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So. This "crowdsourcing" thing. Is it any good? I have my doubts. But let's not be hasty.As an experiment, I'm going to post here the opening paragraph to a story that I came up with just now. I solicit your suggestions for what comes next.
So long as what you guys come up with helps move the thing along, I'll post new segments. When it fails to do so, I'll stop.
I have no more idea than you do what the outcome will be.
Here's the first paragraph:
The city had been frozen in time. The moon hung, a thin disk of ice, in the afternoon sun. Birds were motionless specks in the sky. You could climb the smoke billowing from its chimneys halfway up to heaven and there discover an unimaginable nation just an hour's effort above the mundane world.
Got it? Go!
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The notion of suggesting anything to you, Maestro, is intimidating. The easy lie of "I collaborated with Michael Swanwick on a story", however, is even stronger as a temptation.
ReplyDeleteThe clue of course is in the "had been" - what is it now? Unfrozen? Or perhaps thawing, the faces moving by molasses slow ticks? Paths to the sky shift. One could become stranded on a cloud.
And I suppose, as long as I'm pretentiously ruminating, you need a protagonist. You've already got a fairy tale sort of start, with a city turned into the sort of ruin your parents warned you away from. So perhaps a young girl, hard nosed and curious and unafraid?
And if the brave set their eyes on the heavens, others noted that those in the frozen city were themselves frozen. Stasis - a different type of path from the present. Around the city fringes a hedge of these seekers accrued, the bold and the desperate, caught abruptly as they clambered over the frozen ranks before them.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThe city had been frozen in time. The moon hung, a thin disk of ice, in the afternoon sun. Birds were motionless specks in the sky. You could climb the smoke billowing from its chimneys halfway up to heaven and there discover an unimaginable nation just an hour's effort above the mundane world.
Equally, through gaps in the smoke clouds, vertical shafts of sunlight penetrated back downwards, casting a pattern of bright circles on the earth below. It looked, Immaculata thought, as things might if a crew of immense angels were about to beam down from orbit.
Still, beautiful as it all was, it wasn’t giving her the answers she needed
“Chronology,” she called. “Roll the view back another hour.”
You look at what you're given to look at. It's all real. Or it was real. Or it will be real. And the point isn't empathy. The point isn't interpretation, or even analysis. The point is the recognition of occasional futility. The point is that any operative is limited. The point is that Control knows better than you how and where to move forward in a world that you have been despatched to with no knowledge of history, philosophy, moral dynamics - with no grounding in truth and no sniff of consequence.
ReplyDeleteIt's a lesson for the favoured.