The dyehouse is downwind of every other building, but its location does little to diffuse its smell. The building is squat and dark and windowless. Its roof is pierced with chimneys, like arrows sticking out of Saint Sebastian’s chest. The air around it is soaked in the moist, acrid stench of dyestuff, lye and urine. After a day’s work, I’ll carry that same stench, and everyone who walks within ten feet of me will know I have again incurred an Elder’s wrath.

The work is hard, the hours are long; the dying is no easy task. Pilgrims, still wan and weak-legged from their voyage across the ocean, must bring their garments to be dyed black before they can become citizens of God’s kingdom here on Earth. In so doing, the Elders say, they obliterate the sin of pride, and come into the kingdom humble as penitents.

In the dyehouse, we submerge the aristocrat’s bright velvets and the pauper’s faded woolens into the same steaming, stinking tub of boiling water and ammonia which we have distilled from urine and some other sources. We stew the garments longer than a tough cut of meat, until the threads are weak enough to accept the dye. The dying takes time, but we will wait. Within the wall, time is something we do not lack.

Once the garments have been soaked and softened, we submerge them in a vat of black dyestuff laced with arsenic to help the color stick. We stir this pot for hours before it is time to remove the sodden mass of black clothes. The dye makes our hands rough and gray. The arsenic makes our skin pale and our bodies weak.

There is no punishment worse than the dyehouse, save the tannery and the distillery where our chemicals are made. But that work is heavy and hard—the men labor with their coats removed and sleeves rolled back. I have been told that the sight of men working at such labors would be not purify my soul, but cast me deeper into sin. We women are weak, and must be protected from such sights. Thank goodness.

This is not to say the dying is an easy task. The color fades fast in clean water and bright sunlight, and must be renewed every year or so. The dye does not take to fabric so well here, as it does at Home. The plant we use to make our black is called Miser’s Heart. And like its namesake, Miser’s Heart thrives on cold air and sparse nourishment. It is overfed and overwhelmed by fecund soil. It withers in the warm summers of this foreign clime.

Our plants, like our people, are used to stingy seasons and stony ground. We mistrust abundance. We fear ease. We despise pleasure. Comfort is a snare the devil sets to steal our souls away.

Or so the Elders say.

I believe I would enjoy a few comforts—or, at the least, an easier chore. There is no shortage of dyestuff in this new world, and all of it is a great deal easier to refine that the stingy black of Miser’s Heart. In spring a host of flowers rise in brilliant shades of gold and red and blue, filling the fields beyond the wall like an army bent on conquest.

We could easily attire ourselves in royal blues, imperial purples, or reds as rich as spilled blood. We could be paupers clad in the colors of kings, but we are a modest people; we must work hard so that all who see us will know it. We must attire our bodies in black and never look upon our naked skin. We must hide our hair, lest, tempted by its softness and rich color, we give in to the sin of pride. We must never enjoy softness or beauty, for these are but signposts on the Primrose Path that leads unwary souls to Hell.

This is what the Elders tell me, though nine months of punishment and repetition have not yet cowed me enough to believe it. But I feel myself weakening. My body slows, my mind grows tired. I soften. One day I will soak up the Elders’ words the way softened cloth soaks up the dye. It may take time, but in God’s kingdom here on Earth, time is something we do not lack.

Terra Obscura is the short story I wrote for the class I took. I’ll run it in three parts, starting Tuesday.  Nieves, the sequel to Ember, is nowhere near finished, and won’t be for quite a long time. But I loved the photo so much, I just had to play around with it.

So here’s me cheating on my blogging by posting the start of a story I started a while ago, and mean to finish once I get three or five other Works in Progress out of my head and into my hard drive (and thumb drive, and back-up disk. Save early and often, peoples.)

Nieves

When I was very young, I asked my mother what had happened to the smallest finger on her left hand.

“I cut it off,” she told me, miming the chop of a knife with the flat of her right hand. One swing, sure and swift. She’d smiled when she said it, no doubt meaning to keep the conversation light. She often told outrageous tales just to see my eyes grow big. And when I asked, “Truly?” she’d shake her head and we would giggle over my credulity like a pair of mean little girls.

I did not realize until I was much older that she spun those fanciful tales a purpose. She meant to teach me to tell a lie from the truth, and to distrust even the people I loved the most.

I can’t help it, I’m a fiddler. I nitpick. I tweak.

Editor Laurie and the ever-patient Bam can attest, every time I send in a draft, something is different. I just can’t help it. Just yesterday, I noticed in Ember chapter 8 that I described fabric as jacquard when I really meant brocade. O, the horror! I can’t believe I did that! (Sorry, Anonymous Auction Winner!). It will be fixed in the full PDF.

I can’t leave well enough alone. I change a word here, a sentence there. When a question about my main character that wakes me in the middle of the night like, “What does she do when she’s not killing people?” I have to answer it.

It’s like some kind of curse: Lo, and she shall edit nigh until the very end.

One of these days, I’m going to have to learn to let go. Maybe I can do that by obsessing on my next WIP?

WIP Title: Rohais
Word Count: 7,000/95,000
Current Favorite Words:

Alone of all my sisters, I was not named to honor queens or saints. Instead, my stepmother named me for the climbing rose on the south wall of her garden, with its sweet scent and wicked thorns.

Ember

Charm is a curse. Love is a fire. And this story? It’s is no fairytale.

31,304 / 15,000 (208.7%)

Time to take it off the old WIP board.

I spent more time on it than I’d planned, but I don’t regret it. Ember was sitting on my hard drive at 1,500 words for at least a year. I just could not motivate myself to write it for sale. But once I started writing for fun and web content, the story just took off.

Perhaps the reason for my hesitation was that I have a longer story set in the same world that I like better. The other story, Rohais is also first person narrated. I was beginning to think the narrative voices of the two main characters were a bit too similar. The funny thing is, now that the story is finished, I don’t think Ember sounds too much like Rohais.

So, what have I learned.

1. Writing is fun.
2. I do not need the motivation of a deadline to finish a story (but it helps).
3. I shouldn’t talk myself out of stories I haven’t written yet. Maybe the things I’m worried about won’t be a problem.
4. Some stories run longer than you think they will, and that’s OK.

Look for Ember in November.

I was not surprised when, scarcely nine months after my mother’s death, my father returned from one of his buying trips with a cartload of second-rate silks and a new wife. I wasn’t angry, either. He was the sort of man who needed a wife. He needed stability, love and care. He needed someone to remind him to eat in the mornings and to take him to bed at night.

When I saw the carriage trailing his cart, I’d high hopes of his new wife. But then he told me she was a beautiful, impoverished noblewoman. He called her a delicate flower who needed his care. He told me his new wife had two daughters just my age, and he promised we would be the best of friends.

My father herded half a dozen footmen out to hold the horses, set up the stairs and open the door so he could help his new wife down from the carriage. Her hand preceded her from the dark interior. It was delicate and powdered white, gilded with a filigree of rings and bracelets. Her fingernails were varnished pink. The stones in her many rings twinkled prettily in the sunlight, but I knew they were glass.

My stepmother’s foot followed next. She wore shoes of gaudy pink satin, frayed at the toes, studded with dull glass gems, and capped by a spindly wooden heel that would barely support its wearer from one end of her bedchamber to the other. I do not mean to be cruel when I say this, only factual: I knew her for a whore before I ever saw her face.

…She paused when she saw me, and I couldn’t blame her. I knew what I looked like—my cold expression, my red hair and freckled skin, my black eyes smoldering like hot coals. Her eyes flicked to the torches flanking our door, noting, I am sure, the way the flames yearned toward me though the wind urged them in the opposite direction.

Her face tightened beneath its façade of paint. Her white-powdered hand wavered on the verge of greeting me. In that moment, she realized my father’s tales of an innocent, biddable daughter were spun from the same wishful imagination that had let him believe her to be a noblewoman, and to believe the two hard-eyed whores (scarcely a decade her junior) who peered out of the carriage behind her were her daughters.

“Step-mamá!” I greeted her, taking her shoulders and kissing her powdered cheeks. My lips came away white with a mixture of lead and lard, but it was worth it for the expression of surprise that crossed her face. When my father wasn’t looking, I wiped my mouth on the cuff of my velvet sleeve.

“Come inside, let me show you and my new sisters our home. I know we shall be ever so happy together!”

With my father’s help, the three women wrestled their threadbare satin skirts and listing panniers up the stairs and into the house. I showed them to the parlor, which still stank faintly of burned flesh, and directed my new step mama to sit in my mother’s blue leather chair.

“I just knew you four would get along,” my father said, beaming from the doorway. I hadn’t seen him so happy since before my mother’s illness. “I’ll leave you ladies to get acquainted while I see to the unloading of my latest shipment of fine textiles.”

My new stepmother’s lips parted on a word as the door swung shut. I think she was going to say, “Wait.”

I smiled, pleased as a spider to have so many flies trapped in my parlor. I winked at the hearth and it roared to life, shooting flames up the chimney and sparks onto the rug. The candles followed, lighting all at once.

“Please don’t hurt us!” One of my new stepsisters pleaded. Despite her shopworn satin and powdered hair, she suddenly looked young and frightened.

“We didn’t know,” said the other. “We didn’t know Master Drayman’s daughter was a Wise Woman.”

“A witch,” I corrected, smiling wide to show my teeth.

copyright 2007. Contents of this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

But, really. Just two finished stories? Out of over 200,000 words? That is some lousy track record. The problem with being a seat-of-the-pants writer is that the writing is only fun when I don’t know what’s going to happen. Three of the remaining seven other stories on my hard drive are in, or very close to, their final chapters. And that’s when it gets tough. Writing to find out what happens next, that takes no discipline. But writing when you know what’s going to happen. That starts feeling like work. ::sigh::

But, I do suppose that if I ever want to realize my childhood dream of becoming the biracial, American Barbara Cartland, I’m gonna have to pull up my socks and get down to work.

About 11 months ago, I wrote a post about a story that was almost finished. It was the Original “The Bitter End“. That story, the “Untitled Sci-fi” is very close to finished. But I still haven’t finished it. It’s one of the stories that I mapped out and outlined before I got in touch with my inner seat-of-the-panster. Maybe that’s why I’m having no luck finishing it–there’s no suspense left in the writing.

In the time since I wrote that post, I’ve written two short stories, and started on a full-length novel about which I am very excited. But my “Untitled Sci-fi” nags at me. So here’s my goal: I will finish that story by August 28, 2007 — a year to the day that I first complained about it.

But I’m going to do it. I will.

Take a deep breath.

Get a grip on those pliers girl.

Breathe.

I’m not working on a new full length right now. Currently, I’m trying to finish a novella (Bright) and a short novel (Split) and the as-yet untitled Sci-fi thingy. Overall, I need to write about 50K words, and edit and polish. So I’m doing a modified version of the challenge. It’s rather like doing a modified push up–same name, way less difficult.

Point is, I’m gunning to write 1500 to 2000 words a day for the next 70 (okay, 75) days and have 3 finished stories by September 20th, 2007. Participants are supposed to report updates every Wednesday and Sunday.

Here are the stories I’m working on. I’ll create word count charts for them, soon:

1) Title: Bright
2) Hero/Profession: Kostantin Amur / Man of Mystery or Criminal?
3) Heroine/Profession: Rosalind Stark / Waitress and non-starving artist
4) Setting: Dark River City
5) Length: 25K-30K words
6) Current Status

5,000 / 27,000 (18.5%)

______________________
1) Title: Split
2) Hero/Occupation: Jake Wright/Jack Sinistral / Scientist/Assassin/Split personality
3) Heroine/Occupation: Mara Keane / Professional Knife-thrower
4) Setting: Dark River City
5) Length: 45K-60K words
_______________________
1) Book Title: Untitled
2) Hero/Occupation: Undecided/Alien liaison
3) Heroine/Occupation: Ysabel Ravi/Translator & Traitor
4) Lost planet
5) 45k-60k words