Friday, September 02, 2005

I started writing what I hope will become a completed short-story/novella this evening. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"Dep stopped climbing and extended her legs on the narrow concrete balcony, only peripherally aware of the lichen prickling her knees. She breathed deeply, smelling dust and the nuanced odors of decaying machinery from far below. Although comfortable with heights, she dared not look down. Fatigued from her long climb up the shaft, she narrowed her eyes at the dimness above, imagining she could see a hint of daylight. Nothing. She reached up, appraising her calloused hands, peering through the spaces between her thin brown fingers. She tried to envision the next stage of her climb, cursing her unfamiliarity with the shaft.

"She counted to twenty and stood, ropy brown hair pendulous with sweat, her gear unexpectedly heavy in the cool metallic air. She reached into the shapeless polymer sac cinched around her naked waist and withdrew a lamp. Like the majority of artifacts she was used to, the lamp was sleek and seamless and smelled faintly of biomachines: a vegetable smell that reminded her of the factories and their endless ranks of semisentient attendants. Squatting briefly at the edge of the balcony, she traced fissures in the concrete with a wary fingertip. She nestled the lamp into place; its cilia plunged into the tiny crevasse with a moist popping sound and the bulb activated, throwing her surroundings into pastel relief."

4 comments:

Mac said...

Short-stories can be extraordinarily difficult because you need to fill the reader in quickly and subtly, whereas in a novel you have more room. I'm trying to get back into a fiction groove...

razorsmile said...

I think you'd give nine out of ten reader a heart attack if you ever wrote a sterile future of gleaming steel and clean uniforms.

:D

weevee: iexhus (iExhaust - Apple's contribution to hybrid cars)

Mac said...

I'd love to write a subversive, satirical take on the clean-scrubbed future-world of the 1950s, but I think William Gibson beat me to it with much-anthologized "The Gernsback Continuum."

But if I give it a shot you'll be the first to know.

weevee: weaztwut

Mac said...

"Postbiological Cosmos" is in the works. Slowly, but it's there.

Here's the publisher:

http://www.anomalistbooks.com