"Frostfire," by Kai Meyer (Chapter 3, Part 2/7)

            After Maxim had closed the lattice gate, she placed herself next to him so that she did not have to look him in the eyes.  But from clamorous excitement – and she was still a bit breathless from her flight – she had forgotten the mirrors on the walls of the cabin.  And no matter where she looked, the blond elevator boy seemed to be watching her.

            Mouse hated mirrors.  She was too small and thin for her age, and when she looked at herself like this, there was really not much girlness to her.  She was pale, even in this light that made every other person look healthy; even her lips seemed to her to be colorless and thin.  Her dark blue eyes always appeared a bit tired, perhaps because she always was tired.  The Concierge, who presided over all the lowly hotel attendants, had determined that she had to look like a boy, or else the fine guests might take offense that they let her work through the entire night.  That had been back when she was very small, and so she knew nothing else.  Mouse, the Girl-boy.

            The elevator set itself in motion with a jerk.  Above them in the shaft, the steam-works hissed.  Powerful gears crunched.

            “That’s a pretty uniform,” she said because the long silence was making her all restless. 

            “Thanks,” Maxim said, and then his gaze swept over her own clothes.

            You deserved that, she thought bitterly.  He will see right away that your shoulder-pieces have been mended with carpet threads.

            “Would you like one like it?” he asked

            She still could not look him in the eyes.  “Like it?”  she repeated uncertainly.

            “A uniform like mine.”

            “I’m no elevator boy.”  And also would never be one, she added in silence, namely because the Concierge did not like any girl, not even if she looked like a boy.

            “That doesn’t matter.  I grew almost a head last year.  You can have one of my old ones.”

            “You’re not serious!”

            “Why not?  In my trunk they’re just being eaten by moths.”

            Hard to imagine that there were moths in the dormitories of the pages and elevator boys.  In the hole in the cellar where Mouse slept, there were in fact rats. But that did not bother her.  She liked just about everything that was small and crawled on the ground.

            “Well?”  Maxim asked.

            The elevator came to a halt.  In front of the cabin grate lay a corridor that was only imperceptibly less magnificent than any in the suite level.  Everything in the Hotel Aurora was precious, expensive, and elegant.  Except for the behavior of certain employees, when no guests were present.

Frostfire - Chapter 3, Part 1/7

[Dear Readers:  Sorry this took so long in coming.  After my time in Arschderwelt, Deutschland, I wanted nothing to do with the language for a couple months.  However, I am now recovered and resuming my work, though school starts soon and I might not have as much time for it.]

The Chapter About A Betrayal And The Terror Of The Outside World

            Maxim, the elevator-boy, stood in his cabin, one hand on the the open sliding grate, the other on the long lever that sent the elevator on its trip through the landings.  He smiled across to Mouse.

            She stayed a few steps away from him.  The interior of the cage was lined with polished brass, gold, and mirrors.  Electric light filled the narrow box with the glow of an eternal sunset.  Its radiance flowed out of the interior of the elevator into the hall and touched the tips of Mouse’s feet.

            Maxim looked past her down the corridor.  “Where is your shoe wagon?”

            Strange for him to ask about it.  The elevator-boy hated it when Mouse occupied his cabin with the clumsy cart.  Mouse herself had not been able to  notice the scent of the shoes for a long time, but the boys claimed that the elevator stank of sweat and leather for an hour afterward.  Annoyingly, there was only this one elevator in the hotel, and the use the wagon on the stairs was impossible.  In fact, this was the first elevator of its kind in all of Russia, imported from America, where the new technology was being developed by a man named Otis.  The board of directors of the Aurora was tremendously proud of it.

            Maxim was not just any elevator-boy.  At sixteen years old, he as the oldest and most experienced among them.  And pretty, besides.  Mouse had once been secretly in love with him – until the day she had seen how, for a few copecks, he had let the rich daughter of a hotel guest kiss him.

            “Well?” he asked.

            She sought vainly for mockery or deceit in his tone of voice.  Perhaps he really did just want to be friendly.

            “Well what?” she asked crisply.

            “Your wagon.”
            “Oh, that…I left it a few floors below.”

            “Shall I take you down?”  All the elevator boys were immensely proud of their task, nearly as much as though they carried the cage on their own shoulders through the floors.  Besides that, they had the best-looking uniforms.  All velvety red and set with the same imitation gold that decorated their cabin.  In the elevator, they melted entirely into the sparkling, mirrored area.  My golden boys the Concierge called them, whose darlings they were.  But Maxim was everyone’s darling.

            “I’d rather take the stairs,” Mouse said, and wanted to turn away. 

            “Oh, just come inside.  In the middle of the night, no one uses the elevator at all.  I’m bored.”

            And she of all people should change that?  Maxim had never given her any more attention than a dirty footprint that a guest had left in his elevator.

            Carefully, she went into the cabin and stepped completely into the golden light.  For some silly reason, she suddenly seemed to herself to be a real girl, as though this time the unearthly light made not only the elevator boy but also her much prettier.

            “Fourth floor?”  asked Maxim, and took the lever in his hand, as though the Czar himself had walked into his cabin.

            Mouse hesitated briefly, looked around the deserted corridor one last time, then stepped over the narrow crack into the interior of the cabin.  She became a little dizzy as her feet made a faint, high sound despite the carpet.  The certitude of the deep, black chute under her always filled her with unease. 

What Not To Read

My latest obsession, it seems, is dragonriders and gender roles.  So, in order to make my research complete, I tracked down what might be the only book by a male about dragonriders, that is not a subversion or Eragon:  Dragonmaster,  by Chris Bunch.  It has been most educational.

Things I have learned from two chapters of Bunch:

1.  Do not use run-on sentences, they are not, and will never be, your friend.  Fragments, only sparingly when effective.

“Somewhere in the crags just above the village, and Hal thought he knew just where from his solitary, but not lonely, hill explorations, the beast had its nest.  The nest where dragons had hatched their young for over a century.”

2.  Do not overly smeerp.  Worldbuilding is your friend, and if you can’t be bothered to think about how your society works, then you should not be writing fantasy.

“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the warder…Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll ride for the city and hire the best advocate I can…That’ll put a bit of a stave in their wheel.”

Suppose he had written:

“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the police...Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll drive into the city and hire the best lawyer I can…That’ll put a bit of a wrench in their works.”

Creating a medieval fantasyland is more than just replacing any modern references with period-sounding alternatives (though a toothbrush is still a toothbrush*).  Apparently, even in this world where the poor are really oppressed, there is still a sort of justice system that even a poor restaurant owner tavern keeper can call on.  Which never comes up again (presumably).

3.  Your main character is not an author avatar.  Go play a video game for that.  Your main character has his (or her) own personality and ambitions.  Don’t have them wander around aimlessly until they find plot.

“He’d been offered other steady work in the two years since he’d left the stony mining village, but had never accepted, not sure of the reason.”

The reason?  The author needs you to not have any attachments so you can drop everything and chase the plot, whenever it should appear.  He also needs you to keep moving so that you eventually find the plot.  If you’re going to do that to your character, at least give them a real reason to be a rootless wanderer.  It also doubles as character-building.

4.  I don’t care how beer is made.  The point of the chapter is that Hal gets drunk and tries to ride a dragon.  We don’t need digressions into beer-making at the hops-picking harvest festival thingy that is never going to be mentioned again.  There’s worldbuilding, and then there’s relevancy.

*A note about toothbrushes in fantasyland:  They don’t often exist.  Occasionally I have run across a mention of scrubbing teeth with baking soda (once, in 10,000 page series), or “tooth-sticks,” whatever those might be.  They do seem rather modern to be in a pseudo-medieval world.  However, according to Wikipedia, methods of dental cleaning have been around since 3000 B.C.  Some ancient cultures chewed twigs from certain trees, and around the 14^th century A.D. toothbrushes with animal-hair bristles were in use in parts of Asia.  However, it is most likely that only those of wealth and status would have the luxury for that.  Toothbrushes were not mass-produced in Europe until the late 18^th century, but the word itself dates from 1690.  Interestingly, tooth-brushing did not catch on in the U.S. until after WWII, when soldiers were required to brush their teeth every day.

In other words, if you want your characters to brush their teeth in fantasyland, you can damn well have them brush their teeth.  It’s your world.  The humble toothbrush does a good job of illustarting how difficult it is to make a convincing fantasyland; you have to consider every aspect of daily life, up to and including brushing one’s teeth.

Writing Again

Sometimes it's easy.

Sometimes it feels like the story is writing itself, like it's all already there and you just have to record it.  Every word it perfect, every plot twist just the way it has to be, the characters developing in new and exciting directions so fast you can barely keep up.  It's like something is burning inside you, just under the ribcage.  It's like being horny; that maddening need to be with the story, to let it consume you.

Other times it's hard.  So hard, you don't want to face it.  You look at what you've written, and you wonder "How did I come up with that shit?" and it doesn't seem worth it to fix any of the millions and millions of problems with the text.  The characters are flat, the whole concept is unoriginal.  Your story is boring.  Your initial creative rush has died to a trickle of foul sludge.  New, exciting ideas hover at the edge of your mind, and you want to leave this one behind and chase them, even though you know it will all end the same, and that you won't be able to commit until you finish this one, and maybe, just maybe, a part of you still believes in that boring old story.

It is this that separates the writers from the dreamers.  Even when you don't want to face the story, you do it anyway, and stare at the document for hours, forcing out a sentence every few minutes.  Then it feels like the story is there again, but trapped behind a glass wall, and it can't get out.  Still, you plow on ahead.

Even when your mother walks into your room and asks "Oh, what are you doing?  Are you writing?"  "Yes."  "Is it for your blog?"  "No."  "Oh, do you have some sort of project, a story?"  "I don't really want to talk about it."  "Well, you could just say a manuscript," as she goes off in an offended huff, because even though we usually get along great, if there is a problem with our relationship then it's always my fault, and she never bothers to ask me if maybe I'm being belligerant because I'm upset about something, and what might that be?  Not unless I have a complete emotional breakdown and burst into tears, and even then it's hard to get her to actually listen.  Note to self:  When you start seeing a counselor in the fall, make sure to bring up your crapsaccharine relationship with your mother.

And then you're all frazzled and can't concentrate, and feel oddly violated and raw, so you maybe force out another sentence or at least finish the one you were on, then close down and let the story recover.  But it is still there, that nagging, unfinished business that you cannot quite leave behind you.  And you're going to have to go through it all over again tomorrow.

This is what separates the writers from the dreamers.