Hay, lookit this.
Sep. 1st, 2009 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisfishfliesSo, I kept telling myself all day that I would finish the next part of merfic before going to sleep. Well, that is a lie. I'm so tired if I tried to do anything it would just be writing about how tired I am.
But! Here, have a snippet. This is the beginning of the next part, and may be familiar to some in CHAT.
-----
There are some tales that only sailors tell. They are tales of a cold death that silently steals even the memory of warmth from a person’s bones. Air becomes just a dream and the only light comes from far above. An unreachable height. Then, like a vision of some demented heaven, a magnificent castle rises from the depths.
It is said to be something made of spun sugar, or bright needles, or ice. So perfect it is painful. The castle sparkles with all the colors known, or it has no color at all, or it wavers and shifts in some unseen current. No matter what it is told to look like, it is something past the imagination of men, something with the edge of madness to it.
Jumbled, beautiful, frightful, and impossible fields of coral surround the castle. All the fish in the sea live there, peacefully. They are never still. The ground seems to be a moving carpet of color. It is a tapestry that will never be the same one moment to the next.
In the shadows of the castle there is something that is even more terrible than what came before. Dancing- twisting- between the spires they appear. With smiles of shark teeth and laughter that sounds like glass breaking. Merfolk. They are that last sight of the doomed man. After that vision, a black mist crowds closer as the jaws of death snap shut.
Then the eerie silence is complete.
-----
Haha, that snippet is longer than the prologue. So, there's that.
I'll be needing a beta if this get's any longer. I mean, I should have one anyway, but I never really bother for anything less than 1k. But I really want merfic to be good and I always play fast and loose with my tenses.
And here's another little thing. It is from my creative writing class. We got prompts and I picked "you have a cough, get new medication and it makes something weird happen" or something like that. Only I've only gotten to the getting the meds, not the reaction yet. I want to finish this because it is second person and makes me laugh.
-----
It's whooping cough. You're sure of it. You see news of it coming back on TV all the time, and it scares you. I mean, people used to die of whooping cough. It's one of those things that happened on the Oregon Trail, or even in the game Oregon Trail. It just doesn't seem real.
But, you had this cough for weeks now and it's not funny. None of the syrups or cough drops work, only get you tired or make your mouth taste like menthol-cherry. Having to stop while walking down the stairs because you almost fell down due to a coughing fit? That's just not on.
So, doctor it is. It's not like it could get any worse.
It is whooping cough, and you feel vindicated. Your family laughed and called you a hypochondriac, but you showed them. By getting a possibly deadly disease, but still. You were right. Because of your allergy to penicillin, the doctor decides to try a new antibiotic. That's all right with you, anything to make this end quicker. The suggestion of a humidifier reminds you of being sick as a child. Now all you need is some VapoRub, cheap chicken soup, and The Price is Right and it will be like when you were a kid. That doesn't sound too bad, you think.
The pills taste like expired aspirin. Which is not a thing you want to repeat, but you swallow them down with the sports drink you picked up at the gas station. “Electrolytes are good for when you're sick, right?” you think.
-----
But! Here, have a snippet. This is the beginning of the next part, and may be familiar to some in CHAT.
-----
There are some tales that only sailors tell. They are tales of a cold death that silently steals even the memory of warmth from a person’s bones. Air becomes just a dream and the only light comes from far above. An unreachable height. Then, like a vision of some demented heaven, a magnificent castle rises from the depths.
It is said to be something made of spun sugar, or bright needles, or ice. So perfect it is painful. The castle sparkles with all the colors known, or it has no color at all, or it wavers and shifts in some unseen current. No matter what it is told to look like, it is something past the imagination of men, something with the edge of madness to it.
Jumbled, beautiful, frightful, and impossible fields of coral surround the castle. All the fish in the sea live there, peacefully. They are never still. The ground seems to be a moving carpet of color. It is a tapestry that will never be the same one moment to the next.
In the shadows of the castle there is something that is even more terrible than what came before. Dancing- twisting- between the spires they appear. With smiles of shark teeth and laughter that sounds like glass breaking. Merfolk. They are that last sight of the doomed man. After that vision, a black mist crowds closer as the jaws of death snap shut.
Then the eerie silence is complete.
-----
Haha, that snippet is longer than the prologue. So, there's that.
I'll be needing a beta if this get's any longer. I mean, I should have one anyway, but I never really bother for anything less than 1k. But I really want merfic to be good and I always play fast and loose with my tenses.
And here's another little thing. It is from my creative writing class. We got prompts and I picked "you have a cough, get new medication and it makes something weird happen" or something like that. Only I've only gotten to the getting the meds, not the reaction yet. I want to finish this because it is second person and makes me laugh.
-----
It's whooping cough. You're sure of it. You see news of it coming back on TV all the time, and it scares you. I mean, people used to die of whooping cough. It's one of those things that happened on the Oregon Trail, or even in the game Oregon Trail. It just doesn't seem real.
But, you had this cough for weeks now and it's not funny. None of the syrups or cough drops work, only get you tired or make your mouth taste like menthol-cherry. Having to stop while walking down the stairs because you almost fell down due to a coughing fit? That's just not on.
So, doctor it is. It's not like it could get any worse.
It is whooping cough, and you feel vindicated. Your family laughed and called you a hypochondriac, but you showed them. By getting a possibly deadly disease, but still. You were right. Because of your allergy to penicillin, the doctor decides to try a new antibiotic. That's all right with you, anything to make this end quicker. The suggestion of a humidifier reminds you of being sick as a child. Now all you need is some VapoRub, cheap chicken soup, and The Price is Right and it will be like when you were a kid. That doesn't sound too bad, you think.
The pills taste like expired aspirin. Which is not a thing you want to repeat, but you swallow them down with the sports drink you picked up at the gas station. “Electrolytes are good for when you're sick, right?” you think.
-----
