The next installment

Okay, I guess this is about as good as it's gonna get. Black-Eyed Susan. Teaser:

Her once-blond hair was matted and filthy with dirt and blood and probably hadn't felt the comforting tug of a brush in decades. She had once been young--so young. Something broke inside of me. I put the gun away and asked her for her name.

"Susan," she said slowly, after a long pause. "I think it was Susan."

I was surprised into silence, and had no reply. She had referred to herself in the past tense. I had never heard one of her kind do that before.

"What's your name?"

I did something I rarely do. I told her my first name. "Paul," I said.

"Oh..." she began, and paused again. Then: "Like the one from the Bible."

"Yes."

"I remember going to Sunday school a long time ago."

"So do I." I said it without thinking.

This one isn't very long, but my aim when I started this was to have a kind of outlet to write quick, interconnected scenes that slowly built into a larger story. I'm going to do my best to fill in some backstory pretty soon.

Writing

I guess the season has finally inspired me and I churned out another "chapter" for The Hunter Chronicles. But I think I'll sit on it a while and try to improve upon it. Here's the obligatory teaser.

It was one of those lonely nights that happen only around Christmas-time, when you remember what it was like to be part of a loving, happy family. When you remember what it was like going outside at night just so you could look back at the Christmas tree lights twinkling through the window and enjoy the feel of a chill wind on your neck—knowing a few feet away was the warmth of a house and the love of a family. You remember the sound of your mother’s laughter from inside the house, and through the window you can see your dad grinning his quiet, closed-mouth grin at something silly your little sister had done.

You were going to be opening gifts in the morning and according to the stern instructions you had been issued to stay out of the tool shed, you were pretty sure you would get that bike you wanted. To top it all off, you had a crush on the redhead next door and you were pretty sure she was not uninterested. The world was perfect.

But the world wasn’t perfect anymore and I hadn’t decorated a Christmas tree in years. There was nothing in my 256-channel cable package that grabbed my attention, so I tried the radio. The spectrum was filled with Christmas cheer. It was unbearable. Even the jazz station was jumping on the bandwagon. I tried the classic rock station, but after 25 minutes they still hadn’t played any Pink Floyd and when I heard the opening twang of “Stairway to Heaven” I decided enough was enough, turned off the radio and left a dark apartment behind me in favor of the dark streets before me.

It sounds like a downer, but it has a happy ending.

Writing

I have also attempted to make a real start on the next installment of The Hunter Chronicles. Yes, I have been kind of busy today for not feeling at all well, but I got home about 1:00 so I've had plenty of time. Usually, these kinds of stories are set in the big, famous cities. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about such cities, and would not be able to instill an air of authenticity in the story if I tried to write about them. So...as they say, write about what you know. Here's a sample paragraph.

A river worms through the heart of the city. The city fathers have gone to great expense to make it look pretty and authentic, authentic meaning that restaurants and shops selling food and goods typical (so they say) of the area can trap plenty of tourists and make plenty of taxable dollars. Wide sidewalks line both banks, curving in tune with the water and wrapping around downtown like a broken horseshoe. In the daytime, visitors from far-away lands wander the paths to marvel and remark on the natural beauty of a river in the middle of a big city. In the nighttime, all the lost and lonely souls who have nothing better to do wander it as well; some of them more lost than others, and hungry for the blood of those who are only lonely.

I decided if I was going to write something, I should just start writing and worry about making it good later. I have even managed to work a quick mention of a water meter vault into this one.

New character

I have begun trying to work on a new installment for The Hunter Chronicles. So far I have only written this brief character sketch (just so you know I haven't given up).

“More coffee, hon?”

Darla called everyone “hon,” regardless of any difference—real or perceived—in age or gender. I nodded and pushed my cup toward her and she filled it a half-inch short of the rim with one smooth dip of her wrist, and without even seeming to look at the cup. She didn’t ask me how I wanted it because I ate there so often that she already knew I took it black and wasn’t interested at all in decaf.

She was fortyish, with straight hair tied up in a loose bun that was somewhere between brown and blond, and wide-spaced eyes that were somewhere between brown and hazel. She had the good looks of someone who had probably won a local beauty pageant twenty years before and had tried hard to stay pretty but hadn’t succeeded as well as she would have liked but had succeeded quite well enough for any man who saw her. Thin crow’s feet appeared at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, a strange secretive smile that made her look like she was amused by something no one else could see, a smile couched parenthetically between the curved wrinkles at each end of her mouth.

An old-timer had told me once that sometimes when one of these little diners were built, the owner studied such things as population distribution and economic standing, traffic density flows and so forth. And then sometimes they just found someone like Darla and built the diner around her.

This is a character that keeps turning up in my thoughts. I just haven't figured out what to do with her. But I hope to make her into a recurring character in the story.

I am also wrestling with a problem that must turn up eventually: Hunter's views, or the lack thereof, of God and religion. It seems to me that in such fantasy/horror stories, there isn't really any religious background to the main character (maybe I'm just wrong about this because I'm not well-informed enough on the topic). But seriously, how would learning the truth about vampires and then dedicating oneself to become a vampire killer impact one's preconceived religious beliefs? Maybe I'm trying to be too realistic, but I have been trying to allow the reader as little suspension of disbelief as possible, given the theme of the story.

Dashboard ads

So today I just noticed that they've started putting ads on the dashboard. Click to enlarge if you want to see why I thought, "heh." I guess they don't have any keyword matches for "madness" and "death."

By the way, I have not yet begun to write a new installment, but I have been mulling it over in my mind. I am discovering a new difference in how I am trying to write this story. It seems that generally, my past attempts at fiction have been situation-oriented, that is, I thought of a situation and then tried to make up characters to fit it. In this story, it feels to me as if I'm first trying to create characters, and then seeing what kind of story can arise from them. Maybe this is a better way to write; I don't know. I've never had any training of any sort in creative writing. It has been quite an interesting experience for me so far.

Change of name

I changed the name of Nightgaunt's Realm to something more appropriate for the story. It shouldn't have any effect unless you have bookmarked the old url or subscribed to the RSS feed.

Okay, it's up

After tinkering with it for a few more days, the next installment is up at Nightgaunt's Realm. Click on Secondhand Blood to read it.

Also, thanks to Dinah Washington's "Funny Thing" for further inspiration.

Update

Another update for those two or three of you who are following Nightgaunt's Realm. I have pretty much finished the next installment, but I'm going to hold off posting for a few days at least because I'm sure I'll want to change or add something.

In the fiction I have written before, it was always for fun and something I just enjoyed, and I am enjoying this also (or I wouldn't be doing it), but this time I am finding it to also be emotionally draining. I don't know if that means it's better or worse, but the effect it has on me is something new to me.

Here is a poem by Tennyson that I read several times while working on it.

Song

I.

A spirit haunts the year's last hours,
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

II.

The air is damp, and hushed, and close,
As a sick man's room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the year's last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.

Still working

On the next installment at Nightgaunt's Realm. And just to prove it, here's a little snippet.

Lily was her name, and everyone came here to see her. She sang like she had been there, and was somehow still there, somehow still surviving in spite of all the loss, all the heartbreak, all the years that should have stomped her into oblivion long before and left her dead from sorrow and drug overdose.

She stood tall and dark, hair that must have once been black as midnight dancing in serpent-curls around her ears, dark green eyes glowing from the bleak and cavernous hollows of their sockets. When she sang, some people quietly wept. Some people merely became silent and contemplative. No one spoke. No one threw a beer bottle at the stage. And when she finished and it was time to leave, they all went outside and took a deep breath of the stale city air and knew, somewhere inside, that no matter how bad their lives were, someone else's had been worse. Lily was that kind of a singer.

So for the few who have been checking to see if it's been updated--it hasn't. But I'm still working on it.

Just a note

I haven't given up on Nightgaunt's Realm, for the few who are keeping track. I'm just letting the story stew in my head for a while. I'm planning on another sort of "flashback" episode, and possibly introducing one or two new but occasionally recurring characters. That is all.

Okay...

The next installment is up, check the link at the top right sidebar. Many thanks to Albatross for posting Longfellow's "The Cross of Snow at his blog Painted Ocean.

That is the kind of poetry that speaks to me.

A comment on "Tearless" and a somewhat random 20

The drainage ditch tunnel in that post is based on a real tunnel I saw a few months ago. Of course there were no vampires in it, but...

When you have a job like mine, one of the odd skills you pick up is how to balance yourself between dehydration and needing to go to the restroom. Well, one day my usual precision in this particular talent failed, and I found myself desperately needing to visit the euphemism. So I decided as soon as I got to where this old creek/big ditch ran under the street, I'd just duck under there and avail myself.

In the story, I said it was on the south side of town. The real one was actually on the far north side, in a very nice countryish neighborhood that's very quiet and is one of those "no outlet" subdivisions, so there's no through traffic there.

But as I walked into the tunnel things got creepy. I actually stopped and let my eyes adjust to the darkness so I could make sure no one was in there. The walls were covered with graffiti and there were discarded junk food wrappers, coke cans and beer bottles littering the ground. It looked like a bizarre subterranean hoodlum hangout right in the middle of Pleasantville.

I try to keep my eyes and mind open to random bits of inspiration like this everywhere I go, because you never can tell when something will come in useful.

In other news, no big random 20 tonight, because I'm in the mood for some smoother more ambient stuff. But here's a random 20 from my "ambient/new age/electronic" directory.

1. Enigma - The Screen Behind the Mirror
2. Michael Forrest - Looks Like Riggiddy Rain
3. Sun Electric - Quail
4. Clannad - Na Laethe Bhí (I'm sure the members of Clannad would be horrified to know that someone puts them in the "ambient" field, but their music fits well along with all the other stuff when I'm in the mood for this kind of thing. So I apologize, but I'm not changing it).
5. Richard Bone - Nocturna
6. Kitaro - Koi
7. Samite - Having a Good Time
8. Human Mesh Dance - Rotating Mirror
9. Mike Oldfield - She Moves Through the Fair
10. Jef Stott - Aegean Dub
11. Danny Thompson - Till Minne Av Jan
12. Yanni - Secret Vows (feel free to ridicule me mercilessly--it's there to remind me that I am still on a quest to find his One Great Composition)
13. Dubtribe - Memory
14. Alex de Grassi - Western
15. Fernando Cellicion - Eagle Dance Song (native American flute music)
16. Blackfish - Insight
17. Iona - When I Survey*
18. Opera to Relax - From Life 2 Life
19. The Benedictine Monks Of Santo Domingo De Silos - Vani Creator Spiritus (I also keep my Gregorian chant albums in this same directory)
20. Kozo - Illumination

*Iona is a Celtic group whose music might fall into that "Celtic new age" category, but I hate calling anything that because it just kind of doesn't sound right to me. One thing that sets Iona apart is that they are openly and unabashedly Christian (which pretty much takes them out of the new age category). "When I Survey" is a re-working of the old hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." They use all the original lyrics but with new music which I heartily approve of. This is one of my favorite songs, regardless of artist or genre.

New blog project

One of the things I've been toying with which has been keeping me somewhat away from this blog is a new project in which I will attempt to combine two things I've been wanting to try: to tell a story in blog format, and to tell a different kind of vampire story.

The name of the blog is Nightgaunt's Realm. It has nothing to do with nightgaunts. It's a blog I created here a long, long time ago, one of the first actually, just in case I ever wanted to use it and because no one else had created it yet so I got a pretty cool blog url. A feed link is at the upper right sidebar for now so if anyone is interested you can click on the above link or the one on the sidebar.

You should get a warning that it has adult content. I thought it was better to do it this way, but that doesn't mean it will have explicit s3x. Or any s3x at all, really. It just means the language might get a little intense now and then.

I was going to try and write several installments before I posted the first one, but I think I will have more incentive to keep going if I post them as I write them. New posts will not be on any kind of regular schedule, just as I happen to write them. I do have basic ideas for at least three more installments for now.

Comments are enabled, so as the story progresses, if you have any suggestions or ideas that you think would be cool for further installments, leave a comment.

As usual, the disclaimer: I am not a professional writer or author. It's something I do for fun. If you enjoy reading it, great. If not, that's fine too. There are plenty of other more productive things you could probably be doing, anyway.

More fragmentary fiction

Over at The Last Ancient House I've posted another fragment based on a very explicitly detailed dream I once had. No sense in cluttering up this blog with it. If you want to read it, it's at To Be Like Those Who Are Truly Dead.

Almost everyone died, for a little while. The few who lived thought it was the end of the world. Sometimes now it's easier to believe it was the beginning of hell.

And here I am again, almost out of ammo and the sun coming up. I can feel them gathering, moving on the other side of the wall. They are drawn by the warmth of my flesh, by the beating of my still living heart. I can feel them like the brush of cold scales across my skin in the darkness, like the vague movement of a shadow in the night, like the chill of a winter wind down the back of my neck.