Friday 10 March 2006

Pic of the day: "You need to be writing!" I know, I know. Here!

Writing about writing

My apologies for being late again. There hasn't been anything dramatic up (unless you count the broken tooth earlier this week as dramatic, which it isn't by most standards). I spend my time doing the other things I like: Playing The Sims 2 and occasionally City of Heroes (though not as much as before I lost Internet access, since I also lost my Supergroup). Watch anime, but not as much as I used to, at least not yet. Read a book from time to time.

But now on top of it all I have one of the ever less frequents attacks of creative writing. That's right, I'm writing fiction again. Except this time it is not a novel! That is good news indeed, because I have not managed to finish a novel in like 25 years or so. (And it was a lousy one even then, not worth trying to publish.) Instead this seems to become a short story of roughly the lenght you are used to from women's magazines. Not that I read those, of course. But when I was a kid and starved for literature, I would. Now it is like I live in The Great Library with every door in my room opening into vast halls of knowledge and imagination. It is a wonderful time to be alive, and I suspect that I will greatly resent having to stop. But back to the fiction.

***

It started with little more than an idea. I added a little more detail to flesh it out, but it is still the same at heart. The main character, who is also the teller of the story, is a boy of 17 with an unusual gift or curse: He can see through things. Actually he can not avoid it. When he looks at someone, he will see the clothes, the skin, the muscles and blood vessels and bones all at once. Just like we cannot quite avoid our peripheral vision even when we focus at some point, so he cannot avoid seeing through things to some degree.

Because he was like that from before he was old enough to hide it, everyone in the small town knows it. They have kinda gotten used to it, and also he works a couple evenings each weeks at the town hospital screening people. But even though people accept him in a way, he has very few friends. In a way, only one, the neighbor girl who he grew up with from the sandbox. The other friends are really her friends rather than his, or that is how he feels.

And now another boy their age has joined their clique. But he seems intent on inserting himself between the two childhood friends, and his body betrays that his intents are not entirely as pure as he would let them believe. Our hero has no choice but to confront him and make him admit the truth. But will he be able to handle the truth? He can see through the body, but not through the soul. Tentatively titled "Hearts of lead".

So now you have an idea how I've been spending my days!