Class Notes from Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories - Week One

(Another excerpt from the story I’m currently working on.)

Nicholas woke slowly. It was chilly in the room, and when he shifted his body between the clinging flannel sheets, he could encounter zones of warmth and cool. Two down comforters were draped over them as well; Nicholas could not sleep without their weight on him, while Feniker, who seemed to burn with a furnace’s metabolism, would inevitably throw most of them off during the night, onto Nicholas.

He could hear Feniker’s soft breathing, a burry almost snore, a sound so uniquely Fen that it tugged a smile onto Nicholas’s lips, knowing what his lover’s face looked like when sleep-slackened, how it must look right now. He had drawn the drapes across the windows; the hotel’s front looked out onto the plaza, but Nicholas had opted for one of the less ostentatious back chambers which he secretly thought more pleasant, overlooking the back gardens, which were the more handsome vista, even when leaf-deprived and blackened by the cold, due to the green cedars that ringed it round.

The hotel was stirring. Soon enough his breakfast, with plenty left over for Feniker, would arrive and be deposited outside the door with a discreet knock. The hotel’s own brand of fish tea, with an odd peppery brackishness. He still wasn’t sure whether or not he liked its aftertaste, even after living in the hotel for almost two months now. He had lived with his father before then, but fire had taken their mansion, and both had taken themselves to alternate lodgings. He had chosen this hotel, which he could afford on his lavish allowance, for the way it managed to combine proximity to the student quarter with luxury.

He rolled on his side and found Feniker watching him, no longer snoring, blue eyes bright in the morning light, almost luminous.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Nicholas said. He leaned over to give Fen a kiss. Fen’s fingers tangled in his hair, drew him down to meet lips.

“What’s on your agenda for today?” Fen said.

“I am meeting with my father to go over the plans for the new factory in Cloudmarch,” Nicholas said.

“Will you be visiting it? The expedition is going through Cloudmarch. You could come out with us, say goodbye there, do whatever you needed to do with the new factory.”

“I would serve my father ill as a factory manager,” Nicholas said. “I’m not good with such things.”

“You have a mind keen enough to keep up with anyone in their classes,” Feniker said. “If you chose to exert yourself. Instead you pretend yourself slower than you are, and use it as excuse to while away your days drinking fish tea and playing cards.” He pushed himself off the bed and strode across the chamber, naked, to reclaim his clothing from the bench below the window.

Nicholas gathered the covers around himself, reluctant to lose their warmth, even in pursuit of what the kiss had promised. “What of you, what does the Duke’s secretary do today?”

Fen shrugged and drew on his trousers, sat down to pull on his boots. Behind him the window panes were laced with frost, a pattern like the ghost effluvium a professor had demonstrated at the last University lecture Nicholas had attended.

Thinking of that, he protested, “I do go to some lectures after all, and meet with Professor Wirewit to work on my paper.”

“Meetings that are few and far between,” Fen said. He caught himself. “Look, I don’t mean to nag you.”

“Will you come tonight and see a play with me?” Nicholas asked.

“I will have papers to transcribe,” Fen said. “I have been burning the candle at both ends, and I must decide where I should be spending my time. I do not mean to imply that it should not be with you, only that I would rather spend time enjoying your company, than sitting together staring down at a stage while the audience gossips so loud that we cannot hear half the lines.”

The reasonable tone, the exaggerated patience in his voice made Nicholas want to smack him.

This is going to be a longer, 8-10k word space opera piece that I got asked to do.

Most people called her Phoenix. Her former crew used “Captain” before that and “Sir” afterward. Her hair was silver – not white, but genuine, metallic silver, a long fall against her pale blue skin, the color of a shadow on a piece of willow ware, that made her seems ageless despite the century that lay upon her, and all those decades of pirating.

They said she had been the best slideboard rider of her time, and perhaps the best battleship pilot of all time, back before her parents and lover were killed and she turned rogue.

They said she had done terrible things in her pirate days.

They said she’d been ruthless in her rise to power, moving up the chain from god knows where, an origin she’d never, ever spoken of to anyone, not even her own daughter. She’d killed some captains, slept with others, called in favors and maneuvered and betrayed and seized power with a brutal efficiency that still underlay what now seemed a calm and orderly, rules-bound government.

They said she had killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, or people — sometimes at a distance, sometimes up close, with knife or fist. They said she’d killed a crew member when the shuttle she was in needed its mass reduced and the man hadn’t even argued, just nodded and stepped into the airlock, never said a word as the door closed and the lock cycled, just stared in at his captain as she stared back.

They said time had mellowed her.

They said working with Mukopadhyay, even though he was crazy as a spiral comet, had mellowed her.

They said helping colonize a whole planet, setting up its government, the rich and intricate system that now encompassed the whole solar system called Shiva, had mellowed her.

Not to mention motherhood, they said, a change which no woman escapes going through during pregnancy. It alters the hormones in your system. Softens you. Makes you less rash, less harsh. Takes away even the sharpest edge, not to mention the hormonal craziness, which some women never recover from, after all.

Sure, changes you in a good way, they were quick to say.

But softer, definitely softer.

She’d never do those sorts of things now.

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