asato_muraki (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
asato_muraki) wrote2009-04-03 08:30 pm
asato_muraki) wrote2009-04-03 08:30 pm
Second Abortive re-write attempt, same story
What happened here was that I sent the Mobius POV chapter to a friend who is well-placed in the sf/f publishing world. (He's a writer, and a really cool guy who knows everybody.) he read it and told me that there was a huge market for first person teen empowerment stories, in the vein of Jumper. He said if I re-wrote the story from the Mobius perspective in first person he felt certain it would sell, because he'd just been told by [name many of you would know quite well] that he would buy a hundred teen empowerment stories every year, if he could get them.
I was up nights over that one. I love Mobius, and his story is a good one. He starts out in a bad place, things get worse and he ends up overcoming obstacles and basically saving the day. It seemed like a good fit, but my brain wouldn't cooperate, much. I tried, whichis how I got this bit below the cut.
I wrote this much and then I stalled. Could NOT write it this way. Nope. But I couldn't write it the other way by then, either. I mean, urban fantasies with tough chick protags are thick on the ground these days, and I was hatin' life.
Then I came back to look at it, and it didn't seem so bad after all. If you read it, though, you will see what I meant when I said the beginnings were from the same story, but read like they are from different books. Because the are. Oy. I like the prologue-ish bit though. I may keep that.
This one's short, but under the cut anyway:
The screen shows an empty room – bare cinderblock walls, chinks obscured by a layer of gray dust. A dim light shines from somewhere out of view, illuminating a few scattered crates, coated with the same dull powder. A boy wanders into view and sits on a crate, resting his elbows on his knees. He doesn’t look up.
He wears a torn uniform that looks scorched in places, the color obscured by soot and dirt. His hair and face are pale and dirty with grime; if it were not for the blood streaking down one side of his head, dripping onto his collar, you’d think the video was shot in monochrome. His shoulders rise and fall with rapid breathing and his hands shake when not clasped together between his knees. His head is bowed, obscuring his features in shadow.
Blood runs down into his eye, and he wipes it away with his sleeve as carelessly as if it were sweat.
Off camera, a mature female voice rasps, “We don’t have to do this now.”
Eyes as dull as brushed pewter focus on a point slightly to the left of the camera and we see his face full on for the first time. It is an open, boyish face; the soot around his eyes is smeared, but through the smudges you can see an old bruise fading over one cheekbone. He shakes his head, lips pressed together, hard, betraying no emotion.
“No.” He shakes his head again, a firm gesture of denial. “Now is the only time there is.”
#
Everything you think you know about Shifters is a lie. Or a half truth. Especially about Lethe and me. Neither of us wanted this … this—I don’t even know what to call it. Words are too clean for what’s happening, even the ugly ones.
I’ll start from the beginning, then.
My name is Mobius. That’s my real name, not some Shifter alias like they say on the news. Mobius Vasilev Stoyanov. Some folks take Shifter names to make a break with their old life when they find out what they are, but I’ve always known I’m a Shifter. They called it **** in my family, but it’s the same thing.
You’ve been told that Shifters have only been around for the last seventy years or so. What did they call it? A random genetic variation, or a dormant anomaly that just decided to emerge. That’s a lie, too. The Stoyanovs have been Shifters for at least seven generations, maybe longer. There used to be lots of old Shifter families in eastern Europe, before the Purges.
My father and his brother and their families tried to get out before things got so bad, and mostly succeeded. I was three when we came to live here, which is why I don’t speak with an accent. I went to public schools and kept my head down and my mouth shut.
We talked about the Purges in school, you know. The teachers said they happened because of communism, that free, capitalist democracies would never mistreat their citizens like that.
Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh, maybe. Sometimes you either have to laugh or cry, and I’m done crying.
So we came here, but we still hid who we are. I guess old habits die hard.
When it started, we were living in a third floor walk-up on the south side of Mandisberg. It was me, Papa, Uncle Radomir and Aleksi, my cousin. Aunt Petya had left some time ago, and my mother and little brother had died on the journey from the old country. Papa told me a fever took them, which I suppose wasn’t really a lie.
I look a lot like her – my mother, I mean. Papa only had one photo of her, but she was fair and blond like me. Papa and Radko – that’s what we called Radomir – and even Aleksi are all dark and stocky men. Aleksi use to tease me about being thin and pale.
“Stay out of the sun!” he’d say. “You’ll melt like butter left on the windowsill.”
He had no idea how right he was. See, I knew I was a Shifter, but my talent came late. That’s another thing they tell you – that people start to shift in early adulthood, late teens maybe. I was sixteen when my talents finally emerged, it’s true, but in my family that was old. Aleksi stopped teasing me about being a “dud” when I turned thirteen and hadn’t shown any signs of shifting. I could tell Papa found it troubling; I was his only living son. Dragomir had died before he was two months old, and Papa never took another wife.
He rarely talked about my mother ; I could tell it hurt him to speak of her. Eventually I stopped asking, but I never stopped wanting to know more about her, the woman in the wedding photo who looked so much like me.
When I started changing, I kept it a secret; I wanted to surprise them. See, we were all Shifters, but none of them could change like I could. Most Shifters can’t change themselves much at all.
That’s another thing the news doesn’t tell you. Most of the people locked up by the GACF can maybe grow hair on their knuckles at will, or change their skin or hair color by a shade or two, if they concentrate. Most Shifters are no more dangerous than anyone else. They only tell you about the exceptions to make everyone afraid of us.
We Stoyanovs are exceptional, but not how you think. It’s not big news that maybe ten percent of the population have the genetic markers for shifting. What the government and the Company aren’t telling you is that about six percent of Shifters have other talents as well. Psychic abilities, extra senses. Some can see broader spectrums of light, or they can hear what’s playing on the radio even when it’s turned off, like they can sense the waves.
My family made our living in show business – a magic/mentalist act. Uncle Radko could speak to spirits, though he claimed they were boring, one-dimensional things without much to offer, like the last notes of a symphony still echoing in a concert hall. His act was great, but I think he made most of it up.
The same was true of Papa. Besides being a magician – slight of hand, sawing girls in half – he was also a mind reader. We had a standee of him that read “The Baron von Lattimer, Mentalist Extraordinaire!!!” He made sure his act left room for doubt, though, an objective that required more finesse than seeing people’s thoughts. He was a mind reader pretending to be a showman pretending to be a mind reader as well as a Bulgarian pretending to be a German. The irony was not lost on him.
Keeping my fledgling talent from him was hard. I’d hum a pop song or do math in my head – either one put him off, especially Algebra. Solving for x in my head was less suspicious than you might think. Sometimes I did it for fun.
That’s another way I take after my mother . She was a mathematician with an advanced university degree – quite a feat considering that in communist Bulgaria, the university only admitted the most promising students.
So I would do math in my head and if Papa noticed, he would only smile. It wasn’t that he was being nosey, just that sometimes it was hard for him to block out other people’s thoughts.
I had been practicing for two weeks when I let Aleksi in on my secret. I took him up to the roof, where I had a steel box ready. It was the middle of summer and very hot, but I wanted it to look impressive.
Aleksi didn’t believe I could do what I said I could, and I really wanted to knock his socks off. He was older than me by a year, and finished with school. Our fathers had let him into the family business, and I wanted nothing more than to join him. I could take this thing I could I do and build a great illusion around it – I knew I could.
There is one more with Lethe, but I may have to post that one after I get back. I've got to pack and load my truck, and get some sleep before an early trek tomorrow.
I was up nights over that one. I love Mobius, and his story is a good one. He starts out in a bad place, things get worse and he ends up overcoming obstacles and basically saving the day. It seemed like a good fit, but my brain wouldn't cooperate, much. I tried, whichis how I got this bit below the cut.
I wrote this much and then I stalled. Could NOT write it this way. Nope. But I couldn't write it the other way by then, either. I mean, urban fantasies with tough chick protags are thick on the ground these days, and I was hatin' life.
Then I came back to look at it, and it didn't seem so bad after all. If you read it, though, you will see what I meant when I said the beginnings were from the same story, but read like they are from different books. Because the are. Oy. I like the prologue-ish bit though. I may keep that.
This one's short, but under the cut anyway:
The screen shows an empty room – bare cinderblock walls, chinks obscured by a layer of gray dust. A dim light shines from somewhere out of view, illuminating a few scattered crates, coated with the same dull powder. A boy wanders into view and sits on a crate, resting his elbows on his knees. He doesn’t look up.
He wears a torn uniform that looks scorched in places, the color obscured by soot and dirt. His hair and face are pale and dirty with grime; if it were not for the blood streaking down one side of his head, dripping onto his collar, you’d think the video was shot in monochrome. His shoulders rise and fall with rapid breathing and his hands shake when not clasped together between his knees. His head is bowed, obscuring his features in shadow.
Blood runs down into his eye, and he wipes it away with his sleeve as carelessly as if it were sweat.
Off camera, a mature female voice rasps, “We don’t have to do this now.”
Eyes as dull as brushed pewter focus on a point slightly to the left of the camera and we see his face full on for the first time. It is an open, boyish face; the soot around his eyes is smeared, but through the smudges you can see an old bruise fading over one cheekbone. He shakes his head, lips pressed together, hard, betraying no emotion.
“No.” He shakes his head again, a firm gesture of denial. “Now is the only time there is.”
#
Everything you think you know about Shifters is a lie. Or a half truth. Especially about Lethe and me. Neither of us wanted this … this—I don’t even know what to call it. Words are too clean for what’s happening, even the ugly ones.
I’ll start from the beginning, then.
My name is Mobius. That’s my real name, not some Shifter alias like they say on the news. Mobius Vasilev Stoyanov. Some folks take Shifter names to make a break with their old life when they find out what they are, but I’ve always known I’m a Shifter. They called it **** in my family, but it’s the same thing.
You’ve been told that Shifters have only been around for the last seventy years or so. What did they call it? A random genetic variation, or a dormant anomaly that just decided to emerge. That’s a lie, too. The Stoyanovs have been Shifters for at least seven generations, maybe longer. There used to be lots of old Shifter families in eastern Europe, before the Purges.
My father and his brother and their families tried to get out before things got so bad, and mostly succeeded. I was three when we came to live here, which is why I don’t speak with an accent. I went to public schools and kept my head down and my mouth shut.
We talked about the Purges in school, you know. The teachers said they happened because of communism, that free, capitalist democracies would never mistreat their citizens like that.
Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh, maybe. Sometimes you either have to laugh or cry, and I’m done crying.
So we came here, but we still hid who we are. I guess old habits die hard.
When it started, we were living in a third floor walk-up on the south side of Mandisberg. It was me, Papa, Uncle Radomir and Aleksi, my cousin. Aunt Petya had left some time ago, and my mother and little brother had died on the journey from the old country. Papa told me a fever took them, which I suppose wasn’t really a lie.
I look a lot like her – my mother, I mean. Papa only had one photo of her, but she was fair and blond like me. Papa and Radko – that’s what we called Radomir – and even Aleksi are all dark and stocky men. Aleksi use to tease me about being thin and pale.
“Stay out of the sun!” he’d say. “You’ll melt like butter left on the windowsill.”
He had no idea how right he was. See, I knew I was a Shifter, but my talent came late. That’s another thing they tell you – that people start to shift in early adulthood, late teens maybe. I was sixteen when my talents finally emerged, it’s true, but in my family that was old. Aleksi stopped teasing me about being a “dud” when I turned thirteen and hadn’t shown any signs of shifting. I could tell Papa found it troubling; I was his only living son. Dragomir had died before he was two months old, and Papa never took another wife.
He rarely talked about my mother ; I could tell it hurt him to speak of her. Eventually I stopped asking, but I never stopped wanting to know more about her, the woman in the wedding photo who looked so much like me.
When I started changing, I kept it a secret; I wanted to surprise them. See, we were all Shifters, but none of them could change like I could. Most Shifters can’t change themselves much at all.
That’s another thing the news doesn’t tell you. Most of the people locked up by the GACF can maybe grow hair on their knuckles at will, or change their skin or hair color by a shade or two, if they concentrate. Most Shifters are no more dangerous than anyone else. They only tell you about the exceptions to make everyone afraid of us.
We Stoyanovs are exceptional, but not how you think. It’s not big news that maybe ten percent of the population have the genetic markers for shifting. What the government and the Company aren’t telling you is that about six percent of Shifters have other talents as well. Psychic abilities, extra senses. Some can see broader spectrums of light, or they can hear what’s playing on the radio even when it’s turned off, like they can sense the waves.
My family made our living in show business – a magic/mentalist act. Uncle Radko could speak to spirits, though he claimed they were boring, one-dimensional things without much to offer, like the last notes of a symphony still echoing in a concert hall. His act was great, but I think he made most of it up.
The same was true of Papa. Besides being a magician – slight of hand, sawing girls in half – he was also a mind reader. We had a standee of him that read “The Baron von Lattimer, Mentalist Extraordinaire!!!” He made sure his act left room for doubt, though, an objective that required more finesse than seeing people’s thoughts. He was a mind reader pretending to be a showman pretending to be a mind reader as well as a Bulgarian pretending to be a German. The irony was not lost on him.
Keeping my fledgling talent from him was hard. I’d hum a pop song or do math in my head – either one put him off, especially Algebra. Solving for x in my head was less suspicious than you might think. Sometimes I did it for fun.
That’s another way I take after my mother . She was a mathematician with an advanced university degree – quite a feat considering that in communist Bulgaria, the university only admitted the most promising students.
So I would do math in my head and if Papa noticed, he would only smile. It wasn’t that he was being nosey, just that sometimes it was hard for him to block out other people’s thoughts.
I had been practicing for two weeks when I let Aleksi in on my secret. I took him up to the roof, where I had a steel box ready. It was the middle of summer and very hot, but I wanted it to look impressive.
Aleksi didn’t believe I could do what I said I could, and I really wanted to knock his socks off. He was older than me by a year, and finished with school. Our fathers had let him into the family business, and I wanted nothing more than to join him. I could take this thing I could I do and build a great illusion around it – I knew I could.
There is one more with Lethe, but I may have to post that one after I get back. I've got to pack and load my truck, and get some sleep before an early trek tomorrow.