Rabia Gale's Blog, page 9

tuesday progress update

Spent a lot of time agonizing over the one scene. It was slow, swimming-in-molasses going.

71/91 pages revised. I’m doubtful, but let’s see if I can finish this off tomorrow.

 

Planets Project: behind the scenes

My Earth-inspired flashfic grew out of my intense loyalty for this blue and green, brown and white marble we live on.

I’m a homebody, and I get very attached to the places I’ve lived in. I don’t expect to stay forever at my current address (who knows where the winds of God will blow me?), but I’m confident that I won’t be leaving Planet Earth in this life. This is my one constant address.

I love shows about the universe. I love making up other worlds. I’m fascinated by alien planets. I’m awed by the power of black holes and the splendor of stars. But show me a picture (CG or real) of our water planet, and I’m sniffling and teary-eyed. Earth is home, and the best place to be for this writer. There are still so many marvels and mysteries right here on this terrestrial ball, and that’s what I hoped to convey in my story.

 

 

 

monday progress update

Got a late start today, and it was very slow going. I’m at the place where I don’t know if my changes are improving the story or making it worse. But I push on.

Ironhand Revision Progress: 67/90. Wanted to make it to 70, but it’s already so late.

Planets Project: Earth

Terra Forma

They wondered about their youngest, born as he was in the maelstrom of a supernova, amidst the debris of an exploding star. His birth, thought Papa, had given Terra an unfortunate taste for garbage.

“If only he would stop playing with byproducts,” he sighed, sending gusts of hydrogen and plumes of helium across space. The plasma of his stellar vessel roiled in agitation. “Why can’t he turn from his dratted rock-marbles and look to the stars?”

“They all began with rocks,” soothed Mama, her dim-yellowness steady and calm. “He’ll move on to greater things, like Gravitas and Cerulaea did.”

“He’s too old for such playthings now,” grumbled Papa, but he conceded the point. Gravitas and Cerulaea made him proud, but they concerned him, too.

Gravitas had grown big and dark and silent. His very presence sucked everything toward him. He swallowed up light and laughter and words, giving nothing back. Papa wished he knew what had happened when Gravitas had gone a-journeying.

And Cerulaea, their brilliant, high-strung one, burning ever so brightly. He was afraid that she’d wink out too soon, the way she poured herself into her work.

Yes, they were doing great things in the universe, his older two, pushing the limits the way the children of others didn’t.

And then there was Terra. Little Terra who—his father guiltily thought he shouldn’t even think such things about his own son—was more matter than energy, almost falling off the lower end of the chart. As if he almost was one of the dull material things he played with so incessantly.

***

“Are you ready?’ Terra glimmered with mischief. It shone out of the thin brown-roughened body that he had kept for longer than a star cycle. Not done, thought Papa, indignantly, ready to lay down the law, but he caught Mama’s look and subsided.

“Yes, yes,” said Cerulaea, with a toss and a fidget, trailing sparks. Even in her stripped-down form, the heat emanating from her was almost unbearable. Yes, Papa needed to talk with her, too. “Can we get this over with? I have work to do.”

Gravitas said nothing as usual, wedged into a corner, separate and shadowed. They didn’t look upon him—no one did these days—but they felt the drag of his silence on their words, the way their energies streamed towards him.

In my house, too! Papa twitched a warning flick of energy at his oldest child. Gravitas took the hint and the headache-inducing pull released.

Cerulaea was still talking as Terra opened the portal with a flourish and they all passed through. “I mean, we all cut our teeth on this play-rock. After my electromagnetic experiments, there’s not much left to do on this rock, save smash something into it and see what happens—not that Gravitas left me much to work with anyhow—oh! Oh.”

She stopped, speechless for once.

Where once there had been just rock and ice and metal, there was now…. other stuff. Delicate, growing stuff that tickled their senses in new ways: thousands of shades of yellow and green, intricate traceries in patterns never before seen, complex molecules that flowed, wafted, interacted, tingled.

As Terra scampered around in glee, like a child half his age, calling out names and explaining processes in that breathless way of his, Papa knew only one thing:

His son, the one who played with trash, was special. He had done something not great, but small. Beautifully, wonderfully small.

As they gazed in wonder, Gravitas spoke, for the first time in a long while. His voice fell across them all, suffocating their speech, but for once Papa didn’t mind.

“This,” said Gravitas, slow as rock cooling, “this must be protected.”

No one answered him. But they didn’t have to.

weekend progress update

Busy weekend, so no major progress: 62/89 pages revised. Coming up on a couple of plot fixes and at least one scene I need to extend.

 

friday progress update

Ironhand revision: 52/89. Lost a page, including a fun snippet. But it no longer fit the scene, so out it went.

No first-draft words today.

 

thursday progress update

Revision: page 35/90 of Ironhand. Yep, I extended a scene and the total page count went up.

Written: 438 words of the Jupiter flashfic. I’m writing this in an old-fashioned, fairy tale style, and it’s a lot of fun.

nose to the grindstone

Revisions on Ironhand are currently happening (and about time, too!). I have a deadline (11/26), which helps. I need external motivation!

Snippet from the WIP:

A cloak drifts over to us as we enter through the doors of Kaal Baran. I call her Cloud, as in she has her head in them. She seems to live with only half a foot in this world.

I never considered that cloaks had personalities, but then, most of the time we were too busy trying to kill each other to really get to know one another.

“They’re back,” she says.

“Who’re back?” I ask, but with little hope of a response.

True to form, Cloud’s already passed by and down to wherever she sleeps away the afternoon.

Flutter gets visibly tense, hardening at the edges. “The eerie men.”

“Ah, the band we lost.” I see them now, strutting across the courtyard, looking far too pleased with themselves. Soldiers straggling in after going willful missing.

“Perhaps I should—“ begins Flutter, but I’m already striding ahead of her. She’ll want to talk to them, because that’s what she does. Being a silent cloak must’ve just about killed her, the role is so alien to her personality.

Eilendi like to teach, relate, discuss.

But that’s not how you run an army.

The eerie men halt as they see me come. The minions have the grace to flinch and look ashamed, but the leader—Leap’s his name—gives me a grin full of teeth. They smell like unwashed male and fresh blood. Red stains their claws and teeth.

I catch sight of hair in their nails. Goats.

Of course.

I nudge my spiders down my left arm, asking for a little reinforcement. Leap opens his mouth—to explain, to boast, I don’t know and I don’t care.

He never gets a word in because I punch him right in the face.

He goes down like a sack full of bricks. And stays down.

The other eerie men jump, fumbling for the whips and spikes at their belt. I grab the nearest by the wrist—left hand!—and squeeze. The man gasps, turns a pale bluish color from the pain.

“Don’t—ever—leave—without—permission!”

 

Yeah, I love Kato.

Current progress: 22/88 pages revised.

Planets Project: behind-the-scenes

Yesterday, I shared a flashfic inspired by the planet Venus.

What strikes me the most about Venus is the contrast between the ideal and the reality. This planet can be seen as a bright object in our sky; it is named for the goddess of love and beauty. But when we investigated the planet, we discovered a hellish place, one that could kill you in several different ways (the pressure, the temperature, and the acidity being three I can name off the top of my head).

From that contrast sprang the main character, indeed the very plot, of She Walks in Beauty.

Beauty–and the dark side of beauty–is a theme that has cropped up at other times in my work. The most prominent other example is “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World”, one of the short stories in my broken fairy tale anthology, Shattered. There’s something about the “fairest of them all” fairy tail trope that calls to me.

Planets Project: Venus

She Walks in Beauty

The last time she walked in the gardens, there was a child.

It shouldn’t have been there. It should’ve been cleared out of her way, the way everyone else was.

She trod empty marble corridors to the outside, blinking in the hot sun. Small stones crunched under her feet–her own footfalls had long been her only companions. Water tinkled in a nearby fountain as she entered the walled garden, and lifted the light veil she wore over her face.

On her left, an unwary bird fell like a rock from a tree. Once she would’ve wept, but she’d been away from the sun and the wind for so long she couldn’t feel sorry. A bird was a small price to pay for the caress of sunshine on her cheek and the kiss of wind on her forehead.

And then she turned towards a rustle, and saw the child.

*

No one could explain why the child had been there in the first place, why its mother had not kept it close, why…

They asked all the wrong questions. It wasn’t why the child had been there but why they had agreed to let her out in the first place.

She would never give in to her weakness again.

From behind the curtain that separated her from everyone else, she sent them away. With her own hands she closed the shutters and dragged wall hangings over them, shrouding her rooms in darkness. She tied bells to her ankles and wrists, to warn of her approach. And last of all she took the dreaded veil, the widow-veil, all heavy and black, and draped it over her head and face.

No one would look upon her again.

*

She lived in dimness, like a shade caught between life and death, light and dark. She read many books and played the sitar and paced a tiny enclosed veranda. She learned to see life—such as there was in her apartments—through dark gauze.

The silence that surrounded her was so deep and devoid of life that the chimes at her ankles were only a bit of foolish bravery, the sounds high and breathless, soon swallowed up. Nothing else penetrated that silence, not birdsong nor childlaughter nor, even when they came, the sounds of the invaders’ cannons around the city.

She only knew of the siege in the increasingly frantic letters the councilors and priests and even ordinary people sent her. They told of fouled wells and breached walls, of men butchered during attacks and the last of the emaciated animals butchered in the streets.

She didn’t answer, but she read them all, pondering each word.

One morning she rose from her bed, crossed to her writing desk, dipped her pen into the inkwell.

On thick linen paper marked with her own seal, she wrote: YES.

*

Silence and space were nothing new, but not so the smells. The lingering scent of smoke and gunpowder, the salt and metal tang of blood, and the sweet-rotten stench of messy death. Buildings, blasted and smoke-blackened, leaned drunkenly against each other. Rubble and refuse both covered the streets, crowding against the stretch of tattered carpet they’d laid down for her.

Her route, circumscribed as she had directed.

There would be no unfortunate accidents today. Nothing would happen that she did not intend.

She took a deep breath and ascended the stairs up the city walls. Soldiers stood guard, faces to the wall. Their backs tensed and their muscles quivered as she passed by. A boy in a uniform too large for him started violently when her veil brushed against his thighs.

She went through a deep archway and out into the light, onto a small balcony.  Her veil slip-slithered off her head and face, pooled blackly behind her. Under it she wore pure white to catch the eye. Vivid jewels at her throat and wrists flashed against the stone.

For a moment, she was dizzy from the vastness of the plain before her. The horizon tilted crazily and she clutched the stone railing. Her stomach tightened as she looked at the enemy massed below, at the faces turning up to her, waiting, as they had been told, for her surrender.

So many people.

“Soldiers of my enemy.” Her voice carried, commanded, compelled. “Look at me now.”

They did, and were bound. Even as their eyes burned and their breath turned to acid, even as their weapons fell from nerveless hands, they looked. They could not stop. Did not want to stop.

As the enemy soldiers fell in swathes, choking on their own awe, burning in her gaze, she descended onto the field and walked among them, forcing herself to see what they had become.

Forcing herself to see what she was.

Fingers brushed against her skirt. She would have walked past, spared the man a worse death, but his hand clenched in the fabric, insistent.

She looked down at the soldier. His scalded face blistered, his breath was hot and labored, squeezed out of bubbling lungs.

“Beautiful…” he gasped, even as she killed him. “So… beautiful.”