kadharonon | Entries tagged with writing

This follows roughly after the last post. I don't have a name for this story yet, though I've been posting worldbuilding nattering and random character and story stuff over on my tumblr under the tag "kit and edie".

Kit frowned at the unconscious woman in his sitting room. He was used to people reacting with shock and disgust when they first saw his face, but this was, as far as he knew, the first time a woman had taken one look at him and immediately fainted. A lowering reaction, and one he had not been prepared for. He knew he was ugly, but was he really that terrifying to behold?

She seemed very young. He had taken her for one of Charles’ daughters at first, had wondered if it had really been that long since he had last seen his friend, though that impression had lasted only a moment. Charles had only been married for thirteen years; while the birth of his first daughter had followed his wedding with what some thought was unseemly haste, this woman was far too grown to be that child.

“Who is she?”

“Edie,” Charles said, as if it should mean something to Kit. “Trev’s wife,” he added when Kit gave him a blank look.

Ah, yes, Trevor had gotten married, hadn’t he? How long ago had that been? Kit gave Charles’ companion another look. She was not much to look at, truth be told. Taller than him—which was never saying much—and slim, girlishly so, with an unremarkable face framed by a smooth and severe bob. The only attractive thing about her was the perfect little bow of her top lip, and even that he suspected owed more to cosmetic enhancement than any natural charms she might possess.

He realized now how misleading that slender girlishness was. He had taken her as a very young woman at first, perhaps no more than twenty, and had been ready to judge Charles’ brother severely for it. But a closer look revealed weary little lines creasing her face, the sort that only came with both age and deep exhaustion. This was a woman barreling towards middle age with the rest of them, and as worn down by life.

“And why is she here?”

Charles looked at him as if he were stupid. “Couldn’t stay on the road any longer tonight,” he said, stating the obvious. “Figured you wouldn’t mind us here. ‘S what Great Houses are for, isn’t it?”

“Trust you to remember that old custom when you need something.” Kit sighed. Oh, he had no doubt that one of the housemen was already making up bedrooms for these two—Hiram was efficient like that, and would have seen to it after stowing their car—but it had been a long, long time since Langford House had seen any guests, and Kit feared that bed linens and blankets in good enough condition for guests were in short supply. They would probably have to settle for slightly shabby, with not-too-many holes. “And that wasn’t the question I was asking. What brings the two of you to this part of the country?”

Charles’ cheeks flushed, a clear sign he was about to lie. “Doing Edie a favor. She and Trev had a bit of a tiff,” he said, shrugging his large shoulders. “He decided to teach her a lesson and ran off. Last we heard of him he was somewhere up this way, carousing.”

( Read more... )

This is an extension on some noodling I was doing earlier today that might be where this whole thing begins. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll actually be able to write this entire thing, but suspect I'm going to get bogged down some time in the middle, as Kit and Edie spend a month snowed in in Kit's Extremely Possessive house.

Kit Langford was not the sort of person who entertained. The house he lived in, large and old and inherited, had been built to host visitors, but these days most of the furniture lay beneath dust-cloths to ease the workload of his limited staff. If he could have rid himself entirely of that house and the expectations it brought with it, he would have. But Langford House was not so easily thrown off as that.

Some days, he wondered what would happen after his death. He had heard of old houses driven mad when their families died out for good, and the great workings that were necessary to lay them to rest. Langford House was not as old as some, but he was the last of the family line. Unless some by-blow came to claim it, Langford House would have no guardian, and the government that was so eager to keep him in place would likely have no recourse but to destroy one of the last Great Houses in the country, for the safety of all.

Even if he left it, it would still be his. A Great House devoid of its guardian could neither be safely leased nor sold to anyone not of its bloodline. So for now, he was bound to this place, by blood and inheritance, the last Langford of Langford House. And because he had never been the sort to go out into society, society did not come to him.

It was easier now than when he had been a child. Letters and telegrams had given way to telephone service; slow travel by carriage to railways and cars. He could conduct the business of maintaining the more liquid parts of his inheritance from a distance, and could demand that others came to him if they wished his company.

Not that anyone ever did, of course.

Langford House found it disappointing to so seldom be put to the use it had been built for. The Langford who had laid the foundation had had a large family; fourteen children, a half-dozen of whom made it to adulthood and produced children of their own. Langford House had been filled to the bursting in those days. But plague and war had taken their toll, until all that was left was Kit.

He thought that perhaps those long-ago Langfords would have given the whole business of creating a Great House up as the folly it was if they had known it was all going to end with him.

Because Kit Langford was never going to have a child of his own.

And here are some doodles as I try and figure out what Kit and Edie look like. Well, I already knew what Edie looked like; Kit's a work in progress.

I started using the last name Langford for Kit, but Edie's going to name their daughter Katherine so that she's named after her father and I absolutely refuse to have something that could be read as a Stargate reference in this. But it'll work for a placeholder, so here's ~1200 words from the very end of this story, probably.

There was the distant sound of a car, the tires crunching on the gravel drive that lead to his front door. Kit sighed and sank back in his desk chair, tempted for a moment to let his housekeeper deal with whoever it was and send them on their way. But no, better to not be a coward; no matter how terrible he felt, no matter how much he ached from the sleepless nights of the past weeks, he could put a good face on it and greet whoever this was with equanimity.

He was still making his way down the stairs when he felt it: Langford House’s shock of recognition as Kit’s daughter passed beneath the lintel of its front door for the first time. It took a great deal of effort to not rush down the rest of the stairs, and only the knowledge that he was one false step away from injury in his current state was enough to restrain him.

Edie. It had to be Edie. She must have come in order to… to what? Confront him? Or perhaps...
( Read more... )

This started as a piece of fanfic, but is so far from the source material that I started trying to file the serial numbers off... and promptly lost interest in writing more after I got through a few small chunks of it. But there are still some things I like about it. The main characters are now named Manfred and Hippolyta.

An introduction to Manfred as a small child, circa 1940-something:

There had always been stories about the castle. Manfred had heard them from his parents, when his parents still lived. He had heard them from other students in school, whispers of ghosts, of lights seen in the middle of the night, of pale figures moving. The more foolhardy among his peers had dared each other to go there late at night, though he thought that none of them had ever actually been brave enough to do it.

The only person he had never heard the stories from was his sister. Renate had always laughed when he’d come to her with a new story, laughed and told him there was nothing there to fear but crumbling stonework… and if he knew what was best for him, he would stay away, and not risk injuring himself where there would be no one to find him.
( Read more... )

Manfred meets Hippolyta:

Manfred glanced at his phone again. The last text from Renate’s friend, Hippolyta, said that she was on her way to meet him at baggage claim, but he couldn’t spot anyone nearby who looked anything like the photo Renate had shown him. Not that he would have expected her to look exactly like the photo—Renate admitted freely that it was from a party with a formal dress code and almost a decade old now—but the Black woman in the photo gave such an impression of glamorous abundance that she must surely stand out from a crowd, even if her hair and makeup and clothing were different.

“You Manfred?”

He jumped and turned around. The woman who had just spoken was short—she barely came up to his chin, if that—and dumpy, and dressed in the sort of baggy clothing he expected from a teenager… and, he realized on a closer look at her face, she was almost certainly the woman from the picture. “Hippolyta?”

She made a face. “Your sister still refuses to use anything but my full name, huh? I prefer Lee.”
( Read more... )

An amusing interlude in the kitchen about feeding habits, once Lee's figured out that Mani's a vampire (which takes approximately 30 seconds after she gets him into her apartment):

“Could I, uh, get you something to drink? If you drink things that aren’t blood, that is,” Lee added in a rush.

“Do you have milk?”

“Nope. Afraid not.”

Manfred sighed. “Then just a glass of water. I have some dried milk in my suitcase. Not as good as the real thing, but...”

“Wait a moment, I’ve got some half-and-half. For my coffee. Would that do?”

Manfred clapped his hands together, looking gleeful. “Oh, very well, if I can warm it up a bit.”

Lee poured out what was left of the half-and-half into a mug. Hardly a cup’s worth. “Will this be enough?”

“I will want to follow it with some of the dried milk, but it will be much better than just dried. Thank you.” He kept himself at a cautious arms length from Lee and the silver rings she’d jammed on each finger as he picked the mug up off the counter. She watched for a moment, amused in spite of her own caution with him, as he popped it into the microwave and watched it heat up with the rapt gaze of a predator.
( Read more... )

Sometime after they've been living together for a while, when Mani accidentally gets caught outside after the sun comes up:

Lee looked up, startled, as Manny slammed the door of their apartment closed. The sun had been up for a couple of hours at this point, and the day was blazingly hot, so she had assumed that he was already home and safely tucked away in his bedroom.

He stumbled into the living room and tried to fall onto the couch, but he must have misjudged the distance; he caught the edge of a cushion in his fall and wound up slumping to the floor instead. His face and arms—all of his visible skin—were flushed a sickly-looking pink.

Lee stayed the impulse to rush to his side long enough to pull some cold packs out of the freezer. “Jesus, Manny. You sunburnt?”
( Read more... )

Melissa’s computer was staring at her.

Or at the very least, she felt like it was. It didn’t help that the servers used to store the large data sets needed for governmental workings tended to get a bit, well, weird after a few years, and this weirdness had a tendency to bleed through to the computers hooked up to the network. Some of the computers used directly in finance magic got downright snarky; her friend Freddie from over in tech support had admitted that installing new software was more about negotiation than a straightforward routine with those machines, and had decided she didn’t know how the finance wizards could deal with it on a day-to-day basis. Out of curiosity Melissa had asked one of them, a spacey young man named Nathan she ran into at the water cooler from time to time, and he’d only shrugged.

“Yahnno. I jus’ do. ‘S only a framework for the spells, yahnno?”

Being a secretary hired more for her typing speed and skill at deciphering the often-atrocious handwriting of wizards and less for any sort of aptitude with magic, Melissa really didn’t know, but decided it was more polite to nod and smile than try to get any sort of real-person explanation out of a finance wizard. Even Freddie’s magitech jargon could be a bit much sometimes, so Melissa didn’t really want to know how much more complicated it could get when actual workings were involved.

The feeling that her computer was staring increased. Melissa glared at it testily. “What?” The feeling subsided a little, but was still there, a mild buzz in the back of her brain like the barely-audible noise made by old CRT televisions when the screen was on. Melissa let out an irritable huff and picked up her phone, dialing Freddie’s extension.

“Technical support, this is Frederica speaking, how may I help you?”

“Freddie, my computer is staring at me.”

“Ah.” There was a short pause on the other end of the line. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

“FREDDIE.”

“Sorry, sorry! Well, d’you want me to come up and have a look at it, then?”

“If you’ve got time, yeah. Is this normal?”

“Normal doesn’t really come into the picture for machines in this building. I’ll be right up, though, just need to drop this external hard drive off by Public Services along the way, ‘kay?”

“Okay. See you in a few.” There was a click on the other end, and Melissa set down the receiver, giving her computer another glare to scare it into submission.

------

Anyway I feel like I need to figure out what to do with this, but I have no idea if there's an actual story attached or if it's just a couple of scenes and a peek into this world.

Current Mood: tired

Reading through some old NaNo/Camp NaNo stuff for anything I want to work on, and found this conversation which I quite like even if the rest isn't salvageable. Context is an unattractive but extremely wealthy woman in her 30s who has never been married who has been trying to convince a man to be her lover:

"I have some caveats."

"Certainly. I have no wish to make this an unpleasant experience for either of us. You should feel free to make whatever demands are necessary for your comfort."

"Very well. Number one, then, is that I am incapable of intimacy with a woman I am insufficiently acquainted with. We would need to spend at least a few weeks getting to know one another."

"I shall send you my schedule."

"It's that simple?"

Priscilla shrugged. "For me it is."

"Very well. Number two is that, even if we become intimate, you must not expect marriage to be the ultimate outcome."

"Good lord, of course not. I'm looking for a lover, not a husband."

"Good to know that we are both in agreement on that matter. Number three, then: I have no need of money or love trinkets or anything of that sort, if you were thinking of producing such items for me."

"Well, I had heard that gentlemen treat their mistresses to expensive jewelry."

"No jewelry, I beg you."

"A pity. I had my eye on a particularly spectacular quizzing glass studded with diamonds."

"Heaven forbid."

"I shall have to assuage my urge to purchase incredibly tacky jewelry in some other fashion, then."

Mir asked if I had any more of that last thing I posted, and so I went digging in NaNo folders because I knew I had more of it somewhere. Turns out I did name those two characters at some point; the woman is Edie and the man is Kit. Edie's husband is named Trevor, and Edie's brother-in-law, Charles, is Kit's friend.

The general gist of it is that Edie's an heiress of some sort, married to Trevor, her money supports the family business, she wants a divorce but Trevor's the only one who can start the divorce proceedings and unless she has a kid with him, all the money goes away when she does, whereas if they have a child, there's an equal split. Trevor can't bring himself to even try with Edie because he just can't get it up for women, Charles spends all his time keeping track of Edie because the last thing he wants is a bastard child inheriting stuff from his family, so everyone is stuck and very unhappy about it. Trevor gets sick of it and runs off with his boyfriend, Edie's like "Yay, surely he'll give me the divorce now," Charles drags Edie off to hunt Trevor down, they end up stuck in the snow near Kit's house, and Charles has the bright idea of, being like hey, guess what, my friend Kit is extremely honorable and wouldn't sleep with Edie and he'd keep an eye on her if I asked him to, plus Kit's so damn ugly he won't tempt her at all, and this search would go faster without Edie, so time to dump Edie on Kit!

And then, because this is probably a romance novel, this goes horribly wrong for Charles.

A snippet of Kit meeting Edie for the first time:

( Read more... )

Edie finding out that Charles found Trevor and convinced him to come back to her for the sake of the family:

( Read more... )

Charles runs in to Kit about, oh, nine or ten months after Trevor goes back to Edie:

( Read more... )

And some assorted snippets from after Edie comes back to Kit:

( Read more... )

I haven't really been using Dreamwidth for much, but thought I might as well start posting some random snippets of original work. This is something from one of the past few NaNos; I don't have names for the characters, but it's set in (I think) a 1920s-ish fantasy world, and the woman has what are colloquially known as elf-shot eyes, which are a grey so pale as to be unsettling and considered to be unlucky.

“My husband left me for a man,” she said.

“Did he.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last week.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

She laughed, a high, tinkling thing with no humor in it. “Why, I suppose because after this weekend I’ll never see you again.”

“I see.” He paused and considered her. She looked fragile at the moment, on the verge of snapping, and he couldn’t tell what she needed more: to be swaddled up safe from her own fragility, or to be allowed to snap, allowed to yell and hurl things, allowed to discard all those womanly graces that society foisted upon her, even if only for a short while.

( Read the rest )

2766 words written on... well, uh, we won't say what these words were written on. Something that is Terrible Fanfic and Mostly Smut.

Snippet of the day:

“Take your pick,” she said, opening the tea cabinet. “Or I’ve got coffee, but it’s all instant.”

He made the same face he had made when he had asked for something other than sweet tea. “This will be fine, thank you.”

“Are you a coffee snob?” she teased.

He shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. “If preferring to drink coffee made from beans that have been ground within past century is being a coffee snob, then yes. But I am not even certain that instant coffee has any coffee bean in it at all.”

I have been writing a lot of nonsense lately! Mostly smut, to be honest. Smut that's ostensibly fanfic, but smut. I keep trying to put words on the Trashy Vampire Romance Novel, but that is going nowhere, even the smutty bits.

Ah, well. We'll just pretend these words will eventually make me a better writer.

Actually, there's a thing I could do with Dreamwidth. Hold myself accountable to posting word counts on here on days I write, plus snippets of whatever I'm working on. It's all full of nonsense, but I might as well.

Yes, it's the end of January, hush. I posted these on the Tumblr in, like, December, might as well post an edited version here.

I've got one actual art goal for 2020, and that's to keep drawing as much as possible. I'm likely to fail if I set more intensive goals than that, just because of the way my brain works, but just keep drawing? That's a thing I can do.

Art aspirations, aka things I'd like to try and do if I get around to it:

Draw more backgrounds
Do more drawing from references
Related to the above: do more life drawing!
Related to the above: do more clothing studies so I'm not left staring at a t-shirt going "now where do the wrinkle lines go again?"
Maybe do studies of art from people I admire?
Watch more tutorials for Procreate because I'm always like "Oh THAT'S how that works!" every time I watch one.

Specific art projects I'd like to focus on, if I can manage it:

Make more comics, or turn old scribble comics into new and finished ones.
Finish the minor arcana for the Wolf 359 tarot
(Speaking of cards, I've apparently added "draw a Thoughtstream deck from Penumbra" to my list of projects)
Learn how to make animatics so I can set the mini-episode Rebranding from Wolf 359 to the song "The Other Side" from The Greatest Showman.

Writing goals are similar to the art goals, by which I mean they boil down to just keep writing, even if it feels like I'm writing trash. But I do have some writing aspirations, too!

Writing aspirations:

Write every day, at least a hundred words or so.
Actually finish some fanfics (I say, staring at the Rosemary/Hilbert AU proliferation hell that gets worse each day, as the Star Trek AU splits into THREE DIFFERENT AU OF THAT AU FICS.)
Give writing a fanfic of significant size from start to finish and then actually editing it before posting a try.
Maybe finish writing the trashy vampire romance novel?
Related: Work on some non-fanfic projects once more, just to see if this 22-ish month insane fanfic production period has resulted in me being able to write original stuff a little better.
I spend so much time in second person past tense, I should try other persons and tenses, just to see what it's like.

And neither a goal nor an aspiration, but a task: I really ought to dig into the AU Proliferation Hell sections of my Scrivener files and split it into a bunch of individual projects because some of them have tens of thousands of words on them now and I'd like to be able to track how much I work on any given project. That'll give me a better gauge for how many words in total I've written, too; right now some of them have their own projects and some don't, which makes doing word counts on entire projects a poor way to count my total wordcount given that there's an unknown amount of overlap.

Current Mood: tired

Official diagnosis: Inattentive-type ADHD, with some sort of delayed processing issue as well. So. That's a thing. Doing some therapy, have been pointed towards mindfulness-based stress reduction, and really need to try and exercise more because apparently getting regular cardio helps with the bad brain. (And probably explains why I was more functional in high school and college than I am now.)

In other news: it's draw Rosemary in fancy party dresses she shouldn't wear to Christmas parties season again. This one, at least, she probably doesn't wear to office Christmas parties. (Probably.)

I keep putting words on the trashy vampire romance novel and it's really appalling in places because I saw a post about how milk is an acceptable substitute, nutrient-wise, for blood, and I'm really leaning into that.

I submitted a redesign of a character to the mascot design contest for ConBust and won, so that's nice. Granted, I'm also running a panel on fanfic at the con, so I don't actually need the free con membership, but the bubble tea gift certificate is nice, and now I get to offer them stuff like individual different icons for the different types of badges.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Suzanne Vega