life in the subjunctive mode

I don't know what's going on here but it takes place in Schenectady. The idea has been floating around in my head for a while but I don't know where it is going and I don't really care.

~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

We left at dawn on the longest day of the year. Everyone that we spoke to, from your grandmother to my father’s cousins, said that we needed to go east, so east we went: from apartment buildings to peeling houses with broken-down bikes piled in weedy yards, to the huge derelict building that might have been a factory or might have been a tenement house or might have been nothing at all, abandoned before it was finished. We climbed over the fence and skidded down the embankment just as the sun cleared the tops of the trees in the distance, and crossed the train tracks with its golden orange light burning our eyes.

Most people agreed that it was bad luck to talk before you’ve left your city, but once we crossed the train tracks, we were allowed to talk again, so we said things like, how far do you think it is, and, what do you think it will be like? What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get there? Neither of us had any answers to these questions, so we left them hanging in the air, and we kept walking. The field wasn’t quite as flat as it looked from the roof of the apartment building where we used to meet to plan our journey; there were ridges and dips, and unexpected pieces of twisted brown metal hidden in the grass. You wanted to collect the old nails from the train tracks, but they weighed too heavy in your pockets, and so you dropped them one by one back into the dirt like bread crumbs. I caught at the feathery tops of the grass in my hands and ran the tips up and down your bare arms, even after you laughed and told me to stop.

Let’s go, I said. Don’t you want to make it there before nightfall?

Common sense told us that we needed to pass through the woods before we would find anything worth finding, so we headed straight through the marshy fields towards the dark line of trees turned black by the sun. Our sneakers got stuck in the mud, and water sloshed up into our socks. I took off my shoes after the first hour because we wouldn’t need them anyway, but your grandmother had just bought you new ones for your birthday and you didn’t want to leave them behind.

I can deal with wet feet, but Grandma would kill me if she knew that I’d wasted all her money, you said.

I said I'd type this up ages ago, but it's only in the past two days that I made headway and completed its typing. This is completely unedited. It actually sucks a lot more than I thought it did, which I'm going to attribute to massive leaps and bounds in my abilities as a writer and not the fact that I haven't looked at it in months.

It's also missing most of its italics, because I'm too lazy to go through and reformat this entire thing from Word.

( Ghosts )

So the ending is super-cheesy and stupid, and I'm definitely going to rewrite it., and possibly just kill it and end it differently. I had the new experience of reading this as I'm typing it, and, having forgotten what I wrote or how it was going to end, thinking, 'Wow, I hope he doesn't choose that, that'd be really stupid and unrealistic ... oh, no, he wrote it like that. What an idiot.' Gonna change that.

DUDE. I will post the story later once I've typed it, but I had to announce somewhere:

I just finished a rough draft.

It's 33 pages long, handwritten on looseleaf. By my estimation, that's about 11,000 words, give or take a hundred.

Also, I did this in four days. That's the fastest I have written in an extremely long time.

The story is sort of a story, sort of a character sketch, but in either case, it's a rewrite of the story I gave the horrendous title of What Child Is This, only less 'every character is a cardboard prop here to be in awe of the mysterious main character'. I tried to give it more of a feel of Nyali's place in Yggdrasil House, that while his story is the one being told, there are others going on in the background. To that end, it's far more leisurely. I wrote what I felt like writing, and while it has problems, I like it. I like that it meanders a bit, going in to explore a bit of Felix, and Chatma, and Nameless Telepathic Komodo Dragon, as well as the dynamics of living in Yggdrasil House. Best of all, while I knew that it would end with Tsuya returning, and them dying together, I was completely surprised at everything that happened in the middle. And yet it still worked out. It was wonderful. Because I had no idea what was going to happen, the plot doesn't start until page 6, and there are a couple of lackluster passages that I need to get rid of or change. But it was fun. I got to write something fun, and I was able to do it in my own voice, not in the voice of a character. I was able to write it and just cram as much world building into it as I wanted, and I could show off without worrying because it's on its own separate continuity -- not Revolutionary or Apocalyptic.

The title is now 'Ghosts', because that turned into one of the ideas of the story: that Tsuya and Nyali are stuck in the way that they are because they needed each other so badly that the Rift World itself froze them in time until they were able to find each other. That reminded me of ghosts, and how one common superstition is that ghosts linger in the world because they have unfinished business. So I made it so that there were other 'ghosts' (I called them something else in the rough draft, but I'm going to change it to ghosts) like them, who all wanted something so desperately, to such a ridiculous degree, that they literally froze themselves in time until such time as they could find what they sought. For instance, a catalyzing character, Juan de Sayil, needs to feel religious. It's been such a strong part of his upbringing, which was Catholic, but he never truly felt any spiritual presence. So the second that he wandered into the Rift World from colonial New Spain, the mental torment that this was causing him made him freeze in time. Eventually, about two weeks before the story takes place, he does find a religion which speaks to him, probably an obscure local religion, and is able to die into that religion.

Yay! It was also fun to age Nyali by 560-odd years, and make him old and well-educated and world-weary, but still quintessentially Nyali. I think I succeeded for the most part.

Now is the time of sleeping, and tomorrow will be the time of typing. Then, eventually, editing.