Category: writing

daily living, site updates, the creative process, writing

time for a change

ray brantley
Words WrittenThing(s) EnjoyedStuff Accomplished
TODAY:
*sad deflated balloon noise*		PseudoPod Ep. 713: “You Can Stay All Day,” by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire)Website redesign + updates. It’s summery! I like it!
TOTAL:
9,753 / 15,000		Cat Rambo‘s Short Story WorkshopSuccessfully administered medication to Mrs. Moo
Trying a new thing here. We’ll see how much I like it later.

(I’m not going to admit to how much time I spent fiddling with that silly table to make it look presentable, so we’ll see if this is a format I stick with going forward in subsequent posts. Anyway.)

During the 5-minute timed writing sessions for Cat Rambo’s Short Story workshop today I jotted down two pieces I rather enjoyed: a hypothetical beginning to a short story set in the same universe as my current project, Companion Animals, and a response to the prompt, “The doll was dead.” I’ve polished them just a hair and so figured I’d drop them here, so that hopefully in a few weeks’ time I can look back on this post and compare my progress.

“The doll was dead.”

The doll was dead.

He found it at the bottom of the ravine, half-drowned under grey water run-off and a discarded soda bottle. The doll’s pale pink dress had discoloured under the malign indifference of the elements. Maybe it wasn’t pink at all. Maybe it had been red, once upon a happier time. He would never know for sure, and didn’t care. It was difficult to care, in that moment, about anything other than the doll’s open, staring eyes, which could not be black plastic buttons held in place by a neat criss-cross stitch of black thread, or beads, or little glass marbles with swirls of too-bright colour for irises, tidily affixed to a face of fabric or porcelain.

They couldn’t be any of those things, because fabric could not bruise, and glass could not bleed.

A Last Defence

Starlight pours through the airlock’s glass porthole and illuminates the crime scene before her torch can catch up. Blood, she thinks, glitters like a scattering of diamonds spilt from some baroness’s upended jewelry box. Viscera is duller, like silverware in need of a polish.

She has an academic knowledge of her shaking hands, like her body feels the fear before her mind does. That is one of many things she does not share in common with the little cat that stands, immutable as gravity, fierce as an entire battalion of Imperial pistoleers, on the opposite side of the airlock door.

The station’s failing bulwark groans when the escape pod door hisses open. She turns to throw herself into it, but not without one last look over her shoulder through the porthole. Her saviour, her last defence against the Emperor’s coterie–so small and brave, and so alone.

writing

camp nanowrimo

ray brantley

I’m participating! Look, I’ve even got a project set up on the official NaNoWriMo website and everything.

A bit annoyed that the embeddable widget option seems to be gone, but that’s not really the point.

I’ve set a modest 20k word count goal for myself for the month, which I think is attainable as long as I make sure not to stress myself out or over do it. After two days, I do believe I’ve determined that I am at my most creatively productive between 8 and 9am, which is when I’ve been writing my 100 word minimum each day for the last month and change anyway.

Please feel free to add me as a writing buddy! I would love to be your cheerleader as you put down words on your passion project.

the creative process, world building, writing

‘companion animals’; progress and an excerpt

ray brantley

First order of business, my accountability to myself: today’s word count target was not just met, but more than doubled! Each week I work on this project, I’m able to produce just a little bit more than I did the week before.

So that’s exciting. And, after sharing the first chapter draft with @amaraqwolf for a bit of external feedback, I feel more comfortable discussing the nature of what I’m working on here with less ambiguity, and providing you with a short excerpt!

Continue reading “‘companion animals’; progress and an excerpt” →
the creative process, writing

on accountability, and a little bit of pride: writerly updates

ray brantley

I finished the first first draft of the first chapter of a novel this morning!

Word count currently sitting at a very modest ~6,500 words, with so very many left to go before the finish line is even in sight, but I think what I am most proud of with this particular accomplishment is how steady and incremental process made it possible.

I decided, a little over a month ago while I was nearing the end of my mental health leave from work, that I would do everything in my power to write just 100 words a day towards a novel. That’s it; 100 words at minimum every day, no matter what, and I would work on making these words appear for just an hour each morning. When that hour was up, or when I hit my word count minimum (whichever came first), I’d close out of Scrivener, put the project aside, and not think about it at all for the next twenty-four hours.

And… I did it.

Non-draft words were research-related earlier in the month. Consistency also not great early on.
…but by June I really had hit my stride, and only missed one day.

I wasn’t 100% consistent; the stats above show that pretty transparently, but what they also demonstrate is a clear commitment to trying again every time I faltered or struggled. Some days (here’s looking at you, May 26 and 27), I just could not get the words to come together the way I wanted them to, and didn’t meet even my minimum required output before my hour was up and I had to call it quits for the day. On other days, as soon as I hit that word count minimum, that was it, I was done, extracting another word out of my brain was akin to pulling teeth, but when I walked away from the project for the day it was nevertheless with a sense of modest accomplishment, that I had kept my word to myself and made progress towards a goal that meant a lot to me.

And then there were days like June 22 and 23: ~800 words! And subsequently, almost 600 words! All accomplished roughly within that hour I set aside for myself in the morning before starting my day job, and many of those words such a delight to write that stopping myself from continuing was nearly as challenging as getting started had been when this process began. But I did stop, and I put the project away again, because this steady, incremental, consistent progress is far better for me than just the occasional day here and there throughout an otherwise creatively barren year where I manage to write a deluge.

All this to say, Self, well done. Good job! I am proud of you, Self, for reclaiming hours from your day to devote to the work that has always been central to your–our–identity. And I am extremely excited to see what we will have to share with the world when June 24, 20201 arrives.

Anyway, enjoy this glorious piece of artwork I commissioned from my talented artist friend, Cami Woodruff, of mine and my husband’s two ragdoll cats, and our temporary foster gremlin, Georgie.

From left to right: our beautiful Mrs. Moo, her dopey son Jasper, and one small ground squirrel in a kitten suit named Georgie. Art by Cami!

some recommended reading

“Late Night at the Low Road Diner,” by my dear friend Frances Rowat, published at Liminal Stories.

writing

can’t believe I just wrote a poem about records management

ray brantley 
In the doldrums of mid-morning and beneath fluorescent lamplight
I have my monitors for company and my task list for accountability.

Here is the work my skill set chose for me--to speak truth to power
Through calculated risk factors, regulations and best practices,
Records schedules, classification schemes that valuate a virtue,
That we are--or ought to be--transparently, precisely what we purport ourselves to be,
And where we fall short, see our path towards compliance
(Which is, to me, just another word for integrity).

See it all here,
Reviewed, proof-read, documented with secondary sources
Prepared to be presented, read, categorized and ignored;
Watch power lay the foundation for my future failure
And, in the same breath, thank me for my continued service.

Idealism in this profession has a short shelf life in spirit
If not shored up early by stubbornness and grit.

the creative process, world building, writing

old stuff: new persepolis excerpt

ray brantley

Since writing the excerpt below, my vision for this world and the characters within it has changed considerably. Even in this iteration of the narrative, the characters and the story itself are different from what I envisioned in November of 2013. But I want to celebrate writing that I am proud of, and part of that celebration involves sharing it with you today.

Not knowing Republican Shee hadn’t been a hindrance in the disputed territories, but inside a government run hospital staffed almost exclusively by Shee physicians it was proving to be a real liability.

Corelli Jones stared uncomprehending at the paperwork in front of him. His skin felt hot and cold under his clothes and the terrified lump in his throat was making it hard to breathe.

The Shee attendant, who had been sitting with him patiently for three and a half minutes of unbroken silence, finally betrayed a hint of discomfort and twitched one of the long quills that had been laying comfortably still across the scaled crest of her scalp. She stilled it and said, gentle as she could, “Water? Would you like?”

It was an English word Corelli recognized. He forced a closed mouth smile and put the pen down to shift the sleeping infant in his arms. “Please,” he said. The attendant got up from her seat and left the exam room, closing the door behind her, and only when he heard the latch did Corelli exhale raggedly and lean against the table. He bore the heel of the hand not supporting Gabriella into his forehead. Alone, he bit his lip and smothered the sob before it could come out.

They knew. They had to know. No human on New Persepolis grew to adulthood without fluency in the dominant Shee dialect unless they were from the disputed territories. Crossing the border into Republic territory without submitting to immigration processing was grounds for execution. Humans with counterfeit identification papers–or none at all–were as likely to be terrorists as refugees, the prevailing thought was. Better to err, with extreme prejudice, on the side of caution. The attendant had probably gone to page security–immigration, if Corelli was very lucky. An agent if he wasn’t.

Gabriella would end up a ward of the state and grow up with no knowledge of him. There was no way to ensure she made it to Diederik without implicating him in their dangerous and illegal border crossing, and the cache of funds they’d stashed outside the city would end up in the Republic’s coffers long before it would ever be of any benefit to Gabriella. This gambit had been a risky one, but Corelli thought he had prepared for everything.

Evidently, assuming that humans would be presented with human language intake papers at the hospital had been one assumption too many. What a careless mistake.

Continue reading “old stuff: new persepolis excerpt” →