Revisions

Robin, the bastard, has spent over an hour tonight attempting to convince me that my work all needs revision. And even though i got a little hot with him for the thinly veiled implication that most of my writing was less than perfect, i have been conditioned all my life to listen to robin when he's being reasonable, because three out of five times he's much better informed than me, and knows what he's talking about. And goddammit, although i didn't want to believe it, because believing it would mean i needed to do more work, and that my writing wasn't as AWESOME as i thought it was the first time through, when i calmed down i went through all the pieces that i'd posted (all, what, four of them?), and damned if they don't need some cleanup. So now i've got to do more work.

The first part of that work being me devising a system in which i can revise without cluttering these pages with the same stories over and over. So i've spent the last twenty minutes thinking about that, and i've come up with a system, and it is thus: the title of every posted story will have a specific format, which will be:

Title [(x) n]

where x = the number of revisions (with 1 being the starting value of a just finished story, because zero seems silly, and besides, i do some rough and dirty revising as i write, when lines stop feeling right), and n = the date of the last revision. So this post title, if it were a story, would be "Revisions [(1) 9/20/2008]".

This system has its flaws, of course. It doesn't leave older revisions open for examination, it doesn't track the times of prior revisions, only the most recent, and the status of a revision that totally fails and forces me to go back to a prior one is completely up in the air (if revision 3 is so terrible i just do another revision off of revision 2, is the new revision revision 4? Or revision 3.1?). But. Whatever. I'll burn these bridges when i come to them. For now, let the revisions begin.

Leviathan [(1) 9/19/2008]

Originally this story was based off a doodle i did, in which a gigantic whale, so big that i had drawn other tiny whales swimming around it like pilot-fish, rose to the surface under a tiny oil tanker with the caption "The blue god comes!" I thought it was pretty amusing at the time, and seeing a "visit Alaska" ad on the tube today made me think of it. The story that emerged could really only ever be called "Leviathan", and so, halfway through writing it i went on to wikipedia to look up the word "leviathan" and see if i could weave a little extra symbolism into the story. Mostly, it turned out, the leviathan was just a big, angry, biblical fish. The only two points of real interest were that a.) some references to it indicated that it was a big giant whale-dog for god to play with, which was interesting but not very useful, and that 2.) in some parables, when god created all the animals, he made the leviathan, like everything else, a mating pair, but then as soon as they were created he immediately killed the female, because if they were to ever procreate, nothing - man or beast - would ever be able to oppose them. And so the male leviathan was left to be the sole example of its kind, for all eternity

I didn't believe it until I saw it for myself. Nobody believed it until they saw it for themselves. Satellite pictures of it had been floating around the internet for months, as well as grainy cell-phone photos, every single one discredited out of hand by experts as poorly photo-shopped fakes. I mean, their reactions were completely understandable - a monster whale six miles long, as big as an island and visible from space. It just didn't make sense.

The Japanese were the first nation to officially encounter it. They'd heard the half-mad rumors about it; how it was attracting countless other whales to it as it sketched its languorous figure-eight path along the currents of the pacific, as if they had suddenly all become cetacean pilgrims following their oceanic saint. Even if only half the stories about it were true, they decided, hunting it down would still be an excellent opportunity for "science". They sent whaler after whaler after it, and though every vessel found it – for it made no attempts to hide itself, and its crooning song reverberated through the ocean for a hundred miles – they all returned with empty cargo holds, and captains unable to explain to increasingly cross superiors the overwhelming sense of grief and sadness and pity that they found in its stadium-sized eyes.

We were a U.N. task force sent out of San Diego to observe it, uncertain of our actual responsibilities would be when we caught up to the beast. With satellite tracking, finding it was no trouble, and, knowing where it was going, we managed to place ourselves in front of it with little difficulty. Our little oceanographer's sub hung in its path a hundred feet below the surface, a few hours before it was expected to arrive. At that depth all color bled to blue.

When it came, we at first didn't understand what we were looking at. The ocean in front of us turned dark, but even though we knew, intellectually, what was coming, in practice it was too large a segment for us to accept as anything but cloud cover. And so, when we finally perceived that it had arrived, it was as if we had been snuck up upon by a mountain. We were all in a panic to get our instruments started up and working – by the time we had realized what had happened, it was already starting to pass us. O'Connell had managed to get the cameras running as it drew alongside us, and Yee's aquatic audio recorders were warming up, but the Kubokawas' sonar imagine device was blue screening on them, and they were understandably upset.

And then it looked at us, and all of us faltered in our activities. We all knew that it saw us. It watched us carefully, for far too long to be coincidence, its eyes tracking us as it moved, fixing us with a stare as deep and impenetrable as the ocean itself. "Allah, be merciful with your might," Pahlavi murmured, although to this day I'm still not sure if he was speaking of the whale, or to it. Beneath that gaze it was impossible to pretend we were anything but tiny scurrying creatures, and yet at the same time it never dismissed us. It was like being judged by Poseidon himself, who found us neither exceptional nor wanting.

It took a half an hour for it to pass us, and we watched as the landscape of its side slid past us; acres of barnacles, the canyon of its mouth opened a sliver revealing a forest of baleen, and fins the size of three city blocks, lifting, lifting, pausing, turning, pushing down with the force of tides. The whole time our submarine bobbed next to it like a bathtub toy. Some of us watched through monitors, but most of us – too many of us to fit comfortably, but none of us complained – pressed our faces to the glass at the front, as if we were compelled to be as close to the creature as possible. We watched the monstrous thing glide past us with a grace it should not by any rights have possessed, and our eyes grew dry as we tried not to blink, as if in blinking, even for a moment, we would miss some of its magnificance. Just before it disappeared back into the blue from which it had come, it let out a cry, a low and mournful whalesong, which cut through the little submarine as if its walls had been designed for conducting sound. The air itself seemed to shake in response, and though none of our equipment could confirm it in any scientific way, we suddenly understood why whales would follow the beast for hundreds of miles; we would have as well, were it possible, if only to ease the loneliness etched in those harmonics.

And then it was gone.

1 - The Slope [(2) 9/18/2008]

So i'd been working on this one for a long, long time and it kept getting longer and longer, with more backstory and more explanation and more time and days and excrutiating detail, when i finished writing SN 1006 a couple of hours ago, and i suddenly realized that i could explore this single moment which was the only part of the story that i'd wanted to tell, but had hidden under a big pile of excess crap because a part of me assumed my readers needed EVERYTHING, when, really, they don't. So i just spent an hour cutting away like seventy percent of the crap, and i'm actualy fairly pleased with what emerged. Like a marble statue: just cut away all the marble that doesn't look like an elephant, and you have an elephant. As it were.

"Wow," Emiko says breathlessly, skidding to a stop and spraying up a little fount of snow. "Are you okay? That was amazing."

I lay there for a moment, stunned. It's snowing, and a distant part of me watches the little flakes as they tumble carelessly from the deep grey sky and land on my goggles with a quiet little crunching noise. As the shock wears off I begin to take a stock of all outlying parts. Nothing feels broken. Arms appear fine. Left leg twisted at a weird angle where the ski is lying flat on the ground and carrying the attached foot with it. No such feeling in my right leg, which implies there's no ski there. I wonder how long I can just lie here, but even as I think that she leans over me with a concerned expression on her face. I sigh and sit up, and look forlornly down the slope. My right ski lays five feet down-slope from me, apparently refusing to be associated with the rest of us. I look wistfully over my shoulder where, far, far back up the mountain, I can see the top of the ski lift over a copse of trees. Turning back to face the downhill slope, I sigh inwardly. I've never really skied before – not since I was six years old – and I'm sure it's much worse in my head than it is in reality, but as far as I can tell it's a deathtrap: steep and bendy and endlessly long.

"I don't suppose we can go back up? Take the ski lift back down the mountain?"

She sighs, and offers me my poles. "I don't think so. I don't think it's allowed to go up the slope. It's sort of a one way road."

I take the poles and lay them down next to me, and begin the laborious process of scraping the snow out of the bottom of my shoe so that I can connect my foot back into the ski.

She glances cautiously down the slope, calculating how far we've progressed, how long it's taken, how much slope there is left. She frowns, and I know what she's thinking. I've done the calculations myself: at our current rate, with me falling down about once every fifty feet, we're going to take all afternoon just to finish this one slope. She'd had hopes of hitting as many slopes as possible today, our last day in Tahoe, and she'd spent all morning running me through green circles, the simplest of slopes, before her desire for something closer to her skill level had convinced her that I was ready for the next level in difficulty: a blue square. Though it dawned on me the first time I fell, still in plain view of the ski-lift exit, I can tell that it is just occurring to her what her impatience may have cost her.

As I finally manage to get the teeth in my ski boot to snap into ski's mouth, a couple suddenly appears around the bend in the track above us. They ski dangerously close to one another, but don't seem to care, laughing as they weave down the slope in unison, like choreographed snow pixies. As quickly as they'd come they disappear beneath us, vanishing in an upkicked wake of snow and ice. She looks wistfully down the slope after them, and I can see it on her face – the way she bites her lower lip, a look of almost-sadness in her eyes – her desire to be one of them, to feel speed and exhilaration and the wind in her face.

"Look," I say, getting unsteadily to my feet, "why don't you go and finish this run without me. At the rate I'm going you'll probably be able to get all the way down and back to me before I'm halfway down the mountain."

For a moment I can see her thinking about it, looking down the slope with an expression of longing. I can see the conflict within her written on her face; her desire to enjoy herself, and her desire for me to enjoy myself. It's an uncommon look for her, she who seems to always know so clearly what she wants, and I am suddenly surprised by it. She purses her lips in thought, and I am suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to kiss her, except that I'm too clumsy in my skis, and if I tried to move next to her I would probably fall over, and I have spent the last half hour looking foolish, and so I don't. After a second she comes to a decision. There is an almost imperceptible shake of her head, and then she turns to me, giving a smile that is both brittle and sincere.

"Don't worry about it, Scott," she says. "It's okay. I'm here. I'll stay with you."

And she does. As the descent continues, painfully slow in its stops and starts, as Wanty and Keith pass us, and then pass us again, through fall after fall after fall, she stays with me.

All the way down.

SN 1006 [(1) 9/17/2008]

Robin, as a writing prompt, sent me this, and wrote: "I want a story, and not a star trek 7 rehash. This is perhaps one of the coolest things I've ever seen in space, and I want a story from you that matches it, or a reflection upon it from a character who sees it from a full 180 degrees from our view." So here it is, or at least the first draft. I openly admit that my current influences are the flash story writing blogs Anacrusis and The Fabian Society.

Depending on distance and point of view, every world has a different name for it. It has been called the Heartstorm, and the Dream Thread, and the River of Stars. On a world where it pulses in the night sky, where its energies drum a slow and torpid beat in the heavens, it is referred to as God's Vein. Some have a small inkling of what happened at its heart, and their names for it are ever so carefully fabricated, as if to name the destruction too accurately would be to call its occurrences down onto their own heads. They call it the Last Cry of Alkenar, and the Skybreaker's Ring, and the Martyrs' Nebula - although it is no nebula; it's what's left of a solar system, its sun gone nova, all its contents reduced to dust in the slice of a moment. Sixty light-years across now, it is an ever-expanding cloud of roiling energy, burning so hot that the void itself turns to purple flame in its wake.

From a safe distance of a few light-years it appears to be a pale violet ribbon streaked with white, stretched like a dividing line across the great field of stars. And only a handful have ever seen it from closer and survived.

During the Prismatic War, the Verdant Prince Diadam took his entire fleet into the storm, riding the energy of its expanding edge like a windsailer before a tsunami. A full two-thirds of his ships were destroyed in the endeavor, thousand year old vessels with histories as deep as nations in their own right. But when the survivors emerged a year later, they appeared as if by magic in the middle of the Freeholdings of Orange, and laid waste to the entire system, bringing the war to a decisive close.

The only one to have ever pierced the outer edge itself was the artist Jaime Uture, who locked himself in a bottle of ice mainted at absolute zero, left floating in front of the expanding edge. When they found him a month later, they discovered to their surprise that the bottle had maintained structural integrity, but Uture had not. He never spoke again, or painted, except for vast, magnificant, shapeless murals of purple and white.

And i, of course, have watched it carefully. I have spent weeks - months - keeping but a fiftieth of a light-year ahead of it, staring deep into its chaotic wavefront, hoping to find something familiar in its eddies and whorls of brilliant destruction; to discover something lost. I have spent lifetimes with it, examining its face as if that of a lover. Because for me, it is all that i have left of home.