DAMN!!
If this is an example of 'author intrusion,' then intrude away to your heart's content!
I noticed an inconsistency -- when Molly is in the basement in her son's room, the floor creaks. Earlier, the floor was described as concrete, which doesn't creak. That needs fixed. I understand the point: she has to make some noise to wake him up, but there are lots of ways to do that.
Another is the secret exit through the foundation wall. Where does the tunnel go, and why has no one noticed a big bunch of dirt from the excavation? Note that you don't need to explain this for the reader too much, but if you ask and answer this question for yourself, it'll resolve automatically in the text.
You've also got some spelling and punctuation to tighten up a bit.
Very nice work with the fathers in the box in the tool shed -- I hadn't seen that coming at all.
Truly horrific, and a job well done!
Strenthening Literary Muscle
Moderator: Editors
-
Lester Curtis
- Long Fiction Editor
- Posts: 2736
- Joined: January 11, 2010, 12:03:56 AM
- Location: by the time you read this, I'll be somewhere else
Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
-
Lester Curtis
- Long Fiction Editor
- Posts: 2736
- Joined: January 11, 2010, 12:03:56 AM
- Location: by the time you read this, I'll be somewhere else
Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
Corrections . . .
Items to be corrected are in red; my comments in blue.
Her Lips Are Sealed
By Mark Edgemon
Preface
Author intrusion has been long accepted as a "don't" when writing fiction. The common philosophy has been for the author to get out of the way and let the story unfold of delete itself. Additionally, that comments from the author takes the reader out of the story and interrupts the flow. singular/plural
For five years I have tried to refine my writing to fit in with what is accepted. But as I removed this element, my voice went with it. The author intrusion "is" a part of my style. The combining of fiction, non fiction (author commentary) and poetry encompasses both my skill and interest into one medium.
After so long an absence, I have returned to my style, my first love in writing. I could do nothing else. As far as how readers will respond - time will tell.
Meeting Death For the First Time
"Monsters are not fabled, born or created - they are manufactured."
Apprehension gripped the dark-haired woman as she shuffled down the darkened hallway toward the downstairs basement door. Every sound in the house was amplified. Beaded lights flickered on the walls, reflected from the traffic through the unshaded windows as she passed each room. The floorboards creaked with each nervous step; her breathing sounding loudly as if everything had stopped and focused on her. Standing in front of the basement door, she paused.
The news reports concerning the city's mutilated deaths prodded her to see him after sequestering him away for a year. If she didn't do this now, then eventually, the police would.
She grabbed hold of the doorknob; the metal rattled as she turned it; frightened the door would fly open and - he - would leap out. The metal doorknob rattled as she turned it, frightened that the door would fly open and - he - would leap out. His resentment had grown deep, especially towards her. She betrayed him.
*****
She began to think back to the days she once cradled him in her arms. Imprinted on her soul was the way he laughed; his adoration of her. He was the only joy her simple life had ever known.
When he was sick, she remained by his bedside, changing cold compresses, keeping him warm with her body, seeing she only possessed a couple of threadbare blankets. She would often stand by the window and watch him play, but not where he could see her. She did not want to be intrusive.
It gave her joy to know she had made such a loving child. His happiness substantiated her self worth. No one was ever going to harm him.
Molly Danshackle was a woman in her early forties (when she gave birth to him); thin, gaunt, around 5.5 five feet five when she was not slumping. She had a home in Elstra, a small town in the district of Bautzen, Germany.
*****
She shook off her memories of him. A solemn expression shaded her face. The last time she had seen him was about a year ago. She was unable to bear what had become of him, so she stopped coming down to the basement, leaving his food at the top of the stairs twice daily.
Guilt, became her dark companion, shadowing her every step as a constant reminder of what her silence had wrought upon the very thing she had loved the most.
Walking down the basement stairs sent an ominous shiver down her spine. If it was him, she had to know.
The further she walked down the stairs, the more she coughed from the dank, metallic smell permeating the air. There was no ventilation, but she could keep her son no other place.
Stepping from the bottom wooden stair onto the concrete basement floor, she began feeling around for the metal chain to turn on the light. She found it loosely dangling inches from her face. She pulled it.
Muted light pushed back some of the darkness around where she stood. The light bulb swung slowly side to side giving a disoriented sense to the room.
She began to feel a tickling sensation around her feet through the thin fabric of her shoes. She grabbed the light to steady herself and lifted her right leg. Several layers of crawling insects swarmed around her foot. She shook her leg, but only a few dropped off. She stomped her foot twice trying to shake them loose, crushing mounds of insects into a thick brown paste between her shoe and the concrete floor. They were beginning to crawl up her leg.
She ran toward the door to his room and began kicking the wall to the side. She was able to dislodge most of them before opening the door and darting into his room, shutting it hard after entering.
Once inside the room, she flipped the light switch. Looking toward the floor, she saw hordes of insects flooding into the room from under the basement door. They were swarming toward his bed.
She went to his closet and picked out a couple pair of dirty jeans, shoving them against the bottom of the door to stop the inrush of infestation. The floor in his room was a live carpet of roaches along with many other types of parasitic insects. The air in the room smelled partly metallic, partly a dank, musty, smothery sensation and there was an overriding smell of death.
She walked over to his dresser and opened the top drawer. It was junky, filled with miscellaneous things that were in disrepair; a rusted pocketknife, pieces of broken toys his stepfather had smashed during his many fits of rage; the space ornamented with small clumps of red dried mud.
She sorted through the next drawer, picking up filthy t-shirts, jeans and underwear. Some of the clothes were torn with jagged cloth edges. Underneath everything was a wad of money. He didn't have a job. ‘What is he doing at night?’ drop quotes and italicize she thought.
The First Lies Are the Hardest
"The devil always tells the truth - cause those are the best lies."
‘If only I could have kept Travis from leaving,’ see above she thought, he being her first husband and the boy’s natural father.
*****
Travis didn't care much for his son Robbie. A child burdened his image of being a carefree bachelor. He would often remove his wedding ring in public, but after awhile, most people knew he had a son.
"Hey Travis, did your wife let you out of the house tonight?" one of his bar buddies said, comma added goading him. "Has she hen-pecked you yet? Cluck, cluck cluck - here chickee chickee."
Travis responded trying to laugh off the insult. "I prefer the term pussy whipped." His friend had struck a nerve.
"A couple of my friends told me I looked like I was still in my thirties," Travis said.
"Well hold onto them, cause friends that lie like that are hard to come by," his drinking companion said.
This was just one of the reasons he would start verbal arguments with his wife.
"You're no kind of wife to me!" he would often start out.
"Hush Travis, Robbie might hear you," she said, crying, comma added wanting to quiet him down.
"I don't give a damn, Molly!" he said shouting all the louder.” You’re nothing but a bag of bones. You don't sleep with me in the same bed anymore."
She looked down, comma added not really knowing what to say.
"Well,” she responded weeping, “I'm more comfortable in my own bed. My back has been hurting..."
Travis grew impatient. "That is what you always say! What about my comfort? I have needs, you damn wore out hag!" She sobbed, comma added placing her hands across her face.
"When was the last time you took care of me?" He looked around at an immaculate house, "Sure you cook and clean, But when was the last time you...you..."
"It's not right, you speaking such hurtful things to me. I clean your home and make do with what little money you bring into this house..."
He punched her in the right eye, knocking her backwards onto the floor. She started to get up slowly on all fours. He grabbed her hair and jerked her backwards, causing her to fall again, comma added this time in the other direction.
Her hands grabbed onto his shirt, comma added trying to gain her balance; use comma but her knees buckled until she was kneeling in front of him.
She latched onto his belt and tried to pull herself up. He hit her again on the forehead, knocking her the rest of the way to the floor. He felt like hitting, but she was too weak to take much more. He didn't want her to go to the hospital and him be accused of abuse, maybe serving jail time for it, so he walked out of the house, slamming the front door after him.
She laid on the floor, trying to figure out what to do; whether to take her son and leave, have him arrested or just try better to calm his rages next time. The home belonged to him. She needed the house to protect her son from the cold German winters.
Mysteriously, he was gone a few months later. However, it left her and Robbie in financial need.
*****
She snapped out of her remembrance and refocused her mind looking for evidence. She walked over to the closet, the door already open, comma added and began sorting through his filthy clothes. His jeans were caked in dark red mud, comma added with holes around the knees and bottom.
Her eyes moved slowly over every inch of the closet, until she spied a hatchet on top of the shelf. He must have taken it from the tool shed. She noticed some dark crimson stains on the blade. It could be blood.
She looked at the floor once again and noticed that the insects had pushed their way underneath the door to the room and were swarming toward the bed.
Harnessing the Predator
"What disquieting dreams we spin, from the violence which takes hold in others, by OUR unrestrained acts of selfishness."
She began to think back when Fred had come into their lives.
*****
He was a weather worn farmer in his early fifties. He came over regularly and would often compliment Molly on her house. Her home was nothing to speak of, but it was a sturdy place to live. He had been sleeping nights in a former neighbor’s barn. The bank foreclosed on his farm years earlier.
On this particular day, he had something on his mind. He broached the subject while they were sitting on her porch.
“Molly?” he said with an air of pride, ironic for his financial state and appearance. I’ve got a proposition for you, that you’d be a fool to turn down.”
“What is it?” she inquired.
“I know you’re not working and having trouble making ends meet and all that…” he cleared his throat. “I’m a strong guy, who knows how to work. It's obvious you don’t have any prospects for other relationships. I'm not downin' your looks or anything..." he never thought before he opened his mouth, "...it's just that, well...what about you and me gettin' married?” He glanced over at her expression, but was not encouraged by it.
She looked away for a moment.
He began talking faster trying to bolster his position, “Now, I know you probably gave up on getting married a long time ago after your first husband ran off, but uh, I can at least put food on the table, get your electricity turned back on and make sure your boy is wearing store bought clothes instead of the rags he’s wearing now."
She had been worried about their need for support for some time, but she couldn’t leave her young son alone to get a job outside of the house.
She was silent for a moment and then said, "Alright, but we'll need some grocery money right away. Do you have fifty dollars?"
"No," he replied, "but added quote I can get it." His poverty should have been a clue to how hard a worker he truly was, but she hoped against hope this would be a good decision.
Fred moved in with a sense of ownership. The boy was afraid of him. Fred was an intruder moving into his safe environment. Robbie had adjusted to life without a father, but acceptance of this loud-mouthed fool was more than this boy could understand. He tagged along beside his mother more than usual.
As the new boss made himself more comfortable at his new home, the young boy's eyes were sorrowfully expressive. He would hold his mother's hand a lot more these days. Fred ordered the boy about, stomping his foot at him whenever he didn't move fast enough to suit him.
Fred did not keep his part of the bargain. He rarely worked. He would eat at homeless shelters while leaving his wife and stepson at home hungry. Molly sold possessions for food until there was nothing more to sell. She sewed and mended clothes for a little money, but the needs out weighed one word what little she took in.
Eventually, his stepfather began physically jumping on the boy for the slightest fault.
There was silence most of the time at the meal table. The boy's eyes darted around the room, nervous and afraid. "What are you looking at, comma added you dirty faced son of a bitch?” Robbie sat at the meal table, comma added stone faced, afraid to say anything.
"Huh, what the hell's wrong with you? Are you retarded?" Robbie just sat there, breathing shallow.
Molly ran over to her son, putting her arms around him, stroking his hair, trying to shield him from Fred's angry tirades.
"You want me to get my - my belt?" the red-faced stepfather screamed.
The boy was shaking, his body vibrating: he began to weep.
She held him tight. He tucked his head under her chin and held onto her.
The stepfather stomped out of the room while Molly quieted her son. "It's alright sweetheart, he's gone now. Shhh, you can stop crying." She rocked him in her arms.
Moments later, Fred came seething down the hall, dragging his leather belt, as Molly screamed, “No! added exclamation Stop! Don't hurt him - he's all I got!"
He stood in front of where they were sitting, holding the buckle end of the belt in his hand with the strap hanging down to the ground.
"Please - please don't hit us," the mother said, comma added pleading with the angry tyrant who was waiting for any excuse.
There was a moment of silence, comma added and then Molly said bitterly, "You're in league with the devil!"
Fred laughed and retorted, "He ain't in MY league!"
The first lash landed across the boys face. "Mommy, mommy, he hurt my eye. My eye, my eye!" the boy cried vehemently.
Molly stood up between them. He backhanded her across the face, knocking her downward. She held onto the table and pushed herself back up. He punched her in the nose, comma added sending her backward and causing her to bleed.
She was not strong enough to stop him. She held onto her son and just let him beat the both of them.
"You have no cause to raise hell like this," Molly said shouting. "We've done nothing to hurt you! Would your mother have raised hell like this with you?"
He responded, "The only hell my momma raised...was me!"
He continued beating them until his arms was singular/plural tired. Looking at Molly and her son cowering on the floor was unpleasant and so he turned around and walked into the living room, comma added turning on the television seconds later.
A half an hour past passed before she painfully stood to her feet. She picked up her son and walked him into the bathroom. She turned on the light and gasped. A large growth was protruding from the right side of his head. It appeared like a bluish fluid filled sack on the side of his right temple. She softly touched the whelps welts on his face, ignoring the ones on her own cheek. She held him and cried, rocking gently back and forth.
She thought about getting the gun that belonged to her first husband and murdering Fred in the living room. Instead, she loaded it and placed it under her mattress. She was afraid to take her son to the hospital. She didn't have any money to pay for medical bills and thought Fred might beat them more when they got home. She put a cold washcloth on his eye and stayed with him on the floor of the bathroom until morning.
A few days later, she came home after mending clothes for a neighbor down the street and found her son sprawled out on the floor, half unconscious with an open gash above his nose. Her husband was nowhere to be found. She scooped Robbie up into her arms, wrapped him in his bed cover and raced to the downtown hospital.
Examination of Purpose
"If only we could relive the mistakes we've done made in our lives - we could then with clarity of thought and pureness of heart - repeat the same ones all over again."
She refused to leave her son's side as x-rays and blood tests were being administered. The nurses were sympathetic to her. They figured she and her son had been in a car wreck.
A man in his late twenties wearing a white coat walked into the examination room carrying a clipboard under his arm.
"Good evening Mrs. Danshackle, my name is Dr. Yeardley." The doctor greeted her without a glance. He was the physician on duty.
"Hello," she replied. Molly was quivering.
"Putting this into laymen's terms, your son is suffering from a toxic brain."
Molly held her breath.
The doctor stood there figuring out how to communicate medical terminology to a countrywoman.
"Neurotransmitter imbalances within the brain are the main causes of psychiatric conditions. I believe your son has a condition called a 'disinhibited type' of dementia. There is no question that violent crime can be traced, in part, to brain injury, especially in criminals who are repeatedly violent."
She was wondering if the doctor was talking about her son or her husband. She had not mentioned Fred or the beatings in any of the paperwork she filled out.
The doctor continued, “The most lethal combination is a history of neurological damage and abuse in childhood. When you have a kid who has some organic vulnerability, like a brain injury, and you add being raised in a violent household, then you create a very, very violent person, even if it's not surfacing at this point.''
Molly's eyes welled up with tears. Holding her breath, she looked up slowly and asked, "What can I do for him doctor?"
"You can stop him from being hit!" Molly looked up surprised. "Yes, I can tell he's being abused."
Molly looked down with her arms folded in front of her, comma added trying not to shake.
"I know it's not you, because you would not have brought him in today. However, I'm going to have to file a police report," the doctor said, comma added turning away.
"What's going to happen?" quote added Molly looked alarmed. "Will they take him away from me?"
The doctor looked at her and the boy. "More likely they will arrest your husband. Maybe that will help. I don't know - it's out of my hands." He picked up his clipboard and left the room.
*****
Molly snapped out of her remembrance. She was trembling. Through the years, her son began to look even more physically grotesque. Many of the lumps and growths on his face became permanent. The beatings changed him emotionally. He had become quiet and brooding. His eyes glared with hatred.
She walked over to the bed and got down on her knees, squashing the insects crawling delete on the floor against her skin. She pulled the covers back and lowered her head to see under the bed. Shock gripped her as and she jolted back. There were fingers just inches from her face. She thought someone was under the bed, so she called to whoever was under there to come out, but no one answered. Scared, she reached under the bed and touched the fingers of the hand; they were cold.
Believing it to be a dead body, she took hold of its hand and started to pull.
She fell backwards onto the carpet holding a severed arm, which began to drain cold blood onto her shirt. In shock, she tossed it on the carpet beside her. Insects were crawling in and out of the bloody limb. She could tell it belonged to a small girl. It had been sawed off halfway past the elbow.
"Oh!" she cried out. "He's murdering people!"
A loud noise startled Molly out of her state of shock. It was the sound of concrete grating against itself. She followed the sound visually until she saw a mason block moving inward into the wall of his room. The block was being pushed from the outside. This was obviously how he had been leaving his room at night without walking through the house.
She tossed the severed arm back under the bed and ran to the closet, leaving the door cracked enough to see what was happening.
She was afraid. She had not seen him for a year. Would he be more violent to her? She looked up once again onto the shelf by her head and saw the hatchet from the tool shed. She reached for it and held it in her hands.
After a few minutes, four mason blocks fell through into his room as the nineteen year old climbed through the dirt tunnel and onto the floor. It had been 13 years since he had been that little boy that Molly reminisced about. There was nothing left of that child now. He replaced the blocks and crawled onto his bed facing the sheets.
She watched him through the crack in the closet door.
The Many Purposeful Uses of Molly's Hatchet
"We empower our lives with the release of each truth about ourselves, that we no longer waste energy holding in."
After an hour had passed standing in the closet, she believed he was asleep. She opened the door and slowly walked toward his bed, hatchet gripped in her right hand. The floor creaked. She bent down for a moment, until she was confident he didn't hear. She rose up and took another couple of steps. The floor creaked louder this time.
She squatted fast hitting the floor with a thump. He jerked up with a start and looked around the room. After a few seconds, he noticed the hump of her back beside the bed. He lifted himself up further to see her crouched on the carpet with a hatchet in her hand. He paused on one elbow for a moment and then laid down with his face in his pillow. He knew what she wanted to do. He laid still.
After a few minutes, she got up and stood beside his bed. It grieved her to see the many misshapen curvatures of his head. There would be no more remembrances. She raised the hatchet above her head, comma added pausing only for a moment, comma added and struck a blow hard to the back of his skull. He began to flinch.
As blood gushed from his wound, he whimpered. His suffering gouged her heart. She struck him again, burying the hatchet deeper into his head, exposing grey matter from his brain. She raised her hand once more and struck him harder, comma added nearly splitting his head open.
She jostled his body for a sign of life, but there was none. She thought, 'He had been a good boy. He was always a good boy, always doing what mommy told him to do.' put thought in italics instead of quotes She had never loved him more, never felt closer to him than she did at that moment.
The pillow was soaked with blood. She rolled him over onto his back. Blood was streaming from his eyes, ears and mouth.
Molly was now in her early sixties, frail; the hunch in her back more prominent.
She pulled him off the bed and began dragging his body by the arm across the carpet inches at a time. A trail of his blood marked the path. She had to pause frequently to summon enough strength to move him closer to where she wanted him to be.
It took her an hour to get his body to the bottom of the basement stairs. She was exhausted. She rested for a while cradling the head of her son in her lap, knocking off insects as they tried to enter his open wound. She talked to him, comma added rocking back and forth, filling him in on what he had missed during the last year.
She started again. She found pulling on his arm traveling up stairs awkward. His legs kept getting tangled in between the rails. She started pulling on his shirt, resting after each step upward, until they were at the top of the stairs with the basement door closed behind them.
She had an easier time pulling him across the slick hardwood floor. She dragged him out the backdoor two words and through the yard toward the tool shed.
She unfastened the rusted lock and swung the doors open. She placed the blood stained hyphenate hatchet back on the hooks and pulled the body along side one word a large crate that had an assortment of old, worn out tools on top. She knocked them to the concrete, picked up a claw hammer and began prying the nails out of the top of the lid. When the last nail had been removed, she lifted the lid and threw it to the ground.
"Sorry Fred, Travis; you'll have to make room. Maybe the two of you can get along better with Robbie after all this time." In the make shift hyphenate coffin were two skeletons, each with a large gash in it's skull.
She lifted Robbie's body up and inside the crate. His body was sprawled face up on top of the two existing skeletons.
She began hearing sirens in the night as she scattered the tools back on top of the wooden box and latched the shed door.
She went back inside the house and got her sewing kit, then went to her bedroom and got the gun from underneath her mattress, where she had placed it thirteen years earlier. She walked down the stairs to her son's bedroom, sat on his bed and threaded the largest needle she had with nylon thread. After steadying her hands, she began pressing the needle through both set of her lips toward the far right side of her mouth. Blood dripped onto her hands making it difficult to push the needle. She dried them on her son's filthy bed sheet and continued until her mouth was completely sewn shut.
Ignoring the pain, she set her sewing kit aside and picked up the old revolver. Opening the chamber, cylinder she noticed the bullets cartridges were green from tarnish. She used some alcohol from her medicine cabinet to clean a few of them and placed them back into the gun.
Covering herself in Robbie's blanket, she leaned back onto his bloody pillow now swarming with insects, comma added and placed the gun to her forehead. She pulled the trigger - but the gun jammed. She tried again - it was stuck; the chamber cylinder wasn't turning.
She looked into the barrel searching for an obstruction.
She remembered the times her little boy wore his cowboy outfit. She was the envy of every mother in town when she took him shopping for groceries. He should be a model, they all would say.
A siren could be heard in the night, loud and getting closer. The sound brought about a reflex action, causing her to fingers to clinch - BANG! The bullet pierced her frontal lobe, propelling her back onto her son's pillow.
It did not kill her, right away. She lay there for hours, her body stiff, unable to move more than a few inches. She could no longer comfort herself with memories of him now. Her only connection to him was his blood on her face.
The End
Items to be corrected are in red; my comments in blue.
Her Lips Are Sealed
By Mark Edgemon
Preface
Author intrusion has been long accepted as a "don't" when writing fiction. The common philosophy has been for the author to get out of the way and let the story unfold of delete itself. Additionally, that comments from the author takes the reader out of the story and interrupts the flow. singular/plural
For five years I have tried to refine my writing to fit in with what is accepted. But as I removed this element, my voice went with it. The author intrusion "is" a part of my style. The combining of fiction, non fiction (author commentary) and poetry encompasses both my skill and interest into one medium.
After so long an absence, I have returned to my style, my first love in writing. I could do nothing else. As far as how readers will respond - time will tell.
Meeting Death For the First Time
"Monsters are not fabled, born or created - they are manufactured."
Apprehension gripped the dark-haired woman as she shuffled down the darkened hallway toward the downstairs basement door. Every sound in the house was amplified. Beaded lights flickered on the walls, reflected from the traffic through the unshaded windows as she passed each room. The floorboards creaked with each nervous step; her breathing sounding loudly as if everything had stopped and focused on her. Standing in front of the basement door, she paused.
The news reports concerning the city's mutilated deaths prodded her to see him after sequestering him away for a year. If she didn't do this now, then eventually, the police would.
She grabbed hold of the doorknob; the metal rattled as she turned it; frightened the door would fly open and - he - would leap out. The metal doorknob rattled as she turned it, frightened that the door would fly open and - he - would leap out. His resentment had grown deep, especially towards her. She betrayed him.
*****
She began to think back to the days she once cradled him in her arms. Imprinted on her soul was the way he laughed; his adoration of her. He was the only joy her simple life had ever known.
When he was sick, she remained by his bedside, changing cold compresses, keeping him warm with her body, seeing she only possessed a couple of threadbare blankets. She would often stand by the window and watch him play, but not where he could see her. She did not want to be intrusive.
It gave her joy to know she had made such a loving child. His happiness substantiated her self worth. No one was ever going to harm him.
Molly Danshackle was a woman in her early forties (when she gave birth to him); thin, gaunt, around 5.5 five feet five when she was not slumping. She had a home in Elstra, a small town in the district of Bautzen, Germany.
*****
She shook off her memories of him. A solemn expression shaded her face. The last time she had seen him was about a year ago. She was unable to bear what had become of him, so she stopped coming down to the basement, leaving his food at the top of the stairs twice daily.
Guilt, became her dark companion, shadowing her every step as a constant reminder of what her silence had wrought upon the very thing she had loved the most.
Walking down the basement stairs sent an ominous shiver down her spine. If it was him, she had to know.
The further she walked down the stairs, the more she coughed from the dank, metallic smell permeating the air. There was no ventilation, but she could keep her son no other place.
Stepping from the bottom wooden stair onto the concrete basement floor, she began feeling around for the metal chain to turn on the light. She found it loosely dangling inches from her face. She pulled it.
Muted light pushed back some of the darkness around where she stood. The light bulb swung slowly side to side giving a disoriented sense to the room.
She began to feel a tickling sensation around her feet through the thin fabric of her shoes. She grabbed the light to steady herself and lifted her right leg. Several layers of crawling insects swarmed around her foot. She shook her leg, but only a few dropped off. She stomped her foot twice trying to shake them loose, crushing mounds of insects into a thick brown paste between her shoe and the concrete floor. They were beginning to crawl up her leg.
She ran toward the door to his room and began kicking the wall to the side. She was able to dislodge most of them before opening the door and darting into his room, shutting it hard after entering.
Once inside the room, she flipped the light switch. Looking toward the floor, she saw hordes of insects flooding into the room from under the basement door. They were swarming toward his bed.
She went to his closet and picked out a couple pair of dirty jeans, shoving them against the bottom of the door to stop the inrush of infestation. The floor in his room was a live carpet of roaches along with many other types of parasitic insects. The air in the room smelled partly metallic, partly a dank, musty, smothery sensation and there was an overriding smell of death.
She walked over to his dresser and opened the top drawer. It was junky, filled with miscellaneous things that were in disrepair; a rusted pocketknife, pieces of broken toys his stepfather had smashed during his many fits of rage; the space ornamented with small clumps of red dried mud.
She sorted through the next drawer, picking up filthy t-shirts, jeans and underwear. Some of the clothes were torn with jagged cloth edges. Underneath everything was a wad of money. He didn't have a job. ‘What is he doing at night?’ drop quotes and italicize she thought.
The First Lies Are the Hardest
"The devil always tells the truth - cause those are the best lies."
‘If only I could have kept Travis from leaving,’ see above she thought, he being her first husband and the boy’s natural father.
*****
Travis didn't care much for his son Robbie. A child burdened his image of being a carefree bachelor. He would often remove his wedding ring in public, but after awhile, most people knew he had a son.
"Hey Travis, did your wife let you out of the house tonight?" one of his bar buddies said, comma added goading him. "Has she hen-pecked you yet? Cluck, cluck cluck - here chickee chickee."
Travis responded trying to laugh off the insult. "I prefer the term pussy whipped." His friend had struck a nerve.
"A couple of my friends told me I looked like I was still in my thirties," Travis said.
"Well hold onto them, cause friends that lie like that are hard to come by," his drinking companion said.
This was just one of the reasons he would start verbal arguments with his wife.
"You're no kind of wife to me!" he would often start out.
"Hush Travis, Robbie might hear you," she said, crying, comma added wanting to quiet him down.
"I don't give a damn, Molly!" he said shouting all the louder.” You’re nothing but a bag of bones. You don't sleep with me in the same bed anymore."
She looked down, comma added not really knowing what to say.
"Well,” she responded weeping, “I'm more comfortable in my own bed. My back has been hurting..."
Travis grew impatient. "That is what you always say! What about my comfort? I have needs, you damn wore out hag!" She sobbed, comma added placing her hands across her face.
"When was the last time you took care of me?" He looked around at an immaculate house, "Sure you cook and clean, But when was the last time you...you..."
"It's not right, you speaking such hurtful things to me. I clean your home and make do with what little money you bring into this house..."
He punched her in the right eye, knocking her backwards onto the floor. She started to get up slowly on all fours. He grabbed her hair and jerked her backwards, causing her to fall again, comma added this time in the other direction.
Her hands grabbed onto his shirt, comma added trying to gain her balance; use comma but her knees buckled until she was kneeling in front of him.
She latched onto his belt and tried to pull herself up. He hit her again on the forehead, knocking her the rest of the way to the floor. He felt like hitting, but she was too weak to take much more. He didn't want her to go to the hospital and him be accused of abuse, maybe serving jail time for it, so he walked out of the house, slamming the front door after him.
She laid on the floor, trying to figure out what to do; whether to take her son and leave, have him arrested or just try better to calm his rages next time. The home belonged to him. She needed the house to protect her son from the cold German winters.
Mysteriously, he was gone a few months later. However, it left her and Robbie in financial need.
*****
She snapped out of her remembrance and refocused her mind looking for evidence. She walked over to the closet, the door already open, comma added and began sorting through his filthy clothes. His jeans were caked in dark red mud, comma added with holes around the knees and bottom.
Her eyes moved slowly over every inch of the closet, until she spied a hatchet on top of the shelf. He must have taken it from the tool shed. She noticed some dark crimson stains on the blade. It could be blood.
She looked at the floor once again and noticed that the insects had pushed their way underneath the door to the room and were swarming toward the bed.
Harnessing the Predator
"What disquieting dreams we spin, from the violence which takes hold in others, by OUR unrestrained acts of selfishness."
She began to think back when Fred had come into their lives.
*****
He was a weather worn farmer in his early fifties. He came over regularly and would often compliment Molly on her house. Her home was nothing to speak of, but it was a sturdy place to live. He had been sleeping nights in a former neighbor’s barn. The bank foreclosed on his farm years earlier.
On this particular day, he had something on his mind. He broached the subject while they were sitting on her porch.
“Molly?” he said with an air of pride, ironic for his financial state and appearance. I’ve got a proposition for you, that you’d be a fool to turn down.”
“What is it?” she inquired.
“I know you’re not working and having trouble making ends meet and all that…” he cleared his throat. “I’m a strong guy, who knows how to work. It's obvious you don’t have any prospects for other relationships. I'm not downin' your looks or anything..." he never thought before he opened his mouth, "...it's just that, well...what about you and me gettin' married?” He glanced over at her expression, but was not encouraged by it.
She looked away for a moment.
He began talking faster trying to bolster his position, “Now, I know you probably gave up on getting married a long time ago after your first husband ran off, but uh, I can at least put food on the table, get your electricity turned back on and make sure your boy is wearing store bought clothes instead of the rags he’s wearing now."
She had been worried about their need for support for some time, but she couldn’t leave her young son alone to get a job outside of the house.
She was silent for a moment and then said, "Alright, but we'll need some grocery money right away. Do you have fifty dollars?"
"No," he replied, "but added quote I can get it." His poverty should have been a clue to how hard a worker he truly was, but she hoped against hope this would be a good decision.
Fred moved in with a sense of ownership. The boy was afraid of him. Fred was an intruder moving into his safe environment. Robbie had adjusted to life without a father, but acceptance of this loud-mouthed fool was more than this boy could understand. He tagged along beside his mother more than usual.
As the new boss made himself more comfortable at his new home, the young boy's eyes were sorrowfully expressive. He would hold his mother's hand a lot more these days. Fred ordered the boy about, stomping his foot at him whenever he didn't move fast enough to suit him.
Fred did not keep his part of the bargain. He rarely worked. He would eat at homeless shelters while leaving his wife and stepson at home hungry. Molly sold possessions for food until there was nothing more to sell. She sewed and mended clothes for a little money, but the needs out weighed one word what little she took in.
Eventually, his stepfather began physically jumping on the boy for the slightest fault.
There was silence most of the time at the meal table. The boy's eyes darted around the room, nervous and afraid. "What are you looking at, comma added you dirty faced son of a bitch?” Robbie sat at the meal table, comma added stone faced, afraid to say anything.
"Huh, what the hell's wrong with you? Are you retarded?" Robbie just sat there, breathing shallow.
Molly ran over to her son, putting her arms around him, stroking his hair, trying to shield him from Fred's angry tirades.
"You want me to get my - my belt?" the red-faced stepfather screamed.
The boy was shaking, his body vibrating: he began to weep.
She held him tight. He tucked his head under her chin and held onto her.
The stepfather stomped out of the room while Molly quieted her son. "It's alright sweetheart, he's gone now. Shhh, you can stop crying." She rocked him in her arms.
Moments later, Fred came seething down the hall, dragging his leather belt, as Molly screamed, “No! added exclamation Stop! Don't hurt him - he's all I got!"
He stood in front of where they were sitting, holding the buckle end of the belt in his hand with the strap hanging down to the ground.
"Please - please don't hit us," the mother said, comma added pleading with the angry tyrant who was waiting for any excuse.
There was a moment of silence, comma added and then Molly said bitterly, "You're in league with the devil!"
Fred laughed and retorted, "He ain't in MY league!"
The first lash landed across the boys face. "Mommy, mommy, he hurt my eye. My eye, my eye!" the boy cried vehemently.
Molly stood up between them. He backhanded her across the face, knocking her downward. She held onto the table and pushed herself back up. He punched her in the nose, comma added sending her backward and causing her to bleed.
She was not strong enough to stop him. She held onto her son and just let him beat the both of them.
"You have no cause to raise hell like this," Molly said shouting. "We've done nothing to hurt you! Would your mother have raised hell like this with you?"
He responded, "The only hell my momma raised...was me!"
He continued beating them until his arms was singular/plural tired. Looking at Molly and her son cowering on the floor was unpleasant and so he turned around and walked into the living room, comma added turning on the television seconds later.
A half an hour past passed before she painfully stood to her feet. She picked up her son and walked him into the bathroom. She turned on the light and gasped. A large growth was protruding from the right side of his head. It appeared like a bluish fluid filled sack on the side of his right temple. She softly touched the whelps welts on his face, ignoring the ones on her own cheek. She held him and cried, rocking gently back and forth.
She thought about getting the gun that belonged to her first husband and murdering Fred in the living room. Instead, she loaded it and placed it under her mattress. She was afraid to take her son to the hospital. She didn't have any money to pay for medical bills and thought Fred might beat them more when they got home. She put a cold washcloth on his eye and stayed with him on the floor of the bathroom until morning.
A few days later, she came home after mending clothes for a neighbor down the street and found her son sprawled out on the floor, half unconscious with an open gash above his nose. Her husband was nowhere to be found. She scooped Robbie up into her arms, wrapped him in his bed cover and raced to the downtown hospital.
Examination of Purpose
"If only we could relive the mistakes we've done made in our lives - we could then with clarity of thought and pureness of heart - repeat the same ones all over again."
She refused to leave her son's side as x-rays and blood tests were being administered. The nurses were sympathetic to her. They figured she and her son had been in a car wreck.
A man in his late twenties wearing a white coat walked into the examination room carrying a clipboard under his arm.
"Good evening Mrs. Danshackle, my name is Dr. Yeardley." The doctor greeted her without a glance. He was the physician on duty.
"Hello," she replied. Molly was quivering.
"Putting this into laymen's terms, your son is suffering from a toxic brain."
Molly held her breath.
The doctor stood there figuring out how to communicate medical terminology to a countrywoman.
"Neurotransmitter imbalances within the brain are the main causes of psychiatric conditions. I believe your son has a condition called a 'disinhibited type' of dementia. There is no question that violent crime can be traced, in part, to brain injury, especially in criminals who are repeatedly violent."
She was wondering if the doctor was talking about her son or her husband. She had not mentioned Fred or the beatings in any of the paperwork she filled out.
The doctor continued, “The most lethal combination is a history of neurological damage and abuse in childhood. When you have a kid who has some organic vulnerability, like a brain injury, and you add being raised in a violent household, then you create a very, very violent person, even if it's not surfacing at this point.''
Molly's eyes welled up with tears. Holding her breath, she looked up slowly and asked, "What can I do for him doctor?"
"You can stop him from being hit!" Molly looked up surprised. "Yes, I can tell he's being abused."
Molly looked down with her arms folded in front of her, comma added trying not to shake.
"I know it's not you, because you would not have brought him in today. However, I'm going to have to file a police report," the doctor said, comma added turning away.
"What's going to happen?" quote added Molly looked alarmed. "Will they take him away from me?"
The doctor looked at her and the boy. "More likely they will arrest your husband. Maybe that will help. I don't know - it's out of my hands." He picked up his clipboard and left the room.
*****
Molly snapped out of her remembrance. She was trembling. Through the years, her son began to look even more physically grotesque. Many of the lumps and growths on his face became permanent. The beatings changed him emotionally. He had become quiet and brooding. His eyes glared with hatred.
She walked over to the bed and got down on her knees, squashing the insects crawling delete on the floor against her skin. She pulled the covers back and lowered her head to see under the bed. Shock gripped her as and she jolted back. There were fingers just inches from her face. She thought someone was under the bed, so she called to whoever was under there to come out, but no one answered. Scared, she reached under the bed and touched the fingers of the hand; they were cold.
Believing it to be a dead body, she took hold of its hand and started to pull.
She fell backwards onto the carpet holding a severed arm, which began to drain cold blood onto her shirt. In shock, she tossed it on the carpet beside her. Insects were crawling in and out of the bloody limb. She could tell it belonged to a small girl. It had been sawed off halfway past the elbow.
"Oh!" she cried out. "He's murdering people!"
A loud noise startled Molly out of her state of shock. It was the sound of concrete grating against itself. She followed the sound visually until she saw a mason block moving inward into the wall of his room. The block was being pushed from the outside. This was obviously how he had been leaving his room at night without walking through the house.
She tossed the severed arm back under the bed and ran to the closet, leaving the door cracked enough to see what was happening.
She was afraid. She had not seen him for a year. Would he be more violent to her? She looked up once again onto the shelf by her head and saw the hatchet from the tool shed. She reached for it and held it in her hands.
After a few minutes, four mason blocks fell through into his room as the nineteen year old climbed through the dirt tunnel and onto the floor. It had been 13 years since he had been that little boy that Molly reminisced about. There was nothing left of that child now. He replaced the blocks and crawled onto his bed facing the sheets.
She watched him through the crack in the closet door.
The Many Purposeful Uses of Molly's Hatchet
"We empower our lives with the release of each truth about ourselves, that we no longer waste energy holding in."
After an hour had passed standing in the closet, she believed he was asleep. She opened the door and slowly walked toward his bed, hatchet gripped in her right hand. The floor creaked. She bent down for a moment, until she was confident he didn't hear. She rose up and took another couple of steps. The floor creaked louder this time.
She squatted fast hitting the floor with a thump. He jerked up with a start and looked around the room. After a few seconds, he noticed the hump of her back beside the bed. He lifted himself up further to see her crouched on the carpet with a hatchet in her hand. He paused on one elbow for a moment and then laid down with his face in his pillow. He knew what she wanted to do. He laid still.
After a few minutes, she got up and stood beside his bed. It grieved her to see the many misshapen curvatures of his head. There would be no more remembrances. She raised the hatchet above her head, comma added pausing only for a moment, comma added and struck a blow hard to the back of his skull. He began to flinch.
As blood gushed from his wound, he whimpered. His suffering gouged her heart. She struck him again, burying the hatchet deeper into his head, exposing grey matter from his brain. She raised her hand once more and struck him harder, comma added nearly splitting his head open.
She jostled his body for a sign of life, but there was none. She thought, 'He had been a good boy. He was always a good boy, always doing what mommy told him to do.' put thought in italics instead of quotes She had never loved him more, never felt closer to him than she did at that moment.
The pillow was soaked with blood. She rolled him over onto his back. Blood was streaming from his eyes, ears and mouth.
Molly was now in her early sixties, frail; the hunch in her back more prominent.
She pulled him off the bed and began dragging his body by the arm across the carpet inches at a time. A trail of his blood marked the path. She had to pause frequently to summon enough strength to move him closer to where she wanted him to be.
It took her an hour to get his body to the bottom of the basement stairs. She was exhausted. She rested for a while cradling the head of her son in her lap, knocking off insects as they tried to enter his open wound. She talked to him, comma added rocking back and forth, filling him in on what he had missed during the last year.
She started again. She found pulling on his arm traveling up stairs awkward. His legs kept getting tangled in between the rails. She started pulling on his shirt, resting after each step upward, until they were at the top of the stairs with the basement door closed behind them.
She had an easier time pulling him across the slick hardwood floor. She dragged him out the backdoor two words and through the yard toward the tool shed.
She unfastened the rusted lock and swung the doors open. She placed the blood stained hyphenate hatchet back on the hooks and pulled the body along side one word a large crate that had an assortment of old, worn out tools on top. She knocked them to the concrete, picked up a claw hammer and began prying the nails out of the top of the lid. When the last nail had been removed, she lifted the lid and threw it to the ground.
"Sorry Fred, Travis; you'll have to make room. Maybe the two of you can get along better with Robbie after all this time." In the make shift hyphenate coffin were two skeletons, each with a large gash in it's skull.
She lifted Robbie's body up and inside the crate. His body was sprawled face up on top of the two existing skeletons.
She began hearing sirens in the night as she scattered the tools back on top of the wooden box and latched the shed door.
She went back inside the house and got her sewing kit, then went to her bedroom and got the gun from underneath her mattress, where she had placed it thirteen years earlier. She walked down the stairs to her son's bedroom, sat on his bed and threaded the largest needle she had with nylon thread. After steadying her hands, she began pressing the needle through both set of her lips toward the far right side of her mouth. Blood dripped onto her hands making it difficult to push the needle. She dried them on her son's filthy bed sheet and continued until her mouth was completely sewn shut.
Ignoring the pain, she set her sewing kit aside and picked up the old revolver. Opening the chamber, cylinder she noticed the bullets cartridges were green from tarnish. She used some alcohol from her medicine cabinet to clean a few of them and placed them back into the gun.
Covering herself in Robbie's blanket, she leaned back onto his bloody pillow now swarming with insects, comma added and placed the gun to her forehead. She pulled the trigger - but the gun jammed. She tried again - it was stuck; the chamber cylinder wasn't turning.
She looked into the barrel searching for an obstruction.
She remembered the times her little boy wore his cowboy outfit. She was the envy of every mother in town when she took him shopping for groceries. He should be a model, they all would say.
A siren could be heard in the night, loud and getting closer. The sound brought about a reflex action, causing her to fingers to clinch - BANG! The bullet pierced her frontal lobe, propelling her back onto her son's pillow.
It did not kill her, right away. She lay there for hours, her body stiff, unable to move more than a few inches. She could no longer comfort herself with memories of him now. Her only connection to him was his blood on her face.
The End
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
Personally, I just kind of feel my way through this. Sometimes I use a comma before and; sometimes not. I don't really know the rules well enough to recite them, but there might be something about phrases or clauses. This site is a good place to start:I corrected everything you indicated except for one rule - commas before the word and. I've seen it done before and I know it is accepted, but for the reason that I consider the word "and" a "continuation/transitional" word, I never pause there.
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/
I think they have a search box; type in 'punctuation' or 'comma.' You could Google those things, too.
This one looks good -- rule#2:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/commas.htm
You might be an unusual case; I think most people use too many commas. Anyway, I'm not a professional grammarian, nor do I play one on TV, so do some research.
Mm, for now -- just allow me to enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone else.I appreciate this! What can I do for you?
I might ask a big favor from you later, like beta-reading my novel. You're not in any danger yet; I still have a lot to go on that project.I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
Tao, I don't think the change in spacing helped the story. The paragraphs get larger and that slows the reader down. Sometimes there's a need to do that, but I think that, in this story, it's better to keep the reader moving quickly; keep the tension at a high level. One of this story's greatest strengths is its relentlessness. Leave it broken up; keep the pace quick.
Re: your comment on lay/laid -- I never noticed it, and I don't think most people would. It might be arguable that 'laid' is correct here, since he's narrating this passage in the past tense.
Re: "and him be accused of abuse" -- I think that an acceptable fix would be to change "be" to "being." Look again and see what you think. It does still have a bit of a vernacular feel to it, but the passage is telling what the guy is thinking; it's still third-person VP, but momentarily more limited and specific, so I think it's in character with the story overall. Again, your suggestion results in longer sentences which would slow the pace.
Mark, I missed this one before, but there are a lot of people (me included) who don't think that "alright" is a legitimate word; use "all right" instead.
"Dirty faced" needs hyphenated.
Concerning this:
Re: your comment on lay/laid -- I never noticed it, and I don't think most people would. It might be arguable that 'laid' is correct here, since he's narrating this passage in the past tense.
Re: "and him be accused of abuse" -- I think that an acceptable fix would be to change "be" to "being." Look again and see what you think. It does still have a bit of a vernacular feel to it, but the passage is telling what the guy is thinking; it's still third-person VP, but momentarily more limited and specific, so I think it's in character with the story overall. Again, your suggestion results in longer sentences which would slow the pace.
Mark, I missed this one before, but there are a lot of people (me included) who don't think that "alright" is a legitimate word; use "all right" instead.
"Dirty faced" needs hyphenated.
Concerning this:
I think it does need a little fix. In this case, I think a longer sentence would work, describing an escalation of verbal and physical abuse.Eventually, his stepfather began physically jumping on the boy for the slightest fault.
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." -- Robert FrostAnd with any great story, there must be tension and if there is tension, the writer must partially suffer through it along with the characters he is creating. I never wanted to do that, so I kept a safe distance emotionally between me and the feelings the characters were experiencing.
I've been to that place, and my first visit there was something I'll never forget -- I generated a character to deliver a message, and then killed him.The victim wasn't a walk-on, though; he had a place of honor as the ancient ancestor of one of the present-day good guys in the story. Six dense, single-spaced pages, no dialog, and for most of the first five, I showed him creating his legacy in solitude while he pondered his long life. By that time, I really loved the guy.
I had to kill him, though, to get him out of the story arc, but also to save him from prolonged suffering. I gave him a quick end, and he died laughing -- literally.
I think it took me days to do that, and when I was done, I was emotionally exhausted.
When I get a passage that does that to me, it takes a lot out of me -- but it puts just as much into the story.
I find this a good way to break up monotony and avoid confusion in extended passages of dialog between a limited number of characters. Use a little action to open an attribute. Instead of a long string of 'he said, she said' attributions, you can do something like:However, the idea of grouping dialogue of a single character with narrative or action is interesting and worth studying.
Joe pointed to the newspaper on the table. "And that's why we have to get there before he does!"
There's another reason I like this technique -- some writers have their characters address each other by name to avoid the 'he said, she said' thing, but I don't think that sounds natural. In real-life conversations, people very rarely call each other by name.
Check this out:
http://www.livewritethrive.com/category ... our-novel/
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
This is certainly nothing like the earlier one above. If I hadn't seen your name on the byline, I'd have attributed it to Sergio.
And speaking of attributions . . . I spent the first half of this story going back and forth repeatedly in an effort to sort out exactly who was who. Once I'd figured out which was which between Nad and the Axman, you did the scene change:
* * *
and I had to start all over, sorting out the Axman from the Huntsman.
That really needs fixed.
Aside from that, I can't seem to identify with the emotions of the characters.
And speaking of attributions . . . I spent the first half of this story going back and forth repeatedly in an effort to sort out exactly who was who. Once I'd figured out which was which between Nad and the Axman, you did the scene change:
* * *
and I had to start all over, sorting out the Axman from the Huntsman.
That really needs fixed.
Aside from that, I can't seem to identify with the emotions of the characters.
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
I don't understand this reasoning. I think they mostly overdo it, myself, but kids' shows on the media are saturated with emotion (or maybe that's just drama and I can't tell the difference). [Look up the cartoon show "Gofrette" -- truly delightful -- "Jane and the Dragon" is pretty good, too.]I was writing a simple fantasy children's tale. I kept the emotions light for that reason.
Anyway -- why keep the emotion light for kids?
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
Yes, they're all perfectly proper -- you just used them in ways that perfectly confused me.About the character attributions, you know I'm trying different things, searching for what does it for me and what just lays there. I used the attributions correctly, however, I mixed them up putting some at the beginning of dialogue, some at the end and some omitted when there was a short back and forth conversation, letting the seperate lines show that the dialogue was changing from person to person. All of these methods are perfectly proper, I just mixed them up this time to see what I liked best.
Maybe another reader would have a different reaction.I'm not much into horror or suspense, generally -- SF has always been my greatest love in literature. It's just that your earlier story here had so much power and raw impact, and this one seemed awfully bland.I think you like horror/suspense on a thinking man's scale and was disappointed this was not another one of those. I'll see what I can do about that!
I did see the parallel with this story to so many kids' stories, like you mentioned; you did pretty well with that part of it. And, yeah, as we used to say as kids, "All the King's horses and all the King's men had eggs for breakfast."
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
I think I just found the problem!And to be honest, I tried to write this time without upsetting my nerves like with the first one. And there may lie the truth about good writing, that it must affect the author for it to affect the reader. I hope that is not true, but it just might be.
It IS true; if you aren't affected, the reader won't be either. And I had the sensation about this one that you were holding yourself back.Let fly. Play the Icarus game, and be sure to take a long look down from your thousand-foot perch before you jump. Now, tell the reader THAT story!
To me, it seems like I have to hurt twice as much writing a scene as the reader will feel reading it. Damn right, no easy outs. The first time I had to kill one of the good guys in my story [an earlier story, not the current one], it took me DAYS, and I was physically shaking when I got done. But to this day I think of that scene as some of the best work I've done. I've had a case of writer's block in my current project, and I know it's because I'm scared to approach the material -- my main character is about to get his first heartbreak, and it's gonna hurt like hell. But this is how you keep the reader's attention; you make them care about your character.
There's good news, though -- writing like this is very much like smacking your head against a rock -- it feels SO GOOD when you're finally done!
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Lester Curtis
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Re: Strenthening Literary Muscle
Yeah . . . if you've been keeping all that stuff contained, even you don't know what's in there, and when you spring the latch, it all flies out, uncontrolled . . . a bit like Pandora's container. Kinda scary. Very chaotic at first, but you get used to it and learn to work with it.That is a very scary place. You just don't know where all that unprocessed emotion and vulnerability will take you as a writer or as a person. But on the other hand, one wants to know where they are able to go in their art and in life.
It helps to laugh at it -- if you can.
Keep a sense of perspective, too. It's said that, no matter where we are on Earth, we're never more than six feet from a spider. Think about that, allow yourself to jump on a chair and scream like a little girl, then think -- when's the last time you were bitten by one? See? There's the fear, which you can scare other people with, but the the actual danger is next to nonexistent! Just don't tell that to your readers, or you'll ruin everything!
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?