I'll Be Brave...And Give You Snippets

My dad gave me a quote once from some famous author that said something like, You should only publish your third novel.  I went searching for it, but I couldn't find out who said it.  Anyway, for me....

It's true.

I have two novels (one's more of a novella) that I wrote and completed before Torn Heart.  Sometimes I find myself thinking of them both as a total waste of time, but I have to catch myself and say, "NO!"

I may blush furiously when I read them now, but without them I probably would not have Torn Heart in book format today.  Those two "learner" novels helped make me the writer that I am.  

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"Hello?" Christine sounded as cheerful as ever.

"Hi, Christine.  This is Donna.  I'm at work."  The bitter tone in Donna's voice gave away that something was going on.  There was a pause on the other end of the phone.

"All right, what did he do this time - burn down the store?"

Donna almost smiled.  "We-ell, part of it."  She waited for Christine's astonishment.

"What! Donna, that was a joke."

"That may have been some sort of joke, but I'm not joking now."  Donna kicked a piece of metal for emphasis.  It made a loud clanking sound.

"What'd he burn, then?"

"The right half of the storerooms."

Christine sighed in frustration.  "I wish I could come and see! It sounds so exciting over there, compared with here.  I won't be able to come home until tomorrow."

Donna grinned.  "And even then, you won't be able to come to work."  She heard Christine groan.

"You bet I will! I'll be there even earlier than Liz."

Donna laughed, said goodbye, and hung up.  She ran back to the shopping area.  Carol was just arriving, and someone had evidently told her about the fire.  Her usually neat hair was tousled, and her face was red with anger.  She stormed inside and picked up the phone on her desk.  

"That's it.  I'm calling the police."

"Stealthy Schemes and Tricky Plots" (yes, you may laugh) is a sixty-page book that I wrote when I was eleven / twelve.  It was more of a forced kind of writing, as I did it through my school.  If you find yourself needing motivation for your writing, stuck on grammar, spelling, and shallow characters, I totally recommend How to Write the Novel Way.  By the end of the school year, you'll have your own finished novel.  You'll have finished it because you had to, which is both a good and a bad thing, depending on what kind of writer and person you are.  :)  As I type this, I have SSTP in front of me on the computer desk.  It's self-published, meaning that my mom went and got it printed herself, then cut the paper to size and brought it in to Kinko's to have it bound.  It doesn't look professional by any means.  But right now I feel an odd and strong affection for my first little book.

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"Don't forget: I'll be there with my crutches, just as I promised!" Adam shouted.  There were so many more things he wanted to say.  His insides were crawling like a nest of ants.  So many things could go wrong! What if he never spoke to Thorn again? Or Austine, for that matter? But Robin was tugging at his arm.

"Come on," she said eagerly.  "Let's get a good spot as near as we can."

"Yeah.  Ross is helping the general so he'll join us later."

They made their way to the front of the Harthian army, grouped on one side of the fighting square.  The Braunjillian officer who had been chosen as speaker stepped proudly onto a block behind the fighting square.  "I am pleased to call the Braunjillian champion to the square," he bellowed with a voice like a buffalo's.

All the Braunjillian soldiers took off their caps and cheered, as if the combat was already won.

Adam held his breath as a pair of lithe legs strode to the fighting square.  A pair of shiny black boots clicked together.  Adam's eyes traveled upward.  The agile body of the General Kilian bent to the crowd.  Adam didn't mean to meet the general's gaze, but he did, and Kilian's eyes smirked into his with a flash of ice-blue confidence.  The general's eyes moved along the row, and then narrowed with puzzlement.

Adam tensed.  Did Kilian realize his daughter was missing?

For the Love of Harth.

My dearest love and my first actual novel.  I still love it dearly, but it embarrasses me now, and that's why I feel like it was so much a waste sometimes.  I was always so excited to work on it every day, and my dad and I went through it countless times editing and improving.  (The first/second drafts were a combination of Prince Caspian and Star Wars.) And the characters! I wrote this when I was into the Warriors series, so I named my second male lead "Thornclaw" and shortened it to "Thorn", cause obviously the former is not a name fit for a human when cats with names of that sort are all the rage.  Austine!! My little Mary-Sue is audacious, small, and dark-haired, all things I wasn't and still am not.  So, in a sentence: this story was my intro to the real life of an author - writing's more than just putting words down on paper.  It's about choosing the right words and molding them into different plot twists.  It's about not making your characters perfect ideals about what you'd like to be - cause that shows, and it can be embarrassing.  :)

Make that a few sentences.

I feel like I could talk forever about Harth.  *sighs*  I keep the finished draft in a binder with a cover art that says, "coming, winter 2008."  Didn't happen.

That's okay.

---

"I am a fool, fool, fool!" The words beat out in time to Jacha's pounding footsteps.  She hissed them to herself as she rushed through the complicated maze of passage ways, which wound underneath the main level of the queen's castle like so many noodles in a plate of spaghetti.  Jacha knew her way much better than her pursuers did, and a herd of clumsy of Queen's Guards in full uniform seemed no match for the slight, wiry shadow of a girl as she pivoted on her toes to bolt ahead of them.

All the same, Jacha was furious with herself.  The expensive pin that had caught her eye had caused her to take a chance that turned out to be all too slim.  Its cold, gold weight rested in her clenched hand now, but it had not been worth the dangerous train of shouting men who ran at her heels.

"Get back here, little piece of vermin!" An arrow whizzed past Jacha's ear.  She thinned her lips with determination and gathered all her energy to sprint around the approaching twist in the passageway.

"Stop, thief!"

The call almost made Jacha laugh.  It was so pointless - what thief would stop at those words? No matter how assertive the men sounded, she was going to keep on running.  Jacha burst around the corner, her dark hair whisking against the wall.

A flash of black ahead alerted the running girl, and she skidded to a horrified stop.

TORN HEART! I'll save my extensive composition about how, when, and why it was written for several other posts.  Sorry about any typos you may catch - I didn't copy-paste this excerpt.  I just copied it out from my book - cause I could! (But notice - it's my third finished novel.  :)    

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 Haiven squinched her eyes shut.  She could not let those guards hear her cry, though a valley of sleeping prisoners was not a silent place.  Heavy breathing filled the air, mingled with snores, sharp cries from some, and spontaneous moans from others.  But all the same, she cringed as a wrenching sob broke through her lips.

A cool touch on her shoulder made her uncurl from her shivering ball of misery, and when she looked up, she saw the black-haired girl who had spoken with the general that day chained beside her.

“Haiven?” whispered the girl, her silvery eyes shadowed in the darkness.

Haiven furrowed her brow, distracted for a moment.  “How do you know me?”

“Our fathers were friends.  I remember you from when we were both younger.  I’m Celene.”

“Mmm.  Yes,” murmured Haiven faintly, her brow furrowing even deeper.  There had been so many children of her father’s friends that she could not keep them all straight.  But even so, it was comforting for them both to have a friendly face in the huge mob of strangers, and Haiven huddled down at Celene’s back, still unhappy, but feeling braver and ready to take on more Cliffhangers at break of dawn.

Hearts Unbroken (temporary title) is a story I'm writing with Whisper.  We have 90 pages and six main characters.  And we take turns writing chapters, sometimes both sharing in on one.  I was writing when this when Torn Heart "attacked" me and I had to write it.  But this one's still plugging along.  It's gonna be great! When we get some more plot threads woven in there.

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There may be spoilers here.  Sorry.

Ren looked at Grailyn with a sinking feeling in her stomach.  She hadn’t remembered that they had no proof of their claims.  That was a grim blunder that made light of something very serious. 

            

“We can give you proof,” Grailyn said.  “We know where they meet.  Remember the number on that old house at all, Ren?”

        

 She shook her head, cringing at the prince’s skeptical look and wishing with all her heart that she had written it down somewhere.  If the prince didn’t believe them, they really would be hung.  She had heard that hanging didn’t hurt at all, but she wasn’t sure if she believed it.  After all, who could come back from the dead to give the truth?   

          

But one look at Grailyn and she swallowed her fright.  He wasn’t about to give up and she shouldn’t either. 

“And all this about my Merriam being a spy,” Cyrus began.  “It’s wrong, I say, just burning wrong.  Imagine such a beauty put on a ship with leering, stealing ruffians like pirates.”  He spat on the stone floor.  “Climbing riggings and swabbing decks – bah!”

“I don’t believe she swabbed any decks,” said Grailyn.  “But she wanted something for her father, that’s sure.” He leaned forward, nose to nose with the prince.  “Listen, Highness.  We can give you proof that Shiloh’s in the wrong.  And we won’t try to escape.”

We won’t? Ren poked him hard, but he went on without seeming to notice.

“What do you say, Highness? Do you want to see the truth?”

Prince Cyrus was silent.  He seemed to be contemplating whether to risk his life to Shiloh’s magic, or risk the escape of two dangerous criminals.  He turned to look Grailyn and Ren full in the face, his decision made.  Ren’s heart constricted and she clenched her fingers around a handful of soft pillow.

“No,” said Prince Cyrus, and stalked out of the jail, with the parchment crumpled in one fist.

Coming in an unestimatible amount of time: Seaspear! I love this story - it's turning out just how I hoped it would! I'm around 90 pages with this one too.  :)

I hope you enjoyed my (very long) writing history, friends!  Congrats to anyone who read the whole thing :) I'd love to hear more about your own writing history, if you're "willin' ", as Mr.  Barkis of David Copperfield would say.

- Ellyn