An ending without a story

“It is important you strike at the edge of the market,” Valian said to the Brothers Urgo. “I will set heel to horse and take Lady Ginelle away to safety. You can take what pleasure you will with Sebastine, as long as he is dead when you’re done.”

The Brothers Urgo were the most muscles one could by for ten silver fellarins. They had been banned from every tavern in the city, having killed at least one person in drunken brawls at each of them. They sat now with Valian in the attic room of an inn. The single candle that sat between them made shadow dance across the kindling he’d used to make a crude map of the market.

“Lady Ginelle’s affection for the rogue will bring us back to the market. I will lead them away as far as I can before we’re forced to turn back. Take what you will for him. It will only make it more believable that he was set on by someone come to collect his debts.”

Valian saw the brothers’ eyes go wide before he felt the steel against his throat. He heard neither steps nor breathing. The increased volume from the street below was the only evidence that the window was open.

“Do you share common cause with this man or are you hear for the money?” Sebastine asked.

Frar—or Fjor, Valian could never keep them straight—laughed and elbowed his brother in the side.

“The money,” he said with a half-grin.

Sebastine ripped Valian’s purse from his belt and threw it to Frar.

“You are paid. Be gone with you.”

The Brothers Urgo wasted no more words for Valian. They snatched up the purse, scrambled to their feet, and raced out the door. Valian leaned forward, expecting Sebastine to lower his knife, but the blade cut into his neck, and blood leaked down into his shirt, tickling his chest hairs.

“How did you know,” Valian asked.

“I didn’t,” Sebastine answered. “We are both damned to be the men we are. Ginelle begged mercy for you, and for her I granted it. But she is not here, and that mercy remained with her.”

“She will never forgive you. She will never love you with that smile that puts the sunshine to shame. She will know you are no better than me.”

“She will never love me,” Sebastine said. “To her benefit. She is too smart to settle for someone like me. As for you,” Sebastine drew the knife across Valian’s kneck, carving from Adam’s apple to shoulder. “She will never know.”

Valian gasped. They had played their games for so long. He had expected more time. He had more to say. He had more to prove. He was the better. He was worthy of Lady Ginelle’s smiles, of her longing stairs, of her soft lips. He was the hero of this story. He was supposed to win this time. Not Sebastine, him.

Valian fell to the floor. He watched Sebastine lean over him, only to wipe the dagger on Valian’s favorite shirt. He walked out of view, back to the window. There was a metallic thud. He’d kicked over the candle into the little kindling market. The flames crawling onto him were the last thing he felt, the oily black smoke the last thing he saw.

Kingdom Death

Legacy games are all the rage in the board game world at the moment. My Tuesday group has already completed Seafall and Gloomhave and are 7/12 through Charterstone. I even have my own that I worked on over Christmas that I hope to devote more time to if work wasn't trying to kill me (believe those articles about how the 40-hour week is dead). I've had the wonderful opportunity to sit in on a friend's campaign of Kingdom Death a couple times, and I have to say it surpasses all the other legacy games I've played in story and atmosphere. Seafall and Gloomhaven had their strong points, but both suffered from weak endings ("Wait, what?" and "That's it?" respectively). And granted, perhaps I will be disappointed by Kingdom Death's ending, if I should ever experience it, but for now, I'm reveling in the creative doors it's opened in my mind. So, despite being sick for the bajillionth time this year, I sat down for a quick wind sprint to excise the opening that has been playing in my head since Friday when my character was killed during the end-of-game reward phase. That's right, I was killed by post-game box text, and it was glorious.

So, with the self-conscious caveat that I've been writing academic papers for the past three years, here is a small wind sprint on Kingdom Death.

CHAPTER 1

The first thing you notice isn’t the light, the cold white glow in the distance that illuminates a black lamppost that would otherwise be lost in the absolute darkness that surrounds you. The first thing you notice is the quiet. There is no breeze, no air, no sound of birds or bugs; the world holds its breath endlessly. The silence lasts for so long that the world around you feels dead, and you wonder if you’re dead, too.

Turning about brings no comfort. Away from the lamppost stretches an endless night without stars to twinkle or moons to glow. In every direction there is absence, in every direction but one. You head to the lamppost, the single white beacon calling to you like a fishing lure. You take comfort in the crunch of your footsteps. Dry grass, brittle like hay, pokes your bare feet. You accelerate your step, relishing the painful stab of each sheath. It says you are alive, and you beat that message to the world around you for all to hear.

If you were not alone.

Dream Chasing

I was in the mood to overwrite something tonight. I had a glimmer of an idea during a drive to New Brunswick that I'm letting percolate in my brain. I thought I'd do a quick wind sprint and make it as thick and sappy as I could.

DREAM CHASING

Amid the darkness of sleep, dreams illuminate sight and sound, a match-strike of fantasy that fades as quickly as it burst into existence. Come dawn only smoke remains, a phantom of the light in which we played. It fades into oblivion with the first gentle breeze, and our memory of it fades with it. When our parents tell us to chase our dreams, they tell us to change the fleeting. By the time we catch it, we will no longer remember what it is. They tell us to chase our dreams so they can convince themselves they did the same, and what they caught was what they wanted.

The twist is, sometimes the light doesn't fade. Sometimes you you remember your dreams. That bright flash of fantasy burns onto your brain, and you chase it with every breath. And if you should be so fortunate to catch those dreams, they'll tell you those aren't the dreams you should have caught. Try again. Chase something more realistic, something more prestigious that will pay the bills or that you can tell your nuclear family about someday.

When our parents tell us to chase our dreams, they're full of shit. That's why I've stopped listening to them.

Reincarnate

So I'm working toward my Masters of Science in Instructional Design and Technology (how to make education better, basically) and I've found that I can't write a research paper every week, do my regular job, and write a novel all at the same time. However, I have a three-month break coming up, starting next week, and I'm anxious to start a new project. I had an idea a couple weeks ago for my very first literary fiction novel. I was itching to write tonight, so I popped off 250 words. Here's a taste.

Where do you begin? It's not an easy thing, when a person asks you “Where do you think it went wrong?” With thirty-plus years under your belt, how do you pick out a day, an hour, an instant and say, Yeah, this is where it went wrong. You could pick this fuck-up or that one, but rest assured there was a whole host of fuck-ups that preceded them. So you say, I don't know. It just happened, gradually, because that's the kind of sage-like cliché that resonates with people and they don't push.

And what's galling is that if I truly had to pick one moment where it all truly went wrong, it's not even my fuck-up that I'd pick. It's my twin brother, Danny's. We were fifteen when he got into his accident and I realized how quick it all can be taken away from you. I got a sense of my own mortality, or whatever. Live each day like it's your last because holy shit, it just might be.

They say no one should die a virgin. They said it, and I repeated it to my girlfriend, Emily, and she agreed with them and me. They also say it only takes one time, which turned out also to be true. So if you want to know where it all went wrong, blame Danny. What we he doing, skateboarding without a helmet? That was stupid.

Pregnant at fifteen, married at sixteen, sometimes I think Danny's the one that got off easy.

First Paragraph for One of the Good Days

I've been bumbling around a concept for a few weeks and while I was watching "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" (which you should totally watch, because it's awesome), a few lines popped into my head and I figured I should write them down before I go to bed. So here they are:

Victoria wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. That's one of the problems with living so long, things don't last. They age. They whither. They get dirty. And the pricks at city hall throw you a rag and tell you to clean things up, but the rag they gave you is just as dirty. Victoria was the love of my life, but this city's gone to shit, and I don't think I can love her like I used to.

Wind Sprint: Serenity

I tell Liz Poole all the time that I'm never going to write Urban Fantasy. But an opening line while I was driving from physical therapy gave me an idea for a character that turned an espionage thriller plot I had been ruminating on into a genuine urban fantasy.

The original espionage was inspired by a crazy lady I passed in the subway one day. She stood near a street musician, one whose music I really enjoy. He's a junky that plays a mean harmonica with a bean can shaker. He makes some great blues music. She was screaming, "SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!" Except she wasn't screaming at the musician. She had her back to him and was shouting at the escalator. I wanted to know what she was seeing. And wouldn't it be interesting if something was actually there?

Combine with that a separate experience where a less talented musician was there not actually playing at the time I passed. Someone threw money in her hat and she handed the person a folded piece of paper. Now, most likely, the paper was folded around drugs. But what if it wasn't? What if the musician was a CIA operative passing information to another operative? How cool would that be?

Mix those two together. What if the CIA isn't just your normal espionage spooks? What if it's a supernatural agency? Who can infiltrate better than a changling that can change his/her features? (Reminds me a little of Gail Carriger's work and some other urban fantasy I've touched on but can't remember at the moment. Lurker, ring a bell with you?) A small government program attempting to track the tidal wave of immigrants moving to America at the end of the 19th century (tracking Irish and similar "blights" on the country), discover supernatural beings living among us. The Cenosapian Identification Agency is formed to identify how pervasive the infestation is and to determine whether they're a biproduct of the Irish or something else entirely.

Fast forward a few decades when the government begins to fight the red menace and all of a sudden supernaturals are necessary to fight back communism. Stalin and Hitler both had their own cenosapian programs and if we give the reds the advantage, it'll spell the end of democracy for the world! Fast forward a few decades more and now the wall has fallen and post-War colonialism is winding to a close. Espionage isn't that useful with only one remaining super power. [Avoid all your overdone plots and think of something cool to go here.]

Now all you need is a main character. And that's today's idea, Serenity.

"My parents didn't name me Serenity because they were Buddhists or existentialists or anything like that. They were nerds. Big, cosplaying nerds, and they named me after a spaceship. Thanks mom. Thanks dad. Why couldn't you be hippies? Make love not war. Smoke weed. Wear hemp. If we had spent my childhood getting high and eating brownies rather than rolling for initiative, maybe I wouldn't be in this mess.

I rolled a three, by the way. Maybe that's the problem too."


(That last part might riff too close to GEEKOMANCY, but the point of a wind sprint isn't to show off a new idea, but to fastball pitch an idea against the wall and see what kind of Rorschach shapes come out of it.)

I'll puzzle around with this more after I'm done with my next draft of FAMILY JEWELS.

Inspiration Strikes Like LIghtning

It's not a good idea to wait on inspiration, but when it strikes, you grab that shit and hold on. It can be a winning lottery ticket, and if you tell it to wait until later, you might never get to scratch off those numbers and hit the big score.

/simile

I was leaving work late today, as I have done for weeks now. It's the busier time of year, made busier because I'm trying to get everything done so my holidays can be holidayicious. AND I had skate practice tonight, for which I was running late. As I hustle to the elevator, I hit the button, the down arrow lights up, I hear a ding, and...

...nothing. The doors don't open. Another door behind me opens. I look. That arrow is lit up too and there's a person inside. I watch the opposite elevator the entire time. I step in, watch, the doors close, I watch to the last. The light was on, but the doors never opened. How strange! Especially since I just listened to a piece on NPR's Marketplace about the science of elevators. I've been paying attention, and that was certainly weird.

Wouldn't it have been horrible if I had gotten on that elevator and then it broke down and then I missed skate practice entirely rather than just showing up late.

What if... what if... what if...

So many possibilities come to mind, and then I hear the first lyrical construction of what becomes the first few lines below. After I finish my current rewrite, I have two novels on deck. One is a larger fantasy I've tried to write twice before. The other is a science fiction who-dunnit with the working title of FAMILY JEWELS. I may have done a wind sprint for that one previously. I dabbled on it because I couldn't get it out of my mind. And I admit, I was unimpressed with the wind sprint. This, however, these few paragraphs capture the tone and attitude I want for the story.

BAM! Inspiration to the face! Hop past the break (if you see a break) to read the first few paragraphs. I'll let this simmer on the back burner for when I write the full thing. This may move it up to the next-to-bat position even though I've been world building on 7TH SACRIFICE a lot lately. We'll see when we get there. For now I still have a lot more to do with BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE.


Chapter 1: Benedict Quick Hated Running

There is always a singular instant, a domino moment, when What Is deviates from What Should Be and becomes What If. All of a person's nicely ordered and freely chosen decisions become the victims of causality, falling one after the other. For Benedict Quick, lead detective at Quick and Easy Investigations, that moment occurred on Saturday the 15th of April at 0731. He stood on the fifth floor of the Bellanton Building, waiting for the uppevator to turn into a downevator, but when the up-arrow light turned off and the down-arrow light turned on, the doors did not open.

Another down-arrow light turned on, and a synthesized bell dinged as the doors to a second downevator opened behind him. Ben stepped into the metal box, an old-style pulley/engine conveyance that worked against gravity in both directions to move a person to differing floors while keeping their feet on a solid plane.
“Backward fucking planet,” Ben grumbled for the billionth time, punching a plastic circle marked “G” that lit up after he touched it.

That kind of antique novelty was common on planet Wozniak, the odd and eccentric, the vogue and the retro. Most members of the Galactic Cooperative of Planets used anti-graviton movement tubes, uppevators, downevators, leftevators, rightevators, and so on. These old style boxes only moved up and down and had a tendency to get stuck, even back when they were the only method of transport from the first to the fiftieth floor.

The first downevator's light remained on, but its doors never opened. It sat there, waiting for someone to call for service, while Ben made his way to the ground floor. Ben Should Have gotten on that first downevator. It Should Have gotten stuck between the fifth and the fourth floors with him inside. Then he wouldn't have reached the lobby when he did. He wouldn't have spotted Xio Xiolin--a white-collar biometics counterfeiter with a bounty on his head--walking toward the exit. Xiolin wouldn't have made eye contact. Xiolin wouldn't have run. And Ben wouldn't have had to chase him.

Benedict Quick hated running.