First Page Review bloghop

This post is part of the First Page Review bloghop. The idea is simple. On your own blog, post the first 1,000 words of something you're writing or have written, then sign up on this page linking your 1,000 word post. Visit other people on the list and read theirs, then leave a comment to let them know if you liked it, what worked, what didn't, and if you'd keep reading.

Just for fun, here is the opening from The Ashes of Home, sequel to Ghosts of Innocence, which will likely be my next project once I've polished and published Tiamat's Nest.

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'Hope springs eternal' the ancient saying goes, but hope is a poor foundation to stake your life on. Shayla Carver, master assassin (retired) and first governor of the Freeworld of Eloon, was shielded by more security than any normal paranoid could hope for.

Any normal paranoid would have died years ago.

Shayla did not believe in hope. The official security measures were there to keep out the bounty hunters and the merely competent. The serious threats she relied on her own senses and training to deal with.

Her airways had clamped shut instinctively at the first salt-sweet taste on her tongue. Years of assassin training identified the airborne drug immediately. Peritax. A small dose would render her senseless in seconds.

Ambushed! In my own fucking bedchamber! Shayla pushed aside the annoyance. Questions of who and how could wait. All that mattered now was survival.

Time slowed as Shayla's mind went into overdrive. Long seconds marked by the thump of her heartbeat in her ears. She knew she had only moments to assess her situation and deal with it.

Peritax was not a poison, it would just leave her helpless. And it dispersed and broke down quickly, which meant there had to be someone nearby to release it and to finish the job. Whatever that might be.

Shayla's eyes scanned the bedchamber while she stumbled forwards a couple of steps, feigning the effects of the drug.

Two figures stood to one side in servants' robes. Barras and Gingallia? No! These could not be her servants. They were still standing for one thing. Any innocent party in this room would be comatose by now. And these two moved with stealth and menacing purpose. One behind Shayla, cutting off her escape, and one between her and the doors leading out to the balcony to her right. The only other way out of her suite.

Any more?

Shayla's lungs screamed for release. To draw a breath. A breath would mean death. Hah! I'm a poet! The irrational thought flitted through her mind on butterfly wings of madness. Focus! Shayla realised that she was losing her fight against the drug just from that small taste.

Her hand crept towards the hilt of the knife under her robes. She stilled it and instead stumbled another step towards the bed. I can't fight these two. If the drug didn't take her, anoxia would.

Another step.

The figures closed in.

Shayla let herself flop towards the bed, buying herself a few precious moments. As she pitched forwards her legs folded under her, then she launched herself across the bed. She rolled, outstretched hand reaching for a concealed button under the edge of the headboard. As she rolled, she glimpsed a face in the shadows of a hood. It looked like Barras, but Shayla noted nose plugs, a tiny breathing unit clamped between thin stretched lips, and eyes filled with hate.

A razor line of blue fire bisected the space she'd just vacated. A rapier shimmerblade!

Her groping fingers found the hidden button as she completed the roll. The bed collapsed behind Shayla, halved effortlessly by the shimmerblade. Tall windows ahead of her flew open and she continued her motion, hurdling the waist-high sill out into a hundred foot drop.

Gravity took Shayla as she forced the last dregs of tainted air from her mouth and drew in a deep, clean draught from the night rushing past her face. A second later, her feet connected with the broad eaves overhanging her bedroom windows. She hung upside down in the grip of an artificial grav field and drew her own blade, watching the lit window for signs of movement.

Every bedchamber should have its secret emergency exits.

Shayla hoped that her disappearance might have confused her attackers. If at least one of them leaned out of the window to see where she'd gone, she'd quickly have one less to deal with.

No such luck.

First one, then the other, appeared through the opening in a tuck roll, too fast and just out of Shayla's reach. Damn, they're good! They must have figured out what had happened. But she'd really expected no less. Only the very best assassins ever got this close.

They both landed in front of Shayla, back to back, in fighting crouches. The nearer one saw Shayla and signalled to his companion, who also turned to face her.

The first one, the Barras lookalike (traitor or impostor?) swung his rapier. Shayla's own blade flashed blue and met it with a jarring wrench.

A shimmerblade was a rare and fearsome weapon, highly prized by undercover agents as a weapon of stealth. When activated, the vibrating crystalline edge could shear through anything less than military grade vehicle armour -- or another shimmerblade. But when two such blades met in hand-to-hand combat, the results were random and potentially catastrophic for one or both combatants.

Shayla's knife hand went numb. She barely managed to keep her grip on the hilt as she stumbled back against the wall towering over her head to meet the ground hanging impossibly above.

But at least she had been prepared. She'd activated her shimmerblade at the last moment and knew what to expect.

Her opponent staggered back in the other direction. One foot found the edge of the eaves, and he stepped, without thinking, to keep his balance. But he was now half out of the edge of the grav field, and conflicting forces led his reflexes astray. He lost his balance. The planet's natural gravity reclaimed him and he fell, shrieking, into the night.

The remaining assassin reached into her robes. Her hood had slipped, revealing a good likeness of Gingallia, one of Shayla's senior personal servants. It also revealed eyes filled with fear and shock at her companion's sudden demise. This looked like the junior of the two, but she was still a force to be treated with respect.

How I found the write path

This post is brought to you via the special blogfest, How I Found the Write Path, hosted by Carrie Butler and PK Hrezo.

The Prompt: Write a letter to yourself when you first started writing toward publication. Details here.

Dear Budding Botanist,

It's exactly ten years on since you put first halting and painfully self-conscious words on the page, when you decided (and Space only knows how the heck that happened) that you could write a novel.

In those first months, as the pile of words grew, you were convinced that the literary world would beat a path to your door, lapping up the sheer beauty of your glowing prose.

*Cough*

I've got news for you, and you ain't gonna like it!

Publication is a cold, uncaring, profit-motivated business. It doesn't care about you or your stories unless it can see a clear and sure-fire path to making money out of you. I'm not knocking this, it's a legitimate business model especially given the vast number of talented writers out there, but it does lead to behavior that makes it enormously difficult for new writers to break in.

The good news is that the world of writing is a wonderfully diverse and supportive community. All real writers know how hard the publication process is, and they band together to help and encourage each other. I don't think you'll find anything like it elsewhere in the creative arts.

So, here are some things you should know to help you on your way.

Have fun

This is paramount, and it is not some feel-good wishy-washy idealistic crap. Readers can tell when you're having fun and when you're just going through the motions. The parts that you had most fun writing will often also be the most enjoyable to read.

Take the opportunity to torture your characters. Make then act in ways that you would never dare. Bring the reader into your mind and share the wonders of your imaginary world. Write what you enjoy and make your enthusiasm shine on the page. Have fun.

Know your own mind

Throughout the writing and publishing process, you will be bombarded with advice. The more advice you hear, the more confused you will get. For every "thou shalt" you read about, there is someone equally experienced preaching the opposite.

For the most part, there are no absolute right answers. Sure, there are some answers that are more or less likely to lead to a good outcome, and some that will almost certainly torpedo your efforts, but there's a vast no-man's-land in between where it's largely a matter of preference.

So, what to do?

The most important thing to remember is that this is your journey. Not somebody else's. If you heed some advice and it doesn't pan out, the only person to blame is yourself, so become self-reliant and take responsibility for your own destiny. All I can advise here is to read and research and draw your own informed conclusions. Know your own mind and work out what's right for you.

That's not to say be obstinate and insist you know best, but choose carefully which advice to follow and which to set aside. Do so knowingly, and own the outcome.

Pull your finger out

Your story is doing nobody any good sitting on your hard drive. You are in danger of wasting years on the agent query lottery and there are respectable alternatives to traditional publishing. You are living in times when technology and social media are connecting people like never before, and shaking the foundations of brick-and-mortar bookselling. Be a positive part of the revolution.

The onus is still on you to craft the best product you possibly can. Don't take shortcuts. Polish your story until it is something you are proud of, until you reach the point where you find you are editing but no longer really improving. Then...

...Get off your sorry butt and get it out there.

Good luck and best wishes
Old and Creaky Botanist

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Credit:
Ian S. Bott
www.iansbott.com

I give my permission to use my entry in the e-book compilation. 

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Origins

Blogfest time again! This one is hosted by DL Hammons, Creepy Query Girl, Alex J Cavanaugh and Matthew MacNish.

On February 13th, all participants will answer a most vital question: When and how did you first become a writer? How did it all begin? What are your writing origins?

Writing was something that kinda sneaked up on me from a distinctly unpromising background.

At school, I was OK at English but struggled with stringing together coherent thoughts on paper. It was the same with other subjects, and the one common theme was writing. I disliked it. It wasn't so much the writing of words, it was coming up with what to say in the first place. My mind always went blank.

The one subject I excelled at was mathematics, which involved no writing. Bliss!

Guess what I studied at university? Feeling insufferably smug whenever one of my friends had to pull an all-nighter. Essay crisis? Pah! Mathematicians don't write essays.

And so I continued through life, thankful never to have to write another essay or piece of creative prose ever again!

Then, in September 2004, I started getting an idea for a story. Some images formed in my mind so vivid that I felt compelled to try getting them down on the page.

To this day, I have no idea why.

So I made my first faltering and painfully self-conscious attempts to write a scene or two of a novel. It was difficult. Each time I turned to my computer screen it felt like someone was watching over my shoulder, pointing and laughing at my ridiculous attempts. But it got easier.

And then I started wondering if I was doing anything worthwhile, or if it was nothing more than self-indulgent time-wasting. I found an online critique group, submitted my first chapters, and nervously checked email for responses.

And I made a wonderful discovery.

People didn't laugh. They didn't sneer. Sure, what I had done was nowhere near publishable - but it wasn't a lost cause.

Since then, I've worked to improve. The more I learn, the more there is to learn. I still struggle with ideas, with how to torture my characters (I'm way too nice to them), how to get them into - and out of - awkward situations, but I am now proud to count writing as a serious pursuit.

Global suckishness revisited

A group of awesome bloggers, Lydia Kang, DL Hammons, Creepy Query Girl and Nicole Ducleroir, had a great idea for a blogfest.

This is your chance to do some major catching up, and re-post a favorite blog post of your own that NEEDS to see the light of day one more time.

On December 16, re-post your favorite/most informative/most life-changing announcement/most ANYTHING blog post you want to re-share with the world.

Don't let a great post fade away into the ever-expanding blogosphere without one more shout-out!

Well, I can't pretend to post anything life-changing, or even especially informative, but this one, originally posted October 23, 2010, rather spookily foreshadowed the Wall Street protests a year later.

The Global Suckishness Index

I guess it's just coincidence, but there's been a bit of a trend in some of the recent blog posts I've been following. For example (and ignoring the many blogs dedicated entirely to rants about the state of the world) there's Sam's and Lettucehead's sad experiences in today's employment market, and David talking about the perils of the New York subway.

Anyway, it sparked some thoughts about the general suckishness of the world at large, and why this might be so.

And I came to a startling realisation.

There's a lot of natural danger and hardship out there, and disasters regularly hit the headlines - hurricanes, floods, droughts. But in reality those are minor blips and there is more than enough wealth and resourcefulness in the world to deal with them. Nature really accounts for only a tiny proportion of hardship.

The only logical conclusion is that the vast proportion (I'd guess maybe 95%) of human misery is entirely man-made!

Worse, much of the man-made misery is deliberate, and all of it is avoidable.

Some of it is down to religion - "my belief is better than your belief, and you'd better believe it!" - but most is caused by people wanting to get more out of the system than they are willing to put in.

And that's almost always expressed in terms of money.

Money is the root of all evil?

Here's a little thought experiment.

What if I suggested that money is unnecessary?

What would happen if we all woke up tomorrow in a world without money?

Chaos! Mayhem! Everyone suddenly penniless and starving!

But wait. Why should that be? Did the sun fail to rise on this penniless world? Did crops stop growing?

Stop and think for a moment. What if everyone simply carried on as they did yesterday? You got up, went in to work and did whatever you do. You went to the store and took from the shelves exactly what you would have done before. The shelves are still stocked because the people who stock them turned up as normal. The delivery trucks arrived, fully loaded, as normal because all the factories and warehouses kept working.

It gets better. You walk out of the store a lot quicker because you didn't have to line up to pay. OK, spare a thought for all those cashiers who suddenly don't have anything to do. Aren't they in trouble? Out of a job? But why would they be in trouble? In a world without money they don't need a job. Every other part of their life could carry on as normal. But then they could pitch in and help unload the trucks and stack the shelves and then everyone could go home early.

And think of all those millions of people working in banks across the globe. A whole industry, suddenly redundant. But nobody need go hungry because nothing important has stopped happening. And all those spare pairs of hands that could be turned to doing something genuinely productive.

When you look at it like that, the whole concept of money is nothing more than a vast and unnecessary drain on the planet.

OK, there's one glaring hole in this scenario. Everyone wouldn't just carry on as before. How many milliseconds would we be into the new day before somebody, somewhere, said to themselves "why should he get fillet steak while I'm making do with a Kraft dinner?" Human nature would kick in PDQ, and we'd all start taking more out of the system than it can sustain. That is why everything would descend into chaos and mayhem.

The truth is that there is more than enough food and water, space and energy for us all to live comfortable lives. But human nature compels us to want more, and to take it unless something stops us. Money may have its problems, but it's the most effective mechanism we have for putting a throttle on what we take from the world.

For me, the most frightening thing that global capitalism has unleashed on the world is a new and insidious form of life, and this is where the endemic global suckishness comes from. All the big corporations and financial institutions have taken on a life of their own and they are out of control. They've become self-serving and self-perpetuating, all-powerful, and utterly divorced from any moral or social conscience.

I don't think we're going to change human nature in a hurry, we probably can't do without money as a means of regulating access to resources, so as far as I see it the answer must lie in changing how we manage the flow of money. What we need are financial and corporate mechanisms that put the welfare of the general population back into the frame as the most important shareholder.

I don't pretend to have answers, this is only a rant after all, but I'm happy to accept any suggestions...written on the back of $20 bills.

Casting call

Before getting to the main part of this post, which is an awesome blog hop hosted by the lovely Carrie Butler, here are a few reasons for celebration...

Today is our seventh anniversary in Canada. Hooray!

Today is also this blog's second anniversary. I started it off here to mark our fifth year in Canada.

This is my 200th post. Wow! What a lot of nonsense!

So...on to the blog hop...

The idea is to feature a few characters from your book or WIP, using some kind of visual aid. Please click on the sticker above to see the list of other participants.

Now, although I liked the idea of this I tried searching for suitable images to capture my characters but nothing seemed right. Some people seem always able to lay their hands on the right graphic or clip art when they need it. I envy them. Ferreting out nuggets from the ocean of information out there is not my forte.

So in the end I gritted my teeth and got out paper and pencil. Let's be clear about this. I draw. I paint. But I don't do people or faces, so this is way outside my comfort zone.

Anyway, here are some of the main characters from Ghosts of Innocence.

First up, meet Shayla Carver, my protagonist. Badass assassin on the outside, inside she's just a messed-up little girl trying to find meaning in an ugly world. Having her home world fried by Imperial warships when she was just eleven didn't help matters.

Shayla's nemesis, Imperial Chief of Security, Chalwen ap Gwynodd. Not someone you want to meet down a dark alley. In fact, even in a brightly-lit room it's not a happy encounter. People prefer to avoid being the focus of her attention. Even a "Good morning" from Chalwen feels like a full-on interrogation.

Chalwen's right-hand man, Henri Chargon, Chief of Internal Affairs. Dark alley or not, chances are you'll never even see him coming. If Chalwen could be likened to a bear with a bad hangover, Henri is more like a snake. Sly, patient, and deadly.

There are many more characters in the story, but I want to give special mention to the overall setting. I see the worlds themselves, the palaces and deserts, the forests and mountains, as characters in their own right. So here is Jemiyal, a mining colony where the climax of the story takes place.

Thank you, Carrie, and co-conspirators Melodie and Lisa, for an exciting blog hop.

I Hate You

Tessa Conte, over at Tessa's Blurb, is hosting a Hatefest today.

The idea is as follows: On August 12th, post a story, an excerpt of your work or a poem you've written that shows HATE of some form or another - your character hates someone, someone hates your character, or maybe you hate someone / something?

So, of course, I've picked a passage from Ghosts of Innocence, because, of course, in a story of tit-for-tat revenge for the toasting of your home planet there's never going to be any kind of hate showing.

Is there?

Here, professional assassin and revenge-seeker, Shayla Carver, has stolen the identity of a newly-appointed public servant, has infiltrated the Imperial Palace, and is face to face with her unsuspecting quarry for the first time.

There were guards at the doors and ranged around the walls. None of them had weapons drawn. The nearest was a good twenty feet away. Shayla stood alone in front of the desk, scant feet from the Emperor himself.

She looked at him with a mixture of loathing and curiosity, carefully masked under an expression of bland obeisance.

I could kill you here and now!

The feeling was overwhelming. It would be so easy. She could end it now, and she didn't care what happened to her afterwards.

But she submerged the burning rage under glacial determination. I don't just want to kill you. I want to destroy you!

Emperor Julian Skamensis leafed unhurriedly through a sheaf of documents floating across the surface of the desk. He spent a few seconds reading each one, scrawled notes on some, signatures on others, oblivious to the simmering hate standing opposite.

Patience.

In order to calm herself, Shayla forced herself to gaze past the Emperor's shoulder to the tall windows behind him. Fountains played in the courtyard behind. Rose beds formed a blaze of regimented color. The whole effect was more sumptuous and welcoming than the solitary fountain and tired flagstones of the court outside Shayla's window. Her eyes followed the tracery between the window mullions, the high glass panels glowing in afternoon sun depicting scenes of Imperial conquest. She hastily tore her eyes away and instead followed the plush folds of green and gold drapes.

At length, the Emperor looked up from his desk.

Housekeeping note: The timing is a bit awkward for me, but this blogfest was just too interesting to ignore. When this entry gets posted my Internet access is likely to be patchy at best. I will try to get online to visit other participants, but please understand if I don't get around to it for a couple of weeks.