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.

0 - Unrequited [(2) 8/06/2008]

So, has it been long enough for everybody to forget about this place? Everybody gone? Good. Let's begin, then. I've always felt that poetry was in some way for writers that couldn't handle prose (er, don't mention that opinion to my poet friends), but i concede that it does make expressing one's feelings a bit easier.

This is just to say
all the things I never could
to you.

The half-remembered sentences
which came to me in dreaming,
and vanished

like dew

in morning sun.

This is me informing you
of all the
secret ways
I love you.

How the world seems as if
it is more full of light
when
you
are here.

This is to let you know
that the chambers of my heart
are empty
but for blood
and you.

This is just to say
to you
all the things I cannot say
to you;
to say them in

my heart

and in

my head.

Twelve Reasons Why I Loved Her - an introduction

So the purpose of this blog was to get me to publish here one piece of prose a week. Actual honest to god prose, although more to keep me fresh and writing than to actually produce good prose. So i came up with a cool idea for a project, wrote about a third of a page, and then forgot about it for about two months. This is me reaffirming this blog. Once a week. Prose!

The original project that i came up with is based loosely off of the graphic novel 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. It was advertised as twelve short stories set in non-chronological order that explore a relationship through its course. With the title of twelve reasons, i was given the impression that each one would be a specific and independent story with its own theme and idea. To my distress, it turned out that it was just the story of a relationship chopped into twelve parts and thrown out of order. Which was interesting, and actually pretty good, but it wasn't what i was expecting, and it wasn't what i wanted. So i thought i'd do it better. Twelve Reasons Why I Loved Her is going to be (ideally) twelve standalone short stories, each one exploring a different aspects, from before through after, of a relationship that i was once in (names will be changed to protect privacy and also because, to be honest, i don't really want her to find it and get all freaked out about it when it's really more of a writing exercise than anything else). So, hopefully coming soon to a blog near you,

Twelve Reasons Why I Loved Her


Addendum: God i love this layout! Look at the thread title! It's a tiny little lighthouse!

comics have moved

New site: Blubber Buddies

Just because i realized i was doing it all for comics, and prose wasn't happening. So i figured it might as well actually be the title that i like for my comics. El Story Blog may actually get prose one day.

Addendum: god i love this template. It's like the most pretentious thing i've ever seen.