Revision Round-up 1

Okay, I seem to be doing this whole blogging thing. I'm already way more consistent than the last time I tried.

So, my goal for the blog Monday-Friday is to publish a short piece of fiction every day. My goal for the weekends is to revise the pieces I did throughout the week, and post them in a mega-post like this. If all you want is one very long post with four or five 500-1,000 word stories in it, here you go!

This week, I wrote four stories and an introductory post. I've gone back and revised the intro post directly, so you'll have to go there and check it out.

The four stories are here, though, starting with the first one, which I never actually titled. This was the longest story I did this week, but it was still fairly tight. Most of the edits I ended up doing were minor— ground the setting by picking a state for my fictional small town, tighten up a few of the lines, add a throwaway reference to the auto shop so that when it comes back up later in the story, it's not a surprise. I tweaked the dialogue a bit, too, trying to get closer to following Butcher's Five-Word Rule. I think it reads a little better now, especially that one line from the Max character where he says like four different things.

Anyway, story 1:

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character: mechanic

prompt: character takes a day trip to a small town

The old red-brick-and-white-siding of Dansville, NC rolled into view, and Brenna sighed to herself. In some ways, it was good to be back. Not in most ways, but at least a few. She had grown up along the two-mile stretch of nothing that made up downtown Dansville, crashing shopping carts and getting stoned and collecting cool sticks along the two-lane highway. Now she rolled past familiar sights, made new through the eyes of adulthood. Down there was the school where she had started her first puberty. A little further, the video store where she and Max had spent as much money on weed as on N64 rentals. Further still, past the auto shop, was the one good restaurant in town, where you could get a fried pork chop, mashed potatoes, and a lemonade for $5.60.

The school was still in operation, she saw. A whole new generation of little buffoons running around, consuming each other's innocence on a daily basis. The video store was long gone, of course, the outline of an unfamiliar shape discoloring the wall above the storefront. Video Maximum had died, and some other business had moved in here and died as well.

The restaurant, Dave's Flame Grill, seemed to be going strong. Brenna doubted the pork chop meal was still five bucks, but it was probably worth it anyway. Her mouth watered at the memory of juicy meat, fluffy potatoes, and savory greens. Definitely stopping on the way out of town.

As she turned down Rose street (right before Daisy street and just after Poppy lane, god these street names were cloying), she reached for the volume knob on her little Honda's radio. Blaring guitars, thundering drums, and the guttural screams of Byron Davis faded, leaving the sound of wind through her open window, tires on asphalt, and a fun new clicking noise that hadn't been coming from her engine when she'd left home that morning.

She leaned left, sticking an ear out the window, listening to the rumble of her engine. Yeah, it was definitely saying things it shouldn't be saying. "Fuck," she muttered, easing into her next turn and starting to look for parking. She was a block away from Max's, that was close enough.

The walk to 402 Portia Lane was short, and made comfortable by a light breeze and plenty of shade from the trees along either side of the pitted sidewalk. The apartment building she came to was a wide, squat collection of red bricks and blue door, built on a wider, flatter patch of grass. She mounted the steps up to the door, went inside, found apartment E, and texted here to the occupant.

She was about to knock when the door swung open and Max was there, tanktop, sweatpants, beanie, and big grin all coming toward Brenna at once. His hug was accompanied by her Name, effortlessly spoken in glad friendship, and it made her grin and squeeze back even harder.

"Hey, Max, good to see you."

"Good to see you," Max said, pulling back and holding Brenna by the shoulders as he looked her over. "Damn, you're looking hot. Is that okay to say? I dunno, you gotta tell me if I do something weird."

She gave him a curtsy, pulling at the sides of her black-and-white checked skirt and laughing. "Nah, it's cool, I know I'm hot now."

"Come on in," said Max, stepping to the side and beckoning her into the small 1-bedroom. Beyond, she could see a comfy-looking couch set up against a wall, a passthrough to the kitchen above it. Short gray carpet coated the floors, bookshelves lined the walls, and a large fern took up one corner. It looked homey and comfortable, and a far cry cleaner than Max's last place.

"I like what she's done with the place," said Brenna, pulling her shoes off and stepping in to investigate the knicknacks on the nearest shelf. She gave her friend a sidelong smile, making sure he knew she was mocking him, and making equally sure he knew she was being gentle about it, welcoming him into the joke.

"Yeah, Amanda's cleaned me up a bit. Hell of a stoner, though. You'd like her."

"When do I get to meet this mythical vixen?"

"She's at work right now. Here, your stuff's in the bedroom," Max said, heading toward the hall behind the kitchen.

"Oh, hey— I might need a ride to the auto parts shop," Brenna said. Max stopped just beyond the kitchen and turned back.

"Shit, what happened?"

"Dunno yet. Figured I'd let the engine cool a while before I went poking around in it."

"You don't wanna just send it to A-1?"

A-1 was the town's auto shop. The town's only auto shop. Brenna had spent countless hours there as a kid, bashing superhero dolls together at the front desk and learning the names of all the tools on the greasy shop floor. It was a place that held a lot of meaning for her, and a lot of complicated feelings surrounded it. Many of them, fairly recent.

Max saw her hesitation. "Yeah, of course, no worries. I'll give you a ride out to Salvo."

"Thanks, Max."

"No worries."

"It's probably nothing, and about half the somethings it could be, I can fix with the shit in the trunk anyway."

Max nodded. "Do they even know?"

Brenna looked down and saw she had picked up a little plastic Garfield, the orange cat now squeezed in her palm, a talisman against evil memory. She put it back on the shelf and sighed. "You know what my dad would say."

"Yeah," said Max, his tone solemn. "Yeah, your dad and your brother would both be shitheads about it."

"I can't just cut them out completely, can I?"

Max shrugged. "I dunno, Bren. I dunno."

They stood, silent and uncomfortable for a long beat. Brenna thought, for the thousandth time, of all the ways she could imagine her family reacting to the news that she was trans. None of the possibilities were pleasant. Hell, maybe she should go to A-1, just rock up there in front of the whole crew, let her family find out in public and embarrass themselves.

Max broke the moment. "Anyway, come on. Amanda collected a bunch of old clothes for you to pick through. She'll be home in a couple hours if you wanna smoke and play Smash or something until then."

Brenna smiled. Not everything in Dansville was awful. She'd moved away for very good reasons, but that afternoon, she remembered a few reasons to come back once in a while, too. And the pork chop she ate that evening on her way out of town was just as juicy and delicious as she remembered.

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Story two's edits were much the same deal. I pulled out a few unnecessary phrases, tightened things up just a bit, and tweaked some of the dialogue.

Part of the reason I started this blog was that I wasn't impressed with my character work in my first book. I felt the dialogue wasn't great, and the characterization unremarkable. That's why I include a character prompt in every short story I publish here— to force myself to write from different perspectives, and to train myself to create memorable, interesting characters.

I think I'm on the right track with these stories, but boy does some of the dialogue still feel unnatural. I hope it's a bit better here than it was on Wednesday:

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After living with humans for six hundred years or so, Daphne could tell their emotional states by a number of subtle queues— the set of their brows, the hunch of their shoulder, and, in this instance, the length of their hugs. Trevor had started by taking her hands, which could mean any number of things. He'd sat her down on the ornate couch in the drawing room, hard cushion accepting her tall frame with a creak, and had looked at her with tears in his eyes. Bad news, then.

Then, rather than speaking, he'd embraced her. The hug lasted past "minor disappointment", past "personal tragedy", and progressed into "I've already projected my grief onto you and am comforting you to avoid acknowledging my own needs". His arms around her shoulders were tight, his body trembling. She returned the squeeze, gentle in her way, careful not to break him with preternatural strength.

"Trevor," she said finally, into his shoulder. "What's happened?"

He pulled back and looked at her, then up and off to the side, studying the swirling architecture that connected wall to lavish teal ceiling. Humans did that when they had to put their thoughts together. It was a habit she'd worked half a century to break. She liked to observe her speaking companions.

"Mitsie was attacked, at the edge of the grounds," he said. He started to say more, then set his jaw and grunted, staring away and slamming a fist against his knee. Tactics to keep sobs from interfering with one's voice, Daphne surmised. She waited.

"It's bad. She'll never..." He grunted again, a rumble of frustrated pain. "There was so much blood."

That was bad news. Daphne had chosen Mitsie for the Awakening. Now she would have to wait for another suitable child to be born to the family.

"What did it?"

Trevor hesitated, and Daphne could read a complexity of uncertainty in him. He had convinced himself that he wasn't at all sure of the thing he was sure of.

"We don't—"

"Trev. What was it?"

"We're not sure. We found tracks, but—" he cut himself off, but his gaze flicked to her neck, where the wolf's paw tattoo hid behind her pale hair. She nodded, grim in understanding. If they had broken the treaty, it would mean war.

"Take me to where it happened."

"You don't want to see Mitsie?"

"Will she live?"

"We don't know."

Daphne considered. The human thing to do was to shriek and cry and demand to see the injured child. It was expected of her. She was family, after all, and not just family, but the family's guardian. Centuries of watching the DeVantress family, of protecting it, of encouraging its growth and prosperity. Humans expected certain things from their families, and even in a life as long as hers, she had not entirely rid herself of those expectations.

But she was not human. She was their guardian, not their nursemaid. She had brokered the treaty that had brought them centuries of peace with the neighboring clan, giving the DeVantresses the space to seize opportunity and amass untold fortunes. Now that pact may have been broken. That was a greater threat than the life of one child. Her priorities could not be informed by human expectation.

She would deal with the threat.

"Show me where it happened."

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Story 3: Heracles

A decent writer once said, "second draft = first draft minus ten percent". It's a pretty good piece of advice, or at least, it sounds like it is. it's a philosophy I try to apply, with varying success, to most of my revisions. There's always some unnecessary word or phrase, some run-on sentence that can be trimmed, some dangling bit of plot that didn't need to be there.

This story was the opposite. As I re-read it, I found it needed more. More description, more care taken with each beat. And, as I said at the end of the original post, a mantlepiece with a knife hanging from it. This ended up reversing the old writer's idiom: this second draft is the first draft plus ten percent.

So, please enjoy this story, which I think is my favorite from this week.

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He was at a crossroads, and whatever path he chose, someone's life would be ruined as a result. He stood among the field of screaming beasts, his heart torn as it hadn't been since boyhood. Proceed, and he would complete his final task, restore his honor, and his wife, the mother of his sons, would be returned. All at the cost of the reputation and livelihood of a boy who had barely reached manhood. He wasn't sure what the word "hero" truly meant, but he didn't think this was included in the definition.

He stared across the hardpacked field as monstrosities flowed around him. Ahead, the dwelling place of the young man. Behind, a lonely life wracked with guilt for the fate of Megara, but the knowledge that the stranger would be safe, and that his discovery would save this world from uncountable torment. His hand, tense in the cacophony, flexed around the hilt of his knife. The weapon hung by a leather thong at his waist, the belt completing the look of tunic, war skirt, and sandals.

Beside him, the gaunt man with the snake tattooed on his leg spoke. "Heracles, Son of Zeus, I ask a final time," the man said. "Will you stay your hand?"

The man had been Heracles's guide in this strange, hellish landscape. He had seen the hero safely across the river and through the many circles, had procured Heracles a meal wrapped in flatbread, had sheltered him from the judgment of the realm's denizens. Now he made his request, and Heracles knew that it came from his heart. The man had sympathy for the boy, perhaps even love for him, and Heracles couldn't bear to know that he would disappoint this man.

He opened his mouth to give his reply, but before he could, one of the strange steel behemoths slowed, bleating its Locrian cry. The monstrosity’s captive leaned toward Heracles from the cushioned seat and shouted, "get out of the street, asshole," before the beast regained its speed and swung around the curve of the hellish circle.

"Come," said Theseus. "We can make this decision just as well from the sidewalk."

They crossed the final circle, the one named Thomas Northwest, plunging their way through the monstrous things that Theseus had told him were chariots. The circle was wide, with a vast patch of grass and stone walkways in the middle, decorated by a bronze statue of a man on a horse.

Then they were plunging into the deluge again. The “chariots” which screamed around them had no horses and moved on their own like bulls. They blared their warnings, but Heracles and Theseus remained brave, and pressed through the din. Together, the companions mounted the low platform where humans were meant to walk, where the realm's buildings, familiar stoneworks yet to a scale and of an appearance that was completely alien to Heracles, stood.

"There," Theseus gestured to the stonework that loomed over them. Heracles followed his gaze to the gray and tan front of the dwelling, marked by its transparent entrance with the strange glyphs the locals used for language. "Hotel Zena," Theseus translated.

"And Cerberus is inside?"

"Mason McKenzie is inside."

"With Cerberus?"

Theseus sighed. "With the patent for a drug that significantly prolongs human life. A drug that he calls 'Cerberus', yes."

"Theseus," Heracles began, then caught the pleading look in his companion's eye. He forced himself to meet Theseus's gaze, to make his decision with the full emotional weight of betrayal on his conscience.

Theseus's eyes widened. "Don't—" he said, then winced, doubling over, one hand clasping Heracles's shoulder for balance. Heracles caught his companion under the arm, easing him down to the paved stone ground. They knelt together, brothers in travel, now departing each other's company for the last time.

"I am sorry, my friend," said Heracles, as he slid free the knife from between Theseus's ribs. "I must save Megara. Thank you for showing me this far."

Theseus nodded, holding Heracles's gaze. "Room 208," he choked out. Then his eyes took on a a look of confusion. His brow furrowed, then raised again as he gave a weak smile.

“Athens is beautiful today,” said Theseus.

“As it is every day,” agreed Heracles, heart breaking for his companion.

Theseus coughed, twice. Then he was still.

Heracles dug in his purse for the strange coins Theseus had given him back in the realm of Virginia, at the start of their journey. He produced two of the large silver ones, called "quarter" by his dead friend. With care, he closed Theseus's eyes, placing a coin over each. Would Charon find him here, in this place of torment? Heracles hoped, but the hope was all he had.

He stood, crossing to the large stone planter to the left of the dwelling's door. He wiped his knife on the ferns found there, then sheathed his blade again and entered Hotel Zena, intent on finding room 208 and stealing the work of a young man who had discovered how to block the gates of hell.

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Story 4

I don't like first person. Bold stance for someone whose favorite book series is The Dresden Files, but there it is. Most of what I grew up reading was in third limited, so that's what I'm most comfortable reading and writing. But I'm not here to be comfortable. I'm here to practice. And first person IS valuable sometimes— otherwise my favorite series wouldn't be The Dresden Files.

Speaking of that series, at some point this week I discovered Jim Butcher's old Livejournal, which still has a bunch of posts detailing his writing process. This story is an attempt to write what he calls a sequel, and what any of the rest of us would call a human reaction to shit going down. Go look up his post on "Scenes & Sequels", it's too long to summarize here.

Anyway, this turned out to be the tightest piece of the week. I fixed a typo, found a synonym for an accidentally-repeated word, but there wasn't much to trim. Maybe I'm edited out right now, or maybe I just don't see it. I'm not an editor, anyway. There's probably something I missed.

Or maybe I'm just decent at first person. Dammit.

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My first thought when I hung up the phone was, shit.

My second was shit shit shit. My third was equally unhelpful.

Sorry, I should say hi. My name is Caedex, I'm forty-three, I am an advanced sommelier for an excellent vintner in the Napa Valley. I'm five feet and nine inches tall, my hair is purple and annoying, my pronouns are they/them, and at that moment, I believed I was going to die within the next twelve to forty-eight hours.

Now you can picture me as I slowly lowered my phone from my ear and leaned hard against the kitchen counter, forcing myself to breathe slowly, steadily, to review the facts and what I could do about it.

It was twenty years ago, I told myself.

He doesn't remember, I told myself.

How would he even know, I told myself.

None of that made any difference. Greg Turpen was being released tomorrow morning, I was the one who put him there, and unless he'd had a real come-to-jesus in Folsom, I was fucked.

"Molly," I called. "Molly! Where are you, I need you!"

"What is it, Caed?" I followed the sound of her voice as Molly's precious head appeared around the corner of the second-floor hallway, looking down at me over the railing. Her hair was mussed in that adorable way, and her tall frame and brown freckles flattened me just as much as they do when I'm not in mortal peril.

"I've decided to join you on vacation," I told her. Better to make it a happy occasion.

Except she wasn't happy. She got that are you fucking with me right now look she gets whenever I have one of my grand ideas that screws up her entire plans.

"Now? You decided this now?"

"Yes, I did," I said. "You've been wanting me to meet more people; this is a perfect opportunity."

She leaned against the wall, staring down at me with a flat expression. "You hate people, Cae."

"I'm turning over a new leaf."

"There's gonna be a ton of new people all at once."

"And they're gonna be sitting around chanting 'Om' and comparing patchouli brands, Moll, come on, I can do this."

She stared more, and I tried not to let the adrenaline vibrate my body into visible nerves. A two-week trip to a spiritual retreat outside Portland was exactly what I needed. A nice cleanse, a bit of peace and quiet, no psycho gang-member exes coming after me, the sound of birds, the smell of pinecones or whatever they had up there...

It would be great. Relaxing. And far the fuck away from here.

Eventually, I saw the corners of Molly's mouth twitch. I knew her annoyance was being pushed to the side by thoughts of us alone in the mountains, connecting with... nature. I flashed her a grin and a wink, and her twitch became a blush that she immediately ducked behind the wall to hide.

I can be persuasive when I want to be.

"Fine, you dick, you can come."

"Yes," I said, "Molly you will not regret this."

"Fuck you," she said, still behind the wall, her voice giving away exactly how wide her grin still was. "Get packing, we leave in two hours."

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And that's the week that was! New stories, starting tomorrow!