Six Sentence Sunday: Sahmara's Sunset

I've been meaning to join in the Six Sentence Sunday fun for well over a month. Every time Sunday evening rolls around I smack myself in the forehead and pledge to remember to get a post ready for the next week. What can I say, I've been a smidge scatterbrained thanks to an overwhelming workload lately. But I finally remembered!

Sahmara's Sunset was my first NaNoWriMo novel. My first fantasy novel. The novel that made me realize there was life after finishing a novel I'd been writing for years. Writing it was a very liberating and inspiring experience. I recently revisited Sahamara's Sunset as part of this year's NaNo 50k, rewriting the first half from scratch and finally creating some words I'm willing to let others see.

The first lines...

Tall grass ripped at Sahmara’s bare legs as she ran headlong across the moonlit field. She glanced over her shoulder. The shadows of her recent captors had grown distant, their voices no more than whispers on the cool wind. Sahmara slowed, not of her own volition, but because her body threatened to collapse if she didn’t. Bent low, she hid in the thick blades. Her chest heaved as she fought to catch her breath.

Victims of the Knife: The search for Ms. Wildstar

Xander peers at the slowing stream of brain jello seeping down the side desk. "Quick! Our writer must be falling asleep. We need to get to her computer to search for that Indian's story."

"Thanks for the recap." Nekar rolls his eyes.

"Sorry, I though we might need one since it's been several days since our last entry. I tried to keep it subtle and quick."

"You call that subtle?" The older man shakes his head. "Whatever. We have work to do. Gather up all pins and thumbtacks you can find. We're going to need some footholds."

Xander nods and dashes off. Nekar sits on the paper-lined path, pondering the few glimpses he's had of the computer high above them. A scrap of paper catches his attention. His heart beats faster.

Xander rushes back up the path, his arms full of colorful tacks and a few bent straight pins. "What are you smiling about?"

Nekar points to the paper. "She loved me once. Ms. MC and I, we really had something."

"Yeah, and as I recall, you ended up wanting to kill each other, and at one point, you plucked out her eyes."

"She got new ones. Better ones."

"I know, they're around here somewhere. Locked away in a box, I hope." Xander shudders.

Nekar scowls and yanks a handful of tacks from Xander's arms. He slams the first one into the side of the wooden desk at waist height. "I can't believe our writer cut me so effectively from my novel. Every single scrap of me." He rests a booted foot on the first tack and reaches up to plant another. "I added conflict, tension and some excellent fight scenes, if I do say so myself."

"You're uhh, going to run out of tacks before you get much farther. Not to mention, how are you climbing upward and inserting tacks one handed? You would have taken them all, maybe put them in a bag of some sort, or even a pocket, so you had both hands free. Ever consider that this lack of planning issue you have might be part of the reason you got cut?"

"It wasn't my lack of planning." Nekar jumps to the ground. Paper flutters away from the immediate vicinity. "It was hers. It's all her fault. If she'd used any sort of outline, she would have seen-"

"That you were unnecessary from the start?"

Nekar's face turns red and his eyes narrow. He grabs Xander and throws the lanky youth to the ground, pinning him there with his much larger form. "Ever consider that you making random insults to instigate conflict was the reason you got cut?"

"It was an innocent observation!" Xander squirms.

"That's weak. You're a weak character. That's why your here."

"Yeah, well, we're both here. And it sucks. So unless you plan on plucking my eyes out too, we should concentrate on getting up that desk and saving Ms. Wildstar."

Nekar gives him one last long glare and lets Xander up. "Fine. Get me a bag for these damned thumbtacks, Plan-ahead-boy, and let's go."

to be continued

Where did monday go?

Not only monday, but I seem to be missing the past five or so days. I've been so busy I don't even have time to be distracted from writing, let alone write anything. Too much work, oodles of kid obligations, now we've added track practice to the onslaught of driving to and fro, weasel prototype creations, work, cleaning out flowerbeds, firepits and picking up a billion sticks (ok, so I stopped counting after about fifty, but I swear it was a lot of sticks) and more work. On the plus side, my creative wells have been filled and characters are talking to me again. Maybe it's just the voices because I'm so darned tired and delusional because I'm not able to eat lunch until 3pm, but I'm happy to hear anything beyond tumbleweeds bouncing around in there. I see some suspicious looking characters milling around under my desk. Goodness only knows what they're up to, but here's to hoping I have enough time to formulate a second post this weeks so we can find out.

What is our dear writer doing?

Nekar taps his foot on the paper lined path and glares upward. "We've been standing here, waiting and waiting for a month and half. What the hell is our dear writer doing?"

"She's at her computer a lot, she'd got to be writing, right?" Xander peers above the piles of crumpled paper to the desk looming above them.

"You'd think, but no one new has arrived since that indian that took off with Ms. Wildstar meandered toward us. I think she's working and that ooze flowing down from the desk is brain jello flavored."

"She's gone?"

Nekar shakes his head. "Uh, yeah. That indian is a zombie, a free-agent. You know, not bound to stay in place, frozen, just waiting for the next scene to be written."

"Oh crap." Xander glances down the path to the spot he'd last seen Ms. Wildstar. Empty. No visible tracks in the dust.

"Exactly. Who knows where he's taken her." Nekar takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "We need to find some pages of whatever story he came from. We don't know if he's a murderer, a savage or one of those misunderstood emotional wrecks. He could have killed her by now."

"Right. Pages. But his story isn't down here. It's up there." Xander points to the faint glow of the computer high above them. "We'll have to search the hard drive. Do you know how to do that?"

"We'll figure it out together. Our writer has been falling asleep at her computer late at night. We'll wait until then and move in."

"Got it. Now, I've got to piss."

Nekar frowns at the younger man. "We don't talk about that. It's something everyone does but no one wants to read about."

"I know, but it's been six weeks. It's going to be an epic stream. I'll meet up with you later."

to be continued...

rewriting deja vu

As I waited for my car to get fixed the other day, I was trapped in a tiny waiting room with my laptop, no internet connection, and a mental decree that I wouldn't sneak over to play solitare instead of writing. I had critiques of one of my wounded short stories staring at me and a big blank space indicating where I'd left off over a month ago on my editing efforts. I didn't go back a reread anything, I just started up where I'd left off. Then there came a paragraph that several people had comments on. It needed some tweaking.

My usual method for tweaking is to read all the comments then go to a blank page, and using what I remember of the area (I hadn't read in over a month) see how I could write it differently. Then I paste the new effort in and compare the fresh one with the original. Creepy thing was, they were almost word for word. I'd managed to tighten a smidge, but that was about it. I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday but that's apparently because my brain is too busy remembering entire stories word for word. Not that I could recite it if put on the spot, but give me a keyboard and it spews out. The mind is a mysterious thing.