Post by m-Dok on May 27, 2006 21:36:13 GMT -5
I decided about a month ago to try and write a fictional, novel-length story, and I just now started it. I am only part of the way through chapter one, and this is an excerpt from about half of what I've written so far. it is a project that, if determined, I WILL finish, but it will probably take at least over a year because I procrastinate contstantly, run dry on inspiration often, and school work will always take time and energy away from such pretentious goals as writing a book.
Anyway, though comments and criticism probably won't change how i'm writing this thing... I never put my work out for people to see it, so I might as well put it out here to see what any of you think of it so far.
Again, this is not a finished portion of work. It only a small part of what should be chapter one of what I plan to be an expansive set of chapters. anyway. I'd really appreciate any comments or suggestions to help motivate me, I guess.
Anyway, though comments and criticism probably won't change how i'm writing this thing... I never put my work out for people to see it, so I might as well put it out here to see what any of you think of it so far.
Again, this is not a finished portion of work. It only a small part of what should be chapter one of what I plan to be an expansive set of chapters. anyway. I'd really appreciate any comments or suggestions to help motivate me, I guess.
1. Haikus About Running“Smother the children
We’ll run before they catch us
breathing their own air”
Silas pecked fervently at the smooth keys of the electronic typewriter propped atop his folded legs, his tongue sliding across his pale pink lips. Greasy black hair draped like thin curtains across his intense brown eyes and caught on the rectangular frame of his thick-rimmed glasses, spilling over. He’d said it nearly a million times before, but he could see perfectly fine from behind his long bangs. Like peering through a set of black blinds. Blinds set behind a one-way mirror, though, of course, because while he could certainly observe the world, he knew the curious, prying world could not observe him. However, his elders and more socially-involved friends would protest, insisting that he must be blind as a bat. Crippled by his own hairstyle.
As if the vain lot of them weren’t ‘crippled’ by their hairstyles themselves. Put in bondage by their own wardrobe. Slaves to fashion. Silas sneered instinctually.
He was not blind; not close to it. However, he would admit this, if at least to himself: behind his hair, behind his clothes. Behind his typewriter and cameras, and behind the glass, curtains, and blinds, he had his own world. Silas Riverford, he could create his own reality, and he could live in it and make it his own. This hidden sanctuary belonged to no man, but to his conscious and his demons. His will and his way. He sniffled gently and anxiously tugged his paper and freshly-inked poem from the machine weighing down his lap.
Holding the paper up in front of him with his skeletal white fingers, his gaze intensified as he scoured his work, as if scanning for imperfections in the 17 syllables laid before him. He sniffled again. He could smell the musty air of his own disheveled four-room apartment, saturated with the dank, thick scent of stale cigarettes. Traces of paperwork, torn envelopes, and receipts littered his bare floor, occasionally dancing in the artificial and inconstant breeze sputtering from the rusty vent on the far wall. His walls were just as naked as his floors, though graced with the occasional ash smear or cigarette burn. He’d removed all of his possessions from the small apartment in an attempt to clear his own muddy, troubled thoughts, as if he would be able to pull more inspiration from the noisome air than from an inhabited living space. Hacking softly to clear his throat, Silas rolled a fresh sheet of white paper into the typewriter, and sat in silent thought, waiting for a fresh stream of consciousness to guide his fingers across the keys.
In about a quarter of an hour, it came.“The season slipped by
so after it we ran, but
we missed the winter”
Silas knew the meaning just as much as he understood the last one. The last two. The last dozen. In fact, he never really knew what he was writing or saying. However, communication had always been a problem for him, so he avoided it at all costs. Mrs. Riverford, his mother, had paid for books suggested by a child psychologist which contained step-by-step guides to overcoming fear of social interaction, behavioral skill-building exercises, and how-tos on self-esteem. Books teaching you how to love yourself. The truth is, Silas knew, you can’t love everybody.
He pushed his drooping glasses back up to the bridge of his nose and forced them into place, back into the dent they had already made in his fragile, translucent skin. Through the square, nonreflective lenses perched near his long, slightly crooked nose, the shadowed bags under his round, reflective eyes seemed to drip with age he didn’t possess. He was twenty-two, but in his eyes, in the mirror, he could see and feel the despair of an aged witness to many deaths.
Right now, the mirror through which he saw was his paper in his typewriter in his lap on the floor. And the words poured out.“As the cities burn,
our lies, our lives, they smoulder,
but still we run, shamed”
