Cold walk, warm house. My uncle’s third knuckle on the right, potato-sack lumpy and his red voice and the fall of the Roman Empire. The stars were out, but I was in.
Humans do these things. They do these things to each other every day.
My face was bent. I rolled next to the couch and waited, while meteors impacted on the surface of Mars.
The press of headphones, the music and the moon – I lay with the sheet over my head and lost myself. The rhymes, the words – the quick symmetry of the drum and the strange keen of the electronic flute.
I think about Star Prophet’s planets — about the songs he hears. The whirling slide of space and time, the spaces, empty – now full. Jupiter turns his face, and Saturn hula-hoops across the dance floor. The blood on my pillow is red. The rains of Mercury and Venus, the broken canyons hidden beneath the cotton-wool cloud.
[I’m really not happy with this section. I’m used to bla-bla-blahing my way, spitting out a few hundred words like it was nothing. This sucker’s fighting me. I’m going to keep working on SP in dribs and drabs, then do a massive revision when it’s all done. This is what I get for actually thinking about a story.]
There is no immediate response at the door, but the sound of a window quickly opening around the side of the large building. Mara and Quintus move to the corner of the house to investigate — spotting a lanky blonde man slithering out of a window. He is completely nude, except for a pink pillow covering his genitals. A flushed looking young redheaded girl is closing the window behind him, closing the curtains in desperation.
“Afternoon.” the naked man waves at the two travelers in a friendly manner, and moves crab-sideways towards the nearest line of bushes beyond the Pennytown Square.
Mara and Quintus turn as the front door of the house opens. A portly half-orc with a thick black mustache appears, wearing an immaculate brown tunic. He cranes his head around looking for who knocked, then spots the gunslinger and duelist.
“Can I help you folks?” platinum teeth shine in the sun, matching the buttons on his coat and his belt buckle.
Mara haggles briefly with the fat trader, and holds out a purse.
“Fine, fine.” the Master Trader took the gold, and yelled through the open door. “Beulah! Beulah, bring my strong box, dammit.”
Moments later a wide-hipped red-haired girl appears, her face still flushed, bearing an iron box. Master Drover slips the coins through a slot in the top, then pushes the box back into her hands. “Run along with you.”
The half-orc points idly down the road to his right. “My cleric is also my blacksmith — the forge is a a dozen houses down that way — you can’t miss it.”
Quintus and Mara move through the dirt streets of Pennytown. The townsfolk seem to be mainly returning from the lunch hour, wiping crumbs from their chins or taking one last pull at a wineskin before heading towards one of the many warehouses or stockyards. They follow the scent of coal and steel to a low, dark-beamed barn. The forge is quiet, but the smell of the bellows is strong.
Hung on a post next to the entrance is a polished piece of red steel. Etched into it with care and precision is a blue square.
The forge is neatly layed out, a dozen fresh horseshoes are cooling on a wooden table, next to a tub of linseed oil. The blacksmith is nowhere to be seen, so Mara avails herself of an elaborate set of bells hanging next to the doorway. They clang and chime, and a door at the back of the forge flies open.
The tall blonde man they had glimpsed earlier – still shirtless, and desperately trying to tug on a pair of cotton pants. He topples forward, landing awkwardly on his shoulder. He looks up at Quintus and Mara, and his long-jawed face bursts into a grin.
“Well, hello again.” he said, continuing to button his pants.
Star Prophet lay in the dirt. Underneath the drain pipe by the abandoned Bojangles he lay in mud and water, the blue jacket he always wore, a black cord wrapped around each wrist. After school I would bring the lunch I had saved and sit with him on the broken concrete and talk and watch him eat — pushing each wrapper into his mouth and chewing the plastic. Not a crumb escaped and he would talk about planets.
“Jupiter now, that’s a giant musical note — a hum in the cosmos, a perfect counterpoint to the static coming off Mercury during the winter months.” a clean slide of plastic pulled from his mouth.
analoglove00b by jean fhilippe
He always wore the hood of his coat up, even in June-heat. Somewhere in his orbit of town he had found some white tape, and carefully lined out a star on the front peak of his hood.
“People gotta know. People gotta know.” Star Prophet said, right hand clutching the zipper tab of his coat.
“Yeah?” I said. “They gotta?”
“Gotta-gotta.” completing our joke.
He stank, sweat and plastic and wet earth. His hands were brown like mine.
“The chance, the promise — the song that the rings of Saturn sing. It belongs –we belong!” he yelled, a stray fleck of yellow bread falling from his lips.
They chased him away from everywhere. The stores, the streets, the fronts of churches. Star Prophet would run and point, sliding down railings and stairs. His long brown finger to the heavens, spraying spit and star charts into empty faces. Late nights he would grab rich drunk white boys by the lapels and shake them into his words about Orion and Sagittarius and the shapes of memory in the stars.
They beat him and broke him and chased him into the wilderness like a dog.
So we sat and talked, and the house waited.
“It’s in us -It’s in us the stars and the sky and the light of the sun and the dance of the moons, and I can feel it — I can feel it in my heart, lifting me up while I sleep, and I can’t sleep only dream the stars in my water, and in my earth the moon.”
Sometimes Star Prophet would cry. Sometimes Star Prophet would hold my hand, and that was okay.
“Tell ’em. You gotta tell ’em when I can’t. Won’t you?” he whispered.
“I will. I promise.” The stars were out and I was late.
“And Cheetos — maybe, tomorrow?” his star-marked hood bobbled.
“Yeah, okay.”
I walked home in the stars, to the dark house where my uncle waited.
[I finished this piece, and realized I was writing about Doctor Who.]
The devil-kin emerged carrying the emaciated form of an old human man. His bones showed through wasted skin — silver hair, and a long scraggly beard. His tunic was rotting, and food spilled down his chin, crusted up in his beard. His eyes were tightly bound, with a surprisingly clean strip of white cloth. The man worked his mouth feebly, trying to come to grips with the sudden flood of light and abrupt jostling.
Amidst the wrinkles on his left arm, a faded tattoo could be seen. A white spiral, shaped like a teardrop.
My beloved gave me some constructive criticism on my writing recently, and of course I handled it maturely.
Which is to say, I was dismissive, hurt -and jerked my knee REAL HARD. Rejecting what she said out of hand, and refusing to accept any remote validity to her statement.
Fifteen minutes later I realized she had a point.
Then I pouted for a day or so.
Then the crying.
And now that I’ve processed, I’m ready to obliquely admit that she had a point, a small point.
[Read: She was completely right.]
Her criticism was:
Since you write in third person exclusively, you have a tendency to not show character’s emotions. I understand that you’re trying to “show, not tell” — but I’d like to get more inside the character’s heads, and get a sense of their emotions. [Heavily paraphrased, she’s the one with the eidetic memory.]
I read back through a few pieces, and I can totally agree with this assessment. And while I’m always going to err on the side of allowing my audience to make their own conclusions about characters — I feel this is a tool I need to be able to master, because it can be extremely effective.
So, my question is: How do I do this, without my stuff sounding like a Harlequin romance?
I can’t just write “The mage was sad. Her sadness was strong, and full of more sadness.”
Can I?
Opinions, suggestions, and examples if you got ’em!
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