Teaser Tuesday: Insults in the Rain

Hello all! Well, we have reached That Time of the Semester again - the time when I am running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to do all the things I need to do. This week is made much more insane but also much more awesome by the New Voices Literary Festival, in which I am a student guide and get to introduce the FIRST EVER YA writer invited as a speaker to Ithaca College. (This was totally my idea. Just sayin.' *toots own horn*)

Anyways, due to the insanity, you guys get a teaser today! YAAAAY. It is from my senior project / that Irish Famine novel. Maire's new friend Caleb is a shepherd at the farm Maire's ended up at, and she's instructed to bring him and the other shepherds dinner even though it's pouring rain. She runs into someone else instead...

Enjoy!

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She plodded across the fields again, pushing her sopping hair out of her eyes as she went towards the sheep pastures. The basket was heavy, and she wondered what four shepherds could possibly need that felt like rocks. But she dragged it along behind her, her hands slipping on the wet wicker, peering through the rain-splashed darkness to find some sign of Caleb. 

She walked directly into someone as she was looking the other direction for some sign of sheep or shepherds. 

“Augh – sorry, I didn’t-”

And then she stopped. The figure in front of her in the darkness was not Caleb or Sean or one of the other shepherds. It was not someone from the farm at all.

“You’re capable of apologies,” the Secrets Man said, his smile just visible in the dim light. “Interesting.” 

“What are you doing here?” Maire snapped, stumbling backwards. 

He had no reason for being there, in the rain, of all things. He had no reason for reminding her so starkly of her betrayal, of reeling her in again. She’d thought she was free of him, now he’d trapped her in this place. Thought he was done with her. 

“I just thought I ought to happen by, see how you might be holding up. It is a difficult thing to leave one’s family, after all.”

The smile, all she could see of his face beneath the shadow of his brow, widened slightly. 

“You tricked me,” she snarled, gripping the basket handle tightly, wishing it was something less unwieldy, something she could strike him with. “You said nothing about leaving them forever, you bastard. This is your fault.”

 “You can blame me if you like,” he said, shrugging calmly. “If that’s what makes you feel better about all this.” 

“I don’t-” she stammered, but then she stopped. She didn’t want to tell this man just how much she hated him. She didn’t want to tell him that she’d likely kill him given the chance. And she could not let him know how very broken he’d left her, and just how much she knew this was all her own fault. “Why? Why did you bring me here, of all places?” 

“I knew you’d be treated well, fed, paid, the like,” he answered. “That is what you wanted, wasn’t it? You wanted to save yourself. You can do that here.”

“But – why another Cunningham? Why a place that’ll just feed the English?” 

“Well, I thought you might like to have some familiarity.” 

Maire had no words for him then. There was no phrase found in heaven or hell that would properly express just how much she loathed him. 

“So how are you faring?” 

“Why should you care?” 

“Temper, temper!” he said with a laugh. “I’m merely being polite.”

“Why did you bring Agnes here? Why did you bring any of us here?” 

“Because there’s some good you can do here. I thought she could, but it seems that I was wrong.”

“Maire?” 

She spun round, looking for the sound of the voice, and saw Caleb materializing through the rain. He was going to see the Secrets Man, he was going to find out everything horrible about her. But when she turned again, the Secrets Man had vanished into the dark as easily as a puff of smoke.

 

Getting it All Out

I'm the kind of writer who likes to just writewritewritewritewrite until the draft is done before attempting any kind of edits. I've always been rather fond of the pottery metaphor for novels: you've got to get all the clay lumped together on the wheel first, and THEN you can start shaping it into a pretty bowl or vase or what have you. But you have to get all the parts together first.

That's not to say that editing while you go can't work - obviously the first rule of writing is that there is no universal rule of writing. Some things work for some people, and other things work for other people. Sometimes, the same methods don't even work for different novels - circumstances change, deadlines are looming, the characters aren't cooperating, et cetera. For my senior project / work in progress, The Long Road Home, I had to go back and revise what I'd written about a year ago before I could continue. It just wasn't working as it was, and I needed to fix some things before I could move forward.

Since then, however, I've been just chugging along as fast as I can (can I get to "the end"/past 50k by the time finals week rolls around? WE SHALL SEE) and it's been going great. Obviously, my project mentor has been pointing out her concerns as we go along, mostly some hitches in worldbuilding continuity (uuuugh worldbuilding... you make so much sense in my head!) but she's really understanding of the fact that I fix things later. And it's nice to be aware of those problems as they come up; I don't have to run and fix them, always doubling back before continuing onwards, but it's nice to know what I'll have to work on later, and to be able to try and smooth those things out in future chapters so that there's a bit less to revise.

How about you, dear blog readers? Are you the kind of writer who just chugs along forward, or the kind who revises along the way? Will I finish this manuscript before I graduate? What do you think? :)

Teaser Tuesday: Unexpected Friendships

Hello, dear blog readers! It's Tuesday, isn't it? I'm sorry. It's midterms week. And while this is my last ever midterms week (at least as an undergrad... I could always change my mind and go to grad school sometime...) (also LAST EVER MIDTERMS WHAT EVEN) and therefore relatively light in terms of workload, I still have lots to be getting on with.

So you know what that means, fair readers! It means a teaser. Here is a shiny new scene from my senior project, The Long Road Home. Maire was a bit ill the night before due to scarfing down her dinner after not having eaten properly in months at least, and Caleb helped her out. She still doesn't want him telling anyone about it, though.

I hope you enjoy this!

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“You didn’t have to kick me,” Caleb said, his voice quiet. 

“You were going to tell her about last night,” she snapped, noting that he looked rather like a defeated puppy but not quite caring. “I don’t want her thinking I’m weak.” 

“She wouldn’t toss you out on your ear after one day if you were ill-”

“I can’t afford to take that chance.” 

He tilted his head to the side then, looking puzzled, but she did not explain; instead she gave him a pointed look and turned away, walking further into the kitchen. Elizabeth greeted her with a “good morning,” a small plate of food, and another mug of tea. Maire made herself smile in return, even though the food made her nervous, before heading for an empty table at the back of the kitchen. 

It did not remain empty for long. 

“Eat slowly, remember,” Caleb said, sitting down across from her with his own half-finished breakfast. 

He smiled casually, then picked up his fork and began finishing off his egg. 

“I’m not going to shake you, am I?” she asked. She eyed her breakfast warily – she didn’t want to waste it, she could think of few things that were worse. But just then, with the memory of last night’s illness, eggs and porridge had never seemed less appealing. 

“Not a chance.”

“I can look after myself, you know. I don’t need saving.” 

“I’m sure you can,” he said, looking up from his plate. “Doesn’t mean I can’t help. Stick with the toast today, it’d probably be best.” 

Maire resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him, and suddenly she felt like something cold and hard had sunk into her chest. She wasn’t teasing Michael about all this. Michael wasn’t here; she’d never tease her brother again. 

She took small bites of the toast, chewing slowly, half afraid to swallow anything, but that cold weight in her anchored her, and even after she’d been forced to accept Caleb’s toast as well, she did not feel like vomiting any of it up. She turned to her tea, hoping the warmth might melt the cold out of her enough that she could work that day, when Caleb dragged her plate across the table towards himself and began eating her portion of porridge. 

“Oh, I see how it is,” she said, not quite certain whether she wanted to shout at him or burst out laughing. “You’ve only been kind to me to steal my breakfast.”

“No sense in wasting it,” he said with a shrug, his blue eyes bright with laughter. “You won’t be able to enjoy all this for a few days yet, so, in the meantime-”

“You’ve decided to help yourself.” 

He nodded, incredibly pleased with himself, and returned to her breakfast. 

“Caleb Monaghan, you are incorrigible,” she said, rolling her eyes and sipping at her tea. 

“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.” 

“It wasn’t meant as one,” she told him.

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t. But I’ll take it that way all the same.”

Maire shook her head, falling silent as she watched him finish off her breakfast. She’d never met anyone with whom it was so useless to argue; not even her father had had such a relentlessly cheerful manner of refuting everything she said. It was strange, speaking to someone so very optimistic. And yet at the same time – whether from the tea or Caleb’s smiles, she couldn’t quite tell – the hard, cold lump in her chest had eased somewhat.

Making Time

One of the final requirements for a writing major at my school is a class called "Senior Project." Each section is organized slightly differently by the professor who runs it, but what it boils down to is a semester long project of the student's own choosing where they work one-on-one with a professor, rather than in a workshop class setting. It's meant to let us figure out how to handle being a self motivated writer, rather than a writer spurred on by homework assignments and writing prompts.

I am loving every second of this.

There's one piece of writing advice that makes me feel incredibly guilty whenever I see it, and that's "write every day." I cringe when I see it. I actually do. And here's the thing: I do write nearly every day (and the days I'm not writing, I'm reading). I just don't write for MYSELF every day. I'm an overachiever times ten when it comes to grades, and so schoolwork has always come first. But I'm a writing major - I'm always writing something, whether that something is a journal entry or review for class, a literary analysis, an essay, a research paper, or a short story. There's always something.

And yet, even knowing that, even being well aware that I was writing, was learning how to master this craft by doing it and doing it, I still feel guilty about not writing for myself every day. Senior Project is giving me permission to do that. Because it is for a class - a very important class for my major - I structured my whole schedule around having time to write. I am determined to finish this draft this semester, and I'm well on my way to accomplishing that. Because I know myself, and I've MADE the time to write while appeasing my obsessively-good-student side.

I think that's part of the "write every day, make the time to do it" advice that gets left out a lot. You have to really know yourself and how you work in order to carve out that time. If you will actually be miserable if you get up one minute earlier than you have to, don't make your writing time in the morning. Make the time, but do it in a way you can actually keep to that time without torturing yourself.

The point of Senior Project is for us to motivate ourselves, rather than having a professor motivate us. I'm already a very self-motivated writer; I've written novels before this one, I know how I write, I know how this all works. I'm just so glad to finally get the chance, in an academic setting, to really dig into a project for an entire semester, and not feel that I have to prioritize homework over what I want to write.  Because what I want to write IS homework.

And hopefully my project advisor won't be too upset when I come up with an entire novel's worth of material...

Teaser Tuesday: Harsh Words

Hello, all! Some of you may remember some snippets I posted about a year ago from a manuscript entitled "The Long Road Home," which was set during the potato famine. My senior project this semester is revising and continuing that original project, and thus far it's going really well!

Here's a scene that wasn't included in the original version of the first few chapters. Maire, the protagonist, has just had a rather unorthodox proposition, and her younger sister questions her about it. Enjoy!

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“Maire?”

Maire jerked round, pulling her hand free of the strange man’s grip, to find her sister standing in the road gaping at her. 

“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.

“Where did that man go?” Brigid countered, pointing.

Maire turned round again, expecting to find the man looking at her with his sly smile and his dark, dangerous eyes laughing at her a bit, challenging her to figure out what to do next, but where he had stood, there was nothing. He was simply gone, with no sign of him on the road in either direction or in the fields beyond. He had vanished, a puff of smoke on the breeze, leaving nothing but his strange mix of promises and threats.

“Who was he, Maire?” Brigid asked. “How did he vanish so quickly?” 

“What man?” Maire said, in a voice she knew was shaking far too much to be convincing, but she was too busy scanning the roads for any sign of him. How was it possible that he was simply gone, in the space of only an instant? People could not disappear so quickly. People could not become invisible. 

Had she somehow imagined the whole conversation? Had she finally gone mad, after everything, after starving, after Michael, after Cunningham’s threats, had she finally lost her mind and invented a man and a job? 

But she knew she hadn’t imagined it. That man had been real, just as the sick, sinking feeling in her throat was real, just as the inexplicable pull she felt towards his promise was real. 

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong, but Maire was reeling too much to put the pieces together. 

“What did he want from you?”

Maire blinked, remembering that her sister was standing there gawking at her, and she shook her head to clear it. Brigid still held her fishing pole in one hand, but now, at the end of the line there were two little fish, hardly thicker than Brigid’s skeletal wrist but nearly as long as her forearm. And there were scratches on her cheek. 

“What happened to you?” she asked, stepping forward to examine the marks. “Did you fight someone for those? Mum will skin me alive if she thinks I’ve started you fighting, did you think of that?”

“I didn’t fight for them, I caught them, and then I ran away before anyone could get them from me,” Brigid snapped. “Who was that-”

“But someone still took a swipe at you, didn’t he?” 

“Shut it!” Brigid shouted, stamping her foot. Maire started; it was not like her sister to shout at her. “Maire, who was that man?”

Maire almost let the words “I don’t know,” slip past her lips, but she stopped herself. For one thing, he’d said she should tell anyone, hadn’t he? It was to be a secret. She’d agreed on that. But she could not admit her uncertainty to Brigid, any more than she could tell her the truth of that encounter. And yet she knew nothing about him. She did not know where he came from or where he would take her or why. 

She was to accept work from this man and she hadn’t even thought to ask his name.