NaNoWriMo Results.

Well, I didn't make it.
But I made it halfway! And I think that's pretty good. :)

And because people kept saying they wanted to read it, I'm going to start posting it! So isn't that exciting!
You can read it here.

I don't know how often I'll update it. Maybe a chapter a week? Or two chapters a week? One every three days? I don't know. It will probably end up being updated whenever I think of it.

Anyway, all that's up at the moment is the prologue, which you've probably already read if you are reading this right now. But I'll get the next section up soon.

That's all for now!

Novel!

I'm doing NaNoWriMo.
(I explain it all here.)

It's gonna be difficult, and my inner editor is going to go insane.
But I am SUPER excited.

I decided to continue the "winds" story. I think it shows the most promise, and a lot of it's world is kind of sketched out in my mind.

I'll post it here after the dust settles.

So I changed the end of the Prodigal rewrite a lot?
But then my computer did something weird, and kicked me off the internet, and Blogger did NOT save the edit.

It took me a long time, and you know how it is when you've worked on something for a while, and then lost that work, and you don't want to do it again just yet?
Yeah, that.

So I might redo it someday. And I might not.
Just so you know.

Prodigal Rewrite

I did this for Understanding the Times, my philosophy-type class.
But I'm posting it here, because I kind of put a lot into it. I don't get that many opportunities to write creatively as an assignment, so I ran with it.
:)



He was back. He had been missing for seven weeks. We even thought he might be dead. And then he came back.
I was angry.
You see, I’m the type of kid that all the adults love. I’m smart, witty, and well-read, but most importantly, I’m obedient. I follow the rules. I’m quiet when I’m supposed to be quiet. I know the answers when I’m called on. I haven’t had a detention in five years.

My brother is the problem child.
He yells at our parents. He gets into fights. He drinks and smokes and does everything that comes with it. And schoolwork is the last thing on his mind.
One day there was a big fight. He had come back to our house at 10:00 in the morning, hung over. And my dad, in his ever-so-tactful way, said something about it. Jordan didn’t take it so well. He declared how sick and tired he was of living under this roof, with our parents always superimposing their morals on him, and then demanded that my father give him all the money in his college fund.
Dad, to everyone’s surprise, complied.
Jordan left that day.
My mom cried for hours, and my dad sat in his chair in the living room, staring at the wall, flexing his hand over and over.
As always, I did my best to pick up the pieces.

We got a postcard from him two weeks later. It said he was in Vegas, having the “time of his life,” and that he was “so glad to be out of the hell” we had subjected him to his whole life.
Dad tore it up before mom got a chance to see it, and pretended he’d just had a bad day at work. But I knew.
We heard nothing from him or about him for four more weeks. Then one night, watching the news, a story played about how “a 19 year old Jordan Daniels was found last night in a car by the side of the road. He appears to have been using several illegal drugs, which mixed in his blood to become a fatal combination. More on this story after the--”
I muted the television and faced my parents. They continued to stare at the screen in shock
“We don’t necessarily know it’s him. Right?” I asked, my voice quavering. “I mean, there could be some other Jordan Daniels out there…”
“Y-yeah, there could be.”
We sat there in silence as a Subway commercial played with no sound. I couldn’t take the strained silence for much longer, and went up to my room to damage my hearing by listening to music full blast.
My parents watched the rest of the news story. It turned out to be some other kid from Decatur, Illinois, who was on the run from the law. It wasn’t our Jordan.

The next week, we got a phone call.
It was Jordan, calling collect to tell us that he was homeless and completely broke. He had sold his car to get money for food, but even that was gone now. He was so desperate that he had even taken food from a dog bowl in the backyard of a house with an unlocked fence.
My dad immediately bought him a plane ticket home.
When he got back, my parents had a huge welcome-back party, inviting all of our family, neighbors, and church to come eat and celebrate the fact that he had returned alive.
On the day of the party, I sat on the couch, gripping my can of Coke, staring at my shoes.
I was the model kid. I was the one who deserved the party. I had caused my parents no trouble after all these years, and gotten nothing. Dad had bought Jordan a car, but not me. He had let Jordan go to parties but made me stay home to study.
It was ridiculously unfair, and I sat in the company of happy guests listening to my mother tell the story, wondering if it would be best to run away for a few weeks, myself. Eventually I got sick of the party and went upstairs. I felt my dad’s eyes following me, and I sat on my bed and waited. A few minutes later, he came upstairs.
“What are you doing up here? Why don’t you come back down to the party?”
“I really don’t understand, Dad. I’ve caused you so much less trouble than Jordan. For my whole life, I’ve been working to get straight A’s so you and mom will be proud of me. For my whole life, I’ve obeyed what you tell me to do. You bought Jordan a car, but you won’t even acknowledge how hard I try for you! You barely let me go places with my friends! But Jordan comes home after wasting everything you’ve given him on drugs and girls and who knows what, and you throw him a huge party!”
“Son, you are always with me. Everything I have is yours. But we celebrate and are glad because Jordan was dead, and he’s alive again. He was lost, and now he’s found.”

Poll!

Okay, I don't know if you even like my writing that much, but lets just assume you do. :)

I don't really have time to continue writing a whole bunch of stories, but I would like to continue one of them. So I'm going to let which one be up to you!

The three main ones I'm thinking of are:

1. The Travis story - (http://ianreedisdead.blogspot.com/2009/01/travis-story-as-per-beths-request.html)
2. The wind story - (http://ianreedisdead.blogspot.com/2009/07/beware-winds.html)
3. The Gratium story - (http://ianreedisdead.blogspot.com/2008/12/there-will-be-consequences.html)

So if you could please comment and tell me which one you would like to see more of most, that would be awesome.
And if not, I guess I'll just flip a coin.

A free verse poem

Walking past me as if they don't have a care in the world,
Their shoulders bent under the stress.
Smiling like the sun.

Holding their head high.

They betray no emotion--they think--aside from the carefully calculated.
Smile.

Twenty-five degree tilt, eyebrows arched just so.
Fifteen perfect teeth showing.
But you can see it in the eyes.

As they pretend it's all okay, I wonder.
As they struggle harder, I empathize more deeply.
As the strain becomes more and more obvious, I pray.
They never know.

I plead with them from the sidelines:

"Give it to the one who died for it all.
Give it to the one who can handle it.
Give it to the one who has something better for you."

They don't hear.
Why would they?
I never spoke a word.

They continue to sink.
I continue to grip the side of the lifeboat.
Standing on shore.
Watching.

Why don't I say anything?

Fear.

Of man. It overpowers the other fear.
The one for man.
For the souls of the ones stuck in this decay.

I am the salt, but I don't want to reach into the sepulcher.
Fear.
Worry of what people will think.
Worry of what people will say/do/infer.
Worry that I'll have to--
Be involved/get messy/have to work/not know the answers.

Fear that when I get in the lifeboat, and paddle out to them, and throw them life,
They'll reject it.
That I'll have to sit in the boat that could and would save them as they drown before my eyes.
That they'll drown.

That they'll drown.

Beware the winds

As the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls of the ramshackle hut, everyone drew the linen rags closer to their mouths. Fearful eyes darted around, pausing briefly on every hole, watching and waiting.
The wind continued to blow against the side of the house, seemingly accomplishing nothing more than the creation of an eerie song produced by its passing over and through the various punctures in the wood of the old construction. The family inside, however, remained still.
Watching a few moments longer, and seeing nothing out of the ordinary, one member of the group began to relax. The wizened old man dropped his hand slowly, removing the linen from his mouth and taking a cautious breath.
"No! Father, stop!" yelled a woman's voice, muffled by the cloth still covering her lips. "We don't know whether or not it's safe yet!"
The man waved her concerns aside, shuffling towards the hard-backed wooden chair in which he had hastily placed his book when the wind had begun to blow. He picked it up, sitting heavily, and began to flip through the pages, locating his place.
The two children of the family watched him a few moments longer before dropping their own mouth coverings to the ground and running over to his chair, looking up expectantly for their grandfather to continue the story.
"Ebenezer! Moriana!" their mother cried, "cover your mouths! We cannot afford to be careless! This is the way we lost your father!"
Paying her no heed, the children scrambled up onto their grandfather's lap, leaning against him so as to better view the pictures of the storybook. Their grandfather took a deep breath and had just begun to read when, outside, the wind shifted.
Inside the house, no one noticed. The fearful mother picked up the linen cloths dropped by her two children, coming up behind them and tying them behind their heads, making sure they covered both their nose and mouth. They began to protest, but she insisted.
"You will wear these for another twenty minutes at the least. If it was up to me, your grandfather would be wearing one as well. I know he is quite certain the danger has passed, but I am not. And as your mother, it is my opinion that counts, not his."
Her eyes shooting daggers at her father, she gave the knot behind Moriana's head another pull, making sure it was tight, and retreated to her seat in the corner. Her father resumed the story with great gusto as if nothing had happened, and the children were quickly absorbed into it, forgetting their surroundings completely.
In through a small hole in the south wall of the house, unseen to the family, was floating what appeared to be innocent dust. Tinted slightly red, the color of their dirt floor, it looked quite unassuming, as if someone had walked too heavily past the wall.
It drifted, in a half-there cloud, toward the center of the room, where the two children sat with their grandfather, all three wrapped up in a story about pirates and the ocean and buried treasure.
The rust-colored spores caught on the breath of the three, drawn in closer toward their mouths and noses. The linen over the mouths of the children stopped almost all of the spores from reaching their lungs, but the spores flew into the unprotected mouth of the grandfather.
In a few minutes, the mother would notice a light pink dusting on the cloths over her children's mouths, and they would all realize what had happened.
In a few hours, her father would develop a hacking cough that would steal his breath and vigor, restricting him to his bed.
In a few days, they would need to burn his body, a new breeding ground for the spores, before they multiplied to the point where even a cloth over the mouth could not protect them any longer.

Four days later, standing several hundred feet away from the funeral pyre of her father, the woman wept, her face a stony mask of determination despite her tears.
She thought of the rulers and politicians, living in their opulent, air-purified houses, unthreatened by the spores, as they squabbled and bickered about their petty disagreements. She thought of the scientists, living safely in their "Fortresses of Learning," claiming they were doing their utmost to find a solution for what they had done, even though the first outbreak had been eleven years ago. And she thought of the people, daily facing the horror of the spores, with no guarantee of survival or safety as they did their best simply to exist.

"Something," she said darkly, watching the flames grow higher and higher, "has to be done."