I've just finished putting together the beginning of a project on the writing domain, Halflit. It's an open ended collaborative story-writing endeavor called Carousel, and anyone who's interested in participating can wander over there and register whenever.

[x posted to a variety of places]

I'm moving my writing blog, at least for the most part, to here:

http://crows.halflit.net/sketchbook/

Also, the Halflit (http://www.halflit.net) domain is becoming active again. There are challenges in the members area and I will be launching an open project in the next few days (just as soon as I can find my TABLET PEN where the hell did it go arg...). If you're interested in looking into it and joining up, just shoot me an email - crows /at/ halflit.net.

Loves <3
M

“Ho there! What's that!” a voice nearer to him cried out in curious alarm, drawing the snap of his attention out of his swirling thoughts. He stopped and looked down the hill, watching the collective of his brethren bewilderedly drop their their skids and turn, raising their hands to mitigate the indistinct glare of the sky.
His senses honed to a sharp enough focus a few moments later to perceive the sound, and the black mass in the sky, at the same time. An ungainly flying shape angled its way through the petticoats of the cloudcover, which was low over the ground but so featureless that it offered little depth-perception to the eye. The staccato of its blades slicing the air to keep it aloft struck Caleb's ears unfettered by the haze that made its shape inconstant in the sky.
Caleb narrowed his eyes for a few moments at the helicopter as it moved inland and then burst into a run back down the slope away from the base. He paused on his way down, skidding to a stop that almost sent him tumbling to grab a bewildered compatriot's shoulder.
(  “You. Find a pair of binoculars,” he gasped, gulping the air, his tired lungs unprepared for the sudden sprint. “Watch that thing as far as you can see it, keep an eye on its direction.”  )
( [True Life] )

[And so it begins again. For NaNo this year, I'm writing more chunks of last year's story, and chunks of its sequel, called True Life. This is from the kickoff last night, between midnight and 3 AM; picking up where I left off before. Fragments. It is not spellchecked.]


Jadany sat on her knees, feeling her feet go numb against the cold concrete floor of the compound. The stone, the air, all felt warmer than Witch's gaze curiously down at her from where he sat across her, their knees only a hand's bredth apart in the half-darkened room. She breathed in once, laboured, and breathed out again.

“You don't have to,” his voice came, as if from beyond a great distance, the low rumble of thunder that might call one's attention to a stormy horizon.

“No,” Jadany breathed slowly out, letting her eyes fall finally shut to the heaviness that pressed them. “I do.”

( ...like the thunder that might call one's eyes to a stormy horizon... )

The stairwell I raced down terminated in a slightly more expansive platform of raw concrete with an unkind looking metal door. Pushing my way out, I turned blindly onto the sidewalk and moved against traffic, away from the light of the apartment community and into the tangerine glow of the street lamps. My shoes slapped against the rain-glazed street, my only company, and my thoughts could not decipher any reason. I clutched the paper dampening in the cold sweat of my palm. I did not know where to go.
( Read more... )

[19 weeks? Really? It's not that there hasn't been work; just... haven't... posted anything. But I'm starting a sincere effort to get back to this story (I know, I know), starting with the thorough re-write it deserves.]

Amber Poe.

“For the third time, I don't know.”

My words echoed across the telephone line, crackling out of an emergency call center headset into the harried ears of an overworked woman who didn't believe me. Having received all the warnings about how it was illegal to impersonate an actual emergency call, I stood finally at this impasse with this stranger; how could she believe a story that I didn't have to tell, anyway? I felt the stoniness of my own silence bearing down on me. My knuckled whitened on the telephone. This is what 911 is for!

“Ma'am, are you in danger?”

( Read more... )

Alright, commence editing on 'A Bottle Full Of Blood'. I'm to post it in sections as I get the changes typed in; part of the process, however, is finding a proper title. I'm considering 'The Bone-Paved Way' so far, but that's all that's come to me.

Halflit.net

I've started a community for writers. It will include not only a community for fun, workshop, and support, but also hosting for people who are interested. I'm UNBELIEVABLY EXCITED.

Check it out, let me know if you're interested.

The weight of the glass in my hand.
The heat of the fire in my throat.
The ring in the sound of my voice.
The loose ground upon which we stand.
The hollow words of the old toast.
The feeling of losing a choice.

The hand that I grasp in the dark.
The desperate gasping for air.
The taste of the wine on your lips.
The searching in vain for a spark.
The lie that no one can compare.
The things I don't think I can fix.

The sad morning ache in my bones.
The dishes that wait in the sink.
The hesitant close of the day.
The message that you won't be home.
The wandering eye that I blink.
The telling myself you won't stray.

The more time we're spending apart.
The realizing that I can breathe.
The things that we once thought were true.
The still-dimming ache in my heart.
The old, broken things that I leave.
The things that remind me of you.

.

[Written originally in the Same_Oh! community. I'm very on-the-fence about the word 'until' in the third stanza. Keep it, ditch it? The line would otherwise stay the same.]

He lived next door to
Our apartment in the Projects.
His equipment was loud,
Studio of smoke and
Fire.

He caught dewdrops,
Shivering
In quiet midair. Every
One like a
Star.

Until we moved away,
Now the diamonds no
Longer sparkle, impressed
On empty
Space.

Forty-five now, among
My own children, magic
Still washes
My memory in the
Dark.

It was grass-watering season. An army of thunderheads on the far horizon (the flat one) raised their unseasonable grey and white flags of warning nonetheless. Hattie lay on the sun-hot face of the big rock in Amie Gregor's front yard. The cold water of the sprinkler tickled her bare feet.

Amie wasn't home even though she said she would be, and Hattie was already bored of waiting outside of the empty, tiny house.

The clouds were marching closer and gathering slow menace. From their dark bellies, Hattie was beginning to hear the boiling thunder.

“Hat,” a voice – a man's voice, young and nervous – broke through the phalanx of advancing clouds. “Hey, Hat!” Urgency gathered in the syllables, and the lawn, the hissing sound of the sprinkler, the hot rock, the storm-lapis sky, all began to dissolve.

Hattie turned in the corroding fog of reverie to see Amos Rivera – a boy who went by Percy Blysshe Shelley in the group, where had arisen the custom of renaming members, usually after poets. Sometimes they called him Adonais for short. It was oddly fitting, she'd always thought, but she didn't know why.

“You OK Hat?” Amos was upon her now, giving a friendly grasp to the sleeve of her coat, a sad and canine expression of concern folding his brow above his brown eyes.

“Oh, uh, yeah...” Hattie hadn't realized that he was expecting some kind of human response out of her, though in retrospect that could have been construed as a little silly.

“Seriously, what's up? You don't exactly look well.” Amos said as Hattie linked arms with him and allowed him to lead her off toward the hotel plaza down the block where they were staying.

She liked Amos. He was new to the group – Hattie was not known for her quick interface with newcomers, usually identified amongst the arcane old blood that sometimes kept too much to themselves – but she got along with Amos. He was young, eager to please, and rich on inherited money. But he was very good He also seemed to have a genuinely soft heart.

“It's nothing. I just didn't realize that we were going to be here when they made the booking.”

“Didn't you? I heard you say you grew up in this town during the last meeting.”

“Yea, but...” Hattie began to explain. gesturing across the large lot that held the resort. “None of this used to be here. They put in that street for the hotel, that's why I didn't recognize the name.”

Hattie found herself looking back over her shoulder anxiously, toward the dilapidated little house on the corner. It was obviously a relic from an era past, nestled on it's tiny lot among larger, more modern apartments, a sad little ghost pleading Hattie's memory out of 20 years' hibernation.

She turned back to the hotel and the present to find Amos watching her with an expectant expression of concern. Instinctively, she smiled and shrugged, when something seemed to strike her nervous system with a sudden shutter. Hattie whipped back around to stare at the abandoned house -why hadn't they knocked it down to build there?

“First time I saw a dead body it was being pulled out of that house.” She said distantly. Amos blinked but didn't otherwise respond. They walked together back into the hotel.

I'm linking to the site, here: I'm excited to have this story online, a lot of work went into it and a lot of work will further. This is the first of 9 segments, interlinked on the site.

A Bottle Full of Blood

chaos.blackglass.org: Rebuilt, with all-new stuff posted on it. I'm filtering things in as I go... But I have a bulk of current projects put up there to have something more firm and more permanent than this notebook. It's long overdue.

[posted also to Incommune.]

Now here, here was a thing that made me want to return to the desert; to my desert. The Western Clathe Dunesea, that lays beyond a region of Clathir called the Mouth of Hell, West of the mountains, west of the great city Castiin which knows no rest for it has both a diurnal face and a nocturnal face to smile on the many different peoples that assemble there to trade. Bearing ever westward, ever into the inferno of the rising sun.

I am not a native of that hard, bright land. Sometimes, I wish I were... its scions are a brave and powerful people, a bloodline I would be proud to claim my own. Where I was born bears little consequence; I have not returned to that place for decades and do not care to.

(So many questions -.-)

[Second chunk, BY THE WAY there's a fair bit of swearing in this one. I might make mention that the whole Skin Game story contains some adult themes, though I haven't gotten into writing a lot about them yet. I'm not very good at keeping a general appraisal of that but, on a general basis, the audience I consider when I'm writing things unless I'm specifically writing for something else is an audience of adults.]

“Why do you do this to yourself?” Banen’s voice shook beneath his mask of purity, his mask of neutral quiet. She felt it in her flesh, felt it as his breast trembled, the air pushed forth from the exhalation of the words unsteady. He was angry. He was hurt. Aishling relished it, as much as she was able.
( Read more... )

[I started this story years ago, and have worked on it off and on since then. The last stint was quite a while back, but I've pulled it off the brick that houses all the stuff that's been dumped off of two dead computers now. I've always liked the characters in it - though I may end up renaming half of them (Bane and Morningstar, particularly; we'll see). This is the first go-through (in chunks) of stuff that needs more substantial re-writing than I've had a chance to give it, but I've at least cleaned up most of the really messy stuff from my teenage years. Oh man.]

Aurrin locked eyes with Banen, his gaze reluctant as he met hers from across the pandemonium of the hall. She still stood framed by the door, having just entered, slightly late, filled with silent terror and fury. Unheeding of Morningstar's meandering crowd of peon's and couriers, she cut through the loose crowd of people directly toward him. Bane stiffened, evading the brush of her shoulder as she settled into the place at his side. The aura of entitlement that she carried around her form made Banen bristle; she was determined that they would take this mission together, and that it would would help to clear the obstacles they’d happened upon as lovers. Aurrin and Banen had met working together, and it was too that element she wished to be returned. ( Read more... )

The bars of the gilded birdcage were so thin as to feel impossibly fragile against the press of her fingers. The lone inhabitant, a tiny finch of exotic and unfamiliar plumage, eyed her warily from its perch.

Across the room from her, he pretended to tend his orchids, his fingertips tracing down the deceptively strong stalk of one of the flowers as he watched her sidelong. Shying away from his furtive glance, and having been caught looking herself, she glanced down to find her own fingers were still detectably flushed from the lingering heat of passion. Still able to feel the weight of his eyes on her body, she drew the loose folds of her dressing gown more tightly around herself, tucking a smile she was unable to repress into the shelter of her shoulder.

A second later he was beside her, sliding his warm hands around her hips to undo her grip on the material.

“Stop.” his voice pressed against her throat, an insistent purr just above a whisper. “Why do you always hide from me?”

Turning into his arms as the robe fell open so she could press her naked breast against his skin , she caught the line made by his clavicle between her teeth for a second, grinning against the inside of his shoulder.

“Because it always feels like the first time, with you, and I'm never sure what you think of me.”

Dear Adler,

I have a dream, often, that always ends here: the five-fingered shape of a black-gloved hand hardens out of the dark, stamping the wall so close to my face that I feel the scant brush of ballistic fiber against my cheek. He pushes off the wall, propelling himself down the corridor in apparent ignorance of me. He is so close I can smell him, even today, sweating cold as I write you this thing in assured peace and safety. He smells of life, of excited sweat, mingled with more artificial traces of singed firing residue and pleasant aftershave. He is human, just like you, or I, or any of the rest of these men who have come to destroy what I have known my whole life as constant. He is human.

I wonder, less often than I used to, if this wasn't the critical juncture... if I had stayed in my bedroom like an obedient station-brat, would I have been able to have seen them as soulless, as demons? If I had been able to see them as demons, (and, subsequently, not come to contemplate all those deeper evils, which come not by nature but by choice), would I have lived to tell you this story?
( Read more... )

Dear Adler,


I know we are still human. After all these many generations of vagrancy, when so many of us spend much or all of our lives without setting foot on the soil of any world at all, that does not change what is fundamentally within us. A few hundred years of relative freedom is barely a drop in the evolutionary bucket compared to the millennia we spent earthbound. The human organism is programmed to understand that the world will end under some kind of deafening holocaust of fire. It is the wrath of God, or man's fatal mistake sundering the sky with gouts of nuclear madness. It is the explosion of the sun, the implosion of the earth itself.

That's not how it happened.
( Read more... )

[An image that intrigued me. There's no more than this to it yet, in my mind or anywhere else!]

Kirsa lifted her head into the thin, winter air and stood still to listen over the wide expanse of snow and low brush, brittle with the season's leafless hibernation. One breath, and then a second, unfolded in silvery plumes around her face as she focussed waiting for a seam to come in the perfect silence. It rolled over the ice-fettered moorland in the cold, clear bay of a single hunting horn, bell-like with the voice that only Arlon's instrument could produce.
She smiled to herself, indulging in the sudden closeness of the memory of warm meat, the rangy company of the dogs in the keep, wine, Arlon's hand at her shoulder and his friends piling in in pairs from the long campaign. Letting that private smile warm her cheeks a moment, she straightened to hear the snow muffled hoof beats that signaled the retainers that had gone before him, un-announced. Shaking a little stiffness from her body, she broke from her place and finally crested the hill she'd come up to listen for him, but a mark on the canvas of snow stopped her in her tracks before she cantered down the gentle slope on the other side.
It was a wide arc of black-red, edges alternating between knife-like and indistinct on the whiteness. The two retainers, each riding one of the pair of swifter greys that moved ghostly in their stable full of robust war-horses the color of coal and coffee, were pulling up around the stain, a dozen or so yards from where she came on foot. In the center of the ichor lay a man, his eyes and mouth both open – blind and silent – toward the sky, his arms splayed carelessly away from his body, and a long gash crossing his arched chest.
One of the two men dropped from his saddle and, looking up, pronounced the stranger certainly dead. There was a long moment of the other man not knowing quite what to do until Kirsa joined them and flung her hand back toward the manor which wasn't far from where they were.
“Take him inside so we can at least afford him the hospitality of a proper burial. It may be the only chance we have to ward away whatever did this to him.”
The warm anticipation of her husband's return was crippled by the chill that man's dead face put in her. It had been, she thought, too quiet when she'd gone out that morning to wait for him. Ever since Arlon was a boy, he'd taken time and pleasure to teach her how to listen for the beasts of all seasons; how to know their voices and movements, even in darkness or the uncanny invisibility of a wild animal. This morning, there had been none.
Furthermore, there were neither tracks nor a trail of withered blood-spatter leading to the fallen man. Arlon's retainers exchanged a look before taking his ankles and feet to drag him back toward their keep.