WIP meme (xpost from IJ)
Aug. 16th, 2007 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darklunaI saw the "Post bits of your WIPs" meme go around a little while ago, but I didn't have most of my writing on my online computer. Now I do. That includes 61,000 words of the post-apocalyptic fairy tale, but I actually intend to finish that someday. Here are some of my orphans. I have, like, 18,000 of them.
Here's some of my giant high-school era WIP, which was called something stupid.
Twilight drenches the house, making trails of stars of the last few streaks of sunlight upon the dusty windows. Connell sits crosslegged in one warm square of floor, watching the trees' shifting color, trying to remember a poem he once read. The trees take leaf by leaf the evening.
He can sit like this for hours as the days and nights spin on without him.
Danielle
When we inherited the house, it was all dust and dropcloths, its age obvious with every choking breath we drew.
Connell opened all the windows, and most of them haven't been closed since.
He also began what I suppose is best described as a project, turning the house into something only he could envision.
He tamed the garden; I helped him discover its paths and its plan. But once I began to spend my days in classes, the straight walks I'd found with him turned into mazes.
Lately he has worked inside the house, painting one of the corner rooms on the second floor.
One wall is already done, or at least he's stopped working on it for the moment. It bears an interwoven mandala-like pattern in violet, indigo, and gold. I stop to see what he's doing and find him at the wall that gets the morning sun, covering the old white-turned-gray
paint with brilliant blue.
I watch him for a moment. "What will you do when it's finished?"
Connell shakes his hair out of his eyes, a streak of cerulean on his cheek making him seem painted for war. "It will never be finished."
But I know the house as it will be is already a complete picture in his mind. There will be an end to this madness of activity, and every day fills in a little more of the canvas stretched in his mind.
"Someday," I say, and leave, not because I have said all I want, but because sometimes you have to try to speak his language, and it is made more of silences than words.
Though he is my twin, our minds seldom have a common ground. I don't know why he became himself and I me. Could I have been that way too, shadows and tongues? Perhaps.
My mother once told me that when we were little we spoke our own language together before we knew how to make adults understand us. I wonder if that has not been Connell's path all along, the refinement of a speech for communicating with no one but himself.
This was the one in which the house decided it wanted to be a POV character, which was kind of cool. This was also the WIP in which I feel like I started to find my own voice, and got a bit more experimental, learning how to do things my way. The cool stuff is too embedded in the crappy stuff to salvage, though.
*
This is the start of a romance that would never get published, because, as is my wont, I've gone and made the hero a verboten profession - baseball player, in this case. I gave him a giant, goofy last name because a big ol' name like Garciaparra or Saltalamacchia on the back of a jersey is one of those things I find inherently amusing. The title was going to be The Trouble with Mr. Franglopanini, which they would totally have made me change if I had gotten the baseball stuff past 'em to get it published, but it made me giggle every time.
I'm pretty fond of the bit where Kit is waiting for her brother in the hallway. I think I did an OK job with the description there. And I like Henry's overprotectiveness, especially given that he's otherwise kind of a cad.
*
"The problem with you, Kit, is that you always find something to be unhappy about. A new job won't make you happy. Nothing will until you decide it will."
About ten retorts popped into Kit's head at once. The first three or four were scathing comments about armchair psychology. The rest were about how Bryan had just turned a minor disagreement into full-out verbal warfare, and at her brother's baseball game, where they were supposed to be having fun.
What actually came out of her mouth was one thing she didn't intend to say at all. "Maybe my job isn't making me unhappy," she snapped. "Maybe my fiancé is."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Yes, I did, but Kit—" He stopped.
He had no idea how to deal with this, Kit realized. She had always been so nice. She had gone out of her way to avoid conflict. She and Bryan both hated scenes.
Scenes, she thought now, were not always a bad thing.
"I'm tired of this," she said. "I'm tired of you thinking you know me. You don't."
"Then." He wanted to argue, or shout, or something; she could tell. But he wouldn't. That was the problem with Bryan. "Then I guess I should go." He said it with that damnable calm she had come to hate, that calm that made her feel that, to him, not even she was worth getting worked up over.
"Go," she said simply.
He did.
Kit could easily imagine Bryan going back to their apartment and doing whatever it was he did—playing with typesetting scripts, probably—until she came home. Maybe they wouldn't talk for a little while, but tomorrow one of them would say something carefully neutral, and the other would just as blandly answer. Before long it would all be back to normal. That was how it happened when they fought. Not that they had ever really fought. They had minor disagreements, and quibbles that came down to semantics. They kept their emotions out of it.
Kit had been keeping her emotions out of things for so long that she wasn't sure she knew how to feel them anymore.
She decided not to worry about Bryan now. If he was home when she got there, fine. If not, fine.
She thought this over for a second and realized that it really was fine. In fact, she honestly didn't care one way or the other.
Maybe it was her stubbornness, or maybe it was just the perfect summer-afternoon weather and the way the ballpark always felt like home, but Kit was OK. She really was. Besides, her brother was up, and she was damned if she was going to be gloomy right now.
Henry looked at the first pitch, a fastball that barely nicked the inside corner. He couldn't have hit that one, Kit knew. Luckily, the pitcher didn't know, and the next one was off-speed and toward the outside, just where Henry liked them. Kit watched his eyes light up as he got a read on it early enough to hold back for that crucial fraction of a second.
He smacked what was surely an easy double toward left center. But the Syracuse shortstop jumped straight into the air and snagged it. "Wow," Kit said under her breath, impressed in spite of herself.
That was the third out. Henry kicked at the dirt disgustedly. Kit caught his eye and shrugged.
The first Syracuse batter got to first on a single that Kit felt was cheesy. The second hung in there and drew a walk, quite a feat with San pitching. That brought up the shortstop. Kit studied him as he walked to the plate, trying to see if his ability to defy gravity showed in any way.
He wasn’t handsome, at least not in any traditional sense of the word. But Kit, long immune to the charm of cute ballplayers, found she couldn't look away from him. From this angle she could read the name across his back: Franglopanini. She could see, too, the intensity of his dark eyes, the stubborn set of his mouth, the curve of his biceps against his jersey.
San's first pitch bounced in the dirt and got past Tim. Kit groaned inwardly as the runners advanced. Second and third, nobody out.
Tim trotted out to the mound to have a word with San. They were going to intentionally walk the shortstop. Kit didn't like it, but she could hardly blame them.
Franglopanini stepped out of the box and took a couple more swings, staying loose. He glanced into the stands, at Kit, for just a second, then back for a longer look. Something sparked in those liquid-dark eyes. Is he interested in me, or my body? Kit wondered almost idly. All the Whalers knew that, as their second baseman's sister, she was off-limits, but none of the visitors would know that yet, unless Henry had gotten a lot more aggressive with his hands-off campaign.
Tim got back into position behind the plate. Franglopanini shot Kit a shy half-smile before stepping in again.
Huh, Kit thought. Interested in me.
San seemed to get his mental balance back after the wild pitch, and struck out the next three Syracuse batters to get out of the jam, and the Whalers held onto their one-run lead to win.
As everyone else filed out of the ballpark, Kit went to wait in the corridor. The fluorescents flickered overhead; she caught the scent of grass and mud, of the cigarette Tim was sneaking, of the faint basement dankness underlying everything in a way so familiar to Kit that she didn't find it unpleasant anymore.
Home. Corridors almost exactly like this one, like in any minor-league park in any city. She'd waited in them countless times, for her tall father with his bristly moustache and his scent of sunshine and linseed oil, and later for her brother.
Henry came out of the locker room, took one look at her face, and pulled her aside, out of earshot of the other guys. "Katie, what's wrong?"
"I think Bryan and I broke up."
"Oh no! What happened? You wanna skip burgers? We can leave now…"
Kit laughed. It felt good—so good, in fact, that she almost couldn't stop. But she managed to get hold of herself. Hysterics outside the locker room were not an effective coping mechanism.
"No, it's OK," she said. "We can go. I think it'll help." She didn't really feel like being alone with herself just yet anyway.
Some of the Syracuse players came along. The right fielder, a tall, skinny Dominican kid named Luis, had been traded from the Whalers only a month ago, and hugged Kit, and said "Hi, hi," which was just about the only English he knew other than baseball words. The Syracuse shortstop was there too.
Henry started chatting in Spanish with his friends, and Franglopanini came over to Kit.
"Hey," he said, almost shyly. She was so used to overconfidence that a little bit of hesitation struck her as cute. "Hi," she said.
"I'm Alex."
She shook his offered hand. "Kit."
He was awfully big—a good three inches taller than Henry, and built broader. Now, off the field, he seemed a little uncomfortable with his height, as if he were a bit younger and had just had a growth spurt.
"You're Henry's…?" He let the question trail off.
"Sister," she said.
"My baby sister," Henry said, appearing behind Kit. He shot Alex a look that said And don't you forget it.
*
Mary, the waitress, shook her head at the group when they came into Platters, but Kit knew her too well to miss the twinkle in her eyes. Kit also didn't miss the fact that their three regular tables were already pushed together at the back of the restaurant.
Kit sat between Henry and Brendan, the third baseman. Alex took the seat across from her.
She peeked over the menu, which she didn't need to read, at him. He had remarkable eyelashes, thick and black, fringing those deep, dark eyes.
He glanced up and caught Kit staring.
Her first impulse was to drop her gaze, but that stubbornness was still working in her, so she kept on staring. She didn't even blush.
Flash of white, white teeth as Alex grinned at her. Wow, Kit thought. That was quite a smile. Dimples, even. She hoped he didn't realize how that smile could easily make an otherwise sane girl forget her name. She didn't think he knew.
Henry nudged her, and she snapped out of it to see Mary with her pencil poised. Kit ordered her usual cheeseburger and vanilla milkshake.
If Bryan was at home, waiting for her, let him stew in his own juices. If he'd left, he was already gone, and she might as well put off dealing with it.
***Then I skipped a bit, as is also my wont, to get to Alex's POV after they leave the restaurant.***
Alex glanced back and saw that Kit was trailing behind the group.
She looked up, right at him, too direct to be accidental, and his heart thudded alarmingly.
He wasn't sure he liked her, actually, which was why it worried him that he couldn't stop staring at her, not in the diner, not now. She looked awfully young. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but some of it was too short to stay up and fell around her face at just cheekbone-length. Alex had caught himself wanting to reach across the table to toy with it probably a dozen times during dinner.
He let the others go on. They didn't seem to notice. San was telling one of his stories, punctuated by hand-waving and sound effects.
He wanted to tell Kit that he wasn't the kind of guy she had every right to expect him to be. He was sane and steady: that was what he did.
But she walked straight to him and put one hand on his shoulder, and tilted up her little chin, with her perfect mouth half-open and her blue-or-green eyes half-closed, and there was no way he could resist; so he leaned down. She waited, he would always remember afterwards, and he was the one who leaned down and kissed her. Her hair between his fingers, as he pushed those shorter strands back from her face, was softer than anything he could think of, and when she opened her mouth beneath his, she tasted like vanilla. She went up on tiptoe to slip her arms around him. He started to ease away, but she made a tiny protesting noise, and he couldn't stand it and pulled her close again. She lifted a hand to his face, small fingers against his cheek, so cool that he knew he must be burning.
Then she smoothly stepped back, and said, "Thanks. I needed that."
And walked away.
Here's some of my giant high-school era WIP, which was called something stupid.
Twilight drenches the house, making trails of stars of the last few streaks of sunlight upon the dusty windows. Connell sits crosslegged in one warm square of floor, watching the trees' shifting color, trying to remember a poem he once read. The trees take leaf by leaf the evening.
He can sit like this for hours as the days and nights spin on without him.
Danielle
When we inherited the house, it was all dust and dropcloths, its age obvious with every choking breath we drew.
Connell opened all the windows, and most of them haven't been closed since.
He also began what I suppose is best described as a project, turning the house into something only he could envision.
He tamed the garden; I helped him discover its paths and its plan. But once I began to spend my days in classes, the straight walks I'd found with him turned into mazes.
Lately he has worked inside the house, painting one of the corner rooms on the second floor.
One wall is already done, or at least he's stopped working on it for the moment. It bears an interwoven mandala-like pattern in violet, indigo, and gold. I stop to see what he's doing and find him at the wall that gets the morning sun, covering the old white-turned-gray
paint with brilliant blue.
I watch him for a moment. "What will you do when it's finished?"
Connell shakes his hair out of his eyes, a streak of cerulean on his cheek making him seem painted for war. "It will never be finished."
But I know the house as it will be is already a complete picture in his mind. There will be an end to this madness of activity, and every day fills in a little more of the canvas stretched in his mind.
"Someday," I say, and leave, not because I have said all I want, but because sometimes you have to try to speak his language, and it is made more of silences than words.
Though he is my twin, our minds seldom have a common ground. I don't know why he became himself and I me. Could I have been that way too, shadows and tongues? Perhaps.
My mother once told me that when we were little we spoke our own language together before we knew how to make adults understand us. I wonder if that has not been Connell's path all along, the refinement of a speech for communicating with no one but himself.
This was the one in which the house decided it wanted to be a POV character, which was kind of cool. This was also the WIP in which I feel like I started to find my own voice, and got a bit more experimental, learning how to do things my way. The cool stuff is too embedded in the crappy stuff to salvage, though.
*
This is the start of a romance that would never get published, because, as is my wont, I've gone and made the hero a verboten profession - baseball player, in this case. I gave him a giant, goofy last name because a big ol' name like Garciaparra or Saltalamacchia on the back of a jersey is one of those things I find inherently amusing. The title was going to be The Trouble with Mr. Franglopanini, which they would totally have made me change if I had gotten the baseball stuff past 'em to get it published, but it made me giggle every time.
I'm pretty fond of the bit where Kit is waiting for her brother in the hallway. I think I did an OK job with the description there. And I like Henry's overprotectiveness, especially given that he's otherwise kind of a cad.
*
"The problem with you, Kit, is that you always find something to be unhappy about. A new job won't make you happy. Nothing will until you decide it will."
About ten retorts popped into Kit's head at once. The first three or four were scathing comments about armchair psychology. The rest were about how Bryan had just turned a minor disagreement into full-out verbal warfare, and at her brother's baseball game, where they were supposed to be having fun.
What actually came out of her mouth was one thing she didn't intend to say at all. "Maybe my job isn't making me unhappy," she snapped. "Maybe my fiancé is."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Yes, I did, but Kit—" He stopped.
He had no idea how to deal with this, Kit realized. She had always been so nice. She had gone out of her way to avoid conflict. She and Bryan both hated scenes.
Scenes, she thought now, were not always a bad thing.
"I'm tired of this," she said. "I'm tired of you thinking you know me. You don't."
"Then." He wanted to argue, or shout, or something; she could tell. But he wouldn't. That was the problem with Bryan. "Then I guess I should go." He said it with that damnable calm she had come to hate, that calm that made her feel that, to him, not even she was worth getting worked up over.
"Go," she said simply.
He did.
Kit could easily imagine Bryan going back to their apartment and doing whatever it was he did—playing with typesetting scripts, probably—until she came home. Maybe they wouldn't talk for a little while, but tomorrow one of them would say something carefully neutral, and the other would just as blandly answer. Before long it would all be back to normal. That was how it happened when they fought. Not that they had ever really fought. They had minor disagreements, and quibbles that came down to semantics. They kept their emotions out of it.
Kit had been keeping her emotions out of things for so long that she wasn't sure she knew how to feel them anymore.
She decided not to worry about Bryan now. If he was home when she got there, fine. If not, fine.
She thought this over for a second and realized that it really was fine. In fact, she honestly didn't care one way or the other.
Maybe it was her stubbornness, or maybe it was just the perfect summer-afternoon weather and the way the ballpark always felt like home, but Kit was OK. She really was. Besides, her brother was up, and she was damned if she was going to be gloomy right now.
Henry looked at the first pitch, a fastball that barely nicked the inside corner. He couldn't have hit that one, Kit knew. Luckily, the pitcher didn't know, and the next one was off-speed and toward the outside, just where Henry liked them. Kit watched his eyes light up as he got a read on it early enough to hold back for that crucial fraction of a second.
He smacked what was surely an easy double toward left center. But the Syracuse shortstop jumped straight into the air and snagged it. "Wow," Kit said under her breath, impressed in spite of herself.
That was the third out. Henry kicked at the dirt disgustedly. Kit caught his eye and shrugged.
The first Syracuse batter got to first on a single that Kit felt was cheesy. The second hung in there and drew a walk, quite a feat with San pitching. That brought up the shortstop. Kit studied him as he walked to the plate, trying to see if his ability to defy gravity showed in any way.
He wasn’t handsome, at least not in any traditional sense of the word. But Kit, long immune to the charm of cute ballplayers, found she couldn't look away from him. From this angle she could read the name across his back: Franglopanini. She could see, too, the intensity of his dark eyes, the stubborn set of his mouth, the curve of his biceps against his jersey.
San's first pitch bounced in the dirt and got past Tim. Kit groaned inwardly as the runners advanced. Second and third, nobody out.
Tim trotted out to the mound to have a word with San. They were going to intentionally walk the shortstop. Kit didn't like it, but she could hardly blame them.
Franglopanini stepped out of the box and took a couple more swings, staying loose. He glanced into the stands, at Kit, for just a second, then back for a longer look. Something sparked in those liquid-dark eyes. Is he interested in me, or my body? Kit wondered almost idly. All the Whalers knew that, as their second baseman's sister, she was off-limits, but none of the visitors would know that yet, unless Henry had gotten a lot more aggressive with his hands-off campaign.
Tim got back into position behind the plate. Franglopanini shot Kit a shy half-smile before stepping in again.
Huh, Kit thought. Interested in me.
San seemed to get his mental balance back after the wild pitch, and struck out the next three Syracuse batters to get out of the jam, and the Whalers held onto their one-run lead to win.
As everyone else filed out of the ballpark, Kit went to wait in the corridor. The fluorescents flickered overhead; she caught the scent of grass and mud, of the cigarette Tim was sneaking, of the faint basement dankness underlying everything in a way so familiar to Kit that she didn't find it unpleasant anymore.
Home. Corridors almost exactly like this one, like in any minor-league park in any city. She'd waited in them countless times, for her tall father with his bristly moustache and his scent of sunshine and linseed oil, and later for her brother.
Henry came out of the locker room, took one look at her face, and pulled her aside, out of earshot of the other guys. "Katie, what's wrong?"
"I think Bryan and I broke up."
"Oh no! What happened? You wanna skip burgers? We can leave now…"
Kit laughed. It felt good—so good, in fact, that she almost couldn't stop. But she managed to get hold of herself. Hysterics outside the locker room were not an effective coping mechanism.
"No, it's OK," she said. "We can go. I think it'll help." She didn't really feel like being alone with herself just yet anyway.
Some of the Syracuse players came along. The right fielder, a tall, skinny Dominican kid named Luis, had been traded from the Whalers only a month ago, and hugged Kit, and said "Hi, hi," which was just about the only English he knew other than baseball words. The Syracuse shortstop was there too.
Henry started chatting in Spanish with his friends, and Franglopanini came over to Kit.
"Hey," he said, almost shyly. She was so used to overconfidence that a little bit of hesitation struck her as cute. "Hi," she said.
"I'm Alex."
She shook his offered hand. "Kit."
He was awfully big—a good three inches taller than Henry, and built broader. Now, off the field, he seemed a little uncomfortable with his height, as if he were a bit younger and had just had a growth spurt.
"You're Henry's…?" He let the question trail off.
"Sister," she said.
"My baby sister," Henry said, appearing behind Kit. He shot Alex a look that said And don't you forget it.
*
Mary, the waitress, shook her head at the group when they came into Platters, but Kit knew her too well to miss the twinkle in her eyes. Kit also didn't miss the fact that their three regular tables were already pushed together at the back of the restaurant.
Kit sat between Henry and Brendan, the third baseman. Alex took the seat across from her.
She peeked over the menu, which she didn't need to read, at him. He had remarkable eyelashes, thick and black, fringing those deep, dark eyes.
He glanced up and caught Kit staring.
Her first impulse was to drop her gaze, but that stubbornness was still working in her, so she kept on staring. She didn't even blush.
Flash of white, white teeth as Alex grinned at her. Wow, Kit thought. That was quite a smile. Dimples, even. She hoped he didn't realize how that smile could easily make an otherwise sane girl forget her name. She didn't think he knew.
Henry nudged her, and she snapped out of it to see Mary with her pencil poised. Kit ordered her usual cheeseburger and vanilla milkshake.
If Bryan was at home, waiting for her, let him stew in his own juices. If he'd left, he was already gone, and she might as well put off dealing with it.
***Then I skipped a bit, as is also my wont, to get to Alex's POV after they leave the restaurant.***
Alex glanced back and saw that Kit was trailing behind the group.
She looked up, right at him, too direct to be accidental, and his heart thudded alarmingly.
He wasn't sure he liked her, actually, which was why it worried him that he couldn't stop staring at her, not in the diner, not now. She looked awfully young. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but some of it was too short to stay up and fell around her face at just cheekbone-length. Alex had caught himself wanting to reach across the table to toy with it probably a dozen times during dinner.
He let the others go on. They didn't seem to notice. San was telling one of his stories, punctuated by hand-waving and sound effects.
He wanted to tell Kit that he wasn't the kind of guy she had every right to expect him to be. He was sane and steady: that was what he did.
But she walked straight to him and put one hand on his shoulder, and tilted up her little chin, with her perfect mouth half-open and her blue-or-green eyes half-closed, and there was no way he could resist; so he leaned down. She waited, he would always remember afterwards, and he was the one who leaned down and kissed her. Her hair between his fingers, as he pushed those shorter strands back from her face, was softer than anything he could think of, and when she opened her mouth beneath his, she tasted like vanilla. She went up on tiptoe to slip her arms around him. He started to ease away, but she made a tiny protesting noise, and he couldn't stand it and pulled her close again. She lifted a hand to his face, small fingers against his cheek, so cool that he knew he must be burning.
Then she smoothly stepped back, and said, "Thanks. I needed that."
And walked away.
