Writing Wednesday! Extract from 'The Singing Diamond'

Clear. Something like birdsong, almost like a voice. The diamond sang and would always sing. 

Nobody knew how or why. 

They say it was found by a rogue traveller in the rainforest, who had walked past the trees and his eyes had been blazed with a beam so white and so strong he turned towards it. He marched out of magnetism he took for curiosity, and found it perched in a tree amongst birds of paradise. It was flawlessly cut and heavy as a pebble in his hand, and as it pressed against his palm he could have felt the tiny vibrations of the throatless voice, if he'd stopped to notice.

Many people stole it and sold it, and their lives felt quiet and cold when they let it go. 

It was a myth and a curiosity. The bloated aristocrat who owned it for twenty years and wore it in a pendant to every party (where she had to talk over it) held it in a room on the very farthest tip of her estate. She hated the sound and loathed wearing the damn thing, and even so far away she'd swear she could hear it, taunting her, interrupting the self-obsessed whirl of her thoughts with its lilting song. 

When the opportunity came to pass it on came, her greed gave way to her frustration. Her son's new wife, whom she hated only slightly more than the diamond, was suffering under the truth of the aristocrat's disapproval. The aristocrat saw the gorgeous opportunity to both appear vastly generous while making the new girl's life secretly miserable with this sparkling curse, and she gave the diamond to her daughter-in-law with manic flourish. 

As the aristocrat lay down in bed that night, knowing full well the damned thing was traveling further and further away in a padded box in her daughter-in-law's arms, she wept. Because she knew the diamond was gone, but she could still fucking hear it.

 *

The Singing Diamond is a completed short story that I'm not sure is strong enough to put into my collection. It's hard to make a compelling story from the point of view of an inanimate object. It's gone through several edits and... I still don't know.

Writing Wednesday! Extract from 'Livestock'

Have a bite of my work-in-progress, Livestock, also known as Project: Stone Cold Bummer.

The manager pulled it from the factory cages and took it to the medical wing. 

The wing was huge, white and grey, usually reserved for quarantines. She didn't let anyone else look at it, not even to hose it down. She was smart that way. 

She washed it herself, then ran its barcode. A yearling – somewhere from twelve to fourteen. In that case, it was a runt.

She clapped in its face and it started. She tugged its hair, pinched its scrawny arm, and it squealed, backing away from her. 

 

She drew a pen from her pocket and threw it across the room; its clear blue eyes followed the ballpoint to rest.

Livestock don't do that. 

Something was very wrong.

Rainbows and smileys and some bad writing.

I ordered business cards from Moo (to be fair, they're baby mini business cards) and as I was browsing through the designs available, my first thought was 'do they have Hello Kitty ones'? Now, you might think nobody who wants Hello Kitty business cards should be allowed to have business cards at all. They should be given printer paper and crayons and sat on a tiny plastic chair. That's what I think, anyway. Maybe it's a symptom of the chronic childishness my generation is trapped in – but screw it. I'm a writer. I'm artsy. I'm whimsical. All the smart, pastel designs seemed boring. I'm a special snowflake, goddamnit.

So I got rainbow business cards. They'll be delivered around Christmas. I'm psyched.

Now, I'm aware that I keep calling myself a writer but please let's not get our wires crossed – this self-imposed label is not some sort of delusional, narcissistic thing. It's an affirmation which I know for a fact is currently false (with the definition of a writer being someone who writes and gets paid and knows how grammar works – see extract below for evidence to the contrary), but which will hopefully become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're not esoterically-minded, humour me and pretend that an affirmation and a lie are separate things.

I also did something sorta crazy the other day. I've been reading No Country For Old Men and while I'm not mad about the plot, Cormac McCarthy's style just blows me away. When I was still labouring under the delusion that I could mentally handle two years of Masters, I wanted to focus on Cormac McCarthy's novels for my thesis – because The Road is probably my favourite novel of all time. And he's too cool for quotation marks.

So while working on Project: Not A Fanfic, I wrote a whole chapter in a weak impression of McCarthy's style. It turned out to be rather spectacularly bad. Have an extract:

She stood and went outside. It was dark and it had just rained and there were strong winds knotting her hair and raising goosebumps on her skin. The air smelled wet and fresh. The rustle of the wind chewed on the edges of her mind and she pictured a thousand enemies waiting beyond the edge of the darkness for her, breaking twigs and shifting restlessly in the distance waiting impatiently for her to come within reach, within swiping distance.

She shivered, looked at the moon, and went back inside. He asked her what she'd been doing outside. Fresh air, she said. She looked to the ground so he wouldn't see her pupils had become tiny pinpricks in her muddy green eyes.

He said he was going out and that she should have a hole dug by the time he got back. She said how big. He said about six foot long and six deep. It should be easy in this mud.

If she had been sober her stomach would have dropped and her skin would have grown to match the green of her eyes but none of that happened. She nodded and made herself and him a cup of coffee. Most of the time even when he said he wanted coffee he wouldn't drink it. His cup stayed full and a thin brown ring started to stain the cup around the edge where the coffee ended. He packed up his things, real organised, and left. She listened to his truck start and chug dead and start again. She looked at the cup he left behind and downed the lukewarm instant coffee that had a sludge of sugar at the bottom. He hadn't even stirred it. 

She tied up her hair in a knotty tail then twisted the tail around into a messy bun that would stay off her neck as she sweated. He kept the shovels in the shed which he kept locked because some of the tools had blood on them and no point letting people wander in there. Although he liked things clean some stains were sentimental.

I doubt this chapter will survive revisions, but it was fun to write.

Project: Not A Fanfic is going well, by the way. I'm on schedule in terms of word count (37,086 words as of this evening), and just yesterday I tackled a massive action scene I've been putting off since day one. Anyone who knows me knows I consider it a feat of strength to walk and talk at the same time, so my co-ordination and spatial reasoning skills aren't quite at action-adventure levels. Luckily the good folks in my story have guns* so they don't have any messy, confusing, multi-limbed hand-to-hand combat for me to grapple with.

One of my characters gave me a pleasant surprise too – while I thought she was relentlessly blasé and well-adjusted, turns out she's been faking it. I'm thrilled, because she's more real and relatable now. She was bordering on Mary Sue-ish before. Although I realise how problematic it is that when a male character is perfect it's heroic, and when a female character is perfect it's unrealistic.

Like any adult with rainbow business cards, I use smiley stickers to motivate myself.

My new favourite quote and motto for NaNo.

Luckily, perfect people are boring and I won't tolerate them in my stories. Right now every character in Project: Not A Fanfic is so damaged I'm surprised they get anything done. Hell, I don't even expect much from them, I'm just hoping the poor bastards manage to get to the end of the book without turning into a suicide cult. 

*I dislike guns and I don't really understand them. If it were up to me, my characters would shoot jelly babies from slingshots at the bad guys. But since the bad guys don't care how I feel, and have guns with bullets, I fear this could put my team at an unfair disadvantage.