FYI

In case you haven't seen it yet, stop by my new blog: The Unpublished Writers' Guide to Survival.

All The Hubbub...

If you've been over at The Writing Spectacle, you know I'm in the query process, so I thought I'd share a little bit of what all the Hubbub is about.

This is the first three or so pages of Dying Embers - a 78,000 word suspense with romantic elements.  Hope you enjoy it.  =o)

Dying Embers

Chapter 1

As she approached the twisted Mercedes’ wreckage, its cracked side mirror winked at her as if they shared some unspeakable secret.  The wind blowing through her mousy-brown hair made the leaves of the grand old trees waver and the moonlight dance across the pine straw.  All around her whispered the soft hush of the forest and faint noises from the road.  So peaceful.  She could almost forget what she’d done, if not for the sickly, wet gurgle.

Standing beneath a tree a few yards above, she couldn’t tell if the sound emanated from the vital fluids dripping out of the engine, or from her husband and his mistress.  Maybe it was the tree as its sap oozed from a wide gash where the metal had ripped away the bark.  The car was dead.  The other three would die soon enough. 

She only felt sorry for the tree.

Her intention had only been to send them down the embankment to the gully below.  If she’d known a tree would stop them partway down, she would’ve planned the whole thing better.  If she’d planned the thing at all, this would’ve gone so much smoother. 

Whatever Will had done, the tree didn’t deserve to pay for it. 

“Hello?” a harsh voice rasped in the night air.  It was filled with pain and the wet sound of too much spit or too much blood.  The noise was so soft anyone else wouldn’t have been able to tell who survived the impact, but she knew the cadence deep inside her, even before her brain had time to register it consciously.

“Hello, Will,” she whispered back.  With a slow deliberateness, she nudged a rock down the steep hillside.  It bounced off one of its many brethren with a loud clack, and her smile widened.  Except for the poor tree, she picked the perfect spot. 

“Hello?” he said louder, his terror filling the air and echoing off the jagged crags.  “Is someone there?” 

Her lips curled into a sneer as she bent to pick up a rock.  With a deftness born of many summer softball games, she tested the weight of it in her hand and then hurled it against the one unbroken pane of glass left.  

The sound of its shattering came only an instant before Will screamed like a little girl.  Or maybe it was his cheap hussy. 

If she was lucky, they were both alive.  Their heartbeats would mean her plan hadn’t completely failed after all.  Oh, she wanted them dead, but not too quickly.  If she was going to spend the rest of her life suffering from their betrayal, the least they could do was spend a little time suffering themselves.

Above them on the road, a semi chugged its way up the hill and she froze.  Everything would be ruined if they were discovered now.  Truck drivers could see too much from their perches, and she needed time for her tormentors to die.  In the morning, the skid marks would be visible on the asphalt, or the sun would glint off the car’s mirrors, and they would be found. 

Too late.

“Whoever you are, please help us.  My wife is bleeding badly, and she’s having trouble breathing.”

The smile left her face.  His wife?  His wife?  So the lies were to continue even unto death.  Bastard. 

“She’s not your wife,” she said into the darkness, each word drawn from her like splinters from a stake in her heart.  Step by merciless step, she crept toward the vehicle; each one bringing her closer to her goal. 

“She never was your wife.”  With each step, another millimeter of her perfect white teeth glowed in the moonlight.  She was snarling by the time she slid the last few feet.  

“And she never will be.”  When she reached the back bumper, loose rocks slid beneath her feet, lurching her against the trunk.  The car wobbled precariously. 

Good.  Better than she hoped for, actually.  If the car tumbled into the ravine, days could pass before anyone found the bodies.

“Emma?” her husband called with a new kind of fear soaking through his tone.  “Is that you?”

“Yes, Will.  I’m here.”  Even as she spoke the words, though, she knew Emma Sweet was gone forever—swallowed by the gaping hole inside her.  For more than a decade, Will had been her world, and like an asteroid’s impact, this event had left her burnt and lifeless.

“Go get help.”  His command shook her out of her misery.  He had no right to boss her around anymore.  Still, her hand closed around the phone in her pocket.  It was within her power to save him.  He’d be grateful for his life…

But it wasn’t just his life hanging by her will.

“For you?” she said sweetly, and then let her words saturate with the hate she was now so full of.  “Or for her?”

“For both of us.  Please, Emma.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please.  I know what you’re thinking, but I can explain.”

“I don’t think so,” she said again.  The cold sound of her words almost shocked her back to sanity.  She was the woman everyone loved and admired.  Emma Sweet wasn’t just a name; it was a persona she’d wrapped around herself for years.  Anyone who knew her would insist she couldn’t hurt a fly…

How It All Begins - Djinnocide

Well, I certainly haven't been over here in a while.  Let's just say this hasn't been the year for feeling good enough about myself to share my writing, and leave it at that.  However, this morning I decided to take the plunge.  Here is the new opening for the Djinnocide rewrite I'm working on.  I hope you enjoy it, because other than a few tweaks, I ain't changing it again.  =op

No one ever asked me if I wanted to be a genie. I never even thought such a thing was possible. I was a modern woman living in the Roaring Twenties. Against my mother’s wishes, I wore my hair and my skirts short. I drank at speakeasies. I danced with gangsters. Hell, I even smoked cigarettes for petesakes. After surviving for two whole decades, I was certainly too old to believe in fairy stories anymore. 

My father, Reggie, he was the dreamer in the family. He was the one always looking for the next big wish and if he could steal it? Well, that was even better. Me, I spent decades looking for the next big party. In fact, I had been prepping for my own birthday extravaganza when the package arrived. The shipping label said ‘Constantinople’, but whether my thief of a dad was still there was anyone’s guess. Odds were even he’d moved on to the next port of call and his next score. At least he’d bothered to think of me enough to send a gift. After all, it’s not every day a gal turns twenty. 

“Marriageable age,” my mother had mumbled at me that morning in lieu of a more sentimental greeting. She’d meant ‘well past the age of finding a husband’ if her previous birthday wishes were any indication. She’d wanted me married and out of the house before I could even graduate high school. To Evangeline’s way of thinking, I should’ve had at least three babies she could bounce on her alcoholic knee by the time I reached this age. 

I didn’t care about her wishes. Lucky for me neither did Reggie. As he often told his dear wife, “Josephine Eugenia Mayweather will marry when she damned well pleases”. I mentally amended that to add ‘if ever’. 

And if the gifts he sent from abroad were any indication, I would have no problems in life by joining the family business. How hard could stealing really be? Reggie didn’t seem too taxed by it when he came home on his infrequent visits. In his words, he only had the law to worry about and they hadn’t nabbed him yet. 

Prison didn’t scare me. Not then. I was young. I was invincible. And I planned to tell Reggie that I was his new partner, as soon as possible. If he couldn’t come home for my birthday, I would go to him. I would demand my place in his life and he would teach me how to relieve the world of its monetary burdens. 

 I was an adult. I would do as I damn well pleased. In fact, as soon as my party had wrapped up, I planned on telling Evangeline that her daughter was finally out of her hair. I’d board a tramp steamer before the month was finished. 

But first, I had a package to open. 
....

Thanks for reading along.  Hopefully it whets your appetite for more.  And if not, remember the old maxim: If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.  Or rather, if you leave a rude comment, I'll moderate it into a black hole anyway.  So there.  =op

Something Different

Tonight I thought I'd offer you something different from the last snippet.  This one is the beginning of the suspense I've been working on over the past couple years.  It's written from start to finish, but I never edited it all the way through.  Its temporary working name is Nano (short for Nanotechnology) and it's the book I've chosen to work on in this time between new projects.

I hope you enjoy it.


2/27/11: Sorry.  I took it down because it needed a total rewrite - a fact I didn't realize until after I posted it here.  When I get it fixed, I'll put it back up.

Excerpt - Blink of an I

Well, it's been about a year and a half since I posted anything over here.  I totally meant to keep up with this, but life has a tendency to get in the way.  This being the year of change for me, though, I think I'll try again.  So, in honor of that, I'm posting the beginning of a book I finished a couple years ago.

To make the posting of this a little more poignant, the other day my teenage nephew asked if he could read one of my books.  I offered my most recent, and asked him what he liked to read.  His answer: "Anything, but I'm kinda picky about my literature."  No pressure there, eh?  Since my most recent finished project is more commercial, I sent him the manuscript I call "Blink of an I" - a dystopian that skirts the line between YA and adult.  This is what I'm offering you today...

The twisted hulk stretched into the air above her like a man straining to grasp the hand of a loved one being pulled away. On the opposite side of the strait, Mary could almost make out another someone reaching through the fog.


Or maybe she was only remembering that it was there. Every chance she got, she trekked the many blocks to stand on this strip of land between the ocean and the bay to wait. Unsure of what she was waiting for, and yet still waiting. On sunny days, she could see across the thick belt of water where a twin husk reached toward the city. The two corroded towers between rose from the waves—silent guardians of a past she would never know.


Her fingers traced, yet again, the strange symbols rising off the brass plate at the base. They probably told what the expanse was for, but their meaning was lost to her. Below her the surf crashed against the rocks, and silently slithered back into the bay, whispering secrets in a language she wished to understand.


Turning her back to the mystery, she cast her eyes across the bay toward the hills and wondered if the upper castes who lived there knew what any of it meant. Surely someone up there had been taught these things. At some point someone thought this structure was important enough to build. It ought to be important enough for someone to remember, even after all the years that must’ve passed.


But if anyone still understood, she knew they would never tell someone like her. She was nothing to them.


Trailing her fingers through the rust, she tried to let go of the pain struggling against her station always brought. In this place, her caste level didn’t matter. The structure behind her didn’t care if she was a lowly Indigo or a lofty Red. After her years in the foundling home, she found structures were better company anyway. The wasted creation above never pointed and laughed at her questionable parentage. It never shunned her because her jumper was a coarser cloth or a poorer color. The warped and corroded metal simply stood, making her feel that maybe once upon a time people didn’t care about such things either. Clearly if men could build such mysterious monuments, they wouldn’t have had time to dwell on origins and castes.


Her gaze drifted partway along the coast and a few blocks in. Nestled inside the grid of streets was her other favorite place in the city. Nothing more than sandy brick and dusty windows, without any outstanding characteristics to draw anyone’s attention, the building—whatever was within—was still prominent amongst the surrounding derelicts surrounding. Like its brethren, it was worn with age. Unlike them, it wore age proudly. Though there was a cracked window pane here and a crumbling brick there, those minor details did nothing to associate the structure with the stolid sentinels around it. None of the others would ever rise to the grandeur it must’ve once been wrapped in.


She never saw a pair of bright eyes peek from between the heavy draperies, but each time she watched, she was sure they were there. Somehow she just knew there was a warm body tucked away, secure behind their folds. She couldn’t imagine it any other way.


Maybe tomorrow she would visit. Perhaps then she would summon the courage to quench her curiosity.


If there was time. Between work and sleep, there was never enough time.

I hope you enjoyed that.  As always, feel free to comment, but this isn't posted for critique or review.  It's just an offering for those who stop by.  =o)

To Prologue or Not to Prologue

Migrated from The Writing Spectacle - with comments. Originally posted on July 7th, 2007.


There seems to be something of a disagreement in the writing world about the dreaded prologue. From what I've read, prologues are a no-no. (Which is why I said 'dreaded'.) I've even had people tell me to drop the prologue from Caldera. But no real reason has been offered beyond the 'prologues are bad' argument. Oddly, one agent I queried loved the prologue and thought I should write a non-fiction piece based on the prologue. Unfortunately, he didn't like the premise of the novel itself. Ack. But I digress.

That's one side of the disagreement. On the other side, many of the books I've read lately have had... :drumroll: Prologues. Hmmm. Some of those books have been bestsellers. Now, you don't hear about those authors coming out in favor of prologues. They just write them.

While I'm sure people are out there writing prologues that do little more than give backstory or drag the beginning with unnecessary information, I don't think a wholesale ban on prologues is the right way to go about addressing the issue. Any more than a wholesale ban on slang or incomplete sentences would be appropriate. Just because some people use these devices improperly doesn't make them evil.

Having said that, however, I am considering dropping my prologue. Don't get me wrong. It's sets the whole book up rather nicely. It's only two pages, and I think it helps to be in there. How much it's helping, though, remains to be seen. And whether it's hurting Caldera's chances to be published remain to be seen as well. Right now, it's a coin toss. No one who has read the book in its entirety has had a problem with the prologue - or if they did, they never voiced their opinion about it.

So, I'm leaving it in the hands of my blog readers. The prologue is below. For those of you who haven't been reading along, the underlying plot of Caldera is about a scientist with a plan to control the impending eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

------------------------------------------------------
Prologue

It has happened before.

Six hundred thousand years ago, death and destruction rained from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River, from the plains of Saskatchewan to the Gulf of Mexico. Seventy-five thousand years ago the sun disappeared beneath a haze of ash, killing the majority of the human race in the ensuing global winter. Fifteen hundred years ago, the most notorious of human eras—The Dark Ages—began in a shroud of gray volcanic dust.

Early in the 19th century, the center of a tiny island in the Dutch West Indies swelled and trembled and burst. Fiery boulders fell from the sky; ash blanketed both land and ocean for hundreds of miles as it spewed into the atmosphere. More than ninety thousand people died as the sky became clogged with soot—soot so thick that the year of 1816 was to become known as ‘The Year Without a Summer’.

Later in that same century, a mountain rising from the depths of the East Indies exploded and then collapsed. The sea rose twelve feet that day, pushed up suddenly as tons of rock dropped into its murky depths. Thundering walls of water swept toward Java, Sumatra, Bali; tens of thousands drown as the ocean broke over their homes and villages.

In each instance a caldera has erupted, and in each instance the world has born the brunt of its destruction.

So far, many of these types of events occurred before the ascension of man; so far, they have all occurred in sparsely populated areas. In the scheme of human disaster, these events remain insignificant. In perspective, the death toll has been minimal. But still, the tiny native children who shivered in fear as Tambora thundered down upon them thought it more than minimal. The tribal women who screamed their last breaths as Krakatau choked the sound away considered it from a different perspective. The peasants who endured The Dark Age’s endless years of starvation and suffering certainly thought it significant.

They all must have prayed for whatever god they knew to make it stop. They must have offered sacrifices and tributes to appease the wrath that cascaded upon them. But even amidst their fruitless prayers and hopeless offerings, they must have believed in their hearts that nothing could stop nature.

In the mountains of western Wyoming, a caldera lays in a fitful sleep—churning and gurgling and smoking like some great evil dragon—and mankind dances around it as if it has been caged for their amusement. The sparkling geysers and the boiling mud are merely an interesting diversion right now, but the dragon is bound by no man’s chains and it has overslept by twenty thousand years. When it awakens, no man will think it amusing, and no man with think of it as a mere diversion.

Pompeii was a firecracker. Mount Saint Helens, a birthday candle. When Yellowstone makes up its mind to blow, the people in its path will wish they’d been at Hiroshima instead.

Will they be praying on some sprawling ranch in Montana? Will they be screaming in some sparkling penthouse in Denver? Will they be choking under a layer of ash on the bustling streets of Houston?

Perhaps nothing can be done to stop nature. Or perhaps, just maybe, something can.

It has happened before. Perhaps it doesn’t have to happen again.
---------------------------------------

If it never gets published with the rest of Caldera, at least it's here. Barring any feelings about the writing style of the above excerpt, what are your thoughts on prologues? Do you use them when they're necessary, or do you shun them entirely?

Posted by B.E. Sanderson at 7:35 AM
Labels: excerpt, Writing

4 comments:

Anissa said...
I love this prologue of yours. It provides such great tension to kick off the novel. But I hear you on the industry's prejudice. I haven't used a prologue myself. Haven't really felt the need, and then with all I hear about NOT doing it, I just haven't. That's not to say I wouldn't if I felt it necessary. ;)

Maybe just query with chapter one. Then, if a full is requested, include it. Good luck!

July 7, 2007 10:59 AM
Tia Nevitt said...
I like it but I would consider making it much shorter. I think the Year Without A Winter example is one that you should keep. Also, in the first paragraph, it is not clear what you are talking about. Although I knew it was a volcano because I know something about your story, it almost sounded like a meteor strike.

Just my opinion . . .

July 7, 2007 6:09 PM
ERiCA said...
I admit, I'm usually one of those anti-prologue folks. But that's because I see so many prologues that are really just the first scene of chapter one separated as a prologue for no good reason, or that show a random chunk of backstory that's really unnecessary at that point in the plot.

In your case, it's different. At the very least, it explains what "Caldera" means and why the explosion would be so deadly. Seems important to me!

July 26, 2007 2:23 PM
Andrew said...
I like prologs. They are the underlying menace that keeps you reading through the character development.
Here's the first line of my prolog: Two of the most massive super-galaxies in the history of the Universe collided.
And from that one line I've written an entire novel. It's about the only place in your novel where you can explain without resorting to awkward "know-it-all" character soliloquies.
On top of that, I have a "quote" that even comes before my prolog, providing addition perspective on what you're about to read.
Unless someone dies in the first paragraph of the book, it's hard to generate that kind of tension without a prolog.

September 18, 2007 11:22 PM

Caldera Excerpt

Migrated from The Writing Spectacle. Originally posted January 7th, 2007.

As an example of how memories can be woven into your fiction, below is an excerpt--based loosely on my own experience--from my second novel, "Caldera". The movie mentioned below really does exist somewhere in the dark recesses of some elementary school vault.
-------------------------------

Growing up in the countryside with neither siblings nor neighbors, Myke had spent many solitary days outdoors, running through the fields and woods that surrounded her home. Free to discover the world without gaining a fear of it, hers had been a dreamlike existence. She made friends with the squirrels, and the birds, and the rabbits; she grew to love every rock and shrub and tree. Looking back, she knew it was that sincere childlike wonder about nature that had made her such an easy target.

She’d heard whisperings about man’s destruction of nature throughout grade school. They came in seemingly harmless storybooks, and on various children’s television programs, and in snippets of the news that she would catch as she played in the living room each evening. Still, as she looked back over her life, she’d come to the realization that her real indoctrination came in earnest during her third grade year.

Many times since, Myke recalled that incident and realized that in any other country if she had been exposed to information of that nature in that form, it would have been denounced as propaganda. That it came to her in an American public classroom in the form of a short film made it education. Looking back, she could only think of it as repulsive.

The movie had seemed innocuous enough, clicking along on its rickety projector as all such films did. It could have easily been about Nanook of the North, or about the Grand Canyon for all the notice her classmates took of it. For them, movies were just another form of recess; for her, they were another means of gaining knowledge. She loved them all, but movies about the outdoors were her favorites. Though she never could have known it, it had been her downfall. Sadly, at eight years old, she had been ripe for the picking.

By that age, she’d already been subjected to many such films about the beauty of untouched nature. This one seemed to be no different. At first the film showed a great sweeping primeval forest with a gentle meadow in the forefront; a babbling stream and marsh grasses filled with birds, alongside. She could remember leaning forward onto her elbows in rapt attention at the splendor of it all. When suddenly the camera panned in closer to show men standing in the field, she had felt a rush of disappointment. Men had no place there, in her mind, and she had resented their intrusion.

The men seemed to be making plans of some sort. They were wearing hardhats and pointing from blueprints they were holding to the landscape around them. The voice-over had reflected Myke’s own thoughts as it spoke of the men and her own indignation had been apparent in the script. When the scene shifted to show bulldozers pulling down trees and plowing through the meadows, she had only nodded her head.

At barely eight, she’d already understood that it was a bad thing for man to use nature to suit his own purposes and that man was bad because of it. The next scene, though, had sealed the lid on her perception of mankind as wanton destructor. The scene showed men starting a fire to burn off the marsh grass, and in a very graphic display, that had made little Myke feel lightheaded and that haunted her adult self still, the camera showed nests full of baby birds being burned alive.

On that day, Myke learned to hate mankind.

------------(End Excerpt)--------------

May the makers of that movie rot in hell for what they did to hundreds, if not thousands, of impressionable 8 year olds.