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doctor-ector · 7 years

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A/N: Contains violence, illness, and character death, though I personally wouldn’t call any of it graphic. Also, this almost certainly needs a trigger warning for historical inaccuracy.

“I’ll wager that I beat your count two to one.”

“And if you kill yourself attempting to meet this goal, from whom shall I collect my winnings?”

“Then someday you will have everything of mine.” Despite the somber truth which belied his words, Brendis laughed from deep in his belly. “And in any case, we both know you’ll be the one paying at the end.”

“Not if I do not agree to your wager.” It would be a fool’s bargain, for there could be little doubt as to Brendis’ eventual triumph. While his brother wore his armor as easily as a second skin, Edrick struggled, his slim, almost maiden-like shoulders wearying within moments of donning the heavy iron plates. He bore their family’s raven coat of arms only for duty, with none of the passion that burned within his brother’s breast. And why should he? The lands they fought for would belong to Hildbrand, and then to his firstborn son. Edrick would never savor the fruits of their victories as Brendis would.

Perhaps it was this reluctance that turned so many against Edrick. Brendis was a man of easy smiles and bellowing laughter, a warm spirit that drew in others. In their eyes, his frivolous spending and frequent indiscretions with serving girls, barmaids, and vassals’ daughters across the Rhineland became marks of generosity and virility, yet more proof that God had smiled upon Lord Hildbrand on the day of his heir’s birth. Edrick recognized this foolhardiness as such, but he made no effort to curb his brother’s actions. Any attempt would be seen as jealousy, a sniveling, weak younger brother longing to possess what his older sibling’s strength of body and spirit had made his.

Brendis gave Edrick a hearty clap on his shoulder. “We’ll compare after the battle.”

He tasted only salt. He knew not if it came from sweat or blood. Edrick kept his sword held high, but none engaged him. There was no purpose, for even a fool could see that the battle had already been won. Their enemies’ force had been greatly outnumbered, and the superior skill of Hildbrand’s men had only magnified their advantage.

Though the wise had pulled back, saving their energies for fights less easily won, the assurance of victory had not dulled every man’s taste for battle. Brendis urged his horse forward, sword held high, ready to fell the two knights he pursued. The sun glinted off his armor as he knocked the first from his horse, the enemy knight’s scream rising above the other sounds of the battle as his own horse’s hooves came down upon him. Edrick knew the smile Brendis now wore, could almost hear him adding one to his count under his breath as he turned to his next opponent.

He could not have seen the third knight coming up behind him, could not have heard the clomp of galloping hooves more than a heartbeat before the mace struck the side of his helmet. The battle slowed before Edrick’s eyes as Brendis crumpled forward

“Brother!” Edrick dismounted and raced toward his brother, the weight of the armor forgotten, and sat next to Brendis’ fallen figure. With careful fingers, Edrick removed his brother’s helmet. Blood plastered Brendis’ dark hair to his forehead, and bruises already bloomed violet along the side of his face and down his neck. The wound should have killed him, but as Edrick felt a steady pulse beneath his fingers as he probingly ran them over Brendis’ neck, searching for any more signs of injury.

He played the part of the concerned brother, but underneath that façade, Edrick’s mind danced among the possibilities. The wealth, the women, the lands, all of it his, never to be squandered as they would have under Brendis’ rule. Though it was never spoken aloud, all knew Hildbrand was not long for this earth. The aging lord grew weaker by the day, and his heir would soon assume his throne.

He heard a cough and looked down to see Brendis’ eyes bright and alert. Rage roared within him. “Brother, I –“

Edrick clasped a hand over his brother’s mouth. “Be silent.” He had never heard such power in his own voice. In that moment, he knew, and what had been just an inkling of a thought became his fate.

Brendis’ eyes widened as Edrick pulled out a dagger. He writhed, desperate to get away, but Edrick kept him firmly pinned to the ground. “I am sorry, brother,” he whispered.

The lands prospered under his rule, just as Edrick had known they would. His fields shone with green and gold while drought and famine wrought havoc on his neighbors’ holdings. Prudence guided his every decision, and for this he was rewarded year after year. When the first whispers of plague arrived, he immediately ordered for the ports to be closed. None would enter, few would leave, and his holdings would remain safe.

But the plague was not so easily stopped. The disease struck first at the outermost villages, and reports and rumors swirled together of entire families locked in their homes to die, of children crawling through the streets, their hands and feet blackened and dead, of bodies left decomposing on the streets with no one left to bury them. Even Edrick had no way of separating the truth from the fiction. He tightened the restrictions on travel ever further as the disease spread, but nothing slowed its march.

On the day the plague reached Harfstaard, Edrick retreated to his courtyard alone. The church bells rang all day, announcing the dead, and with each toll he prayed that he would not soon be among them. For though no precautions had yet triumphed against the plague, if anyone should be spared, it was him. A roaring fire was sweltering in the summer heat, but it kept all away.

His palms grew damp with sweat as he waited, sword in hand, moving only to add more tinder to his fire. Daylight darkened to dusk, then slipped into night, and with it, the church bells stopped their ringing. The darkest corners of his mind wondered if the pause was to allow the ringers to sleep or if no one remained to ring them. He smelled decay lingering beneath the smoke, felt the heat grow ever more unbearable as he waited for morning.

Edrick felt more than heard the man’s approach. “I am to be left alone.”

No one replied, and when he squinted to see through the flames, his heart stopped. A raven stood on the opposite side of the fire.

A weaker man might have fainted dead at the sight, but Edrick’s reason soon prevailed. “I did not call for a doctor.”

The figure, a man in one of the terrible masks the more foolish among them thought would ward away the plague, only stood there.

His breath came in shallow pants, and his skin burned, but he would not move away from the false security of the fire. “Who are you?” Edrick demanded.

Again, the figure said nothing, merely moving a step forward. Another step soon followed, taking him into the fire, but the man showed no sign of pain, nor did his long, dark robes ignite. Edrick refused to move back as terror dawned over him, a terror only the demon before him could incite.

“Tell me who you are.” He had not been so weak in years. His blood pounded in his veins, and Edrick’s knees shook beneath him, threatening to collapse at any moment.

Still silent, the figure stepped out from the flames, ever closer towards Edrick, stopping only inches before him. “Tell me,” he said, his words hardly more than a whisper, but he already knew he would receive no answer.

With shaking hands, he lifted the mask, and in Brendis’ eyes, he saw the flames.

#mine

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doctor-ector · 7 years

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Plotting Methods for Meticulous Plotters

A Guide for the Seasoned and the Not-So-Plot Savvy

This is a subject that a lot of writers tend to struggle with. They have ideas, great ideas, but are uncertain how to string them together into a solid plot. There are many methods that have been devised to do so, and most seem to be based on something you might remember:

The 5 Point Method

This is your basic plot diagram:

Exposition – This is the beginning of your story. This is where you introduce your character (s), establish a setting, and also present your main conflict.

Rising Action – Your story now begins to build. There are often multiple key events that occur where your main character may be faced with a new problem he has to solve or an unexpected event is thrust at him.

Climax – Everything you’ve been writing has been leading up to this moment. This is going to be the most exciting part of your story where your main character faces the main conflict and overcomes it.

Falling Action – This is mostly tying up loose ends after your main conflict is resolved. They are minor things that weren’t nearly as important as the main conflict, but still needed to be dealt with.

Resolution –The end of the story.

This is probably the easiest way to remember how to string together a single (or multiple) plots. It may be easier for some to define the main plot as the central conflict, or the thing that’s causing your main character a huge problem/is his goal.

The 8 Point Method

This method is used to write both novels and film scripts, and further breaks down the 5 Point Method. From the book Write a Novel and Get It Published: A Teach Yourself Guide by Nigel Watts:

Stasis – The opening where the story takes place. Here you introduce your main character and establish a setting (Watts defines it as an “everyday” setting, something normal, but it can be whatever you want).

Trigger or Inciting Incident – The event that changes your character’s life an propels your story forward. This is where you introduce the main conflict.

The Quest – The result of the event. What does your character do? How does he react?

Surprise – This section takes of the middle of the story and involves all of the little setbacks and unexpected events that occur to the main character as he tries to fix the problems he’s faced with and/or achieve his goal. This is where you as an author get to throw complication, both horrible and wonderful, at your protagonist and see what happens.

Critical Choice – At some point your character is going to be faced with making a decision that’s not only going to test him as individual, but reveal who he truly is to the audience. This cannot be something that happens by chance. The character must make a choice.

Climax – This is the result of the main character’s critical choice, and should be the highest point of tension in the story.

Reversal – The consequence of the choice and climax that changes the status of your protagonist, whatever that may be. It could make him a king, a murderer, or whatever else you like but it has to make sense with the rest of the story.

Resolution – The end of the story where loose ends are tied up. You’re allowed to leave things unresolved if you intend to write a sequel, but the story itself should be stand alone.

Three Act Structure

While this method is usually for screenplays, it is also used in writing novels (for instance The Hunger Games novels are split up into three acts). From the The Screen Writer’s Workbook by Syd Field: Acts 1 and 3 should be about the same length while Act 2 should be double. For instance if you were writing a screenplay for a two hour film Acts 1 and 3 would be 30 minutes each while Act 2 would be 60 minutes.

Act 1, Set Up – This contains the inciting incident and a major plot point towards the end. The plot point here leads into the second act and is when the protagonist decides to take on the problem he’s faced with.

Act 2, Confrontation – This contains the midpoint of the story, all of the little things that go wrong for the protagonist, and a major plot point towards the end that propels the story into the third act. This is the critical choice the character must make.

Act 3, Resolution – This is where the climax occurs as well as the events that tie up the end of the story.

Another way to look at this method is that there are actually three major plot points, or disasters, that move the plot forward. The first is at the end of Act 1, the second is in the middle of Act 2, and the third is at the end of Act 2.

The Snowflake Method

A “top-down” method by Randy Ingermanson that breaks novel writing down into basic parts, building upon each one. You can find his page on the method here. His ten steps:

Write a single sentence to summarize your novel.

Write a paragraph that expands upon that sentence, including the story set up, the major conflicts, and the ending.

Define your major characters and write a summary sheet corresponding to each one that includes: the character’s name, their story arc, their motivation and goal, their conflict, and their epiphany (what they will learn).

Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph in Step 2 into its own paragraph.

Write a one page description of your major characters and a half page description of less important characters.

Expand each paragraph in Step 4 into a page each.

Expand each character description into full-fledged character charts telling everything there is to know about the characters.

Make a spreadsheet of all of the scenes you want to include in the novel.

Begin writing the narrative description of the story, taking each line from the spreadsheet and expanding the scenes with more details.

Begin writing your first draft.

Wing It

This is what I do. I tend to keep in mind the basic structure of the 5 Point Method and just roll with whatever ideas come my way. I’ve never been a fan of outlines, or any other type of organization. According to George R.R. Martin, I’ve always been a gardener, not an architect when it comes to writing. I don’t plan, I just come up with ideas and let them grow. Of course, this may not work for some of you, so here are some methods of organization:

Outlines

Notecards

Spreadsheets

Lists

Character Sheets

And if all else fails, you can fall on the advice of the great Chuck Wendig: 25 Ways to Plot and Prep Your Story.

Remember, none of the methods above are set in stone. They are only guidelines to help you finally write that novel.

-Morgan

#for future reference #writing

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doctor-ector · 7 years

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A/N: Another writing sprint. Unedited. Children’s story-style witches.

There are few things worse than the frustration of Manhattan rush hour. One of them is navigating above the traffic of downtown Manhattan on a 1980s vacuum cleaner.

“Stay up!” Josie hisses, kicking the bag, which rewards her with a puff of stale dust. She should have known that the junky vacuum that had been hiding in the back of Nana’s guest closet for as long as she could remember was trouble. If she’d been smart, Josie would have shelled out the thirty bucks for a 7-day subway pass while her broom’s in the shop, but that’s two fortune readings and she owes twenty thousand in student loans for a witchcraft degree she doesn’t even use. Instead, she has a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t fly straight and has a nasty habit of –

She screams as Hoover drops beneath her. Her stomach tries to find its way up her throat as twenty stories fall past in an instant. Josie squeezes her eyes shut and tries to accept the embarrassment of dying in a vacuum cleaner crash, but as suddenly as it cut out, Hoover whirs back to life. Horns honk, and she opens her eyes to find herself floating all of one foot above Fifth Avenue. Some douchebag flips her off from his Mercedes, and she spares a second to return the gesture before returning to a more acceptable altitude. Josie usually prefers to stay a good fifty stories above the traffic, enough to avoid collisions with most of New York’s avian inhabitants, but not wanting a repeat of earlier, she speeds along low enough that she could extend her leg and scrape the paint of the bigger trucks below.

Once her hands stop shaking, she grabs for her phone. Not going to make it to the coven meeting, she types out. Hey, at least Hoover is good for something.

You can show up late. Don’t try to weasel your way out. Why had she taught Nana how to use an iPhone? Her cell pings with another message. Go.

She wants to pretend she didn’t see the message, but that never works. Fine.

The rec center’s basement smells like mildew. The organizers have tried to hide it by burning copious amounts of incense, but it’s not working.

“Fumira,” she whispers, waving her fingers in front of her face, and the smoke parts for her. That gets her a few strange looks, which seems odd, considering this is a coven meeting, even if it is the kind of coven that puts up orange and black flyers advertising their meetings on the YMCA community board. Well, Nana did say they welcomed all ability levels. Maybe she can clue them onto that useful little spell.

Josie surveys the area. Seven of the tables are occupied, mostly by witches and warlocks old enough to be her parents or grandparents. She heads for the back corner, where three other women in their twenties sit and laugh over a board game.

“May I sit here?” she asks.

“Of course!” The woman on the far right, a cute redhead with thick glasses and a mess of freckles, scoots her chair over a few inches so Josie can slide in with them. “Sam Jameson,” she introduces herself, and reaches out to shake Josie’s hand.

They. “Josie DeSilva. Nice to meet you.”

The other two women introduce themselves as well. Sam speaks up next. “We’re only one turn in. Want to join in?”

“Sure.” It looks like some kind of trivia game, but not one that Josie’s familiar with. She’s not sure what the H on the back of the cards is for, and the lion, snake, bird, and weasel (which she would later learn was a badger) pieces seem a little random. That’s okay. Josie’s never met a trivia game she didn’t like.

“All right. Are you okay with being Slytherin?” Sam asks.

Josie shrugs. “Sounds good to me.”

“Oh good. Some people –“ she shoots a glare at Aanya, the woman on the far left – “get touchy about the whole Slytherin thing.” Sam draws a card from the deck. “In The Chamber of Secrets, how many students are petrified?”

“Remember these are based off the book, not the movie,” Aanya adds.

With her words, everything clicks. Josie hears her heart pounding in her ears as she rises. “I can’t do this.” She hurries towards the exit. How dare they?

“Hey, Josie, wait up!” Sam shouts, but she doesn’t. She can’t even think here, with the mildew and the incense and the people who dare to call themselves witches while playing Harry Potter trivia games. Josie refuses to tolerate that kind of disrespect, that sick parody of her religion. Who cares if it’s popular, or it gets people interested in the magical arts? She lets the basement door slam behind her.

The chilly October air stings at her face, and it won’t be fun to ride home in, but that’s really just the cherry on top of this fantastic night.

“Josie!” Sam catches up to her just as she’s mounting the broom. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

She searches Sam’s face for a moment, and the woman looks so honestly confused that she steps off. “Harry Potter.”

Sam frowns. “Not a fan?”

“To put it lightly.”

“I’m really sorry about that. I thought you’d know what you were getting yourself into. I should’ve asked.”

Josie shakes her head. “It’s not a big deal.”

“No, it really is. I offended you.”

“You apologized.”

Sam has a nice smile, the kind that’s wide and bright and shows a lot of teeth without being too toothy. “Want to come back inside? We could play another game, if you’d like, or just sit and talk. It’s nice to have younger members.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” She wills her vacuum up, and it sputters for a moment before deflating.

Sam frowns at Hoover, then turns to Josie. “Need a ride home?”

She gives Hoover an experimental kick, but it’s no use. “If it’s not too much of a problem.”

“It’s not,” Sam reassures her. “Just give me a sec to tell the others where I’m headed.”

She’s sitting on the couch in a beat-up Salem University tee and the ugliest sweatpants in Queens when the doorbell rings. “One second!” Josie shouts, and she hides the family-size bag of potato chips she’s been snacking on behind the couch before answering.

“Hi!” Sam says the instant she opens the door.

“Hello again.”

The other woman shifts uncomfortably. “I just happened to be in the area and thought I’d say hi.”

“Mission accomplished.” Sam giggles at that. “Want to come in?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

As she lets Sam in, Josie realizes just how disgusting her and Nana’s apartment is. A half-folded basket of her robes sits in the middle of their living room, and her cauldron’s bubbles on top of the space heater, potion ingredients spread in a semicircle around it. “Sorry about the mess. Things have been kind of busy.” Not really, but she needs an excuse.

“Don’t worry about it.” Sam walks over towards the cauldron. “You brew potions at home?”

“Yeah. I don’t have a good workshop space right now.”

“That’s so neat! My grandmother used to do that – she made all her own medicines and had a cold remedy that could’ve made her rich - but Mom and I have tried a few times, and all we ever end up with is gross-looking water.”

“Do you have her ingredient list?”

Sam nods. “Not with me, but I can send it to you.”

“I’d like that.”

The conversation hangs for a moment. “So,” Sam says, “I was wondering if you would like to give the coven another try sometime. We meet the second Tuesday of every month.”

“No thanks.” Nana thought it would be good for her to get out and meet other witches in a non-professional atmosphere, make friends with some of the other artists in the area. One event was enough to prove that wrong.

Sam chews on her lower lip when she thinks. Josie wonders if she realizes she’s doing it. “I was also wondering if you might want to get coffee sometime.” More lip-chewing. “Or cocoa, or tea, or something harder if that’s more your style.”

Josie smiles. “I like coffee. I know a really great place downtown, if you’re free.”

“I am, but are you sure you don’t want to try somewhere closer? It’ll be crazy trying to get down there.”

“Have you ever ridden on a broomstick?”

“No, but I’d like to.”

Josie can already feel Sam’s arms wrapped around her waist, Sam’s cheek against her shoulder as they flew high above the city. “Then what are we waiting for?” She motions towards the garage (or broom closet, as most people would call it), and Sam follows. “Trust me, the best views of the skyline are from a broomstick. At night, it’s gorgeous.”

“You’re planning on keeping me until night?”

“If you’ll let me, yeah.”

Sam smiles, and Josie’s stomach does a little flip. “Sounds good to me.”

#mine #my writing

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doctor-ector · 7 years

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A/N: Trigger warnings for mental illness, suicide, and all the angst you can only come up with after 11 PM. Not autobiographical. I just wanted to write more things that weren’t fanfic and decided I’d write whatever came to mind for twenty minutes about once a week. Um, enjoy?

To understand me from a psychological standpoint, I think you should hear one key life event: at age fifteen, I attempted suicide with my mother’s razor.

Experience tells me that you have latched onto the fact that I nearly killed myself, and extrapolated from that information that my mid-teen years were difficult. That’s accurate.

The point that I’m more interested in is that my chosen weapon was my mother’s razor. A safety razor, actually. I am now removed enough from my fifteen-year-old self to see the irony in that, but that’s not the point either. Realize I was fifteen. I think I started shaving my legs at eleven, maybe twelve. In any case, I had my own razor, and it was sitting four inches away my mother’s in the drawer above, even closer within reach.

I still chose my mother’s.

If my life was a novel, or at least the kind they assign in English classes where everything must mean something and you get full credit if you can point to three passages that back up whatever interpretation you’ve come up with, I know how I would interpret that. My mother gave me life, and she would take it. Thus, I would end where I started, and the circle diagram of my life would be complete. The tidiness of that appeals to me. Unlike the fifteen-year-old we’ll keep coming back to, I have an appreciation for geometry, can see where Archimedes and Euclid and that bunch were coming from when they decided to devote their lives to it. There are a lot worse things to devote the rest of your life to. One of them is slitting your wrists in the family bathtub.

Oh, and before you start hypothesizing that my mother was cruel, or abusive, or just a generally awful person, let me tell you that’s not at all true. My mother is in fact so sweet and so nurturing that she decided after raising the five of us that she would become a fourth-grade teacher. The Greek geometers make sense to me now, but how anyone can put up with twenty-one nine and ten-year-olds is still beyond me. I guess I’ll just trust her when she says it’ll make sense when I get older.

My guess is that sometimes people make stupid decisions when they get upset about stupid things, like getting a D- on a geometry exam the same day that your best friend decides they don’t like the way you dress and think you should change your clothes or change your friendship group. Actually, that was pretty shitty of her. Still doesn’t impact me today at all, except for a couple pale white scars that I have to hide with concealer when it gets hot out and I decide to care.

I think I’d like to care less, be loud and proud about who I am, or was, or might have been if I’d managed to go a millimeter deeper.

But not should have been. That is the one thing I’m confident about.

#mine #weekly-ish writing

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doctor-ector · 7 years

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Crashers

“You knew him?” she asked the woman beside her. Dark hair, grey eyes, and the black dress made for a pretty picture, rather Morticia Addams. Very fitting for the occasion.

“Kind of.”

“Me too,” she lied. “He was a great man.”

They sat together again at the next one, for a schoolteacher who had decided not to buckle his seatbelt before heading out that morning. A pity, really, that they couldn’t have scheduled this for a couple hours earlier. She always liked getting lunch on the family’s bill after the service.

The other woman sat a few rows in front of her. She wore a different dress today. Karen wished she had chosen the spot next to her. It might be nice to have company she kind of knew at a funeral for once.

By the third time, she was convinced it wasn’t a coincidence. She never went to the burial. That’s only for the family and closest friends. Karen waited at one of the provided tables for the woman. Every church had a room like this, a cafeteria perfect for informal gatherings, funeral lunches, and wedding receptions where the bride can’t cough up the money for anything better.

“Hey, sexy,” she said as the woman passed by. She was back to the Morticia dress today, complete with bell sleeves. Karen could appreciate that.

She did a double take, and Karen worried she had pushed her too far too soon, but then she sat down beside her. “Good afternoon.”

“Great one.” Karen took a bite of potato salad. They always had potato salad at these things, and she had grown to love it. “So,” she began, “what is it that keeps you coming back?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Is it the idea that you’ve outlived another person? Do you get off on dead bodies? Come on, tell me.”

She shrugged. “I like all of it, really. The atmosphere’s nice. Kind of quiet. Sad and happy at the same time.”

Karen nodded. “There’s one at two on the other side of town, if you’re interested.”

The woman stole a potato chip of Karen’s plate. “I suppose I’ve got time for that, sexy.” Karen watched, transfixed, as the woman placed it on her tongue. Crunch. Smile.

She couldn’t wait to figure out just what she was getting herself into.

“The Catholics down in Bedford are having one Thursday at three. She was a convenience store clerk, fifty-two, and her photo looks like a glamour shot. Might be interesting.”

Eliza nodded. “Think we’ll have time to get there from the Lutherans on Third at ten?”

Karen considered it for a moment, trying to figure out the mental math. “I think we could manage it.”

“Then it’s a date.”

#writing #mine

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