Ah, ladies and gentlemen, I have FINALLY put on my big girl pants and started to re-read my second manuscript.
It is full of holes, lo, big ones at that.
BUT it is also, I'm proud to say, pretty neat! I'm reading it through here and marking it up and I'm thinking "dang, this ain't half bad!" The surprise of that thought almost offends me, but I'm too interested in the story I wrote so quickly last winter to pay any attention to that. A lot of it I don't remember writing, so that helps with the edits. Here we go then, EDITING FOR REALZ!
So that's fun, right? Since it's what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. Anyway, had to share that YES I'm still working on shining up the output from my most recent NaNoWriMo adventure and YES I'm still going to get it published (self published) properly someday. Best I can say, though, is "soon".
Not like next month... but not ten years from now either. Somewhere in the middle.
In the mean time, howzabout a teaser?
Hmmm?
Now I give you an excerpt from my new book about Arbux the giant.
Caveat: it's REALLY primitive right now and in very raw form.
so if you must critique, be gentle. :)
“Initially it was hard enough to sort out just how
he got ‘em. And initially it didn’t
really matter. There he was though, a big ol'd giant real
as could be, standing in a lake and makin’ that strange noise and wearing
bright red pants. My poor head couldn’t
really think what to make of the situation so I just ended up laughing at the
sight before me!
“Oh I laughed.
Hard. How could I not? Maybe it was my youth, maybe it was my
incorrigible nature, maybe it was all of that and then some. My world got a lot bigger that day, I can
still remember how I felt then, just like it was happening right now, and I
think it was just a rare and confused kind of joy that took me over and shook
me to my boots with laughter, laughter, laughter.
“Well, he heard me allright. He heard me laughing and it took him all but
two booming stomps to come back to the tower to see what it was that was making
all this noise. Big ol’ ears like
that? You bet he heard me. Moreover it was clear that he had been laughed
at plenty in his day and he wasn’t taking to kindly to bein’ laughed at again.
“And didn’t I just feel like the biggest jerk in the
world right then! He was still pretty
mad, see, though he was struggling to remember what it was he was up to feelin’
mad about. Flickers of what I guessed
were memories darted across his face as he stared me down. All of his previous interactions with people
had likely been at ground level, too, as he kept glancing nervously to his feet
and the foundations of my little tower.
He was dead set on snuffling around the legs and the base of my tower
and slowly worked out that I might possibly be somewhere in the top portion of
it.
“My laughing fits sure had subsided by then, being
so close to him and seeing him working out my location as furiously as he
was. I started to feel pretty bad for
him. He was just lost, was all. Maybe the ol’ Gods sent this big oaf to my
doorstep as a last-ditch effort to get him found. Maybe it was up to me to find a way to get
this Giant found. It was a strange
thought to be thinking at that point, I know it. But you can’t always help what comes into
your own head at times like this and I am no exception.
“When it comes to dealing with folks that are bigger
than you, you gotta’ be real calm and speak in a loud, deep, even tone. Real calm.
Like I said, fear burns through these guys like fire in dry grass, so if
you betray one blink of fear – well that’s it.
You get your bones scrambled up and he just goes on being big and mean
some more.
“So I said ‘HEY’.
Real long and loud just like that.
He tensed up right away and snuffled his big face up
to the tower window openings where I was.
Our eyes met and so I said ‘HEY” again, suddenly feeling quite foolish
and wondering if Giants had known language ever like we people do. Like that gorilla with the kitten, you
know? You can talk to ‘em, but it’s rare that you ever get put in a place to talk with ‘em.
He began to thrum a low, deep growl. I put my hands up real big and said ‘No!
Safe!’. What else was I going to
say? How do you tell the tiger that you
don’t want to be eaten? How do you
convince an earthquake to take it easy?
I was hoping like hell he wasn’t going to smash me
to smithereens.
Right then, the most amazing thing happened. Well, I suppose by now it’s not the most amazing thing, but I didn’t know
what I was dealing with back then and, back then, by the Gods, it was a pretty
damnedably amazing thing that happened.
He scratched his ear. He licked his finger. He bumped the tower with one of his
tremendous knuckles, like this – see?
Like a monkey trying to, I don’t know, see if his sister is awake.
And then he said his first word to me.
He said real slow and with breath that could eat
through rust, “BEHM”.
Now I don’t have to tell you what a thrill that was!
My whole world had, just minutes ago, gotten so much bigger and now it was
getting bigger again. My worldview just
kindof snapped into place right then. He
had said ‘behm’.
Of course
that big ol’ brute could talk. How did I
suppose he had got out there to begin with?
By flying?
No, at this close proximity a great many things
began to come clear to me. He had the
most beautiful skin, like oiled oak. And he had numerous scars, too, that shone
like white birch bark on a moonlit night.
Many of the scars and scuffs were particularly benign looking but he had
one helluva thick white ring going around his neck and bunching up around his
collarbone. There were big, even, square
scars too. Like someone had gotten up
and took out a big chunk of him for study.
And his knobby ol’ wrists showed me the final clue. One was marked up just like his neck and
collarbone, and one was half scars and half iron shackle… which appeared to be about eight sizes too
small for him but which also appeared to be growing right into him as if he
were a wounded tree. The fibrous,
leathery flesh of his wrist was growing right over the shackle.
This Giant had been held captive. Likely for study. Likely by some shady government agency that
studies these kinds of things. And he
had either been released, or, perhaps he
was the instrument of his own escape.
And ever since, he had been living by himself in the woods of the north
and just trying to survive. That’s where
he learned to speak, I figured. I bet
they got their chains on him and were trying just as hard as they could to
figure him out and turn him into something that the Gods had never wanted. People do that all the time, with plants,
with poisons, with stuff from the bottoms of the oceans, why wouldn’t they do
it to something so grand and mysterious as this big fellow? Well they would. And they did.
And I can guess it didn’t go well for them if he got out and they didn’t
catch him. There likely wasn’t much left
of the ‘them’ to come after him, once he got his steam up.
Probably that’s where he got his trousers too. Leave it to the military to go and degrade
something so pure and majestic as this; and then teach it to wear pants be
ashamed of itself.
Well there we were, just lookin’ at eachother and he
had just said his first word to me. And
it was a question. And I suddenly
realized what the question was. He was
talking allright, but he wasn’t that good at it, what with being as big as he
was and having what I guessed was a completely different set of muscles to work
with. It was a question in, of all
things, Norwegian. And he was lucky my
folks raised me with their language steeped thick into my skull. I heard the word ‘behm’ and I quickly realized
that he had said ‘hvem’, which as you
kids know means “who”.
He had asked me who I
was.
