Advice please

jaxsteeples

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Jun 29, 2010
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I'm writing my novel in erratic, out-of-sequence chunks. Not everyone here will like it. It has a strong story and the erotic content is slow to build up. If you like a shot of neat erotica there are thousands of stories here that get straight down into it. I want to explore characters. I want to ask the question how far would you go for the person you love? I'm not even sure I'm going to include this but please tell me what you think anyway.

Three months after our first meeting, somewhere in North Nottinghamshire, Jasmine and I will be holed-up inside a half constructed barn conversion. It's getting dark, huge gobs of rain are splashing down from the bare rafters overhead. I’m peering through the steamed-up scope of a Barrat M107 Anti Tank Rifle. All I glimpse are momentary lights with comets tails. They are like slow meteors, tracers moving across and above the ground heading towards us. We have twenty one rounds of Armor Piercing Incendiary left . The squad of angels are circling, zeroing in. Angels are almost impossible to put down but there are weaknesses in their body armor and when these fuckers go up they burn, like gasoline.

Jasmine starts to get up. I grab her wrist to stop her. Angel snipers rarely miss. There are two on the low hillside covering the advancing group.

"I’m surrendering Charlie, now. I’m an officer. They will follow rules of capture and treatment."

Jasmine effortlessly extracts her wrist from my grip and places her hand gently on my forearm.

My eyes must have been pleading with her because she's gazing at me like I’m a child. It's one single look distilling milennia of her existence. Her hand is warm and I realize I've been shivering.

"We can't fight them, not like this. They will capture me, then they will torture and kill you." She sighs, maybe at the sheer cosmic stupidity of it all. "They enjoy this stuff Charlie."

She leaned forward, kissed me on the lips, flooding my cold body with warmth. When we broke apart she stared at me hard. There would be no more arguing with her.

"Charlie, this is what you do next: You don’t look for me. You don’t come after me. You run now, and . . . you forget me."

She tilted her head to one side starring into me as if trying to will my thoughts into agreement.

"You promise me you will do this ?"

I swallowed and closed my eyes. My body was shaking violently. When I said "Yes", it was the hardest lie of my life.

Without another word Jasmine stood up, placed her hands on her head and began walking towards the plowed field in the direction of the lights. Like grotesque fireflies the angel-lights had reached the drystone wall and were taking up their positions at the boundary of the field two hundred meters
away. Somewhere deep inside me each step she took felt like a blade striking on bone.

Ten steps out, a round slammed into the ground spraying her with a geyser of mud. She didn’t even flinch. My last sight of her was raising her hands higher and turning a three hundred and sixty to show she wasn’t wired with explosives. It was balletic and beautiful and the image burned itself into my consciousness. Cold rain trickled down my face mingling with hot tears.

I willed myself up. I sprinted over the broken bricks in the yard, across the narrow track and threw myself down the embankment, sliding slithering on my belly through mud, nettles and builders waste.
She had ordered me to live.

What I really said to myself when I lied to her ? "Do I fuck promise anything like this. You know what I’m really going to do? I going to RV with your unit , procure a heap of Semtex , enough Kevlar corded ropes and then I’m going start taking out the gates of hell."

It was the outline of a plan.
 
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Just a few thoughts and reactions:

1. You certainly got my attention from the outset. Lots of energy.

2. I'm intrigued by the angels and hell stuff. Do you know Wyndham Lewis's 'The Childermas'? Given your theme, you might be interested if you don't.

3. Tense shift problems:

i) I liked the future opening:

... Jasmine and I will be holed-up inside a half constructed barn conversion ... It's unusual.

ii) I was comfortable with the shift to dramatic present:

... It's getting dark, huge gobs of rain are splashing down from the bare rafters overhead. I’m peering through the steamed-up scope of a Barrat M107 Anti Tank Rifle. All I glimpse are momentary lights with comets tails. etc.

iii) I was less comfortable with the sudden switch to past narrative:

My eyes must have been pleading with her because she's gazing at me like I’m a child. It's one single look distilling milennia of her existence. Her hand is warm and I realize I've been shivering. (DRAMATIC PRESENT)

"We can't fight them, not like this. They will capture me, then they will torture and kill you." She sighs, maybe at the sheer cosmic stupidity of it all. "They enjoy this stuff Charlie." (STILL DRAMATIC PRESENT)

PAST NARRATIVE STARTS HERE: She leaned forward, kissed me on the lips, flooding my cold body with warmth. When we broke apart she stared at me hard. There would be no more arguing with her.


I'm not being pedantic about this. The unexplained (and unnecessary?) tense shift intruded on my reading. It took me away from the story.

4. As a fragment, this has a lot of potential, I think. However, it is a fragment. The problem with writing novels (as I know to my cost) is keeping the initial energy going through thousands of words, not just the first few hundred. Do you know where the story is going? Do you know how your fragments link together?

The trick, I think, is to stay loose and anarchic enough not to kill the story for yourself, but to be sufficiently organized and disciplined to have a structure to grow into - or something like that. I think there's a paradox at the centre of novel writing. How does one plan and not plan at the same time? How do you let it grow organically but engineer it at the same time? (But I'm probably rambling now.)

Good luck with it.

- polynices
 
J
The trick, I think, is to stay loose and anarchic enough not to kill the story for yourself, but to be sufficiently organized and disciplined to have a structure to grow into - or something like that. I think there's a paradox at the centre of novel writing. How does one plan and not plan at the same time? How do you let it grow organically but engineer it at the same time? (But I'm probably rambling now.)

First, I am painfully familiar with the paradox you describe here. It's like poring over maps and planning out every possible stop on a backroads road trip before you leave, and then getting on the road and going where the moment takes you. It's often surprising the different ways you discover to reach your destination, and there's always unexpected problems and adventures.

My solution to the problem in writing is to go at it as hard as possible, try to write everything and explore every possibility, no matter what they are. Write a ton of scenes, fragments, sketches, etc. Then I revise, repeatedly, and I learn what works and what doesn't with these particular characters and stories. Eventually I distill all those pieces into a (hopefully) coherent whole. It's a lot of work, and probably horribly inefficient, but I'm pretty sure efficiency is not always essential to creativity.

As to the fragment:
sketchy characterization (duh, it's a fragment) but the connection between the characters is strongly drawn. I don't quite know who these folks are, but I know who they are to each other.
I'm not sure quite where this scene fits, it feels like the end of the beginning. If it is the whole beginning, do better with the characters. If Jasmine is going to be this guys motive to burn down heaven and/or hell, make her worth it to us. If that is being done earlier ... well .. good.

Great description of battle. My only thought there is to let us know there are snipers on the hill before you stop her from standing up.

Looking forward to reading more of this.
:devil: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" :devil:
 
Not rambling at all . Thank you for re-tensing everything. This is everything I missed at school. sr71pt
and others are helping with punctuation, and you showing me how to tense words. This is going to be difficult because its how we tend to speak when telling a story. I can see, on paper, natural dialogue looks a mess.

Angels and demons? They are intriguing. I envisage the whole set up as an experimental 'food' processing plant . Wars are engineered, religions- propaganda underlying self perpetuating systems of conflict,- music to soothe beasts on the path to the slaughter house. Angels invented insurgency, divide and rule and systems of mass control. In this work they have no more regard for us than we do for cattle. Hell is a POW/death camp.

'Demons' were the section that rebelled.
 
Nerk . Thank you.

That condensing bits and putting together fragments maybe its a poet thing. Maybe poets are the original attention deficit disordered . Whohwa! Look at that swallow six inches off the wet grass. Now where did I drop my car keys? All fits together in the end.

It is the mid-point of the story. Charlie is a gentle, asexual, hermit-like, totally traumatized ex-special forces soldier. Jasmine is a succubus and an Intelligence Captain in the resistance . She's burnt-out and injured. She's only ever partnered one human being before, all the rest she's assassinated, killed in battle or screwed for information.

It's a quirky love story.

Now here's a question for you: If there is no hope, how did anyone get back to tell us what was on the gates? Maybe knock and run?
 
I always figured it was like a coat check. Leave your hope at the door, but hold onto your ticket, so you can get it back when you leave.

Who gets to leave?

Orpheus (forgot to retrieve his hope on the way out)
Dante (snuck out the back door by crawling over Satan's ... back door)
Oddyseus (escaped Scylla and Charybdis in a day, but Calypso took 7 years)
Aeneas (dude, how are we going to found a civilization with no chicks?)
Innana (a sort of babylonian prometheus, but with tits)

I think that might be it. There would probably be more, if they were clearer about their hope abandonment policy.

Nerk . Thank you.

That condensing bits and putting together fragments maybe its a poet thing. Maybe poets are the original attention deficit disordered . Whohwa! Look at that swallow six inches off the wet grass. Now where did I drop my car keys? All fits together in the end.

It is the mid-point of the story. Charlie is a gentle, asexual, hermit-like, totally traumatized ex-special forces soldier. Jasmine is a succubus and an Intelligence Captain in the resistance . She's burnt-out and injured. She's only ever partnered one human being before, all the rest she's assassinated, killed in battle or screwed for information.

It's a quirky love story.

Now here's a question for you: If there is no hope, how did anyone get back to tell us what was on the gates? Maybe knock and run?
 
With tits? Will go off and research I'm into strong heroines.

Did you think Beatrice was worth it BTW? I read somewhere she was a girl he'd glimpsed on a bridge, don't know the rest of it. Got irritated because I'd been a fan of Thunderbirds and all I could hear was "FAB Virgil," but in no way was that Dante's fault.

From what I know The DC trilogy was political/ theological satire. It was the second book I ever read seriously. The first was Machiavelli's Advice To A Young Prince.

deus est non voluntarius efficio panton

Think what he was really saying

Deus can perussi meus sudo underpants
 
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I never read paradisio and only limped through about half of purgatorio. once it stopped being about horrific and ironic torments, meh. I lost interest.

Please feel free to read into that as much as you like.
 
I envisage Jasmine having an eclectic bunch of operations based contacts . One is a midgit who spent the whole of the nineteenth century being pimped around Europe. Today he is an arms dealer and still has a flow of women coming and going from his office. I'll let you figure out why. Also very useful as an organic tripod, should you need one.

Would that kind of thing keep you interested?
 
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