, so it worked its full magic on my. I apologize to anyone reading this post who feels I may have revealed too much about the plot and this spoiled some of that. Don’t worry, the book is still worth reading.

Micro-tension: In addition to the larger mysteries raised by the story, the ending line of each scene introduced a new, micro-mystery. The scene which followed was a complete story in itself, with tension, conflict and resolution, followed by a new micro-mystery.

Understatement: This particularly struck me in the dialogue, but it was true throughout. Kazuo Ishiguro is a master of understatement. (I am a master of overstatement. We all have our talents.) In prose, the narrator (it’s told first person) says less than she knows, and much less than the narrator knows. In dialogue, the characters did not say everything they were thinking. The unspoken understandings underlying the patina of chitter-chatter makes the dialogue believable.

Details: In every little micro-drama played out, usually between the same three characters, we learned a few more details that defined them as people. Toward the middle of the book, I felt a bit impatient, as I often do with literary novels, because each drama, in and of itself, concerned some trivial matter — a lost cassette tape, a pencil case, a nasty comment one girl made about the other in front of the boy, etc. Okay, a part of me was thinking, can someone please blow up a helicopter now?

The thing is, though, I wasn’t about to put the book down. And all those accumulated details gave me the illusion of knowing the characters intimately, so when Bad Things began to happen to them, it didn’t take vehicular explosions to pack emotional punch.

There’s a lot more I could say about his marvelous technique. I’ll stop gushing for now.

How can I put this into my own writing? I can appreciate it when I see another writer do it, but how can I do it?