Day 7

I feel blah. I don't feel like writing. However, I know I should. I'm going to open up the document and stare at the place I left of (one of them anyway). It's funny, but more often than not when I bring myself to do that I come up with something. There's no guarantees it'll be good or anything, but it's something at least.

***

I wrote, and I wrote quite a bit more than I expected I would. I'm very pleased. Hopefully this means that this 30 day writing thing is providing some fruitful results. The more I write the easier it should become. It seems that way anyhow.

I continued for a bit from both the points I've left off on.

***


The stairway was rickety, though not by far as rickety as Keir had feared. Sam made a mental note to tease him about it later. She was far too intent on the silvery key and where it might be leading. She was not sure if she liked the key or not, she had no idea where it went, after all, and as such no idea what to expect. Having gone up one half-floor they followed a short corridor which ended in a white and entirely unremarkable door. Keir felt the door knob.
"Locked."
"Just be ready then" Sam muttered as she stepped forward, tentatively sticking the key in the lock. It seemed to fit. It just seemed odd that they would use such an old-fashioned design on the key, for such a regular-looking door. It gnawed at her. She heard the click of Keir's gun behind her. With one hand on her own gun she turned the key and slowly, and quietly opened the door.
She had expected it to be dark, but immediately when the door cracked open it emitted a sliver of light. She gently pushed it open all the way and with pistol firmly in hand she walked in, and up a couple of steps. Behind her she could hear Keir draw a breath of awe and excitement.
"Bloody hell." And he walked past her, gazing three ways at once.

Her own heart sunk like a stone. Books. All around them thousands and thousands of books, circling upwards on great bookshelves to a magnificent and unbroken glass-doom ceiling. How under heaven were they suppose to find what they were looking for, what Keir was looking for, in here? Knowing Keir and his hunches, Sam had the unencouraging feeling that he didn't know either.

***

Rolling around she pulled her gun, aiming after the birds. She doubted that she got a hit, but with luck it would keep them at bay, for a while.
"Come on, come on! We got to go!" She was tugging at Keir, who had frozen halfway up, staring at the well. A white smog or smoke was rising up and pouring over the edges, making the bitter smell more pronounced than ever. Sam didn't have time to be subtle. The klatsch of the slap she dealt him over the face could be heard quite clearly over the rumbling. He started and looked up at her, half-dazed, before getting up. The smell had to be getting to him in some way.
"Grab your bag." She gazed skywards for the ravens again, "we gotta shake the birds."
Keir shook his head, as if to get rid of a fly, and then, they ran. Far above the ravens circled, free from their stone abode. Their eternal eyes searching the ground.

***

I'm considering ending the chapter at this point, which would mean I would just have to tie everything together! I'm not sure though, I was planning on including more of their escape. We'll see I guess.

Oh, I also think I figured out a working title for the book. Mimir's Well.

Day 6

I didn't think I'd get anything written, but I did! I got some inspiration and I decided to skip ahead to the end of the scene while I still had it fresh in my mind. As per always, it's short, but hell, I'm glad I just got something down.

***

When the finally came back out, Sam did not blink in the sunlight, as it had gone, and so had the chirping of the birds, the rattles of the rats and the breeze. The sky had turned to the pale, almost-white colour of a twilight that should have been hours and hours off. Sam could feel her heart stepping up a notch. Something had changed while they were in the library. They must have been observed, or triggered something. the fact that she had no idea what, did no bode well for them. Sam looked at Keir, who was far too intent on the book to notice, she would have snapped at him, but her gaze wandered beyond him and over the plaza, intent on something else. She knew to trust her body, she knew she was seeing something, her mind just hadn't picked up on it. Instinctively she slowed her breath down to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, and her mouth opened slightly to let her taste buds aid her sense of smell.
She saw it almost simultaneously as she heard the low, whistling noise. She was running. She was yelling.
"Duck!"
They were tumbling and the black stone ravens swooped over them. Cawing, clawing. Her shoulder hit the ice cold edge of the well and the smell invaded her senses, begging her to take notice. Sea-salt and mud. decade-old decay, sewers and a bitter tangy taste at the back of her throat. There was a tremble in the stones, something down below was awake.
She froze for a split second, and then she clenched her teeth, and got up.

***

And on that hanging note, it will end, for now.

Day 5

No writing done today. Sometimes it just falls out of your head, so much else going on today. Nothing big, just the small puttering and pottering of life. I saw The Patriot today. The one with Mel Gibson about the American Revolution. It was nice, but sometimes it drives me stark raving mad how Hollywood necessarily has to beat you over the head with their message.

The Redcoats are evil. I GET it. It's actually enough that he kills Mel G's son, the evil redcoat does not have to personally persecute him, burn down his home, his sister-in-law's home, kill his oldest son and burn down a church full of people. Enough is bloody enough you guys.

there's a scene at the end where Cornwallis is realizing he's going to lose Yorktown and the entire war and he goes off. "They're just militia, peasants, how could this be?" And it would have been so beautiful if he had stopped there, but no, when you have a hammer you're surrounded by nails, apparently. So he goes on, "everything will be different now. Everything IS different." Guh, annoyed me to no end.

And this I will have to consider my Creative Writing contribution of the day.

Day 4

I haven't written anything really today, I wrote this for the Locution forum, it'll just have to do for tonight's entry:

***

So I promised to write something up for this.

Most of us who joined Marrow's 30 days of creativity are past the 15-day mark by now. The idea of Marrow's challenge was to get creativity flowing and to establish the habit of writing. As a writer it's important to keep writing for several reasons. It will improve your writing skills, hone your creativity and so forth. It's also important because it (oh so mercilessly) teaches us that we'll produce a lot of crap, and that's okay. Keep writing and eventually you'll hit the good stuff.

However, an equally important aspect of the writing process is editing, as I'm sure you all know. Editing is how we separate the grain from the chaff. In this process we don't just eliminate the bad stuff, we build on the good stuff as well, so this is my proposal:

I challenge you all once you're done with your 30 days of Creativity to spend 30 days on editing that material.

This is not necessarily as straightforward as writing new material for 30 days straight. The blogs may reign from actual editing and your woes with commas and clauses to ideas spawned on continuations on stories to why you decided that you'll work on Poem A but incinerate poem B and hope everyone forgets that it ever existed.

The point is to make some form of progress and post it in your blog every day.

Marrow shooed us all to Home Depot to get some material, now it's time to start building.

Thoughts, comments etc is, as always, welcome.

***

Day 3

Sometimes you just know life's testing your resolve. I wrote some more today. Yes, I know you'll all kill me if I don't stop posting snippets of 200 words-or-less. I got going for a bit today, I found a flow and then out of nowhere - lightning headache - comes and steals my flow, and now it's gone. Very frustrating. So, here's what I got since last time and there'll be more tomorrow. Oh, also, everything so far is directly sequential, except that long snippet which was obviously another scene. If it all feels jagged and confused paste it all together to one document and, uh, hopefully it'll help.

***


"Oh, it's all bollocks Sam, there's nothing but cheap pockets out there. Romance novels and, uh, are you okay?" Keir came bustling through the door but stopped uncertainly mid-sentence. Sam paid him no heed as she got up and heaved the desk onto it's side. It was a dictionary alright, English to Norwegian, of all things. It was a thick book, and looked to be stuck pretty good where it was. Sam gave a wave to Keir.
"Hold the other end steady." Once he had gotten a grip she took a firm grip of the book and yanked it off.
"Reckon you found something?" Keir asked quietly and made his way over to have a look at the book.
Once Sam opened it she saw why it had gotten stuck, someone had cut out a hole in the papers to hide something. The paper had gone old and brittle, with her added weight the leg had partially broken off and crashed through the papers. She leafed through the few unbroken ones, of which half promptly fell out and into pieces, until she came to the actual compartment. It held a big, old-fashioned key.
"If this leads to the document cabinet I am going to be right pissed," she said dryly, but a smile was creeping onto her features, this could be something, it could be something real. "Did you see any locked doors out there?"
"Maybe, I saw a door."
Sam gave him a look and he raised his hands in defence.
"I didn't feel like braving another rickety staircase, alright? I like my legs just fine."

***

I'll get this scene eventually, I'm confident about that at least. That makes me thrilled for an entirely different reason, I used to be unable to show unpolished or unfinished work to people, or write stuff that I couldn't complete in one go, that was how perfectionist I was about my writing. I was downright paranoid that if I did one itty-bitty thing out of sequence the Gods of Writing would come down and Smite Me. No wonder I haven't written for such a long time. I think I actually had to mature as a person in order to allow myself to write and enjoy it again.

It's kind of funny that I've been hanging around a Creative Writing forum for so long without participating in the writing. Not that I regret it, if you can't write, if you're suffering from writer's block I think critiquing other people's works is the best way to keep your own skills relatively fresh. I might post something about writer's block later. Right now, I'm going to stab myself with a fork. I am told this will distract me from my headache.

Day 2, second post

I said I'd post again, didn't I? Technically it's past midnight so I'm late, but I've always been in the habit of refusing to recognize the coming of a new day before I've had a chance to sleep on it.

***

Sam could hear him occasionally lifting and dropping pieces of overturned shelves. Shaking her head to herself she stepped over to the desk to check out the drawers. Nothing. She pulled them out spread the content carelessly about the room and knocked their bottoms out. No hidden compartments, no nothing. She knocked on every conceiveable wall-space including the bookshelf to see if they rung hollow. Still nothing. The entire building appeared to be rock-solid.

She sighed and leaned back with one hand on the desk, resignedly eyeing the document cabinet, doubtlessly filled with another bunch of nothings, and then, quite suddenly, she wasn't. There was a crunching noise, an undignified yelp and then she was far too closely acquainted with the carpet for her own liking. One of the legs of the desk had to have given way. Turning her head to get up she realized it was only partially true, what had actually given way was what had been supporting the table leg, a dictionary. She stared at it for a bit, it looked as if it had been gutted by the leg, which made no sense at all.


***

Did I mention how HARD this scene is for me? And I haven't written anything in years, my confidence is a tad shaky. I want to be serious, but I want to have a dry humour in the writing. I want some funny but I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm not nailing it. Maybe I'll feel differently once the scene and the chapter is finished and a cohesive whole.

I come offering excuses, paltry paltry excuses

So I dropped off the bandwagon, big-time. Private life went Zoooooomg! And I got too busy, for real. I had no time to write. So, I decided to start this whole thing over. Today I restart the 30 day challenge and if I fail this time again, I know I'll have no excuses. This is actually day 2, I started over yesterday, however, since I'm struggling with Writers Block over a difficult scene, all I produced was this:


The library had appeared to be small at first. Sam examined the reception desk and the small office, which was empty beyond an overly private blackbird, while Keir checked out the rows of shelves.

***

And this:

Keir was positive that he had managed to keep himself awake, but somehow he must've slipped. If he deceived himself or if he had been distracted by his internal reveries he did not know, but suddenly everything went unnaturally quiet, and then he saw it.

It looked surprisingly normal for a being as old as time itself. Hadn't it been for the arcane longbow and choice of fashion Keir would've been hard-pressed to see the difference between it and any old human. He was fairly certain that it hadn't seen that he was awake, slouched back as he was, rifle hanging loosely in his hands. It went around the circle once, probably checking for a hole, before returning to its original position. Keir was confident it thought he was asleep, until the colourless eyes met his and it grinned, showing off gleaming, pointy teeth. Keir blinked, startled, and it was gone. He stared goofily for a moment where it had been before letting off a string of salty curses and banged, as successfully as can be expected, on the tent-wall.
"Sam, we're live."

***

Kinda sad. I have so much in my head, I have plotlines, concepts, ideas. I have fucking giants in there (literally, uh, almost, they're not physically manifesting, y'know.) They're there and they will be in the story and I'm determined that they will work and make sense. I have images of scenes with cool and snappy one-liners that will not be cheesy at all (the power of my spirit shall overcome the cheese! overcome, I say!). The worst is of course that all of that centres around the cool part, which is the final third of the story, I have to get there first and I better do it fast before all the cool ideas I had about the beginning go away.

Anyway, I promise another entry tonight, but I make no guarantees as far as quality goes.

Day 2

Poetry? Oh no! Say it isn't so!

I don't mind that all the roads have been trod,
long before me, and by greater men than me.
That's okay, I don't mind. After all,
I've never been, and I never trusted great men.

I'll walk in their tracks, my lamp kept black.
I will follow my nose, wherever it goes
with my feet to keep me going, and
the light of my eyes to shine me
on the way.

Day 1

Uh, yeah. So I was supposed to write something today, right? I forgot. I got a call for an inteview for a new extra job, and I found out that the one I was vaugely set up for has gotten down to specs so I know I have three weeks of full-time. I might actually be able to pay my tuition. So yeah, I got distracted, and I have to get up at 5 AM tomorrow. That new extra job? Yeah. Tomorrow. 5 AM sharp.

So I decided, I have a cup of tea. And I have to finish it. So I will write until I'm out of tea. God save the queen old chapes, let's be chipper now aye? Uh. Yeah.

***

Sam had hated the library when she saw it. She hated it when she wrestled the door open and hated it even more when it fell down with a crash after Keir attempted to close it behind them. She ignored his tentative "Oops" and guardedly examined the room. Old decaying shelves lay on the floor or leaned precariously against each other. Absolutely anything could be hiding in there. At best, they would find an unhappy wildcat. At worst, one of the Fair Ones might be found strolling through, perusing the goods, guarding the treasure. Nothing moved beyond the dust in the sunlight. The only sound was their breathing. Hers almost silent, his quivering with restrained excitement.

She looked back and nodded and they slowly moved forward. She didn't like to be here, but if it was anyone's domain, it was hers. Whatever Godforsaken force had compelled Keir to drag them there she would find the source and be rid of it. She dryly made a private note to herself that it had better be a force beyond his damned curiosity.

***

And that's it ladies and gentlemen. An impressive start. If anyone from the forums are reading this, it's a continuation from the story I posted here. Now, I ought to try and sleep I believe. More to come tomorrow.

Marrow's 30 days of Creativity Challenge

So Marrowmeld posted a challenge on the CW board - to write something creative every day, for 30 days. Since there is no good reason for me to not do it, I'm gonna do it. I'm about to lose momentum in my novel concept, and that would be a true shame, for me anyway. So here's to creativity.