angels | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

18/Feb/2013

2012 NaNoWriMo Excerpt #3

Last one of these I’m posting before I get anywhere with editing this novella into shape. I haven’t even got to write the really cool scenes yet! (The really cool scenes are some NGE/Michael Bay stuff. Explaining it here would ruin the explositude.)

Previous excerpts can be found here: /2012/11/12/nanowrimo-excerpt-1/ and here: /2013/01/13/2012-nanowrimo-excerpt-2/

This snippet takes place between excerpt 2 and 1. As usual, comments appreciated.

[Content Warning: sex]

She closed the door and exhaled and lay down on the floor. Immediately, Ikkje appeared from the doorway from the kitchen and sat down next to her. He held her hand. He wore an apron and smelled like cinnamon.

“Do you love me?” Rovy asked.

Ikkje Pouncer appeared to think for a little while. The house was modest, she thought. Like most of Ikkje’s kind, the house was just at the edge of the city, but Rovy was okay with this. “I think I do. I don’t think anything has changed. What’s wrong?”

He spent most of his days out in the emptiness, unrecorded, hunting and gathering. Rovy shook her head. “Long day, is all. Have you heard of the falling elites?”

“Elites?”

“The bewinged men and women falling from the sky, love.”

“Is that where the elites are?”

“Well, a bunch of them fell and something happened to the Information Market. Hardly any Buskers there, but many buyers. Don’t know what to make of it. Is dinner done soon?”

“It is. I gathered a lot of mushrooms and potatoes, today.” He smiled.

She kissed him. “You know, most hunter-gatherers also do the hunting business. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you bring home a phant of any kind.”

“These potatoes were totally a struggle, I swear.”

She stared at the little information ball that had rolled out of her pockets.

She kissed her husband again, “hey, do you really love me?” Read the rest of this entry »

31/Jan/2013

Georg

Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a dead woman. She died in front of him every night and became more and more beautiful. One morning, after a storm, he made his way to the damp alley where she lay, mouth open, face gone. He found her behind a trash can and he cried. She had not got to her feet and walked away like an angel.

The city was besieged. It rained fire and black death. The man stayed with the dead woman, his obsession. And she took one last breath, and her soul possessed him.

26/Aug/2012

Worldbuilding 3: When to Let Go, & New Stuff

Last entry in this series: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/07/20/worldbuilding-2-the-points-of-departure/

If you don’t put your heart into something it can never have the pulse you’ve taken all your life to protect. Similarly, I’ve grown disillusioned with the poisonbeasts and shall instead talk a bit about the deaths of things.

For me, most projects do not simply die, but poison the water and then appear as ghosts in the lucid dreams of my other projects. Which is a fancy way of saying I reuse things, at times, and ideas gnaw on the back of my skull often and hard.

It’s good to let things die, though. I can’t tie that into the other metaphors I’ve used here, so I’ll just say it plainly: deciding that a project is not worth your attention means you’re doing quality control and also that you won’t have to decide that /later/. Saying goodbye at 500 words in is better than 500 pages in, etc.

Letting things die isn’t the same as giving up. Giving up is all defeatlike. Someone once told me, or said in my vicinity, that creativity is the creation of many ideas and then pruning them until you find the ones that are salvageable. In light of that, whenever I let something die I write down another idea, or gravestone the thing into a drabble at the very least. Even if it’s bloody stupid. So, related to that last post about things you can have, here’s a bunch of things I might use, which are of course up for taking (do show me the work when you’re done with it if you pick one of these plots):

Read the rest of this entry »