Self-Indulgent Writing Entry
May. 15th, 2006 12:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losI finally went through the files on my old computers at home, the veterans in recouperation, looking to combine current work on writing projects with lost bits. Disappointingly, there was very little of last summer's project I still wanted to use (always the trouble- a month passes and you've learned so much that everything you previously did is just too vile to look at), and only one the the beginings that held any real promise- the last and shortest of them.
Over the course of this year I decided to fuse last summer's project, dubbed Otherplace for convenience, with Dendrobite, a project from this year, in hopes of giving them enough substance to provide a reader with more than cheap atmospherics. It was mostly a project of substituting one female character with a new one. I sort of realized they were the same story all along. The following is just a scrap, too explanatory to serve as a proper beginning and entirley without the Dendrobite portion of this summer's novel, but it is in some ways the direction of the work.
When Jonathan Hepkins sees a woman with green eyes on the street, he's held up a good three minutes. He can't move for staring, slack grin on his face, expression sweet enough to make you wince with embarrassment when you see it, even if you don't know him from Adam. He can't help it, green eyes being his weakness in women. Once an incredibly effulgent pair had him stuck for a good hour and a half, right there in the middle of a public sidewalk. The police called the Magistrate, who called Jonathan's wife to come pick him up. Miriam arrived with a wheelbarrow, setting her lips and clucking all the way home.
For Jonathan's safety's sake, she is a fair woman, blond, eyes bright blue as can be. It wouldn't do for him to be paralyzed every time they happened to catch each other's glance. Miriam is lovely enough, and is good in the general way of things, and Jonathan is never especially unhappy. Not like Susan Mells, whose sighs are gale force and have been known to fell trees and sweep sailors, sputtering, over the sides of the boardwalk and into the harbor.
At first the magistrate sent her Letters of Firm Discouragement, but these only exacerbated the situation, what with her sighing over her general worthlessness and the failure of her young life. Then came the Public Injunction Against the Sighs of Susan Mells, making the mentioned act punishable by open disdain. Again the problem worsened, and there was talk of the Magistrate's inefficacy, which distressed the solid, serious young man. Weeping tsunamically all the way, Susan Mells was exiled to tend and live in the lighthouse tower at the very perimeter of Otherplace until she was no longer a danger to the community, that is until she had learned to take life less seriously and/or fallen in love.
There she lights the beacon and sighs at the lonely bleakness of the sea and the craggy rocks below her and her own soul's desolation, her gusts speeding outgoing ships and frustrating the inbound. Old sailors coming home roll their eyes and brace the sails when, miles away, the first tremors reach them, causing the waves to slap a little higher on the sides of the ship. They claim she's bad for commerce and make protests before the Magistrate that her Gothic novels should be confiscated, but he simply replies that she helps as much as she hinders, and anyway the whole problem could be solved if they sent a likely young sailor a-wooing.
The Magistrate's family has no particularly important position in the community. His father, Thom Strapp owns a middling-well farm at the perimeter of town, near the crossroads, where he turns out a rather average crop of squash and yams. His rock-candy tree orchard is lovely, the fruit deceptively attractive, long cylinders in a soft blue gray, the color of quiet longing. There is a salty undertone to it from the hard, sea-side soil it grows in. People buy the rock-candy to flavor soups, and they crush it to preserve meat, but as they never can bring themselves to eat it as desert the profits to the Magistrate's father are minimal. The Magistrate's mother, Clementine, is a quiet woman who weaves most of the hours of the day.
Before he rose to his current position, the Magistrate too had a name. He has given up much to fulfill his obligations, more than was required or requested of him. The Magistrate lives in a black stone manor at the center of Otherplace, which has grown in a rough circle up around the house over the centuries. It is a place of confused decorative intentions. Its high, sharp wrought-iron fence has a large gate that is never closed or bared. 'Welcome' is even spelled out in the over-arching ironwork. The manor is lovely, if intimidating.
The manor was originally the home of the feudal lords of Otherplace, and their ghosts recline about its yard after sundown and stare at passers by, dead eyes filled with strange emotion. They hate the living of Otherplace, and the longer they have haunted the yard, the deeper their loathing. Proud and haughty in life, with the loss of it they have nothing in common with the people of the city-- they no longer share their daily struggles or their basic, cherish-able human cares and weaknesses. Death has brought these lords and ladies infinite conceptual altitude, and they stare down the citizens hurrying home in the dusk with enough intensity to make everyone walk a little faster, the hairs on the backs of their necks pricking up in the ghost's presence, the thought slowly worming it's way into their minds. Can they pass that gate? Can ghosts kill? No one stays in the center of town any longer than they have to after dusk, and no one walks through the manor's gate after mid-afternoon.
Up until three Magistrates ago, servants had lived in the attic of the manor. Then a silly maid of all work named Nell didn't turn up for work one day, and the locks on the house's doors hadn't been disturbed all night. The staff, long heckled by minor poltergeists and made uneasy by more serious ghosts lingering in the yard developing especially profound disgust for living people they saw every night, had an evening's discussion and informed their Magistrate they would serve him during they day but seek residence elsewhere, if he would please compensate them for the cost of housing. He refused, but as the months wore on with no sign of Nell and the servant's small acts of domestic sabotage escalated to a new level of viciousness, the Magistrate conceded, consenting to raising their salaries and go without the benefits of a constant household staff. The serving staff now put their master's dinner on the sideboard to get cold and unappetizing and hurried home a quarter after five.
In truth the poor man had resisted with such uncharacteristic lack of understanding because he was afraid to be alone in that house, occasionally glimpsing a white face through one of the windows, staring at him expressionlessly as he ate, read, dressed for bed. Ghosts aside, the manor had the terrible, sound-swallowing silence of all truly old, truly still places. All except for the things it could do with wind. The manor was like a strange instrument. Wind swept from the sea, past the then-new lighthouse, through the then-smaller town to rattle through the four stairs and unnumbered basement chambers, most lost to memory, to create a strange little groan, like muffled pain through several doors. Yes, even without the ghosts, it was not pleasant to live out the rest of one's life alone in the manor. He might have taken a wife to ease the strain, but then Magistrates rarely do.
The current Magistrate was not much afraid of his home. No previous Magistrate had ever had harm come to him in the house, and he was not a superstitious man. Not that he didn't believe in ghosts, for that would have been insane, and an insane Magistrate would never have done at all, but their power did not especially impress him. When he was the recipient of cold, intrusive stares, he simply walked to the window and pulled the blinds.
“Excuse me, do you mind?” He had once asked a ghost who had interrupted his bathing in exasperation.
“No.” The ghost had whispered in a sullen whisper from a throat ravaged by screams. Long ago Lady Uhr, along with her household, had taken ill with a plague that resulted in a bout of madness before death. Her screams when she imagined herself to be roasting alive had worn her throat quite sore. In a faint, spectral way, she frequently wished for a lozenge.
The young Magistrate had drawn the drapes pointedly.
Otherplace is primarily a shipping and farming town. There are enough people that not everyone knows everyone, that problems like Jonathan Hepkin's weakness for green eyes are not generally known and understood, though if they were every green-eyed lass could helpfully carry a pair of dark glasses so as to avoid such problems. Not even the Magistrate knows the face and name of every soul. Yet it is not so large that people cannot become known by almost everyone, the details of their lives the subject of public speculation. While Jonathan Hepkins is a relatively normal fellow, with no greater irregularities than any other Otherplacer, a girl like Susan Mells who causes public commotion, even if quite accidentally, is within the space of a day known to every gossip at every well, where the fault of her parents in the matter is openly discussed.
Stain Blue
Master Black
Over the course of this year I decided to fuse last summer's project, dubbed Otherplace for convenience, with Dendrobite, a project from this year, in hopes of giving them enough substance to provide a reader with more than cheap atmospherics. It was mostly a project of substituting one female character with a new one. I sort of realized they were the same story all along. The following is just a scrap, too explanatory to serve as a proper beginning and entirley without the Dendrobite portion of this summer's novel, but it is in some ways the direction of the work.
When Jonathan Hepkins sees a woman with green eyes on the street, he's held up a good three minutes. He can't move for staring, slack grin on his face, expression sweet enough to make you wince with embarrassment when you see it, even if you don't know him from Adam. He can't help it, green eyes being his weakness in women. Once an incredibly effulgent pair had him stuck for a good hour and a half, right there in the middle of a public sidewalk. The police called the Magistrate, who called Jonathan's wife to come pick him up. Miriam arrived with a wheelbarrow, setting her lips and clucking all the way home.
For Jonathan's safety's sake, she is a fair woman, blond, eyes bright blue as can be. It wouldn't do for him to be paralyzed every time they happened to catch each other's glance. Miriam is lovely enough, and is good in the general way of things, and Jonathan is never especially unhappy. Not like Susan Mells, whose sighs are gale force and have been known to fell trees and sweep sailors, sputtering, over the sides of the boardwalk and into the harbor.
At first the magistrate sent her Letters of Firm Discouragement, but these only exacerbated the situation, what with her sighing over her general worthlessness and the failure of her young life. Then came the Public Injunction Against the Sighs of Susan Mells, making the mentioned act punishable by open disdain. Again the problem worsened, and there was talk of the Magistrate's inefficacy, which distressed the solid, serious young man. Weeping tsunamically all the way, Susan Mells was exiled to tend and live in the lighthouse tower at the very perimeter of Otherplace until she was no longer a danger to the community, that is until she had learned to take life less seriously and/or fallen in love.
There she lights the beacon and sighs at the lonely bleakness of the sea and the craggy rocks below her and her own soul's desolation, her gusts speeding outgoing ships and frustrating the inbound. Old sailors coming home roll their eyes and brace the sails when, miles away, the first tremors reach them, causing the waves to slap a little higher on the sides of the ship. They claim she's bad for commerce and make protests before the Magistrate that her Gothic novels should be confiscated, but he simply replies that she helps as much as she hinders, and anyway the whole problem could be solved if they sent a likely young sailor a-wooing.
The Magistrate's family has no particularly important position in the community. His father, Thom Strapp owns a middling-well farm at the perimeter of town, near the crossroads, where he turns out a rather average crop of squash and yams. His rock-candy tree orchard is lovely, the fruit deceptively attractive, long cylinders in a soft blue gray, the color of quiet longing. There is a salty undertone to it from the hard, sea-side soil it grows in. People buy the rock-candy to flavor soups, and they crush it to preserve meat, but as they never can bring themselves to eat it as desert the profits to the Magistrate's father are minimal. The Magistrate's mother, Clementine, is a quiet woman who weaves most of the hours of the day.
Before he rose to his current position, the Magistrate too had a name. He has given up much to fulfill his obligations, more than was required or requested of him. The Magistrate lives in a black stone manor at the center of Otherplace, which has grown in a rough circle up around the house over the centuries. It is a place of confused decorative intentions. Its high, sharp wrought-iron fence has a large gate that is never closed or bared. 'Welcome' is even spelled out in the over-arching ironwork. The manor is lovely, if intimidating.
The manor was originally the home of the feudal lords of Otherplace, and their ghosts recline about its yard after sundown and stare at passers by, dead eyes filled with strange emotion. They hate the living of Otherplace, and the longer they have haunted the yard, the deeper their loathing. Proud and haughty in life, with the loss of it they have nothing in common with the people of the city-- they no longer share their daily struggles or their basic, cherish-able human cares and weaknesses. Death has brought these lords and ladies infinite conceptual altitude, and they stare down the citizens hurrying home in the dusk with enough intensity to make everyone walk a little faster, the hairs on the backs of their necks pricking up in the ghost's presence, the thought slowly worming it's way into their minds. Can they pass that gate? Can ghosts kill? No one stays in the center of town any longer than they have to after dusk, and no one walks through the manor's gate after mid-afternoon.
Up until three Magistrates ago, servants had lived in the attic of the manor. Then a silly maid of all work named Nell didn't turn up for work one day, and the locks on the house's doors hadn't been disturbed all night. The staff, long heckled by minor poltergeists and made uneasy by more serious ghosts lingering in the yard developing especially profound disgust for living people they saw every night, had an evening's discussion and informed their Magistrate they would serve him during they day but seek residence elsewhere, if he would please compensate them for the cost of housing. He refused, but as the months wore on with no sign of Nell and the servant's small acts of domestic sabotage escalated to a new level of viciousness, the Magistrate conceded, consenting to raising their salaries and go without the benefits of a constant household staff. The serving staff now put their master's dinner on the sideboard to get cold and unappetizing and hurried home a quarter after five.
In truth the poor man had resisted with such uncharacteristic lack of understanding because he was afraid to be alone in that house, occasionally glimpsing a white face through one of the windows, staring at him expressionlessly as he ate, read, dressed for bed. Ghosts aside, the manor had the terrible, sound-swallowing silence of all truly old, truly still places. All except for the things it could do with wind. The manor was like a strange instrument. Wind swept from the sea, past the then-new lighthouse, through the then-smaller town to rattle through the four stairs and unnumbered basement chambers, most lost to memory, to create a strange little groan, like muffled pain through several doors. Yes, even without the ghosts, it was not pleasant to live out the rest of one's life alone in the manor. He might have taken a wife to ease the strain, but then Magistrates rarely do.
The current Magistrate was not much afraid of his home. No previous Magistrate had ever had harm come to him in the house, and he was not a superstitious man. Not that he didn't believe in ghosts, for that would have been insane, and an insane Magistrate would never have done at all, but their power did not especially impress him. When he was the recipient of cold, intrusive stares, he simply walked to the window and pulled the blinds.
“Excuse me, do you mind?” He had once asked a ghost who had interrupted his bathing in exasperation.
“No.” The ghost had whispered in a sullen whisper from a throat ravaged by screams. Long ago Lady Uhr, along with her household, had taken ill with a plague that resulted in a bout of madness before death. Her screams when she imagined herself to be roasting alive had worn her throat quite sore. In a faint, spectral way, she frequently wished for a lozenge.
The young Magistrate had drawn the drapes pointedly.
Otherplace is primarily a shipping and farming town. There are enough people that not everyone knows everyone, that problems like Jonathan Hepkin's weakness for green eyes are not generally known and understood, though if they were every green-eyed lass could helpfully carry a pair of dark glasses so as to avoid such problems. Not even the Magistrate knows the face and name of every soul. Yet it is not so large that people cannot become known by almost everyone, the details of their lives the subject of public speculation. While Jonathan Hepkins is a relatively normal fellow, with no greater irregularities than any other Otherplacer, a girl like Susan Mells who causes public commotion, even if quite accidentally, is within the space of a day known to every gossip at every well, where the fault of her parents in the matter is openly discussed.
Stain Blue
Master Black
