Words Lost and Then Chopped

A few weeks back, I had a program crash. It was quiet, quick and quite painful. I lost thousands of words, about two weeks’ worth. I know, I know, you are supposed to back up. I do, I did, but not for the past two weeks. I thought there would be time for that later. (Otherwise I would have lost more than two weeks!)

I remember what I wrote. But not the exact words, the exact phrase, the details I used. So I couldn’t recreate it exactly the same. But I have finished recreating it and it is mostly the same. I think. I don’t believe I left anything out.

But it is shorter! I lost words along the way, but I don’t think I lost any details. I rearranged the scenes, yes, couldn’t help myself. I also did not have written a few pages worth of dialogue – dialogue I would deleted later anyway. (I realized a few scenes afterward that the dialogue wasn’t necessary.)

But it was only a few pages. I am astonished at how shorter the whole thing is now. It’s like I only recreated ¾ of the work I lost. It’s a puzzling.

Friday Flash: Blood

So . . . this idea came to me today. I didn’t even use an image prompt like usual. I am not entirely sure if it is a good idea, but I decided to go with it anyway.

Blood wreathed the mountain like morning fog.

He stood on his snow covered fields and watched. The lower peaks were still green and white. But he suspected the blood-path of the high mountain lords would engulf the whole mountain before spring.

He looked at the ground, pictured the winter seeds safe under their blanket of snow, and wondered if anything would survive to ripen in the summer.

He took a deep breath and shivered in a fierce gust of wind. The blood tang was sharp in the air. Blood and the musky fire smell of their dragon slaves. They were in the air.

He looked back; his household watched him. Some were wary, some with patience, some with contempt, but they watched him.

Time to go. And damn any who thought him a coward. No one could survive the upcoming war. No one.

Friday Flash: Sucking Water

I made it! I got a #fridayflash and it’s still Friday where I am.

She lay back on the rough wood, smiling into his eyes. The wasteful expanse of miles of clear blue water around them was exhilarating.

The sun was warm. Fuzzy white clouds skated past above in the azure sky. A small one detached itself and wafted in their direction.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

He gently stroked down her shoulders. “Passed out. Poor bastard drank too much.” Smugness there, pride in his decision to drink slightly less. 

She smiled. “Excellent.”

She raised a fist, punched him in the throat. He flopped over to the deck, gasping. She followed up by banging his head against the wood several times. His eyes rolled up into his head.

She got to her feet, dusting off her hands. Work was tough, sometimes.

The craft hovered above the ship now and she lifted her arm, thumb up. A large pipe dropped into the water.

They were going to suck up all the clucking enemy’s water. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

Friday Flash: Fourth Birthday Parade

This fridayflash is for the fourth anniversary bloghop at the friday flash website. The idea is to write a story 400 words long about the 4th anniversary/birthday of something. After several false starts, I finally managed. I was inspired by this picture:

A few excerpts from the Annals of Dead or Lost Colonies:

Dear Julie,

The colony has just gotten the order for the hyperspace module. It’s taken a year, but we finally have it. This will be the first of many letters until you can come here.

I have a house. It’s small, but it has a garden. It’s ours, free and clear.

The hypo gardens are not doing well. Except for the lantern cherries. I don’t understand it. There is a group studying the problem.

Yours always,

Ben

 

Dear Julie,

I miss you. Will you come soon? I’ve added two bedrooms to the house for the children. There is plenty of space. Hyperspace travel is very safe, don’t worry.

The colony celebrated our third birthday with a grand parade. I was in the lead float, as the directory of horticulture. It was quite wonderful.

The lantern cherry have become our biggest – our only! – export. They are in demand and tasty. I suppose it’s good they grow bigger here than anywhere else. They look more like giant melons than cherries. But I don’t quite understand why nothing else growing.

Yours always,

Ben

 

Dear Julie,

I’ve been promoted, dear. I am now president of the horticulture department. The last president died quite unexpectedly in the Greenhouse A. Poor Jerry. At least he died at work. Greenhouse A is where we first started the lantern cherries. We have ten, now.

The colony’s fourth birthday is in a month and we are providing cherries for the decoration. The last of the flowers died months ago and we haven’t been successful in growing any others. Not even marigolds. It’s baffling.

I do wish you would come. I know the ships scare you, but hyperspace travel is so fast these days. You wouldn’t have to spend months on a ship in normal space. I dearly want to see the children, dear.

Love yours,

Ben

 

Dear Julie,

Don’t come! Stay away! God, I am glad you never came.

The cherries destroyed the parade. It was mad. They exploded and attacked and will take over the planet shortly.

This will be the last message I send.

I am going to blow up the greenhouses and take as many of the cherries as I can.

This is why nothing else grew. They’ve been devouring them, the murderous, subtle lantern cherries.

I bet they killed poor Jerry.

Yours forever,

Ben

I is for Ideas

I think I am going through an idea drought lately. Well, more like than I am stuck on the current novel in progress. I don’t know how to go on. I got the middle blues. Which is where I usually get stuck. It’s depressing. I know what happens after this bit, but not how to get there.

I guess that’s why I started the erotica novella. It’s an idea I’ve had for some time and just never really did anything about.

Though I don’t know – should I take a month-long break from the novel to do this? I am and I am hoping it’ll shake something loose. I was frustrated trying to write a transition type bit in the novel and not get getting anywhere. Maybe I should have written the piece(s) afterward, just to give myself a goal. Maybe. I don’t know.

But the erotica novella is new and interesting too so . . . I’m just not really sure if it’s a good idea taking a long break. But we’ll see.

Explosions of Color

This Friday flash was inspired by a photo I saw on 500 px. Here: http://500px.com/photo/28050051 The picture is called Color Explosion by Margaret Morgan. The link looks like it is not working and I think that’s because 500 px doesn’t have a link to the actual picture.

This flash is 700 words and a lot longer than my usual Friday Flashes.This is also my E post for the A to Z challenge. E is for Explosions of Color.

A child raised his gun and took aim at me from the balcony across the street. I turned, hurrying to the door. Too late! A wet splat hit my back and I looked back.

The child grinned at me, toothless and full of glee at having caught the foreigner so.

I scowled and marched inside. I would have to change. Again. This was the third time today.

Liquid blue blate dripped down the back of my shirt. The precious mineral the natives of this crazy planet considered good luck. Everyone splattered everyone with it today, the first official day of spring. It was supposed to bring a good harvest. I didn’t understand the how or why, but I didn’t need to.

All I knew was that I need a ton of pure, unadulterated blate if I was going to pay off the banks. The natives mixed it with water, with clay, with smoke and sold it on the streets for games. And for some reason they refused to sell it off-world. Why they should refuse those profits, I didn’t understand.

My brother eyed from the couch, laughing. “Leave it on,” he advised me.

I stared at him.

“They’ll take it as a challenge if you don’t,” he said.

Maybe. I still didn’t like the feel of my shirt, plastered to my skin and wet.

“Also, we don’t have time for you to change again. We leave in five minutes.”

My brother was a tech specialist on this benighted world. He had come here a decade ago and somehow survived. Most foreigners didn’t. Today, I was grateful.

“The dealer is an hour outside the city.”

He meant smuggler, but whatever word he liked. I wasn’t picky.

 

The trip out of the city was long and boring. Nothing but the same stone-and-wood buildings everywhere. Nothing but the same cobblestone roads, now liberally splashed with blate. They were colorful. Pretty, if you could overlook the weeds sprouting from between the stones.

The smuggler lived on a farm. White flowers grew in the fields. My brother led me to a barn. It was white and red. The roof sloped in that odd design most roofs here shared.

It was dark inside. The only light came from windows up high, near the roofline. The smuggler lounged on top of a wooden crate. I eyed it. Maybe it had the blate I needed. More crates lined the left wall, some open, some empty, some spilling over with the same white flowers growing in the fields.

He hopped down as I approached. “Greg. Good to see you. This your sister?”

“Yes. I told you what she needed.”

“Yes. Pure blate.” He studied me speculatively.

“I can pay,” I told him.

“Sure you can. But. Before I give what you need, you need to do something.”

He spoke my tongue very well. Better than I expected from a blate smuggler.  “What?”

He retrieved a dull metal plate from behind him. It held five pewter bowls, each filled with a different color substance. Red powder, blue liquid, yellow paste, green balls, beige grains.

“It’s a ritual,” my brother murmured behind me. “Harmless. Spread them on your face. Eyelids, nose, mouth, cheek, forehead. Right to left. Go on.”

I dipped my fingers in the cold, slimy mixture and did as my brother said.

But then the smuggler began to change. His skin looked like lizard scales. Pointy white teeth. Floppy ears.

I whirled to face my brother and gasped when he looked the same. “What did you give me?”

The smuggler moved to stand next to my brother. I saw now that a thick gnarled white rope wound around my brother’s throat and disappeared into the smuggler’s chest. “Blate, darling, exactly what you wanted.”

The room turned bright, light shining down from above where there was no light source. “You betrayed me,” I whispered.

“I had no choice, sister. I can’t . . . won’t let you take any blate off-world.”

There was so much light now I could hardly see anything, couldn’t even make out his face. “Bastard.”

“The most loyal man I’ve ever had,” the smuggler corrected. “Perhaps one day you’ll be like him. Close your eyes now, darling. Rest.”

D is for Different

So, for the writing, I am trying something different. Different for me, that is. I am writing  an erotica novelette. I am aiming for 10,000-15,000.  Since nothing else is working for me right now, I figure, why not? And I’ve never written erotica before so it’s bound to be a good exercise.

Also, I’ve read so many of them, I figure I can probably write one. Maybe. It’s the sex scenes that throw me. I haven’t written that many and it is a challenge. Since it is erotica and I am thinking sex is kind of the point. One of the points. The best erotica is the kind where sex is a plot-point, a character-point. The kind of scene that you can’t skip if you want to understand the plot and/or the characters.

It needs to be hot, too. Hot, hot, hot. So you don’t notice all the plot and character points. Hopefully I can manage that. But seeing as how I’ve never written that many . . . yeah.

I want to do this NaNo style – 1000 words a day or thereabouts. Ten days or two weeks. Well, that’s the goal.

I am still not really sure about the balance of sex-scenes vs non-sex scenes. But I’ll figure it out. And there will be a HEA. Happy Ever After, for those you who don’t read romance. No marriage, no wedding, but a HEA ending.

Prayer to the Computer Gods

I am reading a science fiction book where the prayers go something like this:

Computer Angel

Code not our sins; let them be erased and not ROMed in Thy disks.

As we believe and act in righteousness, so shall we be boosted into the Orbit of fulfillment.

Deliver us from the Crash; from the Hard Rads; spare us.

As we believe, so let us Thy Holy Federation be restored in our time, O Spirit of the of the Stars; and if the burden of a faithless generation’s sin be to great, may our souls be received into the Net. Endfile.

It is hilarious. Instructive, too, because this is an author who has turned prayer into exposition. Clearly, at some point in past there was a serious computer Crash that caused the people to turn computers into gods and the internet into heaven.

But so funny! Not to the characters, because religion is a serious business. But I am just cracking up at the mental picture of my computer as an angel. LOL

Also, the Endfile at the end of the file. Funny! LOL

Friday Flash: Muse Wanted

So . . . inspired by a comment on Twitter.

MUSE WANTED

Sonia Lal is recruiting.

Sonia is seeking a top-notch muse, familiar with all classical works and everything in the science fiction/fantasy genre. Must be focused on author needs, up to and including providing such pleasure as can inspire and relax.

She has a number of ideas in development. Hours may be long. Rewards will include a fraction of all payment from products sold.

Please apply at storytreasury.WordPress.com

Shapes of Stories Infographic

Just saw this breakdown of the different types of stories by Kurt Vonnegut. Someone called Maya Eilam actually created. I’ve never read any of his stories, but it’s interesting. I am trying to decide which shape my WiP fits. Man in Hole? Boy Meets Girl? Boy Meets Girl doesn’t have to romance, I don’t think. I am tempted to graphic it. LOL

In any case, I am going to go look for his rejected thesis. It’s an interesting idea.