Hearts & Guns 4
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 6:40 pmWell, of the four stories I’d given myself to the end of the year to tidy up, I’ve done two already, more or less. I don’t know if one of them’s going to make the cut, but right now I need it for the word count, so it’s staying. The Love of Beauty shouldn’t take too long, since I can’t really muck around with its storyline, only cosmetic things. The Art of Dying is a different kettle of fish, so obviously I’m leaving that till last.
I definitely want at least one new story, and I’m working on two, so hopefully at least one of them will come through. But I do suck at coming up with ideas — just about every story I’ve written has been in response to a prompt. (Yes, I need a fluffer.)
So, I’m shamelessly soliciting prompts! If I use your prompt and the story gets written and ends up in the book, you’ll get a free copy, signed and personalised with an illustration. And my undying gratitude. And I’ll throw in some chocolate if you want, too.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Well, I will never stop wanting to see lady crime boss and her loyal lady butler/bodyguard. (Lee even drew it for me!) I’ve also had something sitting in my idea file for a while about a voluptuous 20’s-esque singer who has something (magical? steampunky?) that a lot of criminal organizations want, so she hires a lady bodyguard to protect her. I have no clue what to do with it but I’d love to see it done by someone.
(Somehow, many of my ideas lately seem to involve ladies wearing men’s clothes and wielding guns or swords, lol.)
I’ll post more if I can think of any! Should I maybe link to this post in my journal?
August 11th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
You should write about the community demons and guinea pigs. *nods nods*
August 11th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I want to see how you handle squeamishness in a story. And triumphant fanfare. And worms. And idols. Not necessarily all at once.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:28 am
Oh, Penny, so desperate. (I guess my queue for story and novel ideas is so long, it’ll be years before I do the social demons.)
Prompts:
Locating a tiny amulet in a vast market, like Chatuchak, or even in the amulet market in Bangkok. A palmful of bamboo shoots. A jar of hibiscus and myrrh and flecks of copper, hidden in a medicine store, and the person/creature it will cure. What payment does the medicine store owner accept? An amber bubble that contains a girl’s last breath, and the consequences of shattering that amber. A boy who builds an ambergris lover. A shelf of shields. A one-legged traveller who dallied, once, with a djinni at an oasis, on the blue-tiled floor of a ruined religious-building.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:53 am
A woman goes to a ball and – though she considers herself heterosexual – falls in love with the princess at first sight. Now she must dress up as a man and attempt to woo the princess while fending off the other suitors and hope that once she wins the woman’s heart she’ll love her still upon discovering she’s a woman. (I’ve been meaning to write this story for years, but will never get around to it)
August 12th, 2009 at 6:42 am
A sentient door that suffers from mood swings. A blue demon that possesses a computer. A man made out of holly branches with a giant holly berry for a heart. A mask that transforms the wearer, but in unpredictable ways. A group of people with a special kind of luck that you can steal by having sex with them; these people are forced into prostitution and sold on the black market.
Dave says: A barmaid’s secret life as a Nubian god. Also – a child’s view of the night before Christmas in a world with an anti-Santa Claus. (Wtf, I don’t know either.)
August 12th, 2009 at 9:07 am
I once began a story called “Nicholas”, about a Santa far removed from the happy, friendly image most hold on to. He was a taskmaster who hated Christmas, lactose intolerant, and unforgiving of those who broke the rules. Children who managed to sneak down and catch site of him were kidnapped and taken to the North Pole to slave away in his toy mines/sweat shops. The story was to be told from the perspective of a brother and sister whom had been taken in just such a way. He worked in the mines while she served as The Clause’s mistress. I had this wonderful image in my head of the boy being hunted through a Christmas tree field by the Clause and his wicked elf servants.
August 13th, 2009 at 8:13 am
Laurie – gorgeous picture! Lee has a lovely style, ne? Tentatively searching for a lady bodyguard on my head, I come across an enormous old-school-Soviet woman with a hairy upper lip…
A link would be much appreciated!
Penny – communal demons and guinea pigs sound intriguing, but…what are they? O.o
Gillian – when you say ‘not necessarily all at once’, my brain immediately insists on ‘all at once’: the wonderful wish-granting worm god who lacks worshippers because people are squeamish. The triumphant fanfare would have to come at the end.
Alankria – can I book a tour of your brain? Thanks to this image, the idea of an ambergris lover is giving me some rather hentai thoughts. (But what modern collection of short fiction is really complete without tentacle rape, one might ask?)
W. – that sounds like a job for Takarazuka! Of course, the princess would be a boy in disguise, who falls for the man who he thinks the woman is…
Laurie and Dave – I’d like a tour of your brains, too. (A blue demon – that would explain the BSoD!)
W. – the boy being hunted through a Christmas tree field is a compelling image. Northern forests and bleak lakes, the music of Sibelius…
Everyone – thanks for these awesome ideas! At least one of these has lodged in my brain and started growing tendrils of plot. Many salaams to you all.
August 13th, 2009 at 9:36 am
“A link would be much appreciated!”
Done! And I would just like to say that I would also like a tour of Alankria’s brain.
(And wow, I never realized a hunk of ambergris could look so much like a pile of entrails.)
A couple more: A green girl with tiny sunflowers for eyes. Extrapolating from your noting that “children are monsters,” a society in which children are literally monsters. Someone who lives in a house made of cards. A handsome man with a mouth in his navel (maybe a prostitute or a courtier?). A shop that sells discarded shopping carts.
August 13th, 2009 at 10:19 am
The teeth in the shoulder of an old oak tree; sometimes they breathe out the smell of sulfur and springtime.
Ghost stripes in the whites of her eyes.
The engineer who built Heaven, and the eyeless basilisk he keeps as a lover.
The man with a dragon that lives in his stomach, symbiotic, tapeworm-like.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:11 am
In the Japanese ish tradition of things obtaining life after 100 years, or after being cared for, etc, just that, for a puzzle, that was never completely put together.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
A friend of mine has been lamenting the scarcity of f/f versions of two of her favourite tropes – namely the rivals/enemies with a charged relationship, in the harry/draco vein (although I use the slash the tension in the relationship need not be sexual tension. …although that would be cool) and the charming charismatic villain (c.f. ozymandias, etc.) She concluded the lack was mostly down to a scarcity of female characters in the first place, especially “bad guys.”
I’d kind of like to see one of those as well: call it the queen and the rebel leader, or the vaguely amoral scientist and the caped vigilante, or the leaders of rival scavenger-mechanic gangs among the ruins of the technopolis, building and racing intricate contraptions of recycled futuretrash in the lulls between electrical storms…
August 13th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Laurie – I’m gonna wait for you to write about the guy with the mouth in his navel. (Have you ever read Storm Constantine’s novel “Hermetech”, where they put extra orifices in people’s bodies?)
Tara – hail and well met, and wow, you also have an amazing brain. I went over to your journal and saw that you write comic scripts. Is any of your work online?
Dave – I have a Rubik’s cube like that. 2 corners left to twirl. I hope it can become reconciled to its own incompleteness.
I’m humbled by these great ideas and the fact that you wonderful people are willing to throw them my way. Three or four seem to have lodged in my head now. (!)
August 13th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
(here from Laurie’s link, by the way
)
alternately, mix and match: growing things that should not grow, clockwork trees and glass ferns. the child exploring ruined temples she was warned away from cuts her finger there, is now a target. two old men playing chess on the bottom of the ocean floor. tinned unhappiness, dollar apiece at the market stall. the monster turned his heart into an apple, the applecore was the spine of a fish.
August 13th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
A man prevents a murder for love though it damns the world to destruction. As punishment god (or whatever) forces him to live the month leading up to the event through the eyes of the people who will have died … each day waking up in the body of a different person. At the end of that month he is again placed in the position to either allow the death and save all those people, or prevent it and damn them all. What does he chose?
During a great cataclysm all but a single member of a race is destroyed … through some twist of fate, however, the spirits of the dead are trapped within him, demanding he avenge them or else they may never pass on; he is plagued to near maddness by their screams of fury and outrage, which never cease.
August 13th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
A blind man discovers that by eating the eyes of the dead he is able to gain moments of sight … the higher the organism, the longer the gift lasts. (at most an hour) Once it wears off the eyes press out through his skin as blind orbs. After a month his body is covered with the sightless eyes of fish, cats, dogs, cows, birds, but mostly people. His need for those moments of sight has become an addiction.
August 13th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Image: Men riding giant apes into battle.
August 13th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
…would you hit me if I asked for another return to TEC world?
Calla, of Rev. fame, has been sold to a man who makes spider silk. The silk must be boiled and combined with the dreams of beautiful girls before it can be woven, and once woven it forms a cloth that is the lightest, softest, most gorgeous cloth. People sell their houses and everything they own just for a single shirt of this cloth. But even though Calla loves the spiders (they are very beautiful) she can’t make the thread because she has utterly no idea how to dream.
(I actually wrote out the entire story, which I’ve deleted since a prompt is not a story. *cough* I really, really need to stop playing in other people’s sandboxes.)
OR:
The Ant Queen steals a little boy’s cake while he is sleeping, so he calls the Wasp Queen and together they go to war against the ants.
August 13th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Three Men and a Baby … stuck on an island with no food.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:20 am
I don’t think I’d even be able to write a story about a guy with a mouth for a navel, lol! No, I haven’t read that one – I’ve enjoyed her stories before, so I might have to check that one out. Sounds uber-creepy.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Haha, this!
August 14th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Maggie – that’s an excellent point about the lack of female characters in those roles. Worthy of a post in itself, I’d say, except that I’m not sure I could analyse why we don’t see women there too often. Lack of female characters in general no doubt contributes, but I think it might go beyond that. I’m trying to think of a charismatic female villain who isn’t a femme fatale, and I can’t. And when we write female rivals, their rivalry is nearly always sexual. I suspect we’re conditioned to write from models we’ve inherited from masculinism — possibly even to be turned on by them and turned off by other models. But I don’t know. I think it’s something really interesting and probably quite complicated. Which doesn’t mean it can’t be written, of course. Writing the fiction would probably be a lot easier than untangling the psychology.
Strangely, I saw the spine of a large fish lying in a park yesterday morning!
Caitlyn – that story sounds like it has left TEC world, or could certainly be written without any reference to anything in TEC. If you were able to write the whole thing out, maybe it’s already yours…?
W. – obviously, the men eat the baby! The giant apes…no, the apes won’t fight. They’re like bonobos…hmmm…
Laurie – somehow I can see that guy in the Hellsingverse.
Penny – Ah, that! Sorry for my senile forgetfulness.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:30 am
A girl with mouths in her arm that she has to nurse with a needle.
August 17th, 2009 at 4:54 am
I’m seeing a pattern here… That’s a very creepy image, I can imagine them embedded in her arm like blackbirds in a pie, all opening up to eat like baby birds when the parents come home with food.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I suppose you are correct in that; I’ve sort of got the idea in my head. I don’t do original stuff very often, but my world building lacks and I don’t care for the reality I know.
I know it sounds weird, but of all the myriad of small characters in TEC, Calla sticks in my head; that and the female slave in the market that Gwynn ordered beaten (after she chewed off a customer’s ear for getting too friendly). I know that the fates of both of them were likely to be inconsequential and unpleasant, but I’ve always wondered what would have become of them. More so than many other more important characters. I can’t say why this is so.
August 18th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Her original name was Calila, so by becoming Calla, I think he has already become someone else for you
Sometimes a character in a bit role can steal the show for a reader or viewer and come more vividly to life for that person than for the original author, ne?
I’ve never built a world. I build stage sets. For example, in Ashamoil, there’s a Ghetto of the Doctors. What is that? I don’t know. It’s just an evocative name. Maybe some people will think of plague doctors in masks, some might think of old Kabbalists, others might think of houngans or something. An evocative name can make your reader’s brain build something, and they’ll think you built it, but you didn’t. (I learned that trick from M. John Harrison.)
If your setting is somewhat earthlike, a few concrete details (a building with a pediment, a stained glass fanlight, a room with potted palms and cane furniture) can set up a whole lot of associations, physical and historical, saving you the need to build very much at all. The occasional strong descriptive paragraph does help, sort of like a supporting wall. But you don’t need a whole lot of them, and in a short story you might only need one, or none, and just put little flecks of set-building throughout.
I feel that all my writing lacks, all the time. I have to try pretty hard to make it work, insofar as it does work. Plain old time and effort can make up for a lack of native skill. Sometimes I have to wait for a week or a month or a year before the right line or word or solution to a problem comes. Please don’t let a weakness in one area stop you from attempting to write a story that interests you. You can write it and add worldly details later.
Sorry for the long rant, orz.