Friday Snippet 49

Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite
by Salvador Dali
print for sale at art.com

Update 6/25/08: Snippet pasted in. It's soooo late. It's soooo short. And it's all description. I'm struggling with the action I have planned for this scene. I have a lot of trouble with transitions. I'm also having a tug-o-war with that part of myself that is itching to start editing and rewriting. But that wasn't the deal I made with my muse when I began this project. This whole exercise is an attempt to see if I can keep the harpies at bay until I get a completed draft of a story. The idea is to stay playful and to resist the temptation to start reworking it and second and third guessing every move. But I expected this to be a short story--under 10K and it is already several K past that and still less than half way to the climax I envisioned and the threads are tangled, stretched, and threatening to snap.

Anyway. I'm going to try to squeeze out another half K of words by Friday evening. If I don't manage that then I'm not going to post a snippet at all. I can't have the shell gambit hanging over me during the Read-a-thon and its aftermath.

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This is a shell again. How surprised are we? I'll paste the snippet in sometime this weekend. At least that is the current plan and I've only been later than Sunday night twice in fourteen weeks. My excuses aren't that good this week. I got caught up in two obsessions. Reading fiction and playing the Weekly Geeks Scavenger Hunt which is over as of tomorrow. Yesterday, I fully intended to spend today working on my snippet though. And was foiled by the temps going up unexpectedly. That is one serious drawback of laptops. The heat coming off the keyboard on warm days. If only I could take it outside. But I can't read the screen in daylight. So I've been taking books outside with me and since Tuesday have read the last hundred pages of The Historian, the two Nancy Yi Fan novels and the August Wilson play, The Piano Lesson.

I went outside after dinner this evening and didn't come in until after midnight. I was reading at first but had to stop when it started sprinkling. But couldn't bear to go in. Ed and I then started a conversation about nine-thirty that lasted until nearly one. And since I've been sleeping nights all week that pretty much wraps up my day. Tomorrow is my 'home alone' day as long as the dirt track races don't get rained out. I do need to do some laundry but other than that and breaks to fix my own meals I'll have from 2:30PM thru 10:30PM to designate how I see fit. I will work on the snippet for part of that if I have to use pencil and paper and then type it in after midnight or the cool of Sunday morning.

Meanwhile....

You can catch up or review via the links to the first fourteen parts available below.

The entire thing is closing in on 12K. So much for it being a short story. Based on the scenes yet to be written which I know about, I estimate I'm 1/3 to 1/2 way there. That won't be long enough for a novel either. sigh.

But then I hadn't planned on it being a novel. I have enough novels in progress in this story world!

One of them is even set in this same motel. And someone you've already encountered in this story is a POV character in it. You learned her name when Crystal did in part twelve: Brook the housekeeper. She was the protagonist of my first NaNo novel, Majoring in Marine Biology.

Home Is Where the Horror Is
by Joy Renee

(part one; part two; part three; part four; part five; part six; part seven; part eight; part nine; part ten; part eleven; part twelve; part thirteen; part fourteen;)

With Garrison alternately humming and sucking on his thumb as he considered his next move, Crystal began looking around the room from her kneeling position to get her bearings. The portable crib was set against the back of a couch that was facing the draped window at the end of the long narrow room. The sheckles of light on the floor beneath the drapes indicated a large sliding-glass door behind them. To her right was the TV with a rocking chair in front of it. She could touch the edge of of one of its rockers and set it in motion if she reached out.

The long wall on her right was clear of furniture for most of its length except for a large cabinet next to the door she had entered. On that wall was a mural depicting an ocean scene. Although the bottom section consisted mostly of dark lines suggesting an underwater tableau, the top was filled in full of color and detail. the felt her jaw actually dropping, her lungs filling with awe, her eyes widening and for long moments refusing to blink.

On a sapphire sky under an overarching rainbow that contained more glowing colors than she could name, were a number of planetary bodies--scintillating jewels--in a surrealistic symbiosis with a plethora of marine lifeforms. A gray whale was breaching our of the center of a Galaxy. A hammerhead shark was cruising the rings of a large beclouded planet. An orca was arched inside the circle of a full moon creating the emblem of the Tao. In the far left corner a sun with a fiery halo was playing placenta for a human fetus woven of the fiery threads of the corona with one especially long and bright solar flare acting as umbilical chord.

In the center, leaping out of the ocean in a great spray of sparkling water was a dolphin and upon its back rode a laughing infant raising its arms in an attempt to grasp the rim of the rainbow. Crystal had not yet gotten a clear look at Garrison's face but she was willing to bet that was his face and this was his mother's work.