truepenny | bookkeeping

The World Without Sleep: complete draft, 13,500 words.

Now to find a market interested in a 13,500 word Marxist-Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath-with-vampires novella.

::hollow laughter::

What the fuck. I enjoyed writing it.

And it's time for me to do the first-lines meme again, because it sorts my head out in a good way.

For reference, the first iteration is here, and five of those twenty-two stories are now complete (save for some tweaking on "The Clockwork Pianist").

The Mirador has lost its first line. We're still trying to figure out what the new one is.

The novel which was called The Weight of Memory has lost both title and first line. Flailing a bit, yes indeedy.

The Marriage of True Minds still has its first line, The greatest danger was that he wanted to trust, but I'm not convinced the story's right. Slippery as a bar of soap in a bathtub, that one.

1. My sister Isobel was nervous.

2. "Maiah! Maiah, wake up!"
        An urgent voice, a hand shaking roughly at his shoulder.

3. The heat in Hylant Station was like nothing Tanasestefeth had ever imagined.

4. Cuthbert Swetenham, who had been the ninth Earl of Glastalvon, rose to his feet as the transparent fourth wall of his cell vanished. It worried him, a little, how something that was already invisible could vanish, but he had no other words to describe the phenomenon.

5. On the twenty-fourth of April, Medraut dreamed of Loheris again.

6. The Museum owns eighty-nine specimens of the genus Draco.

7. In January, Jenny Sutpen's baby died.

8. 184. Figurehead. Wood. 35" x 18". American, ca. 1850. Figure of a woman holding a telescope and compass. Ship unknown.

9. Shelby was waiting for them on a rise two miles out of town.

10. I cut off her head before I buried her.

11. It was an open question in the Parrington which of Samuel Mather Parrington's two daughters was more to be feared.

12. They yanked the bag off my head and shoved me forward, hard.

13. Therese Winslow was sixteen, a tall child, slender, with the porcelain-fair fragility of a tea rose or a Shakespeare heroine: Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia.

14. Fortinbras is not Hamlet.

15. "Oh fuck no!"
        Mick Sharpton's howl of outrage was clearly audible in the junior agents' office.

16. The Renault case refused to break.

17. Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought she was special.
        The terrible thing was, she was right.