Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

You’ll Fall Like A Guillotine

Posted July 10, 2011 under Writing | Tagged: , | No Comments Yet

I love combining music and writing. Making playlists for WIPs really helps me get in the mood and prepare for starting a piece. And sometimes songs just inspire one completely.

For the past two days I have been listening to Guillotine by YADI and after listening to it once or twice a story started bursting from my head like Athena. It’s a glimpse into the background of a minor character from another work.

I’m still working on the first draft but here’s the beginning of the story. Please excuse the draftiness.

She had not killed in some time.

Why should she have to when she had plenty of humans willing to kneel before their queen and offer their blood, humans who proudly displayed the scars on their wrists from her delicate nibbles as proof of royal favour?

She did not have to kill now, either. At least not personally.

She could have sent in a small army of humans armed with their barbaric guns. They were more than willing to sacrifice themselves for their queen and her consort.

Or she could send in her people to complete this task. They were stronger than humans and could easily overpower those monsters in the traditional way.

But she did not. Even with her rusty killing skills, even if she had to do it alone, it was her consort they had taken. Thus it was going to be by her hands, her fangs that he was going to be avenged.

Teaser Tuesday: Snow Bees

Posted July 5, 2011 under Personal, Writing | Tagged: , | 1 Comment

For last year’s NaNo I was working on a reimagining of The Snow Queen set in modern London at Christmas. However I haven’t worked on it at all since the middle of November, which was when my grandmother died. It took me a while to come back to Winterheart because, well, my grandmother is in it. She and I were talking about my writing (which she was so very supportive of) and I mentioned what I was planning, and because there was a grandmother in the story did she mind if I named her after her. Well, she didn’t want to name the character after her because she always hated her name; as a sort of compromise I named the character what Nana wanted to be called and based the character on her. She was very pleased with this, but you can see why it was hard after her death to open up the WIP and see her sitting there in the text.

Anyway I am finally back to working on Winterheart and thought I’d share a tiny bit from the first part, which was written at the start of November. I hope you enjoy it.

“The queen of the snow bees lives up in the clouds, the thick black ones like over there. Although sometimes she has a castle high on the mountains. From the sky, or from the mountain – wherever she is, it’s always very high up – she looks down at us and what we are doing, and she sends the little snow bees down to us to spy on us and report back so she can learn about us.”

By this time Kyle and Gabrielle were sitting on the window seat, where Annabelle had joined them; all three teenagers were listening in rapt attention, and even Beatrice was silent, humming no more.

“At night, during the winter, she comes down to earth and wanders the streets. She looks through the windows at all the happy families and all the sleeping children, and she envies us all.”

“Why’s that, Nan?” asked Annabelle.

“Because we are warm, and we are loved. Those are two things that she is denied thus she wants.”