A writer and musician trying to be decent at both things. Here, you'll find some of my attempts at storytelling!
Over the weekend some ravens got into the abandoned shop down the street.
That was when Brimstone knew his time was up.
A story set in the Rekindled Embers universe, which was created by my friend, applezombi. Please send him your support.
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Marvellously done, absolutely marvellous.
11008821
Thank you kindly!
So I say this with all seriousness, and no reservations. You are the kind of writer I aspire to be. This is just incredible.
This line gave me chills.
The sensory imagery here is just so beautiful. You are really quite adept at using all the senses. I feel Brimstone's inflammation, and both the cold and the warmth. I hear what he is hearing when he tears the paper.
I feel this. Sometimes so hard I don't have the words. Some days I think it would be healthier to let go of certain things, to let elements of my identity, elements that built me, fade away. Maybe I will some day. But for now, I'm just like Brimstone.
God, how do you write so well?
Jeez, this whole story gives me chills. This line is just amazing. I don't even know what more to say; you are so much more articulate than I, I think, able to put into words feelings and ideas that still remain nebulous for me.
Thank you for this. So much.
Having not yet read Rekindled Embers at all, I can say this has made me quite interested in reading it, even though I'd planned on doing so already.
That being said, holy crap this is extremely well-written. This feels dark and poetic, inserting feelings into the readers rather than telling a straight story, letting the feelings tell the story. Not to mention the descriptions are fantastic. I don't have the right words to articulate how I enjoyed how you describe the scene, the emotions suffused into Brimstone's surroundings and all of his actions give everything the feel of being old and heavy, the way that he's feeling throughout the story.
Honestly, I'm glad this is so short, because with writing this expressive I'd need a break from anything longer to pick my brain up off the floor and get my head on straight enough to understand the next scene.
Not that the writing is confusing, it's just like fwooom really thick with emotion and it can be heard to read something like that for a long time.
It's almost too good. Koodos to you.
11009136
This is a very reassuring comment, I must say. I was worried that this kind of story would be hard for unfamiliar readers to get into. I'm glad that it made you get more interested in giving RE a read! I really cannot recommend it enough.
Part of my philosophy when it comes to writing description - if there can be a thing such as philosophy for it - is being as precise and yet as simplistic as possible. This allows the language of the story to convey the realness of what is seen in the writer's eye. It's particularly why great stylists are often great descriptors in the most surprising of ways - someone like Woolf is particularly adept at writing how someone looks in the sun or in the night while still retaining the rawness of her style.
This story, I will admit, likely has a few superfluous details that could be removed in another draft, but I am happy that the effect was conveyed. I wanted to say that Brimstone was old without saying outright he was old, and I wanted to give a sense of his house, and how that reflected him. While it is perhaps on the nose to say that a character's setting should reflect something about their personality, I believe it works well enough here.
Oddly, the story you see here is about 100 words longer than the initial first draft. That might not seem like a whole lot, but it's still more than the original in many respects.
Brevity is not my forte, though I have endeavored to get better at it. A story of this length required a precise understanding of length and how to fit the story's "heavy language" within the confines of an upper limit of, say, 3000 words. I was also aware that the way the story would be written would, in effect, require a slow and careful reading of it, meaning that, as you said, there'd be a need to take a break before continuing to the next scene.
Part of the joy and part of the struggle of style is figuring out how to balance a reader's tolerance for syntactical weight against the "voice" of the story, and I am still trying to figure that out with everything I write. But it sounds like I have made a good enough length to the point where this story does not feel like it drags on, too much.
And as you said, it is definitely thick. If not content, then underlying content. I definitely wanted to evoke something particular and avoid a straight-figured plot, and to do that I focused on the language of the piece more than anything.
Thank you kindly!
I trust that my comment wasn't too long to read. I quite enjoyed reading your own thoughts and am quite happy to see that you liked this story.
11009183
Nah it wasn't too long. Learning about how other people approach writing in different styles always helps me, cuz I try to pick up something in order to improve my own writing.
I'll leave it that though, so this doesn't devolve into a back-and-forth of thank yous
11008882
Coming from you, that means a lot. Your nearly half-a-million-words epic has been a gift for me to read in the post-show years. I'm glad I could contribute something in return.
This, I assume, relates both to the tearing, and then the burning, of the paper.
That was the hardest part to write, even though it's not even the final part of the story. When I began writing it, I had in mind an image of him tearing and flicking those pieces into the fireplace, but I had a difficult time trying to turn that concept into something real. It was to be the point of transformation within the story - though perhaps it is a failed transformation, as in the end, Brimstone is taken away. What transformation he goes through is made to be forgotten (the passive voice construction here is intentional). But I wanted to freeze this moment in time. Let it sit in the reader's head, let the language of it fill the space.
I don't know if this is lazy, but I looked through Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and found where he also talked about flicking stuff into a fire - in his case, peels of oranges. Suddenly I knew how to write the moment, pay homage to one of my favorite often-quoted lines about writing, and still retain the language of my own piece. The odd simile pairing of scraps of paper and peels of oranges felt somehow true, and the turn from orange, to blue, to black, to nothing, spoke poetically to me. (I was also thinking about a poem I read, by a Spanish nun, that ended with something about colors fading into nothing at the end.)
I will play devil's advocate and argue that I was not fully able to put into words feelings and ideas that are nebulous to many others.
A component of language and of style is the obscuring of meaning and intention - a component that is only uncovered upon close examination. While this story is certainly heavy in style, I think it's still a style that points to how difficult it is to convey things in a truly exact matter. We can only get so close to the sun, after all. I believe that is because words are inherently limited in their use, and that much of our understanding of them comes not from denotation, but connotation - and it's connotation built from our personal context and our "hearing" of the language as it comes out.
I think for this story, I was not able to fully convey the "kind" of heaviness that Brimstone felt - just that there was a heaviness. On the other hand, that might be fitting. There is a suffering, after all, beyond words. And a memory beyond memory. A story not to pass on.
Mmm.
11009307
Good mmm or bad mmm?
Amazing! You're so articulate and can spread the feels in a story so well. A great addition to applezombi's RE.
Truly, a wonderful piece of literature you have given. It certainly, reminds me in a way of other tales but yet there is a pure raw emotional connection here. Which is something to inspire too, great job on this.
11111965
Thank you! I'm glad the story continues to prove powerful, even after all this time.
I had to admit, when I read about him preparing matches and thought about his name (Brimstone), I believed his intention was to torch himself and his house as a last act of defiance against the Diarchy. The story, though, is probably better served as a reflection on memory in an authoritarian state. A novel that reflects on memory and forgetting along the same lines of this story is Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which reflects on the nature of societal memory in Communist Czechoslovakia. Brilliant work!
I'm shuddering at the horrible irony of this. I can only imagine what the writings on those parchments could possibly have to do with those words that cannot be said. And this for him was the only way to get some fleeting warmth out of them before the inevitable happened, when he had deserved so much more.
This is just beautifully written.
11293688
I mentioned this in the story's Style Notes, but irony - and more specifically, the irony of thesis and antithesis - is prevalent in a lot of the story's language, if not the plot and meta-context themselves. I'm a fan of language that does more than "speak," so I'm quite glad you were able to determine that note of irony that this piece attempts to sing.
If you want to know more about what is hinted at, that is, what may have been on those parchment scrappings, the best thing I can do is direct you to applezombi's Rekindled Embers, in which this story is based. You may find that some of the subtlety found in my story can be explained by details brought up in his story.
Thank you for reading!
11293696
Thank you! No need, that story is exactly where I was coming from in the first place and I'm really enjoying reading it and it's something that I can relate to far too much.
There's quite a bit more that stood out (oh boy, that segment at the very end), but I didn't feel like repeating what other comments already said - and also gotta leave something for the next person ;)