Day 3 (Team July)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Here is the post to update with any extracts, thoughts, or comments you might have for today.

Keep the fires burning!

(Considering the temperatures we're currently having over here, I expect spontaneous self-combusting on my part. *sighs*)

Comments

[elmey.livejournal.com]

Well, both violence and a kind of fragility happen to be involved with this particular memory ;)

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Heirs and Graces

Phase 3 -- July's writing:



Only a few more words today, but I also wrote another blog post (this time for Friday) and at work I finally finished the first draft copy for a 15k word booklet.

Reynard and Jones are still facing up to each other:

"I hope that thing's not loaded. You could do someone a nasty injury waving it about like that."

"That's the general idea." Jones took another two steps forwards, and pressed the gun to Reynard's head. He spoke softly. "See I know where you've been. I know who you've been talking to. People won't like that, if I tell them."

"What I know," Reynard said, as Jones very efficiently relieved him of his own gun, and two of his knives. "Is that it's a hanging offence if you pull that trigger."

"Who's going to care about scum like us? I kill you, that's one less villain on the streets. You think they'll care about one minor snitch, when there's bigger crimes they could be solving?"

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

So what is going on in the other room?

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Jones, you'd better pull that trigger quick - we all know what happens to villains who explain at length how they're going to kill their victims :)

Good, action-filled scene.

[saki101.livejournal.com]

You have been very productive on many fronts!

Is a deal between villains about to be struck?

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Excellent description there.

[six-old-cars.livejournal.com]

Like last month, the first was a zero-words day due to work for my brother. Unlike last month the second was a work day, not a write-in day, so I didn't get started then either. However, I sat down for an hour or so this evening and knocked out 400 words or so.


Only a small snippet. Lucy and Catherine are "doing homework" with "Songs of Glory and Victory" playing...

"Yeah, I know," Catherine began. "But-"
Lucy shushed her as the music faded out. They sat in silence for a few moments but no new song of glory took its place. "Oh, that must be the end of the album!" Lucy said cheerfully. "Shall we listen again?"
Catherine grimaced at the thought. "Oh yes, let's!" She tried not to sound sarcastic but wasn't sure she'd managed it.
Lucy grimaced too as she hit play and the rousing opening anthem began.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

A stubborn knight there.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Interesting opening there.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Heh. I take it they're being watched?

[saki101.livejournal.com]

Is this both a cover for their conversation and a "message" for whoever might be listening?

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Ooof.

[saki101.livejournal.com]

Something similar to what happened a while back on the roof of Bart's.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Excellent snippet there.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

And we all know how hopeless villains are at taking advice too.

Thanks.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Something's about to be struck.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

I don't like the idea of that album one bit.

700 words so far

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Still working on the opening scene (all new writing). I'm finding this tough going. The closer I get to the end, the more the Inner Critic is screaming at me that my narrators are too similar and there are too many words and I shouldn't do it this way and and and and I'm beginning to panic.

Awful Poems by Awful Poets We Learned at School
(Maurice narrating)

Finally, with her mouth full, she asked me, "So, what do you think of Gabriel Hunter?" A bit of potato fell to her lips and her hand went to her mouth in apology. She swallowed back the rest. "I mean the poet."

"I know who you mean." Gabriel Hunter, the surviving poet of a doomed generation, or so he liked to style himself. God knows that was a month of lessons I could not get back. All spent learning this cantankerous rant of a poem "The Dove" which bestowed on its reader every bit as much displeasure as it contained in its endless stanzas. I remember being caned because I forgot it was written in anapaestic metre; for the life of me I still cannot remember what that is.

Reading the poem later by torchlight, at a more relevant phase in my life, with German bombers dropping their payload over my head as I huddled with hundreds of other Londoners in Oxford Circus underground station, I of course realised what as a disillusioned schoolboy I could never have seen: it was a masterpiece on the horror of war and the rage of women. It had been madly controversial in its day, which was well before I was forced to read a bowdlerised version in a dog-eared schoolbook in the middle of a drowsy, sun-filled classroom with a trapped fly buzzing and banging at the window. (I knew all too well how that fly felt.) By the time it reached my eyes, the controversy had disappeared and Hunter was regularly wheeled out to speak at any Great War related shindig. Then he pinched somebody's bottom at the wrong time and they silently decommissioned him. Since then he had lived in seclusion for years. Of course he could afford to: since the schools had published his poem in their anthology, he was filthy rich.

"Have you read many of his poems?" I enquired of Lucia, before realising that of course she hadn't, since he had written only one great one and hundreds of pieces of forgettable doggerel in the intervening years. But Lucia was not listening. Her loaded fork hovered halfway between the plate and her mouth, before being set down again.

[six-old-cars.livejournal.com]

Not watched, as such (they're in Lucy's bedroom), but probably listened in on.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you've been very productive!

Good scene - very convincingly nasty

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Good scene - Catherine and Lucy seem to be adapting well to how to survive in their situation.

[six-old-cars.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. The album is very patriotic, a gift from the Commodore to all his youth club members.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Great progress!

Maurice's sarkyness comes across very clearly in this :)

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

My LJ has I think 75 entries tagged "second draft". I've had to tag the bloody characters too!

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm thinking of deleting most of it though. I don't want Maurice hogging too much of the reader's emotional space. She should be coolly interested in him, no more.