Writer Friday: The Story Lives

I have officially decided to dedicate every other Friday as Writer Friday. On these days I will post something about the current status of my writing/stories if not a tip/trick/topic that any who wants to is more than welcome to respond to. So, to start us off, this Friday is a quick review of what I am actually writing and where I am.

 "Eyes on Fire"

This is the main novel that I have been working on and is kind of my biggest baby. The story came from a dream I had of this very vivid scene of a girl making a pact with a spirit to save her own life. The story of why this happened to her evolved in my head over a few years, then one summer I became compelled and wrote the remainder over a period of about 3 months. The story is now sitting at 90% done, with the end waiting for me to actually put it to paper. At that point it will need to be read through and edited.

This is the novel that I want to send out for beta reading, edit, and send to publishers. If I go into a Ph.D program that allows me to use past work, I would like to have this be my main work as well. This story does have a sequel, but it is bare bones in my head at the moment.


"WTTS" [Working title]

The working title of this book is "window to the soul" and focuses on a girl who can see into others souls via their eyes. The idea that the eyes are the "window to the soul" is a very old proverb that has always intrigued me and quite honestly, I think could really be true. So the idea came to me, "what if you really could see into someone's soul through their eyes...or worse...mess with them?" Thus, this story was born. The main idea had been bouncing around my head for a few years until the story finally came to me.

I have just begun writing this story since I stalled on EOF, so I have maybe 30+ pages on it. I am still hammering out the plot, but I have at least 50% of it figured out. This is a companion piece to the book below and is in the same realm as EOF.


"CC" [working title]

CC is actually the abbreviated title for an anime that I got the tiny, tiny inspiration for this story from. The main reason that this story exists is because it's main character popped right out at me and stated that she has a story to tell. Her story is pretty much known to me and how her story fits in with WTTS is also clear. The rest, however, is not so clear. I have some plot written for this and a little bit of the main characters' back story so that I remember it for when I start writing.




If anyone here is interested in beta-reading any of my stories, please, I would love to hear from you. I have at least one that's ready and perhaps that would get my booty in gear to being active on the rest of the.

Writer tip: Write. Write write write.

Writing Sample: Eyes on Fire Sequel

Background:
This small snippet is actually from the sequel of my first novel (Eyes on Fire) which has yet to be written since EoF isn't even completed. The plot isn't important so much as the emotion. This portion was written during a rather bad night, however the emotion seemed to create this really vivid, tangible scene in my mind. I call this one of my "fits" because I grabbed the computer, wrote this down and then my fingers just stopped.

~~~~~~

The blackened sky glared down upon me, boring holes into the dying auburn of my eyes. I hadn’t seen him for weeks, months even. The emptiness was beginning to feel tangible. On nights like these, when the stars traveled close enough in the blanket of sky so that it felt as if all I needed to touch them was to swipe my hand through the air, were the most unreal to me.

If I concentrated hard enough, I could feel the moist line of searing cold dirt beneath my back. A sharp rock cut a swath across my shoulder blade that I had ignored for over an hour. The air stank with the mold and decay of the fallen autumn leaves, as each breath I took became impregnated with the feeling of being below ground. My body was weightless. I had long become the sky and the darkness had consumed me.

I lay on the underbrush for hours trying to become nothing and something all at once. I let my heavy body sink into the harsh ground. My bones were solid as rock, my skin silky, slick moss over a river of swirling, oozing blood like river water. I had a theory that if I became the black that had become our connection, perhaps it would swallow me and lead me to him.

The drowning never came.

My nightly escapades into the engulfing darkness of the Michaux forest only succeeded in leading me to my euphoria of a stiff drink, or four, until I had achieved the vertigo that I craved atop the Downy-scented cotton sheets of my bedroom. Isaac was gone, my connection with him severed. At least, that was what he was leading me to believe. I felt the barrier he had placed between us like endless miles of hot, molten desert of which I could never see the end of. If I ventured forth into it, as I did most nights while trying to find him, I would quickly become lost, disoriented, and banished to the place I had started from by morning. Isaac didn’t want to be found; that much was obvious.