practice

Missing It

There’s a certain sound that keystrokes make. It’s a sound I hear a lot these days, but usually the sound’s only result is long papers about Antigone or Oedipus or Henry VIII. Not that those results are unsatisfactory – not in the least. In fact, my brain feels as if it’s expanding with every day, acquiring more material, whether useful or not, and using it to fill in the gray corners that have remained as empty and barren as understocked warehouses in thriving cities on the verge of poverty.

However, it’s been a great long while since I’ve associated the clack-clacking of fingers on keyboard with something creative. I feel like while one part of my brain is being used more and more and is stretching its limbs and crying out for joy, another part of it is slowly shrinking into the corner, scared, intimidated. The fear isn’t only from this new intellectual beast growing up near it – it’s also from the tremendous amount of talent that my eyes see every day, in the minds and eyes of other people. The school and environment I’m in is full of people who are writers at heart – many are genuine and love writing, although a fair few are also merely intellectual snobs who feel that knowledge is power that must be shown off, not just consumed. But those aren’t the intimidating ones – those are the ones I just choose not to associate with.

Still, the talent that is rampant on this campus is astounding and my creative brain seems to shrivel up with terror at the thought of being inadequate. But I miss it. I miss that part of me. I miss writing stories and poems that don’t rhyme. I miss writing character studies and wracking my imagination for new things to write about, new styles to try out, new places to describe.

I’m coming back. In a big way. I have to, if only to preserve my sanity and give myself something completely outside of my day-to-day struggle with books and papers and people to focus on. I hope I manage to stick by this promise – I’m coming back and I want to write something, even just a paragraph, each and every day. I know that I can’t expect anyone to read my words when I don’t have sufficient time to read theirs as well, but I’m going to strive to meet that goal too. When I was at home, I managed to read so many posts a day and I enjoyed it. I want to manage to read at least once or twice a week the full range of your – all my wonderfully supportive friends’ – blogs and catch up with you as well. I hope I can keep my promises this time. In the names of Dionysus, Henry VIII and Alan Turing I’ll try.

Austen-Esque

After spending every free moment of the day reading “Sense and Sensibility,” I found myself unable to resist the urge to try to write the sort of passage that might find itself in a Jane Austen book. I’m sure I haven’t succeeded very well, but there’s something irrationally enjoyable about trying to write in such a manner that you must hear the words being read aloud in your mind or you will not understand quite how the sentences end.

While it is true that the estate of Mr P was not large, it is also true that it was spacious enough for him, his wife, and their two young daughters, to live in comfortably. So they did, and while Mr P spent his life working hard in various positions involving sales, he managed to live without worrying about yearly income and without ever needing to trouble the minds of the women of his house.

Mrs P was by nature a peaceful woman, always cheerful, even in the depth of the great aches and pains which afflicted her in older age. She was an excellent example to her daughters, both of which grew up to be miraculously practical and intelligent women. The eldest, Amanda, was educated well and supported herself by her pen. She did, however, make the rather scandalous choice of making a second marriage, even after her first was dissolved mutually by both her and her cold-hearted husband. Her second marriage, by which she provided Mr and Mrs P with two grandchildren, it was agreed by all, was much more successful.

The younger of the sisters, Miranda, was always the more rebellious, and although she might have vexed Mr and Mrs P by her scandalous pursuits at one point in her life, she eventually became a source of pride to her family, for she was free in mind and in spirit in ways which the new world found becoming and agreeable, and even profitable.

While both Mr and Mrs P met untimely and early endings, their daughters kept up a steady stream of correspondences and remained the greatest of friends, even after needing to sell the estate which they so loved. Although deeply regrettable, the selling of their beloved Flora estate was nevertheless an unmatchable help in both the sisters’ lives, for both, headstrong and independent as they were, led quite modern lives and needed funds to keep these in order and comfort, as they aspired to do for many years to come.

Move [Part VIII]

Marianne was afraid for the first time in days. That is to say, she was consciously afraid – her muscles, whether she knew it or not, had been clenched in a sort of animal fear ever since she had first woken up in that cold steel room. But this was different. Marianne had gotten used to the routine of this place, these facilities in which she acted as lab-rat. Her mind was constantly ticking away and her plan was slowly forming during those short spans of time when she knew she wasn’t monitored as closely.

She was unprepared, therefore, for what was currently taking place. She had come to think of Miss Flanders as a scientist; pure, precise and utterly ruthless when it came to her experiments, one of which was Marianne, Adept [for she had been promoted from Novice apparently] #824. Marianne wasn’t ready for Miss Flanders to come into her room, sit down, and try to chat with her.

When Miss Flanders had entered, Marianne froze in what she had been doing. A panic that she had been discovered rose in her, for she had just been making her usual rounds of the room, jogging, trying to see if she could detect any more cameras in there. She jogged so as to have excuse in case she was asked what she was doing, taking rounds and rounds of the room as she did – exercise, she would reply. She promptly forgot this excuse, however, as the fear of Miss Flanders’ entrance erupted in her mind.

Miss Flanders didn’t ask a thing about what Marianne was doing. She didn’t speak for several minutes, but just sat down on the vacant bed in the room and stared politely at Marianne. Marianne couldn’t help noticing that Miss Flanders’ pupils were very wide, so her eyes looked blacker than ever. She also detected a strange smell about the woman, though she couldn’t explain what it was.

When Miss Flanders opened her mouth and asked Marianne the question, in a false, bubbly voice, Marianne knew that things were only going to get worse from now on, and she had to sit down on her bed to stop her legs from buckling completely.

“So, Marianne, what’s your mom like?” Miss Flanders asked.

“Wh-why? Why are you asking that?” Marianne was thinking furiously, trying to figure out what was happening here. She guessed by now how the Set worked, and she was chilled to her very bone at the thought of what they might do to her mother.

“Oh, I just want to know what you think of her. I mean, dear, all our other volunteer subjects talk about their families all the time,” Miss Flanders’ cheery voice was somehow much scarier than her normal, deep, musical and threatening voice. “You, however, seem rather quiet on the subject. You haven’t, for instance, asked to go home since those first few days.”

“Your OTHER volunteer subject? Meaning you think I’ve volunteered for this?” Marianne tried to take the subject away from her mother, but wasn’t sure whether or not Miss Flanders would see through this.

“Yes, you did. You applied, you got accepted, you signed the papers. Now, what about your mother?”

Marianne gulped. She knew that what was coming wouldn’t be a pleasant interview. She’d lie as well as she could, tell Miss Flanders that she absolutely loathed her mother, tell her whatever it took to try and convince her of that. She knew the truth though. She knew that they were planning something to do with her mother. As she lied fluidly to Miss Flanders, Marianne was speed-thinking, trying to figure out her plan and how she could carry it out quicker than she had intended. She resolved, as Miss Flanders raised her eyebrows in disbelief at Marianne’s lies, to begin practicing.

I’ll practice every night if I have to, she thought to herself. We’ll see how they like a taste of defiance soon enough.

My Goal – To Have Voices In My Head

Writing descriptions is all very well, but no work of fiction is complete without dialogue. It doesn’t have to be incredible, it doesn’t have to be witty, it doesn’t have to be much – except that you have to be able to hear it. You have to able to have two characters, two characters that feel real, and you have to know that when you’re reading, or in my case writing, their conversation, you can actually hear two distinct voices in your head that make sense.

You wouldn’t think that would be such a hard thing to practice. It is though. I’ve realized lately that I love writing descriptions and indeed, I know I write them fairly well, at least well enough. But I don’t know, or rather haven’t attempted to know, how to write dialogue, and that’s bad. I need to learn how. The problem is that I can’t just practice dialogue for the sake of itself. I need to have a situation, characters, voices that I can clearly imagine.

I’m not managing to find a way to practice this. I might be obsessing over something silly, but I truly feel I need to learn to write believable conversations. And for that I’ll need people, stories. So that’s what I’m going to try to work on in the next few days.

Devil’s Yellow Shirt [A Short Story]

Despite some misgivings over it, and especially over its ending, I will post this story here and let the grand populace decide. Or the grand ten or so who actually care. I hope you enjoy!

Devil woke up one morning and lay in bed for a few minutes, savoring the feeling of his good mood. Eventually he got out of bed and decided to wear his yellow button-down shirt to work today. He was, after all, in a good mood, so why not celebrate it with some color?

Devil walked through the small corridor of his apartment and entered his equally small and narrow kitchen. He put some toast in the toaster and turned it on. Then he waited patiently for the toast to pop up, put the toast on a plate, buttered it at the table, and went on to munch it. When he was done, he carefully put his plate in the sink. He then went to wash his hands, face and neck, and to put on a pair of pants- something he had forgotten to do before.

Devil started every morning with this blissfully human routine. Then, every morning, he walked to the bus stop, and took the bus to work. Not many people in his office did the work as well or as joyfully as Devil did. Devil prided himself on his good work, as well as his line of work, one that he felt was particularly devilish. What Devil did was this: he looked at a lot of files of sick people, and figured out how to not get them the current financing they needed for their current malady, whatever that happened to be. Devil figured he was probably contributing to Hell a lot more now than he did when he was actually IN Hell. By not giving many people the financial help they needed, a good percentage of them would die due to the lack of help, and after all, there were many more people in Hell than in Heaven, so a good percentage of the dead people would end up in Hell.

Another thing Devil prided himself on, apart from being exceedingly good at his job, was his physical appearance. He did not have horns. Nor did he have a pointy tail or cloven hooves. He wasn’t even very red most of the time, except when he ate Indian food of course. Devil actually chose time and again to be squat, balding, round and clean cut. This gave him the overall appearance of being utterly harmless, something that amused Devil greatly all through the centuries.

Devil had ruled Hell ever since it had been created by the human mind. He hadn’t done very much in Hell after a while, because eventually there were so many people there, that he got to delegate most of his responsibilities to some of the ones who had been there long enough to know how everything worked. Today though, Devil had no idea what Hell looked like, because he hadn’t set foot in the place for some 300 years or so. He assumed that, were he to go back today, it would look very much like a shopping mall. A very large and particularly infuriating shopping mall.

The reason Devil left Hell all those years ago was the very simple fact of his name. A boy, no older than 10 or 11, had ended up in Hell, and Devil, while doing his routine check that everything was getting done, happened to have a chat with the boy. First he learned that the boy had killed his dog when he was 4, and that he had been sure that he would end up in Hell, which in face, was what made him end up in Hell. Then the boy had pointed out to Devil that if he spelled his name backwards it would be Lived. Of course Devil just patted the boy on the head and sent him off to play, but then he thought about it for a while. Then he thought about it a bit more and realized just how ironic that was. Because of course Devil had never lived. He had existed for what felt like forever, but he had never LIVED. Not like all the people who came to Hell had.

So Devil, who considered himself somewhat the adventurous type, decided to live. He went into the world for the first time, and created himself as Robert Livingston. Then he became James Livingston and then, for a while, Charlotte Livingston. Then he decided he’d much rather stay male, and kept changing his name and whereabouts for centuries. That way, he never had to deal with the same people for too long, and he didn’t have the problem of needing to die at some point. About two hundred years ago he started a tradition, something to make his leaving and moving about a bit more interesting. On his last day in a place, he would tell the person he most got along with in that place that he was Devil really. He enjoyed the different responses people gave him and how they changed over time. He got a lot of Perhaps-You-Should-Talk-To-The-Preacher-About-This responses, and a lot of Oh-Lord-What-Do-You-Mean-By-That responses. Mostly though, he got Ha-Ha-Then-Where-Are-Your-Horns responses.

This particular day, the yellow shirt day, was Devil’s last day in his current town. He felt sad about it, because he would have to move far away and change profession and name, because people were so easily traceable these days what with Google and all. Still, his good mood would not be ruined, and he would give himself a good last day.

He got to work, sat at his desk, and ruined people’s lives for a while. At 12:35 he decided to take his lunch break, and he asked his best friend in the office, Mort, to join him.

Devil and Mort got along splendidly ever since they realized that they both didn’t feel any guilt over what they were being paid to do. Devil had decided more than five years ago that Mort would be the one he would tell the truth to on the day of his departure. He knew that perhaps he should stop his silly game, most especially because of the rash promise he made to himself about a hundred years back. But Devil was addicted by now, he just HAD to see people’s reactions and then never see them again.

So Devil took Mort down to the cafeteria, and they both got strong coffees and big salads and even bigger bags of potato-chips. They sat down at a table and talked for a while about the weather, about politicians and about the crime rates. Once they’d both polished off their meals and burped and groaned for a while, Devil decided it was time.

‘Mort, buddy,’ Devil began. ‘Today’s my last day on the job.’

‘What? Why, what happened, Ned?’ Mort replied, taken off guard. He very much liked Devil, or Ned, and didn’t want to be the only guilt-free one in the office again.

‘My mother, she lives in Paris and she’s sick as a dog. I’ve got to go take care of her. Haven’t got a choice. My poor mother did everything for me,’ Devil spun his little stories completely at random each time he left. He enjoyed seeing what his human imagination would crop up with each time.

‘Ah, buddy, I’m sorry to hear that. Any idea when you’ll be back?’

‘Not a clue, old pal, not a clue. I can tell you one thing though,’ Devil paused and waited for Mort to say ‘What?’ which he obligingly did. ‘I can tell you something real weird. I’m Devil, Mort. No joke, old buddy, I’m really THE Devil. The one who supposedly tortures the damned and all that.’

Mort stared, and then he chortled, and then he said ‘Ha! If you’re the Devil, where are your horns, huh?’ and then he chortled some more.

Devil thought to himself, Damn, and then he regretted his promise. Devil was a man of his word, and even if the promise had been to himself, he had to follow it through.

‘Aw, Mort, why’d you have to go and say that? See, I made a little promise to myself. You know those ads online, the ones that blink all these colors so you notice them. The ones that say something like “You’re the millionth person to see this ad! That means YOU win a prize! Click the banner for more details!”?’

‘Yeah,’ Mort wasn’t quite following what was going on.

‘You know how whenever you see that you know for sure that it’s a lie and that you’re not the millionth on that site and you’ll only get a virus if you click on the banner?’ Devil pressed on.

‘Uh, yeah, but buddy, what has this got to do with-‘

‘Well, see,’ Devil interrupted the wary Mort. ‘You really are the millionth person who’s asked me that stupid question about the horns. And you know I’m a man of my word, Mort. And I made myself a little promise that on the day I’d hear the millionth person ask me that question, I’d give him a little prize. And the prize would be, I’d go back to Hell and I’d stop making that person a consort and friend of the Devil. So there you go, Mort. It’s too bad, I enjoyed being here. Goodbye.’

Devil then seemed to drift out of his yellow shirt, as if he turned into mist, and then the yellow shirt and his pants were just draped over the chair, and his shoes and socks lay on the floor.

Mort stared at the chair with the clothes on it. Then he looked around. Nobody else in the cafeteria seemed to have noticed what went on. That is, no one noticed that a person – the Devil? – seemed to have disappeared out of his clothing. Mort stood up and looked around again. Nobody took any notice of him still. He walked calmly up to his cubical in the office, sat down and thought for a moment.

He wondered what was better, the Devil being IN Hell or OUT of it. He decided that for him at least, it was good for the Devil to be IN Hell. When he got to Hell, he would at least have someone to play golf and have a nice chat with.

Mort thought for another minute, and then walked back to the cafeteria and took the yellow shirt from the chair Devil had been sitting in, which no one had touched yet. He thought to himself ‘At least I got a fine yellow shirt on this odd day’. That made him cheerful, and Mort whistled to himself about his free shirt all afternoon.