Camp NaNo, second attempt

I am writing a quick post to say I will be taking part in the Camp NaNo this month (starting tomorrow) and need a lot of encouragement and threats.

Sounds familiar? Oh yeah, I said the same thing in April, didn't I.

I will be attempting 25k again, but this time should get me to the end of the rewriting. There will still be a lot of editing and, in fact, rewriting to do, but nothing that should affect the plot or require new scenes.

But that's for later. For now, there's 25k to the finish line. So come on, cheer me on! (I need it...)

Autumn

I must be in a sharing mood, because here is another extract!
It's the first time we hear from Lacie's point of view, and I've often debated as to where I should put it, but it's currently the start of Chapter 2. For a little bit of trivia, it sets the time in our world at the autumnal equinox, which in 2010 also coincided with a full moon.
This is something that has been written for quite a while, so perhaps a bit more 'matured' than the previous extract, and one I particularly like. Hope you do too! :)

~*~

For years I felt as though nothing tied me to the little girl I was when I left Brittany with my parents. She was a stranger. I knew nothing of her. Peter’s death had turned me into a blank canvas. But it seems the past had only been frozen in time; since being back, wherever my gaze drops risks shattering the surface of my consciousness with long-lost memories: an oddly coloured brick on a house, an old tree by the road, the taste of a foreign sweet. The tiniest word, written on an object as innocent as a school diary, can trigger a flood of thoughts. Autumn.

Tomorrow it will be autumn, but you couldn't tell, with the stifling heat that makes strings of hair, beaded with pearls of sweat, stick to the damp skin on my neck.

Autumn. Peter loved autumn. On Halloween day, he would get up at dawn to carve the pumpkins and decorate the house with paper garlands and crumpled leaves. Then he would spend the rest of the day re-enacting to our family audience spooky stories of spirits and ghosts coming back to earth for one night. If I ever got scared, and I often would, my brother would reassure me with his expert knowledge on how to keep the sprites at bay.

‘It's autumn tomorrow, Mum,’ I say, breathing in the air from the open window in the car driving me back from school.

‘That's lovely, dear.’

Her eyes do not betray even a flicker of life. She's somewhere else, or years behind, when worries had not yet made her fair hair white, her eyebrows fade and her grey eyes become empty.

I clench my jaw and hug my school diary closer, a pain in my throat. It has always been beyond me why she became this nothingness the day her son died and, most of all, why her other child was not good enough a reason to stay alive. Dad was the same. A part of them died that day, I'm sure of that. They say that it's just that ‘Mum and Dad don't love each other anymore but they still love you like before’. But I’m thirteen and I understand a lot more than my parents give me credit for into why we left Brittany and Grandpa's house in a rush after the funeral, why we moved to London, and why Mum and I have to move back to Grandpa's house now that Dad and her have split up. The truth is that the day Peter died they forgot how to live.

The turn of a road, a graveyard behind a stonewall and it all comes back to me with the brutality of the storm at Peter’s funeral: the rain, the casket, the days of frantic phone calls and endless hours of waiting, someone telling Mum and Dad that they had found Peter’s body. I remember now. The visitor looked like an important person; he had a shirt on in spite of the stuffy summer heat.

‘I have to warn you, it might be quite upsetting,’ the man said to my parents. ‘It looks like he's been attacked by some animal. The marks look like wolves' but there haven’t been wolves in Brittany for hundreds of years.’

He seemed to find this idea very puzzling, which I thought was strange; all the fairy tales Peter had told me said the woods were full of wolves.

‘Forensics will tell’, Dad said, grabbing his coat as Grandpa’s car revved in the driveway.

‘Did the Big Bad Wolf eat Peter, Daddy?’ my seven-year-old self asked. ‘Like the Little Red Riding Hood?’

Mum hugged me between two howls of pain and stroked my nose with her finger.

‘Yes, Lacie’, said Dad, looking surprised to find me there, ‘but be a good girl and don't ask questions, you're making Mummy cry. You stay with Grandpa, we’ll be back soon.’

So I stopped asking questions, even when I wondered why there was a thunderstorm that evening, as if the weather-man had waited for us to be sad to start the rain after the days of heavy heat, why Peter was buried in an ugly cemetery and not in his beloved forest, and why his favourite plush dog, Barney, had to go with him, even though Barney was promised to me and would be lonely in a dark coffin with a dead body.

Worst amongst all the questions I was forced to swallow back down with breakfast every morning was why, within weeks of losing my best friend, my brother, my Peter, why on earth I had to lose the second best person in the world, Grandpa. How sad I was to be forced into a cloudy London life with grey parents. It is this same life my parents' separation has made me leave as well to go back to Brittany to the house we had so expediently fled.

Now, being back, I don't know how Grandpa could stand it all these years, every piece of furniture and every stone of his old Breton house tainted by the past, dragging the unaware walker-by into dark corners. Halloween has come early this year; this place is full of ghosts.

First words

There's something always incredibly scary with sharing a new piece of work, no matter how many times I've done it before. These are the first 500 words or so of my new first chapter, straight after the prologue. I hesitated posting this, because I was worried I would be told the descriptions are too lengthy (my rationale being that it is a rather strange world I need to set the scene to). But then again, I should post the words as they are if I am to be honest. If you want to throw me a morcel of sympathy, see my other post on why I find first chapters so difficult to write. 

~*~

This, thought Stus, was History being made.

Near to a thousand sylphs had gathered inside the Ebony Hall – before then, the highest number of people Stus had ever seen there was twenty. The Hall, dug inside an old tree on the outskirts of town, was at breaking point. From his vantage point near the entrance to the hall, a good five wingspans above the ground, Stus could survey the whole assembly of Tree Circle members. Along the bookshelves, row after row of dusty books swarmed with excited faces and fluttering wings of all colours. The garish mix of wing patterns and the constant buzz from the voices had breathed life and chaos into the once stern library. Luminoths clung onto the ceiling, their claws dug deeply into the wood; they cast a dim light onto the Hall, and shadows danced over the crowd. It was dizzying just to look around the colossal room. With the raised platform in the centre of the hall, crowned with the pulpit, the Hall had an atmosphere of a performance waiting to begin. A grim and tense performance. The same words were on everyone’s lips. Marec is dead. The Oak Heart is dead.

As well as latecomers, rumours flew around, too. Some were half-truths, some buried desires now free to emerge and flourish. Marec had been found in a pool of blood. Marec had been a secret drunk and had too much hydromel. Marec had so completely lost his mind that he had flung himself from his tree and forgotten to fly. No theory made the slightest bit of sense to any who had known Marec but Stus was too busy to stop and point this out. As a Rosewood and Faerie Guardia in his public life, he had been given the task of making sure the gathering went smoothly while the Wind Chimes, the leaders of the Wind of Change, made their announcement. The excitement had built up as the number of sylphs had grown, and in Faerie this only meant trouble. His experience patrolling the city had taught Stus that heat, emotions and long waits were rarely good companions. Only his vigilance and the strength of the fifteen minors under his commandment would offer any protection should a spark ignite the crowd. Under the stream of gossip surrounding the nature of the gathering, many Tree Circle members were mourning the loss of their leader, and both men and women could be seen dabbing at the corners of their eyes with handkerchiefs to avoid their tears leaking over the intricate patterns painted on their cheeks – though some did so with such a great deal of noise and fuss that even for sylphs it lacked sincerity.

Stus was not one of them. As grieved as he was by Marec’s death, he knew there were greater things to come. Nate had only hinted at them, but the loss of an Oak Heart meant one thing for sure: there would need to be a new one. Stus’s wings twitched whenever he thought of it. It would not be long until the announcement now.

The terrible first chapter

I have previously mentioned I am on version number three of my first chapter. By that I mean that not only did I start again from scratch, I was also telling a different story in a different place. I invented a whole new scene.

I was trying to get to the action faster.

Obviously I haven’t done a very good job at that, since my second version started with suspense, but then nothing happened, and I still can’t get the words right for version number three.

I read once that your first chapter has to be brilliant because you need to stop the reader from putting the book down (and never picking it up again). But then the next chapters need to be brilliant too so that the reader carries on reading. I have my next chapters, they're ok (I think). So what’s so bloody hard about the first chapter? Why am I struggling so much?

Sometimes I feel like one of those parents in the movies who tell their kids, ‘Why are you so difficult? We have no problems with your brothers and sisters!’

What it is, I think, is that a great deal is expected of them. A bit like the eldest in a family: they come first so everything relies on them.

This is a list that I compiled from various sources on the internet. Unfortunately I did this a very long time ago so I don’t have the sources anymore. It shows all the things a first chapter is meant to do. Perhaps once you have read it you’ll feel a bit sympathetic towards me.

An effective first chapter needs to:

- introduce a story-worthy problem

- establish the rules of the story

- introduce key themes

- introduce graphic imagery

- have action

- intrigue the reader with a character

- give the reader a puzzle to solve, something to worry about

- make your reader ask themselves questions – but not for too long

- make us care about your character

Just that, eh? Oh well, better get cracking then.

I once read a chapter that tried very hard to tick all the boxes of the traditional ‘hook your reader’ guidebook. The opening sentence showed someone about to get shot. It doesn’t get more tantalizing than that. A fight ensued and the person didn’t die – in fact they were the protagonist and narrator. The chapter then tried to make us care about the character by telling us what he had just gone through. It had action. It had references to period clothing (graphic imagery). It was trying to intrigue us with this injured highwayman who was actually a girl. It had characters with intriguing pasts.

It was dull as dishwater.

Sisyphus and his... mash?

I pushed through, and the book tried its best to keep me hanging, but 100 pages in I still found it boring and I gave up. I couldn’t explain why and still to this day all I can say is this: I didn’t care about the characters. If they died, well… so what? But why didn’t I care?

I started analyzing the first chapters of books I loved or thought had effective beginnings and took some notes, but I still find the first chapter a Sisyphus-like ordeal: I try, I try and then when I think I’m there it rolls back down again.

Then I read books like Robin Hobb’s, which are brilliant but hardly have fast-paced action-packed beginnings, and I wonder: maybe a strong beginning isn’t all it’s cracked-up to be. After all, I first gave up on Harry Potter, only to be obsessed with it five years later. I stopped after two chapters and had to start again for His Dark Materials, also on my favourites list. And let’s not talk about Assassin’s Apprentice: it took me weeks to get through the first 50 pages.

But each time the book came with a recommendation, and so I didn’t give up. Perhaps books are like people: sometimes the good ones deserve a chance to be better known. In this case, I should give my first chapter a break and just let it make some friends.

And that’s why you’re here, right?

Fortifications

Hello world!

Long time, no see! Apparently this is a direct translation from Chinese. I have a thing for litteral translations these days.

Anwyay, I was in France on holiday so I didn’t have an internet connection to post with. I also haven’t written much in spite of that, just over 1000 words. And if you’re thinking of asking about that sewing project, go see somewhere else if I’m there (direct translation from French. I think you can figure it out.)

I did have a lovely time, though, and I did a lot of thinking about my story, which is what holidays are particularly good for. I also visited places, which is also good for thinking.

Bayonne

One place I visited is Bayonne, which has ramparts running around it. Then I saw this programme on telly about Carcassonne’s fort, and it hit me that none of the cities in my world are fortified. That’s not a problem in itself, but after discussing how the way wars are the impact the kind of town that people build, I realized that is my problem. There isn’t a reason for my towns to not be fortified. I just haven’t thought about it.

Carcassonne

My conclusion was that I need to work a bit more of the history of my world, so that I know if I need to revamp my towns. Except my world is 12000 years old, of which I have written about 1500. Which is stupid because, if nothing else, my characters are going to refer to the recent history of their country. I have also, for some reason, focused on the other countries (it’s because it’s where my ‘evil immortal sorcerer’ comes from).

How to remedy this grave oversight on my part? If I start writing 12000 years of history, it won't be tomorrow the day before that I’ll be finished (read: any time soon – gosh, I’m really on fire with those French idioms, I should start my own version of Sky! Mortimer!.

I have an idea of how to get around it (that doesn’t involve making my world much younger, which is another option). In a nutshell: be vague. But I thought it would be a good occasion to share some of this history with you, since it won’t spoil the plot. Yep, just like that. No strings attached. Cadeau.

I also have some big plans to share more of my world, probably around the one year birthday of the blog. But shhhhhh! It’s top secret. Unless you’re one of the few I have already told. In which case… shhhhhhh!