LOUISE PIEPER

All that is needed

FF-JUNE-PROMPT-1024x683 On the first Friday of each month the Australian Writers Centre runs a 55 hour 500 word writing challenge called Furious Fiction. It’s furious fun! June’s writing prompt was an image (extract above – see the full image and the winner and shortlisted stories here).

The first thing I saw was a face in the window. So, here’s my 500 words worth:

All that is needed
The room is a symphony of light and symmetry. Marta steps back from the table and I lean forward. I would press myself against the glass if I could. I would draw close and closer still, a moth to the room’s bright flame.

She nods once, affirming perfection, and tugs the cloth from her belt. Transformed from menial to hostess, she opens the door.

Two waiters hurry in, hired so Marta can enjoy herself. They look young and rumpled in borrowed suits. The freckled one darts a glance at the window and I shrink back into shadow, but no doubt he only checks the bottles of wine on the sill.

The guests follow. Sebastian and Elisabeth. Arthur, immaculate. Charles, messy as ever. His bow-tie sits askew and a lock of hair waves like a parrot’s crest. Sybille and Frances whisper secrets. Fiona casts venomous glances at her cousins’ dresses, their heels, their effortless chic.

Grand-mère claps her hands at all Marta has wrought. Her diamonds catch and scatter the light as she turns, admiring. I feel her gaze pass over me and her smile dims. But she presses her powdered cheek to Marta’s, murmuring praise.

I don’t know the other five. Friends? Colleagues? One is a redhead in a tight dress which hugs her curves, snug as whipped cream. Sebastian admires her and thinks Elisabeth doesn’t notice. Two dangerous men, sleek as jungle cats, in their dark suits and matching ties. Another man, attentive to a middle-aged beauty in an emerald sari.

The women flutter, bright as butterflies, finding their places. The men settle like sombre moths beside them. Their chatter fades and they turn to raise their glasses to the guests of honour.

Teddy stands in the doorway, a pirate in a three-piece suit. For a moment, he is all I can see. He smiles at the room but his gaze avoids the windows. An ice queen clings to his arm – diamonds on alabaster skin, white dress and ash-blonde hair. She looks cold but not as cold as me. Then she laughs and pulls him with her to the window.

Her face is inches from mine. She doesn’t see me.

“What a view you have,” she exclaims, “although we’re only, what, five floors up?”

Against the wall, the waiter pales beneath his freckles. Does he see behind the reflection of blonde prettiness is a dark-haired girl looking in from the other side of the glass with eyes like coals?

Teddy doesn’t see me. He never really saw me. He went on with his life and left me here, pinned like a specimen fixed to a board. The windows are old and heavy enough to break the spine of anyone incautious enough to lean out. Although someone would have to release the sash cord.

It wasn’t the fall which killed me.

“To absent friends,” Marta says and raises her glass to me.

Everything is perfect. Everyone is here. And I am the ghost at the feast.

Word*: the villains are revolting!

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Darling, I know! **

Today’s word has a wain’s worth of class attitude: villain.

It seems logical to think that villain would share some sort of etymological root with vile and vilify – all the nasty things in one bucket, what ho?

But English is a language which defies logic. No, it snatches logic down from the tree and squeezes the life out of it, adding logic juice as a spicy flavouring to its hot-pot melange of the half dozen other languages it has smashed together. Tasty!

So vile and vilify come to English from French and originally from the Latin vilis meaning base or worthless. And villain comes via the same route, but not from vilis. Villain comes from villa, as in a Roman’s country house. Someone attached to – working at – the farmhouse or villa was a villanus.

Wait. We’re getting there. It makes as much sense as insulting someone by saying they are churlish or a boor.

By the time the Norman’s conquered their way across the Channel in 1066 villanus had become villein – meaning a low sort of peasant. In the feudal world even peasants had hierarchies and the villein/villain was above a serf, but below a thane. Clear as muck? Excellent!

Soon there were villains all over England – raking muck, sowing and reaping, wassailing and morris dancing. Of course it wasn’t all filth and giggles. They had plague and pestilence to keep things real.

But the point is that villains were peasants and they weren’t too clean or too fussy about what they found entertaining. It didn’t take long before the word villain meant not only a peasant but anyone who was low-born, rude, coarse, base and with no manners or taste.

A yokel, a hick, a hayseed.

And, as has ever been the way, it’s a short skip from low manners to low morals. You know: you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. As well as a general insult meaning common as the muck they raked, villain started to mean an immoral, criminal and dangerous person. A knave and a rascal.

Etymologically speaking:

knave = male servant (Old English/Germanic),
rascal = rabble/people of the lowest class (Old French),
churl = peasant(Old English/Germanic),
boor = peasant (from the Latin for cow).

I’m seeing a pattern emerging here.

By early in the 19th century, villain had been attached to the idea of a character in a book or play whose evil actions drove the plot forward. From there it became a more general word for a wicked or malevolent person, and by the 20th century it had also acquired the gloss of being a criminal mastermind.

A defamatory transformation for those poor peasants, but what’s the take-home message for the writers in the room?

Well, you’re no doubt aware that your villain/antagonist shouldn’t be a moustache-twirling cardboard cut-out, who is evil for the sake of being evil and has no reason for stopping the hero/protagonist from achieving their goals other than that someone has to or, hello, no plot.

Villains need depth and motivation and they need to believe in their reasons for doing the evil things they do.

The best villains see themselves as heroes.

Also… check your assumptions.

Are your villains perpetuating class, race or gender stereotypes? Are you thoughtlessly writing white hat/black hat characters. That is, are all your good guys good-looking? Or slim? Or polite, educated, well-groomed, gainfully employed, whatever other virtue you prize, while the villains are ugly, physically deformed, thuggish, fat***, stupid, etc, etc.

You can do better than that. Great antagonists are often a shadow mirror reflecting back the opposite of the hero – what the hero could be if they chose the dark side. But you don’t have to take an either/or approach to every aspect of these characters.

And you really shouldn’t leap in and assume the antagonist is a peasant because all villains are, aren’t they? Make conscious choices about your antagonists and your protagonists – don’t just have default settings.

The etymology of the word villain is a lesson in class prejudice – it permeates our language without us even realising it.

Words are your tools, writers – know what they mean and what they imply and use them with intent.

*It’s Wednesday word time again. This could get to be a thing.

** I know – that’s not a photo of villains or peasants! They’re Skaven and they’re revolting.

***Someone I know has stopped reading a best-selling thriller author because anytime a character is introduced and described as fat it’s a giveaway that they’re the bad guy. Kind of kills the thrill.

Word for Wednesday

Wed shelf What do Wednesday Addams, Sir Garfield Sobers, Hannibal Lecter and Count Tyrone Rugen from The Princess Bride have in common?

That’s right! They were all polydactylous.

Polydactyly is the congenital physical abnormality of having more than the usual number of fingers or toes.

Polydactyly. Now there’s a good-looking word.

When writing, you want to make your characters memorable. According to the exhaustive TV Tropes, polydactylism is one of those shorthand (ba-dum-dum) tropes for difference – your character is either shown to be adorably quirky and unconventional or their mutation is a metaphor for being a monster. For example, the allegation that Anne Boleyn had six-fingers (and an extra nipple to feed her demonic familiar) circulated after her execution and was (probably) false.

In terms of plot, being able to say “I’m looking for a six-fingered man” definitely narrows your field of suspects, as demonstrated in the detective series Monk and by Count Rugen. You know the routine:

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

They didn’t bother with Hannibal Lecter’s extra finger in the films. In Thomas Harris’s book, The Silence of the Lambs, he is described as having the comparatively rare central polydactyly on his left hand. Sinister! More common is ulnar or postaxial polydactyly, where the extra digit appears on the side of the hand, by the little finger.

In real life, many people born with ulnar polydactyly (like ‘Bond girl’ actress Gemma Arterton) have the extra digit surgically removed when they are children. Or, in the case of West Indian cricket legend, Garfield Sobers, they remove their own littlest little fingers – with the aid of catgut and a sharp knife. *shudders*

So what about Wednesday?

You may not be aware, because she isn’t the sort of girl to traipse around barefoot, but according to Charles Addams, writing in 1963, Wednesday Friday Addams has six toes on one foot. Of course, an extra toe is easier to disguise than an extra finger. Fans of classic sci-fi author John Wyndham’s book, The Chysalids, will recall that Sophie’s ‘blasphemous’ mutation was hidden for years by the simple expedient of not removing her shoes and socks in public. Until she did.

In Hungarian folk belief a person born with a sixth finger on one hand could be a táltos and capable of supernatural power. In fiction, extra digits can be good or bad omens, signs that characters are secretly related, or the reason why the character can do something that no-one else can.

They set the character apart, with an abnormality far more subtle than other supernumerary body parts – polycephaly (extra head), polymelia (extra limb), polyorchidism (extra testicle…although I guess that would only be unsubtle if you took your pants off in public). Moving on…

I don’t have any supernumerary body parts, and have to make do with a mere congenital anomaly – the atavistic swelling of the posterior helix of my right auricle. That’s right, I have a unilateral Darwin’s tubercle, which Charles Darwin called a Woolnerian tip when he wrote about it in The Descent of Man. It’s my vestigial pointy ear.

I’ve yet to read any fictional characters who are marked out as destined for greatness because of their tubercle, but I live in hope. Recommendations, anyone?

An equinoctial day of doggerel*

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It’s equinox and World Poetry Day:

Check your clocks and locks, be sure all’s okay.

With an equal time for both day and night,

It’s a time to rhyme, and no crime to write.

Unless,

I guess,

Your poem is a mess.

In other words…

I had a clever concept, as clever as could be,

That I’d fill my book with poems and lies

And dire uncertainty.

And I’ve nearly got it finished but…

It just might finish me.

Because…

It’s too unkind – I’m in a bind – my wretched mind just will not find

The rhyme, the rhythm, meter or beat, to write the poem, complete and neat.

Instead…

Howling doggerel is let slip, from the leash of my pen,

It chases down the troika, rips the will to live and then,

It spatters bad rhymes on the snow,

Relentless, devouring, as though

It will eat the world. It won’t go

Unless I stop feeding it words….

I guess that would work.

*Sorry. It’s all, unfortunately true. Except for the troika. I’m trying to write a poem for my current work in progress, but it’s just a steaming pile of naffness. So Happy World Poetry Day, damn it – why don’t you go and read something good. If you need a little inspiration (get to end of the queue) The Independent kindly assembled 28 of poetry’s most powerful lines. You could start there. I can’t join you. I have to walk the doggerel.

Write on top of the world

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I’m back to reality, after last week’s flights of fiction in the heights of the Australian Alps.

Five days – two spent mostly driving, which meant hours of plotting, and three spent writing (and plotting, and character soul-searching, and – because I had a writing partner along for the fun – laughing at the self-induced madness that is writing.)

It was great.

But I defy any writer to imagine themselves sitting in one of these very comfy chairs in front of the fire (it was just chilly enough to justify one) and not being inspired to write…

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18Fairhaven I’m pretty damn happy with how it all went, because the work in progress is now 47 out of 51 chapters done, so just 4 chapters and 146 hashtags away from being a finished first draft.

Buckets of thanks to my family for doing without me, and my writing buddy for coming with me, and the lovely staff at Ramada Dinner Plain for keeping us caffeinated.

I know I’ve said before that the writing life has highs and lows, but it’s worth remembering that, sometimes, the highs put you on top of the world.

Or at least on top of the mountains.

So, wherever you are this week, I wish you good writing!

Everything I know about writing I learned…

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It’s my fondest dream, that one day my ridiculously talented child will say that everything he knows about writing he learned from me.

Yes, it would be reflected glory, but you take what you can get, right?

I’m super proud that he has again been shortlisted in the Somerset Novella Writing Competition. He submitted a crime thriller, called Red Ridge, White Snow, and was one of four shortlisted entries from the ACT, NSW and Western Australia.

A crime thriller? Wasn’t his story last year an historical mystery with a fantasy twist? Well, yes, but he likes playing around with genre, and he took some advice on writing from a workshop with Sulari Gentill – that it’s always good to start with a murder.

And, well, that means he definitely didn’t learn everything he knows from me….

Ssssssss-boom! Another dream crashes and burns.

But at least there’s fireworks from the impact.

And I am so very pleased for him.

High, low, everywhere we go

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Here’s a perfect demonstration of the highs and lows of a writing life:

In the same week of receiving confirmation that my short story would be published in the upcoming CSFG anthology, A Hand of Knaves, I’ve also had my historical fantasy novel rejected.

The publishers requested the full manuscript, on the basis of my unsolicited submission, so I sent it off and kept my fingers crossed for three months. Uncomfortable.

Alas! They said they liked it. But they did not love it.

There’s nothing to be done except take comfort from their comment that the main character was ‘likeable, engaging and well-rounded’, pull on my big girl writey-pants, and (like all wordsmiths practised in the dark arts of rejectomancy) get back to work.

A knavish plot

Well, perish my bonnet.*

I’m very pleased to say that my short story, A Widow’s Worth, has been selected for inclusion in A Hand of Knaves – in some fine and knavish company.

The anthology will be published later this year – I’ll keep you posted.

*Actually, no bonnets were harmed in the making of this story.

Five for silver – stand and deliver!

magpies

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.

Our local magpie horde come demanding treats, and in the best knavish style I’d like to ask you to stand and deliver … or, that is, to kindly request your support to help publish a new Australian science-fiction and fantasy anthology.

This year the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild* is publishing an anthology featuring rogues and scoundrels: A Hand of Knaves. Authors will be paid for their stories (the editors Chris Large and Leife Shallcross are probably finalising their selection from the submitted stories as I type**) but the CSFG wants to pay the authors, editors and artists more***.

To which end – crowdfunding!

There’s only SIX DAYS LEFT of the Hand of Knaves crowdfunding campaign.

If you follow that link to Indiegogo, you can support the anthology, and receive in return all sorts of benefits: art cards, books, acknowledgment in the anthology, a character named after you, or for those of you who write – a structural edit or short story critique.

And, of course, you also get that delicious warm inner glow from directly supporting the arts. Mmmm.

Please share the link with anyone you know who is interested in Australian writers and writing – especially spec fiction, which is fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or any combination of them, and remember you only have until the 10th of January to support these delightful knaves.

* Disclaimer the first: I’m the vice-president of the CSFG.

**Disclaimer the second: Yes, I did submit stories to the anthology. No, I don’t know if my knaves have been chosen for inclusion.

*** Wondering about amounts? CSFG is a not-for-profit writing group, and most of the money made from selling previous anthologies goes to funding the next ones. The basic budget will pay authors at a rate of about 1 cent per word for a 5000 word story. I know! Story words are worth more than that! Professional industry rates for short stories are around 6 cents a word. Hence the crowdfunding, so thanks for any support you can give.