Writing meme gacked from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
desayunoencama
Jan. 18th, 2004 09:57 pmpegkerrPost a quote from something you've written (whether or not you consider yourself an author). It can be published or not, from any sort of writing--a poem, a fiction, a letter, whatever.
For mine: this is a freewriting exercise, done early in the writing of the ice palace book, when I posed the question for myself "What do the fish have to say?"
It is cold here under the ice. The water tastes of coldness. We are sluggish, not in any hurry. The sun is gone and we will not see it for months, but we are content. The ice waxes and wanes again. As it waxes, we grow wise. The water tastes stronger, intensifying the flavors. It beats against our gills, and a gulp is colder, heavier, must be savored more slowly. We move slowly. We hover under the skin on the pond, just scraping the tops of our fins on the rough underside of the sky. The magic is cold, white and hard. As the season turns, the magic grows milky, then translucent, and more light comes in. As the magic thins, people come through, people we call, people like you.
Why do we call you? Why, it is good to talk to someone. One grows weary of the other fish in a pond. Our blood senses you up above the magic, and that impresses us, that you swim across the top of the magic, where no fish can ever go.
It moves through the water, making us sluggish and hardens overhead. As the magic hardens, we notice more, but we move more slowly. We eat less, but simply rest, in the sluggish depths. There is no movement. We hover motionless above the mud, where the small animals sleep for the winter.
We wonder about you, who pass above the magic as we pass below. How do you survive, out of the water, up in the thin dangerous air? In the summer, there is no thought, only movement, as we swim about and eat the mosquito larva, and the waterbugs. In dark time, there is only rest, and thought.
Occasionally, something forces the magic open overhead. Sometimes, when that happen, light pours through the magic, like from the sun. And sometimes we are called up, through curiosity, or because one of us sees an offering. It is rare, but there are those of your kind who will talk to us then. But sometimes one of us goes up, when the light pours through the magic, following an offering, and then that one never comes back. We do not know where they go.
We know the underside of power, and the mosquito larva, and the roots, and the mud. The air is hidden from us in winter. This is probably good.
The water is thicker in the winter. It is black and cold. The cold surrounds us and penetrates us, and we slow and slow and then stop, only our gills moving, slow undulations, lazy ripples of movement, the only movement which shows that we are alive.
For mine: this is a freewriting exercise, done early in the writing of the ice palace book, when I posed the question for myself "What do the fish have to say?"
It is cold here under the ice. The water tastes of coldness. We are sluggish, not in any hurry. The sun is gone and we will not see it for months, but we are content. The ice waxes and wanes again. As it waxes, we grow wise. The water tastes stronger, intensifying the flavors. It beats against our gills, and a gulp is colder, heavier, must be savored more slowly. We move slowly. We hover under the skin on the pond, just scraping the tops of our fins on the rough underside of the sky. The magic is cold, white and hard. As the season turns, the magic grows milky, then translucent, and more light comes in. As the magic thins, people come through, people we call, people like you.
Why do we call you? Why, it is good to talk to someone. One grows weary of the other fish in a pond. Our blood senses you up above the magic, and that impresses us, that you swim across the top of the magic, where no fish can ever go.
It moves through the water, making us sluggish and hardens overhead. As the magic hardens, we notice more, but we move more slowly. We eat less, but simply rest, in the sluggish depths. There is no movement. We hover motionless above the mud, where the small animals sleep for the winter.
We wonder about you, who pass above the magic as we pass below. How do you survive, out of the water, up in the thin dangerous air? In the summer, there is no thought, only movement, as we swim about and eat the mosquito larva, and the waterbugs. In dark time, there is only rest, and thought.
Occasionally, something forces the magic open overhead. Sometimes, when that happen, light pours through the magic, like from the sun. And sometimes we are called up, through curiosity, or because one of us sees an offering. It is rare, but there are those of your kind who will talk to us then. But sometimes one of us goes up, when the light pours through the magic, following an offering, and then that one never comes back. We do not know where they go.
We know the underside of power, and the mosquito larva, and the roots, and the mud. The air is hidden from us in winter. This is probably good.
The water is thicker in the winter. It is black and cold. The cold surrounds us and penetrates us, and we slow and slow and then stop, only our gills moving, slow undulations, lazy ripples of movement, the only movement which shows that we are alive.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-18 08:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-18 08:38 pm (UTC)The quote above feels ponderous, a bit like T. H. White's tench.
K.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 05:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 05:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 10:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 03:04 am (UTC)When are you going to get back to the magic system? It all holds so much promise.
B (from Paris)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 06:24 am (UTC)For here:
When I was nine, a fox ran between my father's legs with a curse tied in its tail, and though he shot and killed the beast, by day's end he was dead, his skin the same bright red as the fox's pelt. I swore revenge, and only years later learned that the oaths of a nine year old girl, forged from a pure rage and a still innocent love, are sometimes more binding than the most learned and complex sorceries. Revenge is a lonely life. By the time its fires have cooled enough that you look about you for a moment to consider other things, you are too hardened for the intimacies of friendship, for the trust of a lover, and these cold truths serve to quench the blade of your revenge, to further temper its edge. I threw myself into my studies, bent on discovering the man who had killed my father. I kept the fox's tail locked in a metal box under my bed, waiting until the day I could untie its workings and know its maker.
from "Family Ties"
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 09:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 10:09 am (UTC)It's the title of a story of mine that appeared in an anthology titled THE SHIMMERING DOOR in the U.S.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-19 10:19 am (UTC)That was a very pretty piece of literature. thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-20 04:43 pm (UTC)