Wen Spencer's Blog, page 4
December 16, 2012
December 6, 2012
WOOD SPRITES, Chapter 1: What's in your Easter Basket?
Louise Georgina Mayer learned many important life lessons the week before her ninth birthday. The first was that flour was indeed explosive. The second was not to experiment with explosives indoors – or at least not in a small wooden playhouse that doubled as a film studio. The third was that adults – firemen, EMTs, policemen, her parents -- liked to state the obvious when trying to make a point. Yes, she realized that they'd miscalculated while still airborne – thank you very much. The fourth was that her twin sister rocked – Jillian sat there with blood streaming down her face and managed a wide-eyed story of innocence that pinned the entire event on their Barbie dolls. Fifth was that people believed the stupidest things if you delivered the story while bleeding.
Sixth was that her parents were liars.
"That can't be right." She told the emergency room nurse who was applying the bracelet to her wrist that claimed she was blood type AB. The man blithely ignored her, so she said it louder and clearer. "That's not right."
"Hm? What isn't right, sweetie?" The nurse asked although by his tone he still wasn't paying attention.
"I'm blood type O," Louise stated firmly. She was going to be a geneticist someday. Maybe. A Geneticist or an animal trainer or a circus performer. Unlike Jillian, Louise couldn't decide what she wanted to do with her life. Jillian wanted to write, act, and direct big budget action movies, hence the entire flour explosion. According to their alibi, Barbie was merely pinned under her pink convertible in a blizzard. In truth, the planned small explosion was an ingenious ploy of Queen Soulful Ember, Queen of the elves, to deal with an advancing army of man-eating Black Willow trees. It was supposed to be the climax of their partly accurate partly parody video series on the history of Earth's parallel planet, Elfhome.
"Type O?" The nurse became focused. He picked up a tester and there was a sudden sharp pain in her finger. The machine beeped and he shook his head. "No, you're AB positive. See. Here, let's do your sister."
He made Jillian wince and the machine beeped again. The display said: AB+.
Which was completely impossible. Both of her parents were blood type O, which was amazing only because they were such different people. Their father was tall, weedy thin, Nordic pale and hopelessly nerdy looking. Their mother was an African-American warrior queen who struggled daily not to be anything but solid built. Otherwise two type O people made a boring genetic grid. O across the board with the only possible outcome being O. Louise and Jillian weren't identical twins, which made it even more impossible.
"I always that said we were adopted," Jillian said once the nurse left them. While their dusky skin could be a blending of their two parents, the twin's silky straight brown hair was too well behaved to be from either of their parents and it was becoming apparent that they were never going to be tall.
"We can't be adopted," Louise said. "There's that icky video of us being born. All that screaming and blood and everything. That was mom saying the S and F words."
Jillian giggled. Their parents had planned to watch the birth videos – again – on their birthday until Jillian reminded how many times their mother cursed while giving birth. Luckily their parents hadn't mastered video editing to the point that they could simply erase out the swear words.
"Maybe we got it wrong on how blood type works," Jillian said.
"It's not that complicated." Louise sketched out the four boxes on the sheet of the bed with her fingernail. "At least – it didn't seem that complicated."
"Their donor cards are wrong?" Jillian suggested.
Louise shook her head. "They're universal donors. The blood bank wouldn't get that wrong. It would be bad."
However they considered it, the facts just didn't seem to add up.
Eventually their parents swept in, smelling of smoke, and radiating concern.
"What were you doing in your playhouse that made it explode?" their mother asked. She cupped Jillian chin with her elegant dark hands and made a sound of dismay over the stitches at the edge of her scalp.
"Honey," their father said in the tone that said he thought their mother was being silly. As they got older, they were realizing that their father was child naïve at times.
"George, don't baby them, they're too intelligent to be babied."
Jillian got all wide-eyed innocent again, which didn't work nearly as well without the streaming blood but the stitches helped. "All we were doing was playing with our dolls. Barbie had spun out in the driving snow…"
"The flour and the sifter and the fan?" Their mother asked.
"It was a blizzard." Louise explained since Jillian was losing ground. "The flour was snow."
"What you did was very dangerous." Their father fell back to truth number three: stating the obvious.
"We had no idea…" Louise started.
Jillian kicked her and gave her a look that said that it was the wrong thing to do. Jillian was much better at lying, so Louise shut up. "We have no idea what happened. Why did our playhouse blow up?"
"Flour can explode when it fills up the air like that." Their father explained patiently. "Don't ever play with flour like that again."
Their mother knew them better. "Or anything like flour. Baby powder. Corn starch. Sawdust."
"Where would they get sawdust?" their father asked. He might not know them, but he knew New York City suburbs. Sawdust had proved impossible to find within an easy walk of their local train stations, hence the reason they used flour.
"Non-dairy creamer. Baking soda. Sugar." Obviously their mother had spent time researching dust explosions before this conversation. "Anything like flour. Understand?"
They nodded meekly while Jillian bit down on a 'darn it.'
"Mom," Louise held out her wrist with the plastic bracelet on it. "Why are we AB positive when both you and dad are O. Isn't that impossible?"
Both of their parents flinched as if struck.
"Baby, that's very complicated..." their father started.
"If we don't tell them," their mother murmured. "They'll only guess – and they'll probably guess wrong."
Their parents gazed at each other as if having a long silent discussion. Finally their father sighed. "Okay, we'll tell them. Babies, we wanted to have children very, very much but no matter how hard we tried, for a long time, we couldn't. We started to look into adoption when I was offered my position at Cryobank. It's an embryo bank – umm -- where – where people who – um…"
"It's like an adoption service," their mother took up the explanation. "But instead of babies that have already been born, its babies that haven't been born yet."
They frowned at their parents until their father added. "It's like Easter, but instead of chicken eggs in your basket, you get – ummm – human eggs."
Their mother covered her face, which meant they weren't to listen to anything their father said. It also meant that they probably weren't going to get a better explanation.
"Soooo, you put these Easter eggs into your tummy and had us," Louise said.
"But they weren't your Easter eggs, they were someone else's," Jillian said.
"Yes, exactly." Their father said.
"Close enough." Their mother mumbled into her hands still covering her face.
Louise sighed. They were going to have to research this when they got home.
Sixth was that her parents were liars.
"That can't be right." She told the emergency room nurse who was applying the bracelet to her wrist that claimed she was blood type AB. The man blithely ignored her, so she said it louder and clearer. "That's not right."
"Hm? What isn't right, sweetie?" The nurse asked although by his tone he still wasn't paying attention.
"I'm blood type O," Louise stated firmly. She was going to be a geneticist someday. Maybe. A Geneticist or an animal trainer or a circus performer. Unlike Jillian, Louise couldn't decide what she wanted to do with her life. Jillian wanted to write, act, and direct big budget action movies, hence the entire flour explosion. According to their alibi, Barbie was merely pinned under her pink convertible in a blizzard. In truth, the planned small explosion was an ingenious ploy of Queen Soulful Ember, Queen of the elves, to deal with an advancing army of man-eating Black Willow trees. It was supposed to be the climax of their partly accurate partly parody video series on the history of Earth's parallel planet, Elfhome.
"Type O?" The nurse became focused. He picked up a tester and there was a sudden sharp pain in her finger. The machine beeped and he shook his head. "No, you're AB positive. See. Here, let's do your sister."
He made Jillian wince and the machine beeped again. The display said: AB+.
Which was completely impossible. Both of her parents were blood type O, which was amazing only because they were such different people. Their father was tall, weedy thin, Nordic pale and hopelessly nerdy looking. Their mother was an African-American warrior queen who struggled daily not to be anything but solid built. Otherwise two type O people made a boring genetic grid. O across the board with the only possible outcome being O. Louise and Jillian weren't identical twins, which made it even more impossible.
"I always that said we were adopted," Jillian said once the nurse left them. While their dusky skin could be a blending of their two parents, the twin's silky straight brown hair was too well behaved to be from either of their parents and it was becoming apparent that they were never going to be tall.
"We can't be adopted," Louise said. "There's that icky video of us being born. All that screaming and blood and everything. That was mom saying the S and F words."
Jillian giggled. Their parents had planned to watch the birth videos – again – on their birthday until Jillian reminded how many times their mother cursed while giving birth. Luckily their parents hadn't mastered video editing to the point that they could simply erase out the swear words.
"Maybe we got it wrong on how blood type works," Jillian said.
"It's not that complicated." Louise sketched out the four boxes on the sheet of the bed with her fingernail. "At least – it didn't seem that complicated."
"Their donor cards are wrong?" Jillian suggested.
Louise shook her head. "They're universal donors. The blood bank wouldn't get that wrong. It would be bad."
However they considered it, the facts just didn't seem to add up.
Eventually their parents swept in, smelling of smoke, and radiating concern.
"What were you doing in your playhouse that made it explode?" their mother asked. She cupped Jillian chin with her elegant dark hands and made a sound of dismay over the stitches at the edge of her scalp.
"Honey," their father said in the tone that said he thought their mother was being silly. As they got older, they were realizing that their father was child naïve at times.
"George, don't baby them, they're too intelligent to be babied."
Jillian got all wide-eyed innocent again, which didn't work nearly as well without the streaming blood but the stitches helped. "All we were doing was playing with our dolls. Barbie had spun out in the driving snow…"
"The flour and the sifter and the fan?" Their mother asked.
"It was a blizzard." Louise explained since Jillian was losing ground. "The flour was snow."
"What you did was very dangerous." Their father fell back to truth number three: stating the obvious.
"We had no idea…" Louise started.
Jillian kicked her and gave her a look that said that it was the wrong thing to do. Jillian was much better at lying, so Louise shut up. "We have no idea what happened. Why did our playhouse blow up?"
"Flour can explode when it fills up the air like that." Their father explained patiently. "Don't ever play with flour like that again."
Their mother knew them better. "Or anything like flour. Baby powder. Corn starch. Sawdust."
"Where would they get sawdust?" their father asked. He might not know them, but he knew New York City suburbs. Sawdust had proved impossible to find within an easy walk of their local train stations, hence the reason they used flour.
"Non-dairy creamer. Baking soda. Sugar." Obviously their mother had spent time researching dust explosions before this conversation. "Anything like flour. Understand?"
They nodded meekly while Jillian bit down on a 'darn it.'
"Mom," Louise held out her wrist with the plastic bracelet on it. "Why are we AB positive when both you and dad are O. Isn't that impossible?"
Both of their parents flinched as if struck.
"Baby, that's very complicated..." their father started.
"If we don't tell them," their mother murmured. "They'll only guess – and they'll probably guess wrong."
Their parents gazed at each other as if having a long silent discussion. Finally their father sighed. "Okay, we'll tell them. Babies, we wanted to have children very, very much but no matter how hard we tried, for a long time, we couldn't. We started to look into adoption when I was offered my position at Cryobank. It's an embryo bank – umm -- where – where people who – um…"
"It's like an adoption service," their mother took up the explanation. "But instead of babies that have already been born, its babies that haven't been born yet."
They frowned at their parents until their father added. "It's like Easter, but instead of chicken eggs in your basket, you get – ummm – human eggs."
Their mother covered her face, which meant they weren't to listen to anything their father said. It also meant that they probably weren't going to get a better explanation.
"Soooo, you put these Easter eggs into your tummy and had us," Louise said.
"But they weren't your Easter eggs, they were someone else's," Jillian said.
"Yes, exactly." Their father said.
"Close enough." Their mother mumbled into her hands still covering her face.
Louise sighed. They were going to have to research this when they got home.
December 5, 2012
wen_spencer @ 2012-12-05T13:17:00
Tinker went out into the courtyard to find that all the spell lights been removed, pitching the acre of peach trees into darkness. Black wings churned unseen in the sky overhead, masked by branches. Shrill flutes and thin tin gongs had joined the drumming, growing louder as the musicians came through the main hall.
Her Hand pressed in tightly around her, hands gripped tight to their ejae, ready to draw.
Small figures came spilling out the hall, carrying paper lanterns. Tinker lost count after the first dozen that swarmed through the courtyard, slowly lighting up the area as more and more moved among the trees. One came hurrying up to her. It was little Joey Shoji, dressed in a white tunic trimmed in red and carrying a lantern nearly as big as he was.
"Joey, what's going on?" Tinker asked.
He pressed a finger to his lips. "Shhhh, Providence is coming."
Jin had told her once that Providence was the guardian spirit of the tengu. As the Chosen, he was considered Providence's child. From what she could gather, though, the guardian spirit was actually a dragon.
Did that mean there was yet another dragon in Pittsburgh?
Behind the lantern bearers came musicians. The flutes were shrill. The gongs looked like and sounded like battered cooking pots. The drums ranged in tones from high and thin to sharp and woody. They made a sharp-edged music with no discernible melody. Just as she thought musicians were playing completely solo to each other, they all sped up slightly at the same moment.
Finally Jin appeared, dressed in robes of white. He was dancing, slowly, mechanically, almost like a series of poses. Before each new pose, he would take a quick step forward, so that he was stuttering his way through the dark trees, like a series of still photographs.
Riki followed behind Jin, dressed in black, winged, armed with swords, and his face painted for war. A dozen armed tengu followed, all with swords but no pistols and rifles. Riki's younger cousin, Kieko was the among the armed honor guard.
The possession included a small shrine being carried by a dozen males and a drum nearly eight feet across carried by another dozen. The big drum was settled into a stand, six drummers circled it and stood waiting. There was no sign of Providence. It seemed like an elaborate party to have without the guest of honor in attendance. Then again, if Providence had been in Pittsburgh, Riki wouldn't have been so desperate to find Impatience.
The thrilling near-discordant flute music suddenly stopped, and for a moment the only noise was the wind through the leaves.
All six drummers struck once, a single deep heartbeat of sound.
A second simultaneous downbeat. Then a third.
Then in a sudden, wild of assault of drumming, all the drummers perfectly in time with each other, beat out one massive rhythm.
Jin moved to the shrine, bowed low to it, and opened the front.
Tinker gasped as she saw lay inside the little shrine: a dragon hide.
Jin lifted out the hide and turned, holding the head above him. The hide settled over his shoulders, cloaking him from view. The flutes broke out in their shrill discord and the gongs clattered fast and furious.
Jin started to dance forward again, faster, but still in the odd stuttering poses. This time the poses made more sense. Each could have been a photograph of Impatience as the little dragon moved without the fluidity of life.
Tinker realized she had covered her mouth in horror and her hand was still pressed tight to her mouth. What had happened to Providence? Who had skinned him? The tengu? Why would they do that to their guardian spirit? The elves method of body disposal seemed suddenly sane and pure.
Jin the dragon danced in wide circle around Tinker and her Hand. The big drum throbbed like a massive heartbeat against her skin as the flutes shrieked. The dragon head dipped and rose and turned in a parody of Impatience's curious investigation of his surroundings. Empty eyes took in the night sky, the rooftops crowded with silent tengu, the honor guard kneeling on the ground, the little lantern bearers. Louder and faster the music rushed toward a climax.
A wind suddenly blasted through the trees, and Tinker felt magic surge up and Jin suddenly froze and the music instantly stopped.
The dragon head had been turned away from her.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose as it slowly turned to look at her with gleaming eyes. The mane that had laid down Jin's back rose, crackling with power.
"Tinker haenanan." The voice was too deep, too gravelly, too loud to be Jin's. "Manamana daaaaa sobadadada."
"Princess Tinker," Riki murmured in Elvish from his bowed position. "Our great guardian Providence greets you."
This was entirely too creepy.
"You never told me that he was dead," Tinker whispered in English.
Riki winced and gave a slight warning shake of his head. Providence, apparently, could understand English fine; the dragon scoffed. Its breath blasted warm over her, smelling like wind after a rainstorm. His words rolled over her, seemingly unending. Jin had told her once that dragons were longwinded and indirect and trying to hurry them was considered impolite.
Her Hand pressed in tightly around her, hands gripped tight to their ejae, ready to draw.
Small figures came spilling out the hall, carrying paper lanterns. Tinker lost count after the first dozen that swarmed through the courtyard, slowly lighting up the area as more and more moved among the trees. One came hurrying up to her. It was little Joey Shoji, dressed in a white tunic trimmed in red and carrying a lantern nearly as big as he was.
"Joey, what's going on?" Tinker asked.
He pressed a finger to his lips. "Shhhh, Providence is coming."
Jin had told her once that Providence was the guardian spirit of the tengu. As the Chosen, he was considered Providence's child. From what she could gather, though, the guardian spirit was actually a dragon.
Did that mean there was yet another dragon in Pittsburgh?
Behind the lantern bearers came musicians. The flutes were shrill. The gongs looked like and sounded like battered cooking pots. The drums ranged in tones from high and thin to sharp and woody. They made a sharp-edged music with no discernible melody. Just as she thought musicians were playing completely solo to each other, they all sped up slightly at the same moment.
Finally Jin appeared, dressed in robes of white. He was dancing, slowly, mechanically, almost like a series of poses. Before each new pose, he would take a quick step forward, so that he was stuttering his way through the dark trees, like a series of still photographs.
Riki followed behind Jin, dressed in black, winged, armed with swords, and his face painted for war. A dozen armed tengu followed, all with swords but no pistols and rifles. Riki's younger cousin, Kieko was the among the armed honor guard.
The possession included a small shrine being carried by a dozen males and a drum nearly eight feet across carried by another dozen. The big drum was settled into a stand, six drummers circled it and stood waiting. There was no sign of Providence. It seemed like an elaborate party to have without the guest of honor in attendance. Then again, if Providence had been in Pittsburgh, Riki wouldn't have been so desperate to find Impatience.
The thrilling near-discordant flute music suddenly stopped, and for a moment the only noise was the wind through the leaves.
All six drummers struck once, a single deep heartbeat of sound.
A second simultaneous downbeat. Then a third.
Then in a sudden, wild of assault of drumming, all the drummers perfectly in time with each other, beat out one massive rhythm.
Jin moved to the shrine, bowed low to it, and opened the front.
Tinker gasped as she saw lay inside the little shrine: a dragon hide.
Jin lifted out the hide and turned, holding the head above him. The hide settled over his shoulders, cloaking him from view. The flutes broke out in their shrill discord and the gongs clattered fast and furious.
Jin started to dance forward again, faster, but still in the odd stuttering poses. This time the poses made more sense. Each could have been a photograph of Impatience as the little dragon moved without the fluidity of life.
Tinker realized she had covered her mouth in horror and her hand was still pressed tight to her mouth. What had happened to Providence? Who had skinned him? The tengu? Why would they do that to their guardian spirit? The elves method of body disposal seemed suddenly sane and pure.
Jin the dragon danced in wide circle around Tinker and her Hand. The big drum throbbed like a massive heartbeat against her skin as the flutes shrieked. The dragon head dipped and rose and turned in a parody of Impatience's curious investigation of his surroundings. Empty eyes took in the night sky, the rooftops crowded with silent tengu, the honor guard kneeling on the ground, the little lantern bearers. Louder and faster the music rushed toward a climax.
A wind suddenly blasted through the trees, and Tinker felt magic surge up and Jin suddenly froze and the music instantly stopped.
The dragon head had been turned away from her.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose as it slowly turned to look at her with gleaming eyes. The mane that had laid down Jin's back rose, crackling with power.
"Tinker haenanan." The voice was too deep, too gravelly, too loud to be Jin's. "Manamana daaaaa sobadadada."
"Princess Tinker," Riki murmured in Elvish from his bowed position. "Our great guardian Providence greets you."
This was entirely too creepy.
"You never told me that he was dead," Tinker whispered in English.
Riki winced and gave a slight warning shake of his head. Providence, apparently, could understand English fine; the dragon scoffed. Its breath blasted warm over her, smelling like wind after a rainstorm. His words rolled over her, seemingly unending. Jin had told her once that dragons were longwinded and indirect and trying to hurry them was considered impolite.
November 26, 2012
November 8, 2012
Chapter Length
How long should a chapter be?
First time novelist always ask this question. I did too. One of the reasons is that novels come with no quick and ready instructions like "take two with water" or "insert tab A into slot B" or "drive 40 minutes on I-279." All our life, things generally come with instructions. Heck, even babies come with countless books on child care. Most "how to write" books, however, rarely address the question of chapter length.
The short and dirty answer is probably the reason why. Chapters can be any length you want to be. They can be one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one scene, or many scenes. So writing books say, "any length" and think that covers it. There's a whole lot more than that.
What is a chapter? It's a method of organizing words in a story. It's in the same category as a sentence, paragraph, and scene. So let's consider them all.
A sentence is a collection of words that are grouped together for an impact. Short, fast sentences read as action. Exciting. Tense. Longer sentences have the feeling of being slow, less action, more thought behind the words and less movement. You can chop sentences up. You can string them out with commas, semi-colons, yadayadayada, until they run forever. Sentences can be one word or a hundred. You go by gut feeling but behind that gut feeling is the knowledge of how sentence length reads. The more aware you are as to how number of words impact the feel of the sentence, the more you do it in your conscious brain and not with that subconscious part that is all mysterious realm of the muse.
A paragraph is a collection of sentences grouped together for impact. You can collect all the sentences together on one thought into one massive paragraph.
Or you can put one sentence by itself to make it stand out, and thus increase the effect it has on the reader.
The problem of doing it often is that it makes the story feel choppy.
So what's a scene? A scene is a collection of paragraphs grouped together for impact. It can be a snapshot of the story. Here is the hero eating breakfast, thinking about life. Here is the heroine running for her life through a graveyard. Snap. You have a piece of the story. It's whole and complete little mini-story within that photograph. The thing is that each scene, by its very nature, has a different level of tension in it because it's just a subset of the greater story. The hero eating breakfast is low tension unless he's trying to decide to go into the bathroom and blow his brains out. Which does he put into his mouth – Cheerios or gun barrel? If he's just thinking about cheerios, then his scene is lower tension then the heroine running for her life. This isn't a bad thing. Both are needed in the overall story. Think about the movie Die Hard, between shoot outs the hero sit panting someplace and considers his situation. You need the little lesser tension scenes between the high tensions scenes or it all becomes too much. It's like constantly screaming – sooner or later the scream loses its effect because it's become the norm.
Snapshot, though, misleading in that a scene can be – like a paragraph or sentence – also something very abbreviated. It can be a single sentence that advances the plot one step forward.
So what is a chapter?
A chapter is a collection of scenes. It can be as short as one paragraph, or one sentence. There's one book that I was blown away by the fact that the author had a series of chapters that were just the name of the months to indicate that time was passing and absolutely nothing of interest had happened during that time.
Some people make chapters only one scene long. This is particularly useful if you're changing POVs often. Chapter start would indicate strongly "new person has control of the story." Even if you're not changing POVs, there is nothing wrong with this method. Unlike making each sentence its own paragraph, most readers won't be aware that this is what you're doing because there's no immediate visual impact of "this chapter is just one scene" except by the fact that the chapter numbers build and build. A typical novel often has over a hundred scenes. Also you tend to have a natural scene length. If your natural length falls under a thousand words per scene, then the story will start to feel choppy to the average reader because they're constantly hitting end of chapter. The impact isn't as bad if your natural length runs toward 2000k or 3000k or if it varies between 1000k to 5000k.
However, making a chapter only one scene long means your throwing away a basic structural unit. Imagine what impact tossing away paragraphs and making every sentence stand alone. Embrace the multiple scene per chapter.
This leads you to the natural question, how many scenes per chapter?
As I discussed above, scenes have a level of tension. Some are low. Some are high. If you can't grasp that in your own work, you might want to try this exercise that I developed for my first few novels. Read over you scenes and assign an arbitrary tension level of 1 to 20. 1 is the character is eating breakfast and thinking of nothing more problematic than doing laundry. 5 is the character discovering that they're late for work and can't find their house keys. 10 is the character getting to work and learning that they're fired. 15 is the character stuck in an elevator and the building's fire alarm goes off. 20 they're standing on a ledge on the 20th floor of a burning building trying to build the courage to leap to the tiny fireman's net blow. Give each scene a number, just rough eyeball it, and chart it on a graph. Ideally the tension of the novel should rise slightly, and fall less. You start at 1 or 3 or 5 and slowly build, so it goes 3, 5, 3, 4, 3,7,9,5,10,8,12 etc.
Once you get a feel of what tension level your scenes are, you can now group them into chapters. Chapters should start at a lower tension. People are willing to ease into the ongoing story at the start of a chapter. As the chapter progresses, though, the tension should rise with each scene. At the point that the tension is going to drop down, that's when you break the chapter and start a new one.
Basically it looks like this:
Chapter One: Tension level 3, 4, 5
Chapter Two: Tension level 3, 5, 6
Chapter Three: Tension level 4, 7
Chapter Four: Tension level 5, 7, 9 10
What this does is give the novel the feeling a ramping feeling even though the scenes themselves don't shift that much between them tension-wise.
First time novelist always ask this question. I did too. One of the reasons is that novels come with no quick and ready instructions like "take two with water" or "insert tab A into slot B" or "drive 40 minutes on I-279." All our life, things generally come with instructions. Heck, even babies come with countless books on child care. Most "how to write" books, however, rarely address the question of chapter length.
The short and dirty answer is probably the reason why. Chapters can be any length you want to be. They can be one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one scene, or many scenes. So writing books say, "any length" and think that covers it. There's a whole lot more than that.
What is a chapter? It's a method of organizing words in a story. It's in the same category as a sentence, paragraph, and scene. So let's consider them all.
A sentence is a collection of words that are grouped together for an impact. Short, fast sentences read as action. Exciting. Tense. Longer sentences have the feeling of being slow, less action, more thought behind the words and less movement. You can chop sentences up. You can string them out with commas, semi-colons, yadayadayada, until they run forever. Sentences can be one word or a hundred. You go by gut feeling but behind that gut feeling is the knowledge of how sentence length reads. The more aware you are as to how number of words impact the feel of the sentence, the more you do it in your conscious brain and not with that subconscious part that is all mysterious realm of the muse.
A paragraph is a collection of sentences grouped together for impact. You can collect all the sentences together on one thought into one massive paragraph.
Or you can put one sentence by itself to make it stand out, and thus increase the effect it has on the reader.
The problem of doing it often is that it makes the story feel choppy.
So what's a scene? A scene is a collection of paragraphs grouped together for impact. It can be a snapshot of the story. Here is the hero eating breakfast, thinking about life. Here is the heroine running for her life through a graveyard. Snap. You have a piece of the story. It's whole and complete little mini-story within that photograph. The thing is that each scene, by its very nature, has a different level of tension in it because it's just a subset of the greater story. The hero eating breakfast is low tension unless he's trying to decide to go into the bathroom and blow his brains out. Which does he put into his mouth – Cheerios or gun barrel? If he's just thinking about cheerios, then his scene is lower tension then the heroine running for her life. This isn't a bad thing. Both are needed in the overall story. Think about the movie Die Hard, between shoot outs the hero sit panting someplace and considers his situation. You need the little lesser tension scenes between the high tensions scenes or it all becomes too much. It's like constantly screaming – sooner or later the scream loses its effect because it's become the norm.
Snapshot, though, misleading in that a scene can be – like a paragraph or sentence – also something very abbreviated. It can be a single sentence that advances the plot one step forward.
So what is a chapter?
A chapter is a collection of scenes. It can be as short as one paragraph, or one sentence. There's one book that I was blown away by the fact that the author had a series of chapters that were just the name of the months to indicate that time was passing and absolutely nothing of interest had happened during that time.
Some people make chapters only one scene long. This is particularly useful if you're changing POVs often. Chapter start would indicate strongly "new person has control of the story." Even if you're not changing POVs, there is nothing wrong with this method. Unlike making each sentence its own paragraph, most readers won't be aware that this is what you're doing because there's no immediate visual impact of "this chapter is just one scene" except by the fact that the chapter numbers build and build. A typical novel often has over a hundred scenes. Also you tend to have a natural scene length. If your natural length falls under a thousand words per scene, then the story will start to feel choppy to the average reader because they're constantly hitting end of chapter. The impact isn't as bad if your natural length runs toward 2000k or 3000k or if it varies between 1000k to 5000k.
However, making a chapter only one scene long means your throwing away a basic structural unit. Imagine what impact tossing away paragraphs and making every sentence stand alone. Embrace the multiple scene per chapter.
This leads you to the natural question, how many scenes per chapter?
As I discussed above, scenes have a level of tension. Some are low. Some are high. If you can't grasp that in your own work, you might want to try this exercise that I developed for my first few novels. Read over you scenes and assign an arbitrary tension level of 1 to 20. 1 is the character is eating breakfast and thinking of nothing more problematic than doing laundry. 5 is the character discovering that they're late for work and can't find their house keys. 10 is the character getting to work and learning that they're fired. 15 is the character stuck in an elevator and the building's fire alarm goes off. 20 they're standing on a ledge on the 20th floor of a burning building trying to build the courage to leap to the tiny fireman's net blow. Give each scene a number, just rough eyeball it, and chart it on a graph. Ideally the tension of the novel should rise slightly, and fall less. You start at 1 or 3 or 5 and slowly build, so it goes 3, 5, 3, 4, 3,7,9,5,10,8,12 etc.
Once you get a feel of what tension level your scenes are, you can now group them into chapters. Chapters should start at a lower tension. People are willing to ease into the ongoing story at the start of a chapter. As the chapter progresses, though, the tension should rise with each scene. At the point that the tension is going to drop down, that's when you break the chapter and start a new one.
Basically it looks like this:
Chapter One: Tension level 3, 4, 5
Chapter Two: Tension level 3, 5, 6
Chapter Three: Tension level 4, 7
Chapter Four: Tension level 5, 7, 9 10
What this does is give the novel the feeling a ramping feeling even though the scenes themselves don't shift that much between them tension-wise.
October 25, 2012
Cover of EIGHT MILLION GODS
On Saturday afternoon, Nikki Delany thought, "George Wilson, in the kitchen, with a blender." By dinner, she had killed George and posted his gory murder to her blog. All fiction. Or is it?
Nikki is a horror novelist. Her choice of career is dictated by an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that forces her to write stories of death and destruction. She can't control it, doesn't understand it, but can use it to make money anywhere in the world. Currently "anywhere" is in Japan, hiding from her mother who sees Nikki's OCD as proof she's mentally unstable. Nikki's fragile peace starts to fall apart when the police arrest her for the murder of an American expatriate. Someone killed him with a blender.
Reality unravels around Nikki. She's attacked by a raccoon in a business suit. After a series of blackouts, she’s permanently accompanied by a boy that no one else can see, a boy who claims to be a god. Is she really being pursued by Japanese myths—or is she simply going insane?
What Nikki does know for sure is that the bodies are piling up, her mother has arrived in Japan to lock her up for the rest of her life, and her novels always end with everyone dead.
October 16, 2012
New Elfhome Short Story
My newest Elfhome Short Story is up free to read on Baen's website.
http://baen.com/
You might need to scroll down to see it. Enjoy!
http://baen.com/
You might need to scroll down to see it. Enjoy!
July 9, 2012
What I find when I start looking through folders....
Jane focused on the fact that it was all her husband’s fault to avoid thinking about being a cow. She was going to sneak home, get him to turn her back, and then kill him. Slowly.
“Oh my god.” Sarah cried beside her. Sarah was a red jersey and made even looking like a cow look elegant.
“What?” Jane asked.
“I threw up in my mouth, and swallowed it again!” Sarah shuddered.
“It’s called chewing your cud.” Jane growled and peered back around the corner of the Fleishman’s house. “Cows and sheep have to do it to process their food.”
“It’s gross!”
The coast seemed clear. “Come on, let’s go.”
They stampeded down the driveway with Carol Fleishman bringing up the rear, crying, “Don’t walk on the grass! Don’t walk on the grass.”
You would think that having been turned into a cow, that leaving hoof prints in your perfect lawn would be the last thing you’d worry about. God, Jane hated suburbia. It was all her husband fault for moving them into the land of soccer moms. The book club was his idea. “You need friends!” he had then actually added, “A herd to run with.”
She was just going to kill him.
Said “herd” crossed Mockingbird Lane and went down the Hathaway’s driveway and around the back of their house. They all hated the Willow Hathaway, so no one complained when she cut through the backyard.
“Ewwww,” Beth cried. “I just licked up my nose!”
“Oh my god,” Alice squeaked, and then wailed when they all turned to look at her. “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!”
She turned and fled back toward Mockingbird, plopping out splatters of cow patties behind her.
Jane was just going to kill her husband. This was all his fault.
“Oh my god.” Sarah cried beside her. Sarah was a red jersey and made even looking like a cow look elegant.
“What?” Jane asked.
“I threw up in my mouth, and swallowed it again!” Sarah shuddered.
“It’s called chewing your cud.” Jane growled and peered back around the corner of the Fleishman’s house. “Cows and sheep have to do it to process their food.”
“It’s gross!”
The coast seemed clear. “Come on, let’s go.”
They stampeded down the driveway with Carol Fleishman bringing up the rear, crying, “Don’t walk on the grass! Don’t walk on the grass.”
You would think that having been turned into a cow, that leaving hoof prints in your perfect lawn would be the last thing you’d worry about. God, Jane hated suburbia. It was all her husband fault for moving them into the land of soccer moms. The book club was his idea. “You need friends!” he had then actually added, “A herd to run with.”
She was just going to kill him.
Said “herd” crossed Mockingbird Lane and went down the Hathaway’s driveway and around the back of their house. They all hated the Willow Hathaway, so no one complained when she cut through the backyard.
“Ewwww,” Beth cried. “I just licked up my nose!”
“Oh my god,” Alice squeaked, and then wailed when they all turned to look at her. “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!”
She turned and fled back toward Mockingbird, plopping out splatters of cow patties behind her.
Jane was just going to kill her husband. This was all his fault.
June 25, 2012
Short stories up for kindle
I'm slowly putting up my short stories that I've written up as ebooks. The first two are up in kindle-format on Amazon. Will be working my way toward Nook and ibook format in the near future.
The first two are set in the Elfhome world.
BLUE SKY is back story for the character Blue Sky Montana and is set between WOLF WHO RULES and ELFHOME.
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Sky-Elfhome-ebook/dp/B008E9HVDS/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340643406&sr=1-9&keywords=wen+spencer
WYVERN is set shortly after the first start up, as the railroad is being built between the East Coast and Pittsburgh.
http://www.amazon.com/Wyvern-Elfhome-ebook/dp/B008EACLYQ/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340643479&sr=1-10&keywords=wen+spencer
The first two are set in the Elfhome world.
BLUE SKY is back story for the character Blue Sky Montana and is set between WOLF WHO RULES and ELFHOME.
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Sky-Elfhome-ebook/dp/B008E9HVDS/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340643406&sr=1-9&keywords=wen+spencer
WYVERN is set shortly after the first start up, as the railroad is being built between the East Coast and Pittsburgh.
http://www.amazon.com/Wyvern-Elfhome-ebook/dp/B008EACLYQ/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340643479&sr=1-10&keywords=wen+spencer
June 12, 2012
Eight Million Gods
1: Bounce
"Your mission, if you chose to accept it, is escape your powerful, control freak mother," Nikki whispered to the mirror hung on the back of the apartment's door.
"Miss Delany," the policeman said on the other side of the door. "I have a court-order for your commitment to a psychiatric center for evaluation. Please open the door."
Considering Nikki was in a flannel Hello Kitty sleeping shirt, her hair looked like a rat's nest, and her roommate's fox terriers were barking up a storm, escaping was truly going to be mission impossible. Taking off nearly naked was not an option; she was going to have to be clever. She grabbed hair tie from the hall closet doorknob and stalled as she fought with her long blonde hair. "Under the New York State mental hygiene law, article nine, hospitalization of the mentally ill, I have the right to appropriate personal clothing and safe storage of personal property. Do you understand my rights?"
For some weird reason, quoting law to some policemen was like hitting Superman with kryptonite. They just couldn't cope with material from their home planet. She totally lucked out – there was complete silence from the other side of the door. Score!
She did a mad loop around the tiny living room that currently doubled as her bedroom, snatching up clothing. Bra. Sweater. Blue jeans. She dashed back to the door, dropped the clothes on the floor and stripped quickly. Over Yip and Yap, she could hear her mother arguing with the policeman – probably telling him to grow a pair of balls and just break down the door. It was a really good thing that the officer was waffling before he even got in the door.
"Please, miss, open the door or I'm going to have to break it down."
Nikki had learned young that escalation to force was a bad thing; it led to restraints. She had taught herself how to escape a straightjacket, but it involved dislocating a shoulder. She really wanted to avoid that if possible. Opening the door while nude, however, would be very bad.
"Okay, okay!" She cried to give herself more time. "There's lots of locks and they stick, so be patient!"
Luckily, like any good New York City apartment, the door had multiple locks. She fumbled loudly with them between yanking on pieces of clothing. Of course her bra ended up inside out but she could just suffer. At least the sweater pulled on without a problem. The jeans attempted to be an octopus of alternating reverse and right side out legs. Panic was trying to set in, which would be very bad. While she wasn't dangerously insane like her mother would like the legal system to believe, to the causal observer, her hypergraphia certainly made her seem crazy. If she didn't have pen and paper in hand, her compulsion would make her write on walls or anything available. Time to go to her happy place. She took a deep breath and imagined ocean waves against white sand. Wind through palm trees. Colorful drinks with paper umbrellas.
"Miss Delany?" The officer knocked again.
"I'm opening the door!" She hopped in the foyer, tugging on the jeans one leg at time. "This last lock is sticking!" She gave the top lock a half-twist, zipped up her jeans and looked into the mirror. A Ford model at a fashion shoot, she wasn't, but she'd pass as a normal, sane co-ed about to head out to class. "As always," she whispered. "This message will self-destruct in five minutes. Cue the mission impossible theme music."
She jerked open the door.
The policeman seemed impossibly young, although that could be because he was only about five six. The clean shave, buzz cut, and wide eyes did not help either, effectively rendering him about twelve years old in appearance. His name badge identified him as H. Russell.
Behind him, her mother was trying to gracefully shove him aside.
"Officer Russell," Nikki backed away from the door, heading for Sheila's bedroom as fast as she could, hands in plain sight. She still needed something on her feet, her wallet, and something warm since it was freezing cold for early May. "I need a minute to get shoes on and gather my things."
Yip and Yap decided that her coming down the hallway meant that they were getting out of their crate and fell silent.
"Nikki, I don't have time for you to get your things." Her mother was in full queen warrior senator mode in a black Chanel business skirt suit, more diamonds than some African nations and Prada three-inch heels. "I've got a limo outside. Just put on some slippers and come quietly."
Nikki locked down on the first ten things that wanted out. She focused on the policeman instead. Look Officer Russell, I'm cooperating. I'm sane. You can just stand there and be embarrassed for me.
"Let me just pack one bag of my clothes," she pleaded aloud. "I'm just crashing here. My name isn't on the lease. If I just walk out, my roommate doesn't have to let anyone back in to collect my stuff."
The truth was she didn't truly "own" anything. Somewhere far back in her childhood, she had a faint memory of having a bedroom full of things that were hers and hers alone, an entire room full of privacy. Currently everything "hers" was actually stuffed she permanently borrowed off of her roommate, Sheila.
"I will buy you new stuff." Her mother closed fast, her heels clicking menacingly on the hardwood floor.
They hit the bedroom door at the same time, and Yip and Yap went ballistic at the sight of a brand new person to play with. Instantly Nikki was alone in the room. The fox terriers were the main reasons she was crashing with Sheila instead of other friends; her mother was terrified of dogs. She wanted every advantage she could use against her mother, just in case of days like this. Nikki hurriedly yanked open "her" drawer in Sheila's dresser and grabbed her wallet and passport.
A quick check confirmed her wallet had everything she needed to start life over. Again. Next time in Japan. That had been her plan since she was fifteen, only she wasn't supposed to leave for another six months. This wouldn't be the first time, though, that her mother had screwed up her plans. Nikki shoved her wallet and passport into her jean's pocket and grabbed a pair of socks.
Officer Russell appeared in the door as she sat on Sheila's bed to put on her shoes. Sheila's perfume still hung in the air, making Nikki aware that she was about to vanish out of her roommate's life without a decent goodbye. This is so fucking unfair!
Fair or not, it was what she had to work with. How was she going to get out of this? She pulled on her running shoes. She needed time to think, so she grabbed Sheila's gym bag and made a show of stuffing clothing into it. Yip and Yap would make sure that her mother stayed as far as possible from the bedroom, but Officer Russell was firmly anchored in the doorway.
"This is for your own good," her mother called from the living room, nearly shouting to be heard over the barking. "You're not stable enough to live alone."
Nikki breathed out a laugh. This was going to be one of those conversations where the whole point was to influence the interloper, not the person actually addressed. Her mother realized that Officer Russell was the main thing blocking Nikki now and was trying to shift him to her mother's side. Nikki hadn't been totally aware of winning him over but trusted her mother's judgment.
"I don't live alone." Nikki pointed out to both her mother and Officer Russell. "I have a roommate."
"She posts homosexual erotica on the Internet," her mother countered. "Some of it involves underage boys."
Nikki heart leapt slightly in fear. "You did a background check on Sheila?"
"My teenage daughter disappears to go live with a complete stranger she met on the Internet, yes, I had a background check done on the woman."
"I turned twenty last month, Mother." Nikki picked up her lip balm and used it on her lips one last time. Her hypergraphia begged her to scribble an entire random scene onto the dresser mirror. She controlled the urge and only wrote, "Bounce" onto the glass.
There, this time she let her roommate know that she hadn't been murdered in a back alley. Poor Julie had actually reported her missing before the FBI let her know that Nikki had been involuntary committed to a mental hospital. And wasn't that fun to escape from?
Did her mother know about her plans to flee to Japan? The biggest problem with her plan was how easy it was for a senator to track a US citizen via a passport. Provided, of course, they knew to look. Up to now, Nikki been careful not to cross any borders. She had used a spy level of caution in getting a copy of her birth certificate and applying for her passport. She had researched methods of getting out the country quietly and how movements of citizens were reported. If her mother didn't have her flagged, then she could hopscotch to Japan. If she did…
Nikki closed her eyes. Breath deep. Happy place. A desert island, far, far away from her mother. Away from the closed in spaces of a mental hospital. Nikki, a laptop, Internet connection, and nothing but white sand, shifting shadows, and the dazzle of sun off the ocean.
"Are you okay?" Officer Russell stepped closer and Yip and Yap howled their disappointment that the second new person wasn't letting them out of their crate.
Nikki nodded, opening her eyes. "Just trying to remember if I'd forgotten anything." Like getting out of this apartment a free woman. Still, she needed to find out first what her mother knew. She made a show of opening drawers and going through the contents.
"Sheila writes stories based on Twilight," Nikki called to her mother. "You know – vampires and werewolves? They're not real people. It's called fan fiction and it's all on a password protection forum. You have to register with a valid email account and verify you're over eighteen to read the stories."
"And you think this makes a site secure?"
She knew it didn't. The question was in digging through Sheila's private sites, did her mother's people find Nikki's? Did it matter? If Sheila broadcasted Nikki's "Bounce" command, everything would be abandoned and everyone would move to the new site. Nikki took a deep breath and tightened her hands against taking out the lip balm and this time writing on the walls. Fighting with her mother would get her into more trouble. She needed to run, not stand and try to win this argument since she had no hope of winning. She needed to be clever and quick.
There was a fire escape outside the window. She had tested it out – once. The open steelwork triggered her mild fear of heights. If she could get a head start, she could be to the subway station before Officer Russell caught her. She needed him out of the room.
"Here." She pushed the gym bag into his hands. "Oh, my pills. Can you grab them from the medicine cabinet?" She pointed toward the bathroom and scooped up coins from the dresser top. The one time she attended high school, she lived in dorms. There was a prank that involved the heavy room doors and coins. She had never tried it out on the apartment doors.
"Pills?" Officer Russell's eyes went a little wider.
"Medicine. Mental patient. I know you guys all are a little jumpy about mixing the two. My birth control is in the medicine cabinet with some of my roommate's prescriptions."
"Y-y-yeah."
She followed him across the hall.
"Birth control?" Her mother cried from living room – as far as possible from the dogs as she could get while staying within supervision range of the bathroom.
"Trust me," Nikki said. "None of us want you to be a grandmother."
Officer Russell snickered and opened up the crowded cabinet. "Whoa."
"It's in the back." She said unhelpfully, pulled shut the door and pushed coins into the space between the wood and the jam.
"Hey!" Officer Russell yelped as he found the door wedged shut tight.
"Nikki!" Her mother shouted.
Three steps and Nikki was in Shiela's bedroom. She hit the latch on the dog kennel even as her mother cried, "You stupid idiot! I told you that she was dangerous!"
Yip and Yap came bounding out, nearly levitating with their excitement. They ignored Nikki; she was familiar and thus boring. Barking madly, they charged toward the living room. Nikki slammed shut the bedroom door and flicked the lock. Two more steps and she was to the window and then out onto the fire escape.
Nikki's heart lurched as she forced herself out onto the steel catwalk and then down the rickety ladder. She couldn't let her fear of heights slow her down. She hit the street and started to run. She didn't stop running until she was in Japan.
"Your mission, if you chose to accept it, is escape your powerful, control freak mother," Nikki whispered to the mirror hung on the back of the apartment's door.
"Miss Delany," the policeman said on the other side of the door. "I have a court-order for your commitment to a psychiatric center for evaluation. Please open the door."
Considering Nikki was in a flannel Hello Kitty sleeping shirt, her hair looked like a rat's nest, and her roommate's fox terriers were barking up a storm, escaping was truly going to be mission impossible. Taking off nearly naked was not an option; she was going to have to be clever. She grabbed hair tie from the hall closet doorknob and stalled as she fought with her long blonde hair. "Under the New York State mental hygiene law, article nine, hospitalization of the mentally ill, I have the right to appropriate personal clothing and safe storage of personal property. Do you understand my rights?"
For some weird reason, quoting law to some policemen was like hitting Superman with kryptonite. They just couldn't cope with material from their home planet. She totally lucked out – there was complete silence from the other side of the door. Score!
She did a mad loop around the tiny living room that currently doubled as her bedroom, snatching up clothing. Bra. Sweater. Blue jeans. She dashed back to the door, dropped the clothes on the floor and stripped quickly. Over Yip and Yap, she could hear her mother arguing with the policeman – probably telling him to grow a pair of balls and just break down the door. It was a really good thing that the officer was waffling before he even got in the door.
"Please, miss, open the door or I'm going to have to break it down."
Nikki had learned young that escalation to force was a bad thing; it led to restraints. She had taught herself how to escape a straightjacket, but it involved dislocating a shoulder. She really wanted to avoid that if possible. Opening the door while nude, however, would be very bad.
"Okay, okay!" She cried to give herself more time. "There's lots of locks and they stick, so be patient!"
Luckily, like any good New York City apartment, the door had multiple locks. She fumbled loudly with them between yanking on pieces of clothing. Of course her bra ended up inside out but she could just suffer. At least the sweater pulled on without a problem. The jeans attempted to be an octopus of alternating reverse and right side out legs. Panic was trying to set in, which would be very bad. While she wasn't dangerously insane like her mother would like the legal system to believe, to the causal observer, her hypergraphia certainly made her seem crazy. If she didn't have pen and paper in hand, her compulsion would make her write on walls or anything available. Time to go to her happy place. She took a deep breath and imagined ocean waves against white sand. Wind through palm trees. Colorful drinks with paper umbrellas.
"Miss Delany?" The officer knocked again.
"I'm opening the door!" She hopped in the foyer, tugging on the jeans one leg at time. "This last lock is sticking!" She gave the top lock a half-twist, zipped up her jeans and looked into the mirror. A Ford model at a fashion shoot, she wasn't, but she'd pass as a normal, sane co-ed about to head out to class. "As always," she whispered. "This message will self-destruct in five minutes. Cue the mission impossible theme music."
She jerked open the door.
The policeman seemed impossibly young, although that could be because he was only about five six. The clean shave, buzz cut, and wide eyes did not help either, effectively rendering him about twelve years old in appearance. His name badge identified him as H. Russell.
Behind him, her mother was trying to gracefully shove him aside.
"Officer Russell," Nikki backed away from the door, heading for Sheila's bedroom as fast as she could, hands in plain sight. She still needed something on her feet, her wallet, and something warm since it was freezing cold for early May. "I need a minute to get shoes on and gather my things."
Yip and Yap decided that her coming down the hallway meant that they were getting out of their crate and fell silent.
"Nikki, I don't have time for you to get your things." Her mother was in full queen warrior senator mode in a black Chanel business skirt suit, more diamonds than some African nations and Prada three-inch heels. "I've got a limo outside. Just put on some slippers and come quietly."
Nikki locked down on the first ten things that wanted out. She focused on the policeman instead. Look Officer Russell, I'm cooperating. I'm sane. You can just stand there and be embarrassed for me.
"Let me just pack one bag of my clothes," she pleaded aloud. "I'm just crashing here. My name isn't on the lease. If I just walk out, my roommate doesn't have to let anyone back in to collect my stuff."
The truth was she didn't truly "own" anything. Somewhere far back in her childhood, she had a faint memory of having a bedroom full of things that were hers and hers alone, an entire room full of privacy. Currently everything "hers" was actually stuffed she permanently borrowed off of her roommate, Sheila.
"I will buy you new stuff." Her mother closed fast, her heels clicking menacingly on the hardwood floor.
They hit the bedroom door at the same time, and Yip and Yap went ballistic at the sight of a brand new person to play with. Instantly Nikki was alone in the room. The fox terriers were the main reasons she was crashing with Sheila instead of other friends; her mother was terrified of dogs. She wanted every advantage she could use against her mother, just in case of days like this. Nikki hurriedly yanked open "her" drawer in Sheila's dresser and grabbed her wallet and passport.
A quick check confirmed her wallet had everything she needed to start life over. Again. Next time in Japan. That had been her plan since she was fifteen, only she wasn't supposed to leave for another six months. This wouldn't be the first time, though, that her mother had screwed up her plans. Nikki shoved her wallet and passport into her jean's pocket and grabbed a pair of socks.
Officer Russell appeared in the door as she sat on Sheila's bed to put on her shoes. Sheila's perfume still hung in the air, making Nikki aware that she was about to vanish out of her roommate's life without a decent goodbye. This is so fucking unfair!
Fair or not, it was what she had to work with. How was she going to get out of this? She pulled on her running shoes. She needed time to think, so she grabbed Sheila's gym bag and made a show of stuffing clothing into it. Yip and Yap would make sure that her mother stayed as far as possible from the bedroom, but Officer Russell was firmly anchored in the doorway.
"This is for your own good," her mother called from the living room, nearly shouting to be heard over the barking. "You're not stable enough to live alone."
Nikki breathed out a laugh. This was going to be one of those conversations where the whole point was to influence the interloper, not the person actually addressed. Her mother realized that Officer Russell was the main thing blocking Nikki now and was trying to shift him to her mother's side. Nikki hadn't been totally aware of winning him over but trusted her mother's judgment.
"I don't live alone." Nikki pointed out to both her mother and Officer Russell. "I have a roommate."
"She posts homosexual erotica on the Internet," her mother countered. "Some of it involves underage boys."
Nikki heart leapt slightly in fear. "You did a background check on Sheila?"
"My teenage daughter disappears to go live with a complete stranger she met on the Internet, yes, I had a background check done on the woman."
"I turned twenty last month, Mother." Nikki picked up her lip balm and used it on her lips one last time. Her hypergraphia begged her to scribble an entire random scene onto the dresser mirror. She controlled the urge and only wrote, "Bounce" onto the glass.
There, this time she let her roommate know that she hadn't been murdered in a back alley. Poor Julie had actually reported her missing before the FBI let her know that Nikki had been involuntary committed to a mental hospital. And wasn't that fun to escape from?
Did her mother know about her plans to flee to Japan? The biggest problem with her plan was how easy it was for a senator to track a US citizen via a passport. Provided, of course, they knew to look. Up to now, Nikki been careful not to cross any borders. She had used a spy level of caution in getting a copy of her birth certificate and applying for her passport. She had researched methods of getting out the country quietly and how movements of citizens were reported. If her mother didn't have her flagged, then she could hopscotch to Japan. If she did…
Nikki closed her eyes. Breath deep. Happy place. A desert island, far, far away from her mother. Away from the closed in spaces of a mental hospital. Nikki, a laptop, Internet connection, and nothing but white sand, shifting shadows, and the dazzle of sun off the ocean.
"Are you okay?" Officer Russell stepped closer and Yip and Yap howled their disappointment that the second new person wasn't letting them out of their crate.
Nikki nodded, opening her eyes. "Just trying to remember if I'd forgotten anything." Like getting out of this apartment a free woman. Still, she needed to find out first what her mother knew. She made a show of opening drawers and going through the contents.
"Sheila writes stories based on Twilight," Nikki called to her mother. "You know – vampires and werewolves? They're not real people. It's called fan fiction and it's all on a password protection forum. You have to register with a valid email account and verify you're over eighteen to read the stories."
"And you think this makes a site secure?"
She knew it didn't. The question was in digging through Sheila's private sites, did her mother's people find Nikki's? Did it matter? If Sheila broadcasted Nikki's "Bounce" command, everything would be abandoned and everyone would move to the new site. Nikki took a deep breath and tightened her hands against taking out the lip balm and this time writing on the walls. Fighting with her mother would get her into more trouble. She needed to run, not stand and try to win this argument since she had no hope of winning. She needed to be clever and quick.
There was a fire escape outside the window. She had tested it out – once. The open steelwork triggered her mild fear of heights. If she could get a head start, she could be to the subway station before Officer Russell caught her. She needed him out of the room.
"Here." She pushed the gym bag into his hands. "Oh, my pills. Can you grab them from the medicine cabinet?" She pointed toward the bathroom and scooped up coins from the dresser top. The one time she attended high school, she lived in dorms. There was a prank that involved the heavy room doors and coins. She had never tried it out on the apartment doors.
"Pills?" Officer Russell's eyes went a little wider.
"Medicine. Mental patient. I know you guys all are a little jumpy about mixing the two. My birth control is in the medicine cabinet with some of my roommate's prescriptions."
"Y-y-yeah."
She followed him across the hall.
"Birth control?" Her mother cried from living room – as far as possible from the dogs as she could get while staying within supervision range of the bathroom.
"Trust me," Nikki said. "None of us want you to be a grandmother."
Officer Russell snickered and opened up the crowded cabinet. "Whoa."
"It's in the back." She said unhelpfully, pulled shut the door and pushed coins into the space between the wood and the jam.
"Hey!" Officer Russell yelped as he found the door wedged shut tight.
"Nikki!" Her mother shouted.
Three steps and Nikki was in Shiela's bedroom. She hit the latch on the dog kennel even as her mother cried, "You stupid idiot! I told you that she was dangerous!"
Yip and Yap came bounding out, nearly levitating with their excitement. They ignored Nikki; she was familiar and thus boring. Barking madly, they charged toward the living room. Nikki slammed shut the bedroom door and flicked the lock. Two more steps and she was to the window and then out onto the fire escape.
Nikki's heart lurched as she forced herself out onto the steel catwalk and then down the rickety ladder. She couldn't let her fear of heights slow her down. She hit the street and started to run. She didn't stop running until she was in Japan.
