Six Sentence Sunday: She carried on screaming, because it seemed that there was nothing else to do.

A Six Sentence Sunday sneaked in amidst holiday shenanigans! (Working in a giant bookstore days before Christmas is never a boring thing, I promise you all that.)

This week in The Clockwork Coloratura, my little clockpunk retelling of The Pied Piper, Anna is left to try and come to terms with the fact that the song she had thrown herself into following has seemingly betrayed her, and she is now left lost and blind and alone.
 
 

She carried on screaming, because it seemed that there was nothing else to do.

The screams she could at least understand, and they went forth neatly in the only directions that mattered: Out and away.

(And she did not dare to consciously wonder if they might somehow bring the boy to her, but hope burned just as brightly at the back of her throat and hid itself behind every cry.)

She carried on screaming, and did not remember for several long seconds that she still had feet and hands. She had forgotten her body, in its current useless state; she had accepted that it no longer served a purpose but to bring her self closer to the source of the song.

But the song was scattered and her eyes had grown dark, and she had no choice left but to reach out and feel.

Six Sentence Sunday: Nothing but a chaotic cloud of noise.

Last week, the strange song suddenly stopped in The Clockwork Coloratura.

This week, Anna is left only with an even stranger cloud of noise, and she struggles to understand both why and what exactly this will mean.
 
 

She did not understand, but she could not deny that something was inescapably wrong.

Before, the song had stretched forward, becoming a path, a single solid line. There may have been countless intricacies embedded in that one line, far too many for her to catch and fully comprehend, but the line itself had moved in only one direction.

And that one direction was the only thing that she had needed to know.

But now there was no direction, was nothing but a chaotic cloud of noise.

There was no forward; she could no longer even discern which way was back, neatly eliminating the prospect of giving up on this strange journey entirely and attempting to find her way back to the boy.

Six Sentence Sunday: When she realised she was screaming, she knew that she was lost.

Last week in The Clockwork Coloratura, the streets that Peregrine walked in his search were eerily silent.

But for Anna, on her own strange journey, this is far from the case.
 
 

She screamed.

She could not hear the sound herself; she felt it, a violent expulsion of air from the very depths of her lungs and a bright expanse of red that scraped her throat just as raw.

And when she realised she was screaming, she knew that she was lost.

She did not know how such a thing could have happened — she would have sworn that she had followed the song exactly, had almost perfectly matched its pace, with no indications that she had made a misstep or that the song itself had lead her at all astray. She had not fallen and had not stumbled, despite the weakness and dizziness that still clouded her brain.

The song had guided her faithfully, and she had followed, and she could not imagine that after everything, it would now allow her to fall.

Six Sentence Sunday: Adventures in NaNoLand, and wild new project appears!

NaNoWriMo, thus far, has been an adventure.

I expected absolutely nothing less.

I started Day One with endless enthusiasm and absolutely no shortage of ideas…and, typically, absolutely no way to pick between any of them. (Thank you, Libra.)

And so, also typically, on Day One I just started in with my general default of Writing All the Things, and worked on two completely different projects.

By the end of Day One, however, I had decided that neither one of the two projects I had worked on was the right one, but figured the right one would find me sooner or later.

And late that night, just as I was settling into bed, yet another plotbunny suddenly launched itself atop my brain, and began to very ravenously gnaw.

This did not surprise me, either, and I just decided to give in and give this rabid new thing a go.

And I have. We’ve made some progress (even if not nearly as much as I should have), and after some serious rethinking and reworking I may actually have a somewhat viable story, here.

But. But.

YET AGAIN, for about the third time thus far, I don’t know that that one is the story, the one I can throw myself into so completely that I spew out 50,000 words of it in a one-month span.

Luckily (or unluckily, however you want to look at it), however, as I was leaving work last night, Plotbunny #4 (yes, #4) hit.

The kind of plotbunny where, even if she shake your head quite sternly at it and tell it no, that you’ve already begun another project and do not particularly care to completely start NaNoWriMo over halfway through the month, it will hop up and down inside your head so energetically that you will not be able to focus on anything else, however hard you may try.

Needless to say, Plotbunny #4 would not let go, and I know how this goes well enough to realise that I’m doomed.

I decided to at least be graceful about the whole mess, and give in and start writing it anyway.

Will it go well? Hell if I know! But for now, it’s coming quickly and easily and the bunny and I are getting on quite well, so I can’t really complain. :)

The title is Mei & June, it’s teen fiction/romance (yup, two girls!), and the first draft of the blurb?
 
 

Mei has not been home in over three years, not since the night with the screaming and the broken glass and her mother barging into her bedroom to tell her to wake up, that they had to get away.

Mostly, she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t miss her dad, or the way her parents always fought, or how she always had to sleep her with her door shut and her head under the pillow just to block them out.

The only thing she misses is her best friend. Not being home in over three years means it’s been three years since she last got to see her best friend…the best friend her mother tried to forbid her from speaking to at all after they left, for fear that Mei’s father would be able to track them through any connections they kept.

But Mei and June have been inseperable ever since they were little girls, and that much, at least, is never going to change.

So when June tells Mei that she needs to come with her to her old high school’s prom, Mei says yes against her mother’s will, and June drives for hours to come to steal her away in the middle of the night, and that’s when the world begins turning back over on its ear.

 
 
And now for the first Six Sunday snippet of the piece itself!

Here, Mei is recounting the night she and her mother left, the way her mother woke her up shouting at her to pack, that they were going to leave, before darting back out to continue the shouting match with Mei’s father that had prompted said decision to leave. As Mei was waiting for the fight to end and to see how it would go, she sent a hurried text to her best friend:
 
 

‘Parents fighting. Think Mom is about to leave, and drag me with her. Lyk details when I have any. Love you, June. Hopefully I’ll see you soon.‘

(June is, obviously, my best friend’s name — June Elise Roberts. I generally only call her that when things are really serious, though; otherwise she prefers me to use her initials and just call her Jer.)

I didn’t bother to apologise for texting her so late at night, because the girl sleeps like the dead, and I knew that even if she had gone to sleep with her phone’s volume on, there was no way it would wake her up.

Part of me was glad of that, despite the fact she wouldn’t have gotten mad at me if I had woken her up, but part of me was also more than a little bit desperate to hear her voice, especially not knowing when we would get to see each other again.

She’s the sort of girl who, once you meet her, you don’t do too well without.

Six Sentence Sunday: Like chill coming up to greet you through the ground.

Ahh, the last Six Sunday post of The Clockwork Coloratura before NaNoWriMo begins!

Speaking of, I still have no idea what I’m even doing for NaNo, but hey, what the hell. I make no secret of the fact I am a pantser when it comes to writing, hah. (See: The Clockwork Coloratura itself, aka The Accidental Novel.)

But before NaNo (whatever it may be for me) begins, let’s take a last look back at Anna, as Peregrine still attempts to hunt her down.
 
 

On some level, she was aware that she was cold.

There had been chills before, of course, with the fever, the wild fluctuations between sweating and shaking; but they had been relatively short-lived, as fever-fluctuations tended to be.

This was a different breed of thing.

This was cold, a steady, constant, creeping thing, like chill coming up to greet you through the ground if you were unlucky enough to be left sleeping exposed on stone. It surrounded her, and it did not abate, only grew stronger as more of it began to amass.

At first, she wondered if this meant that she was finally dead.

Six Sentence Sunday, an announcement, and meet The Clockwork Coloratura!

Okay.

It’s official: The Baby is growing up.

It’s creeping towards 20,000 words, now, and nearing the end of what has only turned out to be Part One. (When, at first, I had been roughly estimating that 20,000 words could hold the story in its entirety…ahem.) I’m still not sure how many parts there will be altogether, but I’m going to guess at least three or four, and that they’ll all probably be more or less this same size.

So.

I suppose I may just be writing an accidental novel now, at that.

Go figure.

It even, finally, has a proper title!

I think that I am calling it The Clockwork Coloratura.

(I do love alliteration, and ‘coloratura’ is one of my favourite words, as well as a painfully-apt musical term. At the very least, it should serve as a working title!)

I don’t know, yet, what all this story is going to entail, or where it’s going to go. (For me, being a writer isn’t about controlling stories; it’s about giving yourself up to them as freely as you hope your readers will. It isn’t creating something new; it’s unearthing and polishing relics that already exist, putting them back together and cleaning them up until they are finally whole again and shine.) I don’t know how it’s going to end.

I do know that this story is a lot of things — it’s a clockpunk retelling of the Pied Piper fairytale, obviously; it’s a dystopian, post-apocalyptic story; it’s the start to a series of clockpunk retellings of other fairytales set in this same world.

But mostly, it’s a story about two lonely children, and the desperate way that loneliness can make you cling.
 
 
And now that the announcements are out of the way, have this week’s Six Sentences of The Clockwork Coloratura itself. :)
 
 

Outside the door were flakes of skin.

His first thought was of snakes, of molting, of little girls being swallowed alive and somehow managing to claw their way free, and these were the images that stuck with him even as he shook his head and forced himself to reexamine the scene. On second glance, it was obvious that his first impressions had been quite wrong; far too little skin remained to signify such a thing. The flakes left behind were small, no bigger than a bitten-down nail, and barely big enough for him to recognised them at all. They may as easily have been dust, may have been ancient paint flaking free from the walls, might even have been fragments of paper left behind to crumble and curl.

They might have been any number of things, and yet somehow he knew that they were hers.

Six Sentence Sunday: She walked regardless, and she did not fall.

Every week, I seem to feel the need to announce that I am still (somehow!) working on this same clockpunk Pied Piper project, because my own consistency still surprises me.

I get the feeling it will be quite some time before the surprise vanishes, hah.

So then, world: It is still coming, and I am still not Libra-flouncing away!

But I still do not know how long it’s going to want to be, or have a proper title for it. Ah well.

Onto this week’s snippet!

Anna, left possibly blind and infection-riddled and fever-wracked, is somehow still stubbornly making her way through the streets, drawn by a mysterious music towards some fate she does not understand but cannot ignore.

Fate and necessity and momentum, however, do not obliterate the pain of leaving things behind.
 
 

She walked regardless, and she did not fall.

She could no longer see, it was true, but the song had grown exponentially louder the minute she stepped out of doors. There had been a muffling, inside with Peregrine, as though he had filled even her head with bandages or else used them to insulate the walls, and it had made her heart lurch as painfully as her steps in response.

But silence was death, and she would have her fill of death soon enough. She would simultaneously accept it and embrace this one last bit of life while she could; staying still and quiet would serve no purpose.

Better, anyway, to let him believe that it had been her own folly, rather than his fault.

Six Sentence Sunday: Strictly speaking, she could no longer see.

I said I wanted to finish this whole clockpunk Pied Piper thing this month, and the story is certainly moving itself along!

Peregrine has woken up to find Anna gone — but where, exactly, is Anna going, and what was it made her leave?

(And perhaps most importantly, what will happen when and if she gets there?)
 
 

Strictly speaking, she could no longer see.

In the congealed patch of fog now serving as her brain, she wondered whether it was night or if the fever had struck her blind. She was not even sure which option she would prefer; blindness could easily be a death sentence out on the streets, but being a girl alone on them at night could be an even swifter one.

More importantly, she was fairly convinced that she was dying either way, and was determined to do so under the sun. She would find it, whether she had to walk until dawn or walk until she reached an open patch where she could feel it on her skin, and that would have to do.

Whatever came after would come, and she decided she would meet it head-on.

Six Sentence Sunday: Everything else was as he remembered it, if only minus her.

Another week, and I’m actually still at this whole clockpunk Pied Piper thing! And not only have I not fluttered away from this project yet, I just want to keep working on it more.

Fancy that. :)

(Being an air sign is fantastically helpful for being a writer…until you inevitably hit that whole ‘I MUST WRITE ALL OF THE THINGS ALL AT THE SAME TIME’ stage. Which is generally the story of my life and more than a bit distracting, hah.)

That said, however! Last week, after having stayed up all night to transcribe the ravings of her fever-dreams, Peregrine finally woke to find Anna gone.

Now, he attempts to take stock of the surroundings he has left.
 
 

Everything else was as he remembered it, if only minus her, even if rememberance did not automatically equate to understanding. He could still feel the way his hand had strained to form these shapes across the wall, could still remember how he had traced them with his eyes as he himself was seeing them for the first time.

He had heard them from her mouth before, it was true, but that did not make them real.

And he had hoped that, finally, transcribed in this form and transferred from her lips to his hand to the steadiness of the wall, they might somehow have made more sense than when they merely floating free.

That is, until they had come to the corner, to the very last things he had scraped out until she had fallen silent and asleep and away. They had reached their most abstract here, lonely rhyming syllables and seemingly unconnected couplets of words, strings of followfollowfollow and help and please that he himself had punctuated with a single scrawled Yes.

Six Sentence Sunday: When he woke up, she was gone.

In last week’s Six Sunday portion of my clockpunk Pied Piper project, the night which he spent writing out the ravings of Anna’s fever-dreams came to a close, and Peregrine finally seemed to have a moment’s peace.

But in this world, nothing lasts.
 
 

When he woke up, she was gone.

He was aware, first, of the angle of his head. Before he even opened his eyes, Peregrine felt the indentation in the blankets, that hollowed-out space that she had once filled, and that his own head was now leaning inexoriably towards in her stead.

He heard nothing. No soft slow footsteps, no pained cries, not even the scurrying, scrambling noises he imagined she might make if she attempted to move in such a state.

There was nothing but the hollow place, and the bile rising hot in his own throat in answer.