Writing Contests and Fees

I’m holing up and working hard on the sequel to Beasts of Tabat. I let myself have July 1 off because that was a travel day, but yesterday I managed 5k words, though that last half was like pulling teeth. This morning I got up and sat down without checking e-mail and got 1000 out of the way. My goal is 25k each week until the middle of August, which should see me with Hearts of Tabat in a decent final draft, several stories I’ve promised to people completed, the YA novel further along down the road, and perhaps even some more of Exiles of Tabat (book 3) drafted. I will be teaching while here — tomorrow is the first section of Writing Your Way into Your Novel.

To keep myself honest, I’ll be posting word count and WIP excerpts.

So, yesterday:
Word count – 5k
Hearts of Tabat current word count – 82184
SFWA time – hour and a half on call plus e-mail plus skim thru discussion boards

From Hearts of Tabat, an early chapter, still in rough draft form.

This is what a riot looked like. Pink velvet darkened to plum by spilled punch, and flickers of angry firelight glistening on the sticky surface. Two shattered windows, broken glass spiderwbs in reverse, light from the aetheric lamps hanging over the street outside washing in, acitinic blue white over the parquet floor that had been Benarda’s pride, two hundred and thirty different kinds of wood, each dedicated to a different Trade God, zebra-striped bits of southern wood like dappled petals around her boots, as though she trod on clots of dirt-streaked snow, chips of mammoth ivory salting the petals in tiny white freckles.

A punch bowl, shattered by the first brick that had come in, landing soundly in the middle beside the overturned table, sending punch and bits of curved luster-glass everywhere, a great puddle of liquid changing the colors of the woods beneath them, tinting them dark and rose.

Two paintings askew on the walls, others lying on the floor in a jumble that drew the eye as much as their subject matter, impious and arresting, the torches that had set the rioters outside afire. Someone must have known what the paintings would be like, must have tipped people off, organized the crowd.

There. Marta’s eyes, glittering hate at Adelina across the room. Gods, even now the woman would rather hold her grudge against Bella rather than worry about keeping herself alive.

This is what a riot sounded like: angry shouts coming in through the windows, drowning out the frightened whispers all around Adelina (“Was that Bella Kanto who just went out? Of course I knew she’d be here.) Benarda somewhere behind the scenes, ordering someone else to do something, it was unclear what. The woman’s best chances of keeping her gallery further intact had just walked out the door in order to stand down the crowd, which had grown from the few dozen that had been here when she and Bella had first arrived, immediately after the now-absent Duke’s speech

This is what a riot smelled like: smoke and sweat and alcohol and all the mingled pomades and perfumes ““ who was still wearing vetiver, that went out last season? And what was that intriguing cinnamon and musk blend, was that an actual edge of rum in it or some remnant of the punch?

That was what a riot felt like: Leona’s small fingers in Adelina’s own, Bella’s tiny cousin and the center of all this clamor breathing hard, the gasps and gulps of air she took in when stressed.

Adelina’s own pulse beat fists against the hollow of her throat, pressed tight fingers behind her brows every time the streetlight struck her eyes, hammered at the pit of her belly, unnerving her.

In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.

I see her first while the Mexicana 747 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

The title plays off nearly every line: “I see her first,” (who? is it one of the women from the title?) “a double female blur,” “the near blur,” “the younger blur, “registering nothing,” finishing up with “I never would have looked at them or thought of them again,” at which point the reader is screaming why? why don’t you see them? The answer to that question is crucial to the story.

Here’s another Tiptree beginning, this time of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which uses the strategy of referring to a memory to reveal the conflict. The memory is connected to gender and embarrassment, which will also turn out to be crucial to the story.

Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly — or was he pushed? –into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is Tiptree at her best, examining gender norms and conventions with a ruthless, scathingly honest eye. Somehow that first moment of embarrassment, that moment of being in “the strange toilet” encapsulates so much of what that story is about and how alien the sexes can be to each other as well as how strange their container, the norms that make them up, which constitute the walls of “the can” itself, are. Look at how the center of his masculinity is framed visually: the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. There is so much going on in that first paragraph, including sensory details like the twitch of his insides, the blare of a giggle, the pattern and threat of a zipper, that it’s worth copying out, pulling apart sentence by sentence to figure out how it’s working.

Let’s finish up with Tiptree in a moment that puts everything up front, in the short story “We Who Stole the Dream”:

The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.

Woah. We don’t know what’s going on precisely, but we know crucial details. We have a deadline and it is only twelve minims. While we don’t know how long a minim is, we know it’s not much time because of that “only”. Plus, there’s an auditory echo of “minute” that makes us think they’re of similar length.

What’s at stake? This lives of children, for pete’s sake. Not just child, but children, multiple. And we know how they’ll die: suffocation. It would be hard to write a tauter, more dire beginning.

Writing exercise: write three first lines. They can state the stakes, as in the third example, or refer to some memory or object that encapsulates the conflict, as with the example from “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Include two titles for each, one that plays off the beginning and one that does not.

For bonus points, read “The Women Men Don’t See” and use that as your inspiration.

Feel free to post some of your best first lines on here, I’d love to see some!