In The Works - Lord of the Two Lands

This is from a story with the tentative title Lord of the Two Lands.  It takes place two hundred years after Pharaoh's Son.  I had a strong idea of a character (years ago) and jotted down some things.  I had an idea, suddenly, for a scene, wrote it (or risk forgetting it) and the story has taken off.  Alas, it is on 'the back burner' because I must finish Mourningtide, which is going well.  But still...  It's delightful to know that the springs have not run dry.

This takes place after a battle.  The king has been captured by rebels, who are holding him in a courtyard.  Herihor, who is to all intents and purposes the de facto  ruler of southern Egypt, has just arrived at the end of the fighting.  He has  found Pharaoh where he is being held. 

Herihor stopped and stared. 

A torch lay in a shallow pottery bowl, spilling light across the wall's carved relief: Pharaoh lunged forward, his fist clenched on his foe's upraised arm, the swing of his war mace caught at the moment before it descended. Movement - emotion: Pharaoh triumphant. It was magnificent, vibrant, awe-inspiring, from the king's jutting jaw to the despairing faces of his foes. The dynamic thrust of the leg, driving into the ground, brought his eyes down in a diagonal to a figure at the carving's feet.

 
 

A man stood half-collapsed against the wall, his shoulder against it, his lowered head turned toward it, catching the lingering warmth of the stone in the fading day. As Herihor watched, the man pushed away, staggering a little, and looked up at the carving.

The thought came unbidden: A flame cast by a shadow.

 

He had made some slight noise. The man glanced over his shoulder and then turned to face him with raised head. His hands and arms were bound behind him, wrist and elbow. They had not been gentle with the ropes. He was pale with exhaustion, blood was caked in his hair and sweat made lighter streaks in his dusty face, but the black eyes that traveled scornfully from Herihor's feet to his face were as sharp as Herihor remembered. "You, too," he said.

The contempt in his voice made Herihor wince as he moved forward. "Sire-"

Pharaoh frowned. "Will you spare my troops?" he asked.

 

Herihor stared. Blood was trailing from the side of the man's mouth and he saw the dark smudge of a bruise at the side of his face.

 

Pharaoh tried to shake the hair from his eyes. "I am defeated: I admit it. How can I not? Do with me as it pleases you. My only request is this: those soldiers that fought for me, those cities and temples that assisted me, did so out of loyalty to their king. I beg you: do not fault them or punish them when you set up your--your dynasty. They will love you and yours all the more for that."

 

The gallant generosity of that speech made Herihor pause and look down. He drew his dagger after a moment and stepped forward.

Pharaoh watched the knife leave its sheath. He lifted his chin and faced Herihor more fully.

Writing Tools

Look familiar?

I like tools.  Any type of tools.  I can easily spend a month's salary in a hardware store.  Or an office supply store.  Pens, pencils, screwdrivers, notebooks of all sizes, post-it notes, three-ring binders - I love them all.

But there are different types of tools, and each trade has its own.  For a writer the most important, I would imagine, are the writer's imagination followed by his or her command of words, then grammar...  You get my drift.  I could get very philosophical and talk about writers with fabulous imaginations, but without the ability to write.  I'd love to cite Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example - except that I enjoy his writing.  But having read this passage, I can only chuckle:

"Your time shall come, then, I-Gos", Gahan assured the other, "and if you have any party that thinks as you do, prepare them for the eventuality that will succeed O-Tar's presumptuous attempt to wed the daughter of the Warlord.  Where shall I see you again, and when?  I go now to speak with Tara, Princess of Helium."

    (From The Chessmen of Mars (c) 1922 by Edgar Rice Burroughs)

To be a writer, you need to have a writer's abilities, so we can set that to one side.  But what of the tools that help the writer to write?

Something to write with, I'd imagine.  Nowadays if you don't have a good word processing system, you're in trouble.  I remember buying my first computer, put out by Epson.  I don't know what its memory capacity was. I do know that if I wanted to use my word processing system (a very, very distant version of Word Perfect called 'Professional Word', as I recall) I had to fire up my computer (inserting the start-up disk, which was the size of a 45 record), then insert my program disk in the lower drive.  Then I could start writing.

I was resistant, initially.  What's wrong with typing things?  I type well and quickly (110 wpm at last testing).  I was converted the first time I decided to change a character's name and used Global Search to do so.  I never looked back.

That computer performed valiantly but was replaced in due time with one that had maybe one gigabyte of memory.  It took the diskettes that were a lot smaller and sturdier than the originals.  I converted most of them as quickly as I could.

Some place to store what you've written - like a diskette.  Hard copies are nice enough - except that you end up having to retype them which I now do not feel is quite so easy as I did.  Writers are always fiddling with things.  I'd make changes and save the changes - on a new diskette.  If you check out the photo, you'll see that I have lots and lots of those diskettes - and the only machine I have that can read them is a Dell desktop that is getting old and crotchety.  (I'm writing this on an ACER Aspire that has a 300 gb hard drive, takes flash drives and CDS, and works beautifully.  But it doesn't read my old diskettes.

Diskettes are not the only storage venues.  If you look at the photo, you'll see a slice of my storage means: three-ring binders (the big, fat one sitting atop the bottom manuscript contains jottings on four different stories, none of which were ever saved to electronic media.  Salvageable?  Maybe.  I'm looking through them.

Then there are the notebooks.  I have lots of them.  I keep one in my purse and if something occurs to me, I jot it down.  How many times have I had a great idea for tweaking a scene, thought "Oh, I'll remember it!" and then discovered that I couldn't.  I came up with quite a system for jotting down, transcribing, and then marking what I transcribed.  But I hung on to the notebooks.  Lately, I was interested to see the absolute first notation on one of my books, The City of Refuge.  I had noted an idea for the story - and it was fairly well-developed - around 1984.  It sat in limbo for a time, then came into full blossom around 1994.

Pens.  Can you have enough?  I used to say that something like White-Out was a must. I don't think so any more.

Most recently, I bought a stack of steno pads and four college-ruled 8 1/2 x 11  spiral bound notebooks.  I might need them.

In fact, I think I need to go through what I have and figure out what I need.

...and convert those old diskettes to CDS before I lose something crucial.

I Am a Writer...

I am a writer.  That is to say, I write books.  I do other things, as well, but this blog is devoted to my writing.  Where it comes from, what I'm doing, what I'm enjoying, what is annoying me.  Not so much of the last part, actually.


Why am I a writer?  Well, because it suits me.  I like to tell stories, whether or not I have an audience.  I make up stories in my mind - or perhaps I tend to 'fill in the blanks' on a situation, and it becomes a story.  I write some of them down.  Where do they come from?  All over the place.  I used to carry a notebook around with me to catch my thoughts; I fell out of the practice during a hurried and harried time, but I'm back to it.


What have I been doing?


Well, I wrote my first poem back in fourth grade a few decades ago.  It was so much fun, I kept up with it.  Some of my poetry is enjoyable, some isn't. I  haven't done much of it in years; it is a demanding activity, and my writing skills lie in another direction.  Or maybe I mean that I enjoy channeling the skills in the direction in which they're going at the moment.


I wrote my first novel, as such, around 8th grade.  Hand written in fountain pen.  I still have it.  It's a story about Hawaii in the time of Kamehameha the great.  The title was Born of the Sea.   I followed that up a couple years later with a story that was set in French Canada around the time of the French and Indian Wars.  That didn't have a title, though someone suggested Jaws because some of my characters were rather chatty.


I went to college and a year of grad school.  I was involved in the student newspaper and the fine arts publication, and a number of my poems were printed there.  I wrote a colum - thinking aloud, I guess.  Actually, the colum was rather like a blog.  I did have a following, but it was cut short when I graduated.


Then came The Snowhawk.  That gets a post of its own.  My first full length novel (in three parts, too, so it's a three-fer).  I wrote it before electronic copies and there it sits, not edit-able because it's only in hard copy.  But there are other things about it that have earned it an honest retirement.


I have four novels published and more in the works.  But that's another blog post.