Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 774

Another review of The Dark Citadel

Thank you Margaret Lesh for a glowing review. Praise from peers is always greatly appreciated. Here’s the Goodreads link.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/598493613

Flash fiction: Harbingers

Here’s a taste of the next series, Angel Haven. Also YA fantasy it follows on from The Green Woman. It’s jumping the gun a bit (a lot) but it’s what I’m reading and writing at the moment.

Harbingers

Scyld stood before the sacred oak where the two bodies swung gently back and forth. The sky above was afire with the brilliant oranges and reds of sunset. The last rays skimmed the oak grove while shadows swallowed up the forest paths. He stared down the mountain, across the treetops, his gaze unfocused. Deep in thought he did not hear the creaking of the ropes, the sighing of the branches beneath the dead weights. He did not hear the noise of his feasting thegns or the raucous cry of the birds.

Scyld was reliving his blood dream. His fists clenched and his lips parted as he watched himself splash across the ford, a war cry in his throat. His thegns were about him, axes and swords swirling, throwing up great fountains of river water. In the dream the river ran red, red blood splashed and fountained, and the warcry in his throat was the death knell for the fools in the unguarded settlement.

The dull thunk of a heavy blade slicing through human flesh, the screams and shrieks of the villagers taken by surprise filled his dream ears. The river ran red, and the earth was black with blood. His parted lips curled into a smile. Donar was with them; the god sang in the sweep of the axe stroke, laughed in the whistle of arrows, and roared in the sacking of the wattle huts.

At his back the bodies twisted in the breeze. Sacrifices to Donar. Ropes creaked and Scyld turned finally, his ear tuning to the sounds of the waking world. Two sacrifices. He nodded, satisfied. Two warriors; not feeble virgins this time, these were war sacrifices. Two warriors less, but it was the price to pay, and¬—Scyld’s eyes narrowed—these two had been bragging just a little too loudly, their exploits praised a little too often. He stepped closer, and peered with cold curiosity at the swollen tongues and bulging eyes, his nostrils flaring in distaste at the smell from the soiled breeches. A price well worth paying, he thought as he pushed the redheaded corpse, setting it twisting slowly.

The sound of feasting reached him at last, and a sudden thirst dried his throat, a desire to be with company to celebrate the sacrifice that would bring certain victory in the coming raid. He licked his lips and turned towards the fort. Deep in the grove yellow eyes stared, unblinking. Scyld looked from the yellow eyes to the twisting redhead.

The god comes for you, Hrothgar. He grinned, almost laughed, but that would have been unseemly in the holy place, and left the wolves to their own feast.

Feasting, he heard, and the raucous sound of birds. Scyld raised his head. Against the fire-streaked sky above the fort two black birds flapped with ragged wings.

More guests for the feast, Osmund.

This time he laughed out loud. The blood dream had shown him war and slaughter, he had made two sacrifices from among his finest warriors, and tonight his thegns, their battle lust upon them, would beget another army of sons. The old witch had spoken true for once, with none of her weasel words. She had seen the blood dream and she had sent it to him. Donar would be pleased with his offering; he would be in Scyld’s right arm on the morrow.

The raucous cry of carrion birds broke into his thoughts of massacres and bloodletting. Scyld paused at the gates of his fort and frowned. Two ravens. Flapping with their steady, powerful wing strokes they flew over the fort, then turned and back they came again. Scyld followed them with his eyes, waiting for them to reach the sacred grove. Suddenly uneasy, he started back; anxious to see them settle on the god’s feast. Before he could move they turned about, not reaching the grove, ignoring the enticing smell of dead men. Against the fiery sky they turned about, gracelessly, flying low, back through the open gates of the fort.

Fear gripped Scyld as the harbingers circled the houses, passed over the huts of wattles, and the finer halls of the wealthy thegns, circled once and settled on the roof of the big hall. Scyld’s hall. Cold settled in Scyld’s stomach. Harbingers.

The blood dream came rushing back. In consternation he saw the fording of the river, the bloody water splashing before his face, heard the war cries, the screams and shrieks as blades sliced through flesh. He heard the whistling of arrows. Cold turned to ice. He heard the whistling of arrows growing to a whine. The whine grew to a shriek, and he heard at last the death song the air crooned in his ears.

Silhouetted against the blood red sky, two birds waited. Harbingers.

Flash

Revising the first part of Angel Haven I got the urge to write a flash. You could call it a flash of inspiration, or you could call it going off on a tangent.

Anyway, I wrote 750 words of flash fiction centred on one of the more unpleasant characters (don’t you just love a good baddie?), which might serve as an appetiser for the series. I’ll probably post it tomorrow. Too tired now, and it’s probably full of mistakes.

Spreading the word

June 14 is just seven weeks away. It’s time to start doing a bit of promotion for The Dark Citadel, the BIG YA fantasy event of 2013. Well, of June 14 anyway. In this household.

Tagline:

Evil is slouching into Providence. Will the awakening memories of a rebellious runaway be enough to send the demon back into the shadows?

Blurb:

Fifteen-year-old Deborah is angry and bitter. Rebelling against an arranged marriage to an idiot, she flees the oppression of Providence’s religious Elders to search for her exiled mother, the legendary Green Woman.

Zachariah, dark, brooding and unhappy crosses Deborah’s path as they both plot escape from the House of Correction. Dislike is instant and mutual, and Zachariah blunders off alone to seek the Green Woman’s magical Garden. In the desert wasteland, Jonah, the dog boy takes Deborah’s hand, first as a friend and guide, then as something more.

Abaddon, Lord of Hell is waiting to crush the green magic that will destroy his realm on earth. Deborah is discovering love and the mysterious power of her memories, but will this be enough to defeat the demon and the Elder’s regime, and dispel the shadows cast by the Dark Citadel?

Excerpt:

As always, the pups trotted in front at a steady lope, their bushy tails held low. One night, in the darkest hour before dawn, they stopped, hackles raised. As Jonah and Deborah listened to the throbbing darkness, they heard a shriek, like the call of a giant bird. The call was answered, again, and again.

“What is it?” Deborah whispered.

“Wyverns hunting.”

“Wyverns?”

“Some people, the desert wanderers, call them grave worms.”

Jonah clicked his tongue to warn the pups and pulled Deborah beneath a clump of spiny bushes where they huddled together, not daring to breathe. The air turned icy cold, and they felt the rush of leathery wings on their faces. The wind passed but they were aware of a presence hovering above them. Their flesh crept in revulsion, and an icy trickle of fear made its way down their backs. They could see nothing, but they could hear a reptilian hissing and the sound of sniffing. The steady flapping of broad wings sent waves of fetid air to rattle the bushes of their hiding place.

Deborah felt sick with terror. This is it, she thought in a panic, this is where it ends.

Jonah pushed Deborah’s head down into the sand. “Close your eyes,” he hissed. “Whatever happens, don’t look up.”

Suddenly, there was the swoosh of displaced air, and the bird-shriek rent the heavy air, followed by a cry that might have been the beginning of a bark and ended in a scream of agony. Jonah pulled Deborah’s head towards him into the shelter of his shoulder, grinding his clenched teeth. Then the cold air quivered, viscous and evil smelling, and the presence departed. They lay, clinging together until the darkness began to break up.

* * * *

“What is a wyvern?” Deborah’s voice trembled. “I mean, what does it look like?”

“Ugly. A great winged serpent,” Jonah’s voice too was unsteady, “two-footed and venomous. It got one of the pups, the filthy vermin! They smell warm blood; they see body heat. Nothing escapes them.” He shook his head to clear the nascent tears and tried a feeble smile. “It’ll be light soon, we should find somewhere better to hide.”

But he didn’t move, just carried on gazing at Deborah’s face. With her finger, she touched away the damp beneath his eyes then kissed the place where it had been. As they got slowly to their feet, Deborah slipped her hand shyly into his.

How to take a good idea and turn it into a story

The title could also be: how to take a story and turn it into a novel. Because the two aren’t necessarily the same. The events of a story could be perceived differently by different people, but the art of a storyteller or writer is to present those events in a way that a reader or a listener can understand.

When I finished setting down the first version of the story of The Green Woman, I carried straight on into the sequel, picking up the lives of the characters I thought I knew as intimately as members of my own family five years on. Little did I know at the time, The Green Woman was a bordel, as we say over here, an absolute mess. The next series was well on the way to becoming a monumental bordel before I decided to slow down and take a good look at the whole story.

By that time a publisher had already given me a very thorough critique of The Green Woman, pointing out its strengths, but also the chaotic way I had chosen to drive the story. It took a couple of years to sort out the mess of The Green Woman, double the word count and break it into three separate parts.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to tackle the sequel. The problems were essentially the same. A story that rattles along at a terrific pace, lots of action, lots of characters. But as in most action-packed adventures, the story breaks into different threads, following different characters. The trick is to keep those threads separate and coherent. Mine had got hopelessly entangled.

A good storyteller will keep a dozen balls in the air without the listener constantly asking: Hold on a minute! What happened to X? or, I thought we were in Y, or even, Who the hell is Z? A bad storyteller will get listeners completely mixed up by going backwards and forwards in the narrative as they remember bits they’ve left out, bringing in new characters out of nowhere, and leaving others in the lurch. It’s the same in writing. Too much backstory kills narrative, but too little leads to utter confusion. I think that recognising the pitfalls is being well on the way to remedying them.

Geographical separation of the different main characters should start red lights flashing. Not because you shouldn’t do it—in an adventure you don’t want all your mcs walking hand in hand everywhere—but because you have to be absolutely certain that your reader knows where everybody is.

The more important characters you introduce, the more careful you have to be about headhopping. A roomful of mcs all shouting at once is impossible to control if you are hopping into one head after the other. I had thought this type of situation would have to be written out of the story, but in fact it is quite possible to organise as long as you pick one character and stay firmly in his or her head throughout. Alternatively you can write the entire scene in omniscient third person and keep it clear, no soul-searching psychoanalysis.

Once I had located a suitable break in the story, which happened to be slap bang in the middle, I had 42k words of muddle. Next step was to sort the story into separate chapters for separate themes, locations and characters, but following the same chronology so everybody moves forward at the same time. Scenes had to be added to show what all the characters were doing at a given moment in the action. The alternative is to resort to the often artificial-sounding device of having the characters giving recaps. Last, but almost hardest was to give a rounded ending to what is essentially the first third of a story.

Last night I got to the end of part one. I now have 61k words of a story that starts at A and ends up at Z, with all the letters in between strung out in a logical order. There is still a lot of work to do smoothing off the rough edges and clumsy transitions. But the essential is there. Angel Haven is on the road.

The lull before the summer

Summer is in the air. Not so much in the temperature, as it is still quite brisk in the early morning, but as the sun rises, the air warms and the earth begins to smell of summer.

In town, summer smells are not always the most enticing. Pools of human dejections of one kind or another are part of the scenery, and not every citizen has learned what rubbish bins are for. But away from the streets, the smell of damp earth getting hot predominates, mown grass and the scent of spring flowers.

Viola odorata by Fritz Geller-Grimm

The sounds I associate with spring, the song of the robin and the wagtail, have given way to the screeching of the swifts that finally arrived last week.

Chimney swift overhead by Jim McCulloch

Trixie caught her second lizard of the season—must have been a pretty geriatric specimen since she isn’t the most agile of felines—which we were able to rescue before she damaged it too much.

Common lizard on boardwalk by Babelstone

This season is too short for me. Plants flower and fade too early and the season of baking heat is too long. I intend to profit from these next weeks of green growth, because by June the garden will look like a jungle.

Social networking

Social networking is the bane of my life. Well one of them. And I know I’m not alone. Either you are like me, and find it heavy going, or you love it and spend far too much time playing around instead of working. Lately I’ve been making a big effort to sharpen up my social media skills.

I get blogging; it’s almost stream of consciousness rambling, a jotting down of random thoughts and ideas. It could even be a medium for testing ideas for stories. It’s certainly a wonderful use for the short snippets of writing that my mind anyway churns out as a sideline while I’m writing more serious stuff.

I can see the point of Facebook it’s quick and immediate, and is a relatively painless way of getting a piece of news out. I even worked out the idea behind Pinterest and have started to splatter my ‘boards’ with pretty pictures. Even though I don’t know what use it is as a tool for writers, I could easily spend a pleasant half hour browsing through other people’s pretty pictures.

But Twitter continues to evade me. I have tweeted. Twice in fact. But it’s rather like the quip of the pensioner taken on a daytrip to the seaside for the first time in her life and plonked in a deckchair on the front. When asked:

“How do you like the sea then, Doris?” she replied, “It’s all right I suppose, but is that all it does?”

This is exactly my problem with Twitter. What does it do? How do you join in? And join in with what? I’ve read tweets, and well, honestly! This is meant to be the social networking tool par excellence and I know I am missing some important point. The expression hash tags has something to do with the gap in my knowledge, and so does retweeting. Maybe when I find out what those expressions mean, the scales will drop from my eyes, and behold! Twitter will be revealed to me in all its splendour. Maybe.

City garden in April

There are two reasons for this post. First: a lovely pic of the wistaria in the garden that I couldn’t post on Pinterest—it wanted to stand it on end.

Second: I wanted to see how Trixie asking for third breakfast came out in my new avatar.

Excitement over.

Still trying to make a grand entrance

This last week or so I’ve been struggling with getting a manuscript sorted out. Working out what to put in that important bit between the title page and the end of chapter one. A story, like riding a bicycle, is fine once it gets going; it’s the getting started that’s a bit wobbly.

My own efforts are taking on a less confused shape, but getting as far as this hazy, almost there stage has made me think quite hard about the advice that is given to inexperienced writers.

You must never start a story with:

The weather

A dream

Dialogue

No dialogue

Moving house, school, job

Complaining about something.

You must start a story by showing one of the following:

The concept behind the story

The conflict

The character of the mc.

Of course, you have to bear both sets of directives in mind and reconcile the dos and the don’ts. So, for example, in theory you can’t show the character of the mc if he/she is defined by being a persistent complainer, the conflict if it involves moving house, or the concept if it happens in a dreamworld.

Tricky.

How do you judge a story’s opening? Do you need action from the first sentence? Do you wilt if there’s no dialogue before page three? Do you sigh if you get dreams, alarm clocks, removal vans, or teenage angst in the first paragraph? Does a smart/clever/wacky opening line make you wince? How do you feel about the weather?

I honestly can’t say that I have a phobia about any trope. Maybe that’s why it’s taking me so long to get my own opening pages right.

…and cranking up the action

Yesterday I was feeling very frustrated at the unusable pages I had written, more like the minutes from an extremely boring meeting that an action-packed YA adventure. I half knew what was wrong with it, and I fell asleep last night with the image of a child running from danger in my head. The first thing I thought of this morning when I was jolted out of sleep by somebody slamming the bathroom door, was the running child. I knew now what was the basic flaw in my opening scenes, and I had a tentative idea of how to overcome it.

An opening, if it is not plunging directly into the action, introduces the scene, the characters, and gives a bit of background. That’s what I had done. Fine. But looking over those introductions I realised how static they were. All the characters were either standing observing, sitting contemplating the scenery, or sitting getting bored. There was no movement anywhere.

Usually I see what I’m writing, like watching a film. I try and write an action scene quickly, as quick as the action, with short, terse phrases. This was more like a set of stills from a silent movie. The running child was the key. He brought in a dynamic, a sense of urgency and danger, and suddenly the opening turned into a film rather than a series of dull snapshots.

All I have to do now is write it all down.