Wednesday, November 16, 2005
My sister read my entire novel last night. All 73 pages that I had then. (I have 77 now, and 32 000 + words) She loved it. This is suppose to be a crappy novel, but my sister loved it. Let me tell you, that does a LOT for my ego... she loved it, loves the characters (most particularly Amber and Essar, then also Lyrane... Varok's been dubbed creepy but pitiable, Iren's interesting, the princess had acne *she liked that a lot*, and what is Laytha in there for?!.)... so... yeah. At least I know I'm not a hopeless failure. Even if she reads and enjoys MK and A books, it still means there's going to be other people who'll be able to read this book and enjoy it.
Here's half of chapter four. I'll get the rest up later. This was mostly word filler, even if it did have purpose... snrk... and yes, if it seems vaguely like a parody of a few familiar character's dialogue/common lines have been stolen, they have. (snickers) It should be fairly obvious what/who this is borrowed from anyway, TDE-wise.
***
Chapter Four: The Incredible Edible Cheese
**
A tall and dark haired woman knelt and picked up a shattered rose from her floor. The frozen icy pieces had shattered into a million tiny puzzle pieces of frost when it had hit the white floor. Naraqe narrowed her eyes, brushing them into her hand and depositing them on a nearby table.
She brushed her hand off on her robe. The rose had been in her collection of various pointless objects for ages. It seemed almost strange that it should break then and there, falling into millions of unmendable pieces. It had to be metaphorical, some melodramtic warning from powers beyond her sight that something was going to happen. Something that could possibly spell the end of all sentient kind on the planet, or at least all random frost-worked roses. Something that could very well spell the offset of everything possibly normal in the entire universe!
Clearly, she decided, it was time to eat.
She picked up an apple from a basket on the cupboard and chewed thoughtfully on it. Eating was always an answer to the problem. It was a perfectly logical solution. Put something in your stomach, and then you didn’t have to worry about it anymore, because you were busy worrying about chewing. And it also tended to bother people anyway. They never expected you to just randomly eat. They expected you to do something about it.
It didn’t mean she didn’t intend on doing anything about whatever it was, whether it was the end of all reality or not. It just meant that she was hungry.
But then, Naraqe was always hungry. It wasn’t as if it were an abnormal thing for her to decide to randomly eat, because it was a perfectly normal thing for her to want something to eat. Considering that somehow she had managed to retain a slender shape, it didn’t really hurt for her to do anyway, and apples weren't ever very fattening unless eaten in an excessively fanatical amount.
Finishing the apple, she disposed of the core in a nearby wastebasket. Her rose had shattered. She wasn’t normally clumsy, so for the woman to have accidentally broken it was a very serious matter.
She contemplated the idea. Could it be possible that she had accidentally broken it? Or was it really a dastardly and melodramatic foreshadowing incident caused by a sadistic narrator meaning to cause a quest that would lead to death, doom, destruction, the possible idea of a tear in the fabric of reality, and quite likely true love between at least one pair of characters?
Most likely the latter, she decided. True love was always interesting in the midst of all reality falling into pieces.
Naraqe stood up from her chair, nearly pushing it over, but catching it a moment before it could reach the point of no return and crash to the ground. The elf quickly grabbed her cloak from a nearby rack and threw it on over her clothing, and turned to dash out the door.
If we’ve got a plot going on, that can only mean one thing...
**
Serenor Locale, inner city
**
“A quest!” Naraqe explained with a brilliant expression touching her face for a moment as she threw her hands up dramatically. “Something weird is going on. We have to find out what it is!”
“Are you being a hopeless romantic again?” the person she was talking to asked flatly, giving her an odd look. He was tall and dark haired, as was she, but a lot less elf in appearance, being clearly of human, though quite possibly royal, birth. His hair was neat, as was most of his appearance, clothing tailored to his exact fit. And the blade he wore at his side was anything but a cheap blacksmith’s job.
“Well...”
He raised one eyebrow. “I thought so.”
“But there’s narrators!” she insisted. “And I broke my glass rose.”
He nodded once, and gave her an odd look again. “Nara...”
She folded her arms. “Are you going to come with me or not?”
“Come with you where?”
“What do you mean? Obviously, uh... well...”
He interlaced his fingers underneath his chin, waiting for an answer. He needed a slight shave by this point, a slight smattering of facial hair tinting his chin a shade of gray to match a couple of streaks through his mostly black hair.
The elf queen looked a tad bit nonplused. “I’m not sur... hey!”
“Hey what?” He turned a gray gaze on her fair face.
She folded her arms with a very ticked off expression, and he blinked, glancing around for a possible source of her sudden change in eager mood. There was nothing beyond the simple wooden cantina walls around them and the slightly distant hum of people working, drinking, and talking about topics from everything to pizza deliveries, marriages, problems with their employers, and chickens.
“Well?” he pressed. Outside a bird went haywire and crashed into the window, causing little or no effect to the present occurences beyond to cause the elf to glance over her shoulder for a second and wonder if they were under attack by enemy spies just waiting to throw off the balance of reality.
“The chapter title!” Naraqe exclaimed, ignoring the bird, and hoping it wasn’t an evil enemy spy about to report their entire conversation to the antagonist’s Minions of Great Doom.
He blinked, and gave her a peculiar expression somewhere along the lines of Okay, I always knew you were going crazy... just stay here while I call the men in white coats... However, cell phones hadn’t been invented by that point.
“The narrator called it The Incredible Edible Cheese,” she complained. “I didn’t even get any cheese. I just got an apple.”
“So...?”
“I demand that it be changed!” she yelled at the roof. “This is stupid. No chapter should be named cheese. It’s not even a cheesy chapter. No one kissed, no one spouted purposeless drivel, and no one ate any cheese! At all! Period! Exclamation point! Several exclamation points!”
He sighed.
She reached out and picked a piece of orange cat hair off of his rich crimson toned tunic and flicked it off towards the floor. It stuck to her finger. “You need to shave.” The elf queen attempted to blow it off. Being of an exceedingly stubborn nature, the hair decided to stay put on her finger.
He blinked once at her motion, and then blinked again when she reached out and brushed it off of her finger on his cloak.
“Really,” Naraqe reasoned. “Your chin is going to start matching your hair fairly soon, Leron.”
The now named Leron gave her an odd look, and wondered if there was a nearby loony-bin for insane elf queens. “Black with a few streaks of gray?”
“Stupid chapter title,” she muttered, glaring at the wall. He unconsciously moved out of the way of her gaze as she continued glaring at the wall furiously. About five minutes later a small trickle of smoke began to rise from the wooden wall, and a charred and red circle fell from the wall and onto the ground, breaking into charcoal. He heard the distant whine of a smoke alarm set off by the sudden smoke, but she had lessened the intensity of her stare.
Leron didn’t think it would be a wise idea to get her mad. He gave her a typically blank look, which was all he was best at doing. “Perhaps if you had an idea of where you were headed, I would join you,” he stated, “but I have no purpose to randomly wandering about in circles to find a potentially nonexistent... quest.”
“Who names their chapter Incredible Edible Cheese anyway?” Naraqe growled at no one in particular.
Leron didn’t find he had an answer to this question. It wasn’t a logical question. Trees, it wasn’t even an illogical question, which he could field effectively if the need was ever there.
“I mean, seriously...”
“Nara, did you have a destination in mind?” he asked dryly, deciding that falling back on a logical topic might have been the only way to keep his brain cells from suffering unfortunate painful deaths from her illogically off topic remarks on cheese.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. The Inner Realm.”
“The what?”
“You don’t just name a chapter cheese for no reason!” she wailed.
Leron delaced his fingers and rubbed his eyes. He wondered just how hard it would be to get a decent drink in this place, or whether it was completely full of tacky beverages. “You don’t just go into the Inner Realm for no reason, Nara...”
“But, seriously. CHEESE?!”
“Why would you need to go into the Inner Realm?” he continued on in his questioning, though he had gotten very little response to his last remark.
“Because.”
“Hmm.” He considered the logics of the theories based around reality being pinned to surreality by what most people simply called magic and possibly math playing a factor in this. A moment later he decided she had killed a few of his brain cells and that this was playing haywire with his ability to focus on logic.
“But why cheese?!”
“Nara...”
She picked a piece of her hair from her eyes, pushing the dark brown strand back behind her pointed ears. It didn’t want to stay without a pin and within seconds had slipped back into her eyes, dangling tauntingly in her face. “I’m not going to go very far into the Inner Realm, Leron,” she reasoned. “Or I shouldn’t have to. I just need to get in far enough to access the Archives, and I can’t do that without the level of magic the Inner Realm offers.”
“The Archives?” That seemed fairly tame for the generally dramatic elf queen of the North.
“Couldn’t they possibly came up with something far better than cheese?! We all know cheese is edible! Why did they have to use a chapter title of random purpose rather than one which could’ve explained the purpose of this chapter?! Why incredibly edible cheese?! Why?!”
Leron groaned. “Couldn’t you just find a slice of cheddar, dub it incredible, and eat it to fulfill the purpose of the chapter title?”
Narque gave him a horrified look. “Of course not! That would completely destroy their purpose of having a purposeless chapter title!”
He blinked.
“I want cake,” she decided, and stood up, picking her skirt up just enough to keep it from trailing into the dust covering the floor. Though the rest of the room was completely clean, possibly due to the neat-freak at present inhabiting it, dust seemed to grow from the floor in most places. It just naturally needed to be there.
He blinked again. “Yes, well, I’m certain you can find cake somewhere.”
“Mmm, cake...”
Leron took a moment to consider the elven queen and her natural tendencies for strange reactions to various situations, and decided it would be safer for his brain to avoid trying to understand why she acted the way she did. Elegant in appearance, and clearly beautiful, but she had no sense of reality at times.
Cake, after all? That was as strange as randomly appearing chickens. All of which had tendencies to appear if she was around.
Of course, he had no time to consider why things continually reacted strangely about her, as she vanished past the oaken door and down the stairs to seek chocolate cake. At least one thing was good about that, he reasoned. He didn’t have to listen to her horrified rant on cheese and allow any more of his unfortunate brain cells to suffer slow and torturous deaths at the hands of random remarks.
He didn’t understand why cheese mattered anyway. If the world was going to end, or reality implode, or whatever she had been rambling about was going to occur, why did edible cheese matter. Why did it matter if it had been used completely randomly?
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