First Lines Meme
Dec. 14th, 2007 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksIn the hopes of it jump-starting something, the first lines of my works-in-progress.
Obligations:
Yuletide:[redacted on account of it being a secret and also not having a first line, just a title and a blurb and an outline GYAAAARGH]
Fire and Hemlock essay: This second bit has taken longer than I expected, due to a lifelong habit of mine of putting the cart before the source.
And I should query about the ICFA proposal about now...
Fiction:
Altarwise by Owl-Light (the novel):
“You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”
-- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Part One: The Shapeless Country
Chapter One: The Half-Way House
He starts into wakefulness when the new record clicks onto the jukebox, and for a hazy moment he thinks that that has woken him. But no: the flickering shadows of the room have changed, the night outside gone darker, the fluorescent lights humming dissonant against the cicadas, and the stack of pizza boxes beside his cheek on the dirty plastic table is no longer exuding warm, fragrant steam. How long has he slept?
Altarwise by Owl-Light (the novella, which comes later in the novel):
Yetzirah can see almost nothing of the high country, for the thick and dripping mist that blows around and down and in and out his coattails and the back of his collar. They walk for some way, exhausted as they are, the bamboo man scanning the ground for rocks and gradations of color and moisture, tasting the air, turning now one way and now the other with the air of a person who while not lost nevertheless does not know quite exactly where he is.
"Rahab" (working title):
Once upon a time the king found, somehow, that the princess looked more like her mother than her mother ever had, and that what he had loved in the face of his queen was only her fleeting, fading, vague resemblance to posterity, the shadow of her child in the face of the timebound woman. He’d loved his daughter before he met her. This is always the way of true lovers, to look across a room, suddenly, and know, in all the stories. I clutched my cardigan-clad elbows, knees knocking through my stockings, and looked up sidelong at him burning. Give him some credit. We had already left the funeral.
"Rabbits": No first line yet. Aaargh.
[untitled YA novella]: The rat’s scrabbling hits the side of my tongue, and warm blood pours into my mouth. I don’t know how it’s ever going to heal when things keep breaking it open. “Shit!” I wince, trying to keep my mouth open to let the blood out without letting the rat free. Its tail lashes my chin, but its feet don’t get any purchase, and I am already swallowing. The tail trails afterward nauseatingly, but at least it goes down, and I can breathe and hope I haven’t got any blood on my school shirt.
“That is really, really gross,” says Dwayne, sounding somewhere between taunting and genuine disgust.
I shoot him a look. “Do I bother you about what you eat?”
[untitled P.J. Harvey-based thing]: no first line. Copious incomprehensible notes. Allusions to random poetry. Vague hopes that I am not drowning in metafictional pretensions (unlikely that I'm not, really).
Poetry:
[untitled work incorporating 'Emails Replied to by the Recently Dead' and several other bits]: well, I have 'Emails'. And a few lines here and there. And a very vague idea of what I mean to say.
'The Queer Sweetness of Planets': No first line yet, but I have the end words for the canzone! Whoo!
Why does everything have to percolate so long?
Obligations:
Yuletide:[redacted on account of it being a secret and also not having a first line, just a title and a blurb and an outline GYAAAARGH]
Fire and Hemlock essay: This second bit has taken longer than I expected, due to a lifelong habit of mine of putting the cart before the source.
And I should query about the ICFA proposal about now...
Fiction:
Altarwise by Owl-Light (the novel):
“You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”
-- Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Part One: The Shapeless Country
Chapter One: The Half-Way House
He starts into wakefulness when the new record clicks onto the jukebox, and for a hazy moment he thinks that that has woken him. But no: the flickering shadows of the room have changed, the night outside gone darker, the fluorescent lights humming dissonant against the cicadas, and the stack of pizza boxes beside his cheek on the dirty plastic table is no longer exuding warm, fragrant steam. How long has he slept?
Altarwise by Owl-Light (the novella, which comes later in the novel):
Yetzirah can see almost nothing of the high country, for the thick and dripping mist that blows around and down and in and out his coattails and the back of his collar. They walk for some way, exhausted as they are, the bamboo man scanning the ground for rocks and gradations of color and moisture, tasting the air, turning now one way and now the other with the air of a person who while not lost nevertheless does not know quite exactly where he is.
"Rahab" (working title):
Once upon a time the king found, somehow, that the princess looked more like her mother than her mother ever had, and that what he had loved in the face of his queen was only her fleeting, fading, vague resemblance to posterity, the shadow of her child in the face of the timebound woman. He’d loved his daughter before he met her. This is always the way of true lovers, to look across a room, suddenly, and know, in all the stories. I clutched my cardigan-clad elbows, knees knocking through my stockings, and looked up sidelong at him burning. Give him some credit. We had already left the funeral.
"Rabbits": No first line yet. Aaargh.
[untitled YA novella]: The rat’s scrabbling hits the side of my tongue, and warm blood pours into my mouth. I don’t know how it’s ever going to heal when things keep breaking it open. “Shit!” I wince, trying to keep my mouth open to let the blood out without letting the rat free. Its tail lashes my chin, but its feet don’t get any purchase, and I am already swallowing. The tail trails afterward nauseatingly, but at least it goes down, and I can breathe and hope I haven’t got any blood on my school shirt.
“That is really, really gross,” says Dwayne, sounding somewhere between taunting and genuine disgust.
I shoot him a look. “Do I bother you about what you eat?”
[untitled P.J. Harvey-based thing]: no first line. Copious incomprehensible notes. Allusions to random poetry. Vague hopes that I am not drowning in metafictional pretensions (unlikely that I'm not, really).
Poetry:
[untitled work incorporating 'Emails Replied to by the Recently Dead' and several other bits]: well, I have 'Emails'. And a few lines here and there. And a very vague idea of what I mean to say.
'The Queer Sweetness of Planets': No first line yet, but I have the end words for the canzone! Whoo!
Why does everything have to percolate so long?
