Return of the Vampire, Chapter One: In Which I Prove I Can Write Badly!
Sargon and I went to the annual writers' meeting and Christmas fling on Saturday, toting along for-real homemade cookies. There we gathered for the ritual dirty-santa gift exchange. I feel very merry now, actually. We stole Buffy Season 7, and managed to keep hold of it. I am a happy panda. And I got hold of a Frank Frazetta calendar, too, courtesy of another member who graciously donated it to me in honor of my appallingly cheesy fragment.
But I get ahead of myself.
The bulk of the night was spent on the annual story fragment contest, which is an elaborate form of torture in which every participating person turns in a short fragment of a story or novel, all the fragments get read aloud, and everyone tries to guess who wrote which.
It is not officially a bad fragment contest. But it ends up that way most of the time anyway, as people write the most horrible tripe imaginable in an effort to disguise their style.
Also, we introduced a theme this year solely to annoy one of our most cherished members (writers show their affection in strange ways). She judges a short story contest, and had recently complained about the clichés with which she is assaulted on virtually every first page.
To briefly describe the horror she has to endure, the typical story would involve an elvish thief or a vampire waking up from a dream, often with amnesia. They smirk a lot, and have "impossibly blue eyes."
And, no, the contest she judges is not solely devoted to stories about smirking amnesiac elvish thieves. Why she gets so many of these is something I prefer not to contemplate.
Anyway, many of us chose to write on that theme. Out of eighteen fragments, a full eight of them were about elven thieves waking up. Sargon and I both contributed to the mayhem in our own way, but the undeniable star of the show was the fragment, by a friend, that beat William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land for sheer impenetrable confustimacation, but, alas, I have neither a copy of it, nor permission to reproduce it here, so I shall merely tell you that I was crying by the end.
My own effort paled in comparison.
What's that? You're insane, and want to read it anyway? Fine.
Return of the Vampire, Chapter One: Death of a Dark-Elf
Elf Princess Elizabetha Julia Lucretia Bryanne Faeth NiMorghann woke from her undead slumber and fluffed her black hair which was black as a raven, or maybe the black part of a magpie, even though it didn't need fluffing because it always swept drammaticly back from her perfect porcalin-like face as though ruffled in some invisible dark wind blowing from the depths of time, whence her dark soul had been borne in some bygone age.
Her eyes were sometimes green and sometimes blue, proving you could have it both ways, unless she was deep in Blood-Hunger, when they turned red, and you can bet you'd only be getting it one way then. She didn't need to breath because as we mentioned she was undead but nevertheless her corset tightened excitedly as the man beside her woke into the tastefully-appointed bedroom of her flat in 1889 London.
In her 4,376 years as Lady High-Mistress of Foreplay, High Priestess of the Black Arts (all of them), and a Princess of the Unseelie Faye Court, she had practiced every art of bondage on her many lovers, and mastered some of them. Alexander the Great, Achilles, oh, and Paris was just swell. She'd turned both Brutus and Caesar with the Rite of the Blood-Stones in a single night; also Charlemagne, Da Vinci, Jack Sparrow, Dorian Gray, and Count Dracula. She could not forget the immortal Lord Voldemort, whom she'd met when she'd traveled through time in that one really nifty fic.
Anyway, all were in her 'collection.'
To tell the truth, after so long it rather bored her, but as she looked upon Edward Rhys-Wittingsmere, Lord Frottington, with his red lips and his soulful dark eyes that seemed as burning pools of dark water in some tenebrous forest of the damned, she knew that he desired her even as much as she desired desire, if you know what I mean, and she couldn't help but rise to his heated embrace.
'I will never forget last night. We were meant to be together, my true-love,' he whispered, unaware that her shiney ivory fangs were inches from his pulsating throat, and the BloodHunger was on her like a hunching black marmoset, pulling her hair and urging her to drink deeply from him. 'Our souls are one soul, on one journey,' he whispered, his sensitive lips so close to her ear that his manly five?o'clock (a.m.) shadow razzled her cheek. 'I have returned to you across oceans of time!'
'Oh, shut up, you little tosser,' she said, and bit him.
A spurting fountain of hot blood pulsed into her mouth and he twitched in her lusting embrace. She would only take a little . . . she wanted him able to perform, and he still had to make it out of the flat (by which you can tell they were in Britain and not, for instance, New York).
Lord Frottington sighed against her, lost in the deathlust that always overcomes those who have fallen prey to a Vampyre's caressing velvet embrace, to sacrifice their own precious life-energy to feed the twisted dark soul of the thing that feeds apon them so that now they crave the dark Embrace even as much as the vampire, or in this case Vampiress, craves the hot blood that pulses from their aroused living bodies.
Well . . . perhaps she'd take just a bit more.
'You should really take more care with the company you keep, old Frot,' said a voice from the doorway that was both strong, like a hitching-post, though not so tall and erect, and soft like warm buttercream frosting, but not as sweet. Maybe velvet and iron would be a better analogy. 'Or this one's going to do you like the last one,' continued the voice as Elizabetha yanked both her fangs from Lord Frottington's creamy neck. Her blood-smeared visage with its eyes like sinking blue and green whirlpools with red jewels at the bottom gleamed, no her eyes gleamed, her visage was frightful, like a long dark hallway looking down all the long years of her lightless existence, a hallway where the threadbare carpet let peek through the warped floorboards of her soul, a hallway full of depthless evil and fell intent as she faced the voice that interrupted her.
'Fool!' she cried, heedless of the blood that soaked the front of her dress and Lord Frottington as he slumped back against the little ruffled cushions with a fetchingly helpless sigh. 'Upstart whelp! I am Princess of the Fay! And the Lady High-Mistress of Foreplay! You, a mortal, dare challenge me on my own ground? You shall die to slake my hunger, even as I use Edward's body to slake my lusts!'
'I have faced greater horrors than you,' said the voice, or rather the owner of the voice, which is to say the tall man who stood there with burning green eyes narrow in distaste and fury and about six feet tall. He was, now that Elisabetha looked at him, rather smashing. 'Now push off and let Ed alone or I'll shove Miss Dandy here through your unliving innards.'
And with that he pulled a sword out of the sheathe at his side that surprised Elisabetha for the light that jumped out of it cut to the very dark core of her soul like a big paring knife wielded by an expert intent on removeing all the bad spots from an otherwise yummy varietal apple or other fruit if it was in season.
But it was not a paring knife! It was a sword!
And the moment she saw it, she knew who she faced. His name was a legend among those who had no reason to fear legend, for they themselves were creatures of the everlasting Dark. And yet he was not even a score of years old, and still with the flush of youth about him, which, truth be told, enticed Elisabetha very much.
This was the Direwalker, the Vampyre-Hunter.
Like his prey, he felt no fear or mercy, but unlike his prey, which is to say Elisabetha, he had been trained by this secret sect of British recluses to do battle with the forces of Darkness. Forces like Elisabetha.
'Oh, hallo, Damon,' said Lord Frottington. 'I appear to be bleeding.'
*****
The scary part is that I didn't write that for the contest. How I came to have such a copious pile of honeycombed tripe lying about my computer is another story altogether, and will get a separate post. For now, all you need to know is that reading it aloud will probably kill birds. (Poor Damon gets no respect.)
But that's not all the pain I have in store for you. Sargon dropped this chunk of literary wolf-bait, which caused me to cough up a kidney when I first read it. It is not as long as mine, but that means that, word for word, it is only more atrocious. I hate for this to be the first example of his writing that you see . . . my husband is a more talented writer than I am, really, though I doubt this will convince you of it.
The Dream of Orlando SilverWillow
Orlando awoke for the dream that he had never had before, except the one time when he was in the castle of King Krak. So he knew at once that he must be there again. The elven thief awoke in the cell that they had put him into the night before, even though he had until just now forgotten it. Until the dream. That dream, that dream he had always hated so very much, with an extremity of hatred that made his silver hair stand up on his neck, as though stirred by the unseen wind of a ghost monster of some kind.
Awake, he surveyed his cell, though it was too dark to see anything, but his keen elven sight perceived nothing of use. Walls are stone, and heavy with the slime of things. Suddenly a door! Under his fingers the door was a play that had been written by some famous person. Very articulate and sad. His skilled digits probed and slapped at the wood, feeling for the weaknesses he knew were there. He remembered the words of his elven thief teacher Arathorn the Gay, as he described the many ways to feel things. No one needs eyes, he would say, you only need the meaty digits at the ends of your hands that you can use like fingers to peel away the shadows and read a door like a poem written by some bored princess locked away in a tower with a bunch of jewels and other stuff.
Orlando had felt no weaknesses in the door, nowhere he could feel anything. The door was like a block of wood bound with iron. The wily elf sagged back to the stones, trying to remember his magic words for opening doors. Was it "Eeeny Ooony Wannahh" or "Klattu Barada Nikto" he would always get those confused. And confusing them, he would conjure the wrong thing up. He would have been calling up fire instead of opening the door he wanted opened, or whatever. He rubbed his eyes, and discovered that he was blindfolded! That was why the elf could not see anything! The thief wrenched off his blindfold and saw that the cell was indeed still dark, and indeed was too dark for a thief to have seen anything anyway, so he sighed and put the cloth back on.
But the dream! The Dream from which he had just awakened! That would have told him the purpose of the dreadful King Krak holding him here in this dark unformed cell. It was so vivid, also dramatic and strange. He could remember everything about it. In the this cell, with a blindfold on, in the dark, the elven thief who was also a prince of the realm of Gondorhan would have remembered everything about that horrible dream. Orlando screwed up his face and pouted, trying hard to remember what he already knew. Suddenly, he realized he had been hearing a sound the whole time! It was a buzzing sound, or kind of a grinding. He had no idea what it meant or where it came from. It probably wasn’t important, decided the wily, handsome, rakish rogue.
*****
Do you see why I love him so much?
It must be his impossibly blue eyes.
link
But I get ahead of myself.
The bulk of the night was spent on the annual story fragment contest, which is an elaborate form of torture in which every participating person turns in a short fragment of a story or novel, all the fragments get read aloud, and everyone tries to guess who wrote which.
It is not officially a bad fragment contest. But it ends up that way most of the time anyway, as people write the most horrible tripe imaginable in an effort to disguise their style.
Also, we introduced a theme this year solely to annoy one of our most cherished members (writers show their affection in strange ways). She judges a short story contest, and had recently complained about the clichés with which she is assaulted on virtually every first page.
To briefly describe the horror she has to endure, the typical story would involve an elvish thief or a vampire waking up from a dream, often with amnesia. They smirk a lot, and have "impossibly blue eyes."
And, no, the contest she judges is not solely devoted to stories about smirking amnesiac elvish thieves. Why she gets so many of these is something I prefer not to contemplate.
Anyway, many of us chose to write on that theme. Out of eighteen fragments, a full eight of them were about elven thieves waking up. Sargon and I both contributed to the mayhem in our own way, but the undeniable star of the show was the fragment, by a friend, that beat William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land for sheer impenetrable confustimacation, but, alas, I have neither a copy of it, nor permission to reproduce it here, so I shall merely tell you that I was crying by the end.
My own effort paled in comparison.
What's that? You're insane, and want to read it anyway? Fine.
Return of the Vampire, Chapter One: Death of a Dark-Elf
Elf Princess Elizabetha Julia Lucretia Bryanne Faeth NiMorghann woke from her undead slumber and fluffed her black hair which was black as a raven, or maybe the black part of a magpie, even though it didn't need fluffing because it always swept drammaticly back from her perfect porcalin-like face as though ruffled in some invisible dark wind blowing from the depths of time, whence her dark soul had been borne in some bygone age.
Her eyes were sometimes green and sometimes blue, proving you could have it both ways, unless she was deep in Blood-Hunger, when they turned red, and you can bet you'd only be getting it one way then. She didn't need to breath because as we mentioned she was undead but nevertheless her corset tightened excitedly as the man beside her woke into the tastefully-appointed bedroom of her flat in 1889 London.
In her 4,376 years as Lady High-Mistress of Foreplay, High Priestess of the Black Arts (all of them), and a Princess of the Unseelie Faye Court, she had practiced every art of bondage on her many lovers, and mastered some of them. Alexander the Great, Achilles, oh, and Paris was just swell. She'd turned both Brutus and Caesar with the Rite of the Blood-Stones in a single night; also Charlemagne, Da Vinci, Jack Sparrow, Dorian Gray, and Count Dracula. She could not forget the immortal Lord Voldemort, whom she'd met when she'd traveled through time in that one really nifty fic.
Anyway, all were in her 'collection.'
To tell the truth, after so long it rather bored her, but as she looked upon Edward Rhys-Wittingsmere, Lord Frottington, with his red lips and his soulful dark eyes that seemed as burning pools of dark water in some tenebrous forest of the damned, she knew that he desired her even as much as she desired desire, if you know what I mean, and she couldn't help but rise to his heated embrace.
'I will never forget last night. We were meant to be together, my true-love,' he whispered, unaware that her shiney ivory fangs were inches from his pulsating throat, and the BloodHunger was on her like a hunching black marmoset, pulling her hair and urging her to drink deeply from him. 'Our souls are one soul, on one journey,' he whispered, his sensitive lips so close to her ear that his manly five?o'clock (a.m.) shadow razzled her cheek. 'I have returned to you across oceans of time!'
'Oh, shut up, you little tosser,' she said, and bit him.
A spurting fountain of hot blood pulsed into her mouth and he twitched in her lusting embrace. She would only take a little . . . she wanted him able to perform, and he still had to make it out of the flat (by which you can tell they were in Britain and not, for instance, New York).
Lord Frottington sighed against her, lost in the deathlust that always overcomes those who have fallen prey to a Vampyre's caressing velvet embrace, to sacrifice their own precious life-energy to feed the twisted dark soul of the thing that feeds apon them so that now they crave the dark Embrace even as much as the vampire, or in this case Vampiress, craves the hot blood that pulses from their aroused living bodies.
Well . . . perhaps she'd take just a bit more.
'You should really take more care with the company you keep, old Frot,' said a voice from the doorway that was both strong, like a hitching-post, though not so tall and erect, and soft like warm buttercream frosting, but not as sweet. Maybe velvet and iron would be a better analogy. 'Or this one's going to do you like the last one,' continued the voice as Elizabetha yanked both her fangs from Lord Frottington's creamy neck. Her blood-smeared visage with its eyes like sinking blue and green whirlpools with red jewels at the bottom gleamed, no her eyes gleamed, her visage was frightful, like a long dark hallway looking down all the long years of her lightless existence, a hallway where the threadbare carpet let peek through the warped floorboards of her soul, a hallway full of depthless evil and fell intent as she faced the voice that interrupted her.
'Fool!' she cried, heedless of the blood that soaked the front of her dress and Lord Frottington as he slumped back against the little ruffled cushions with a fetchingly helpless sigh. 'Upstart whelp! I am Princess of the Fay! And the Lady High-Mistress of Foreplay! You, a mortal, dare challenge me on my own ground? You shall die to slake my hunger, even as I use Edward's body to slake my lusts!'
'I have faced greater horrors than you,' said the voice, or rather the owner of the voice, which is to say the tall man who stood there with burning green eyes narrow in distaste and fury and about six feet tall. He was, now that Elisabetha looked at him, rather smashing. 'Now push off and let Ed alone or I'll shove Miss Dandy here through your unliving innards.'
And with that he pulled a sword out of the sheathe at his side that surprised Elisabetha for the light that jumped out of it cut to the very dark core of her soul like a big paring knife wielded by an expert intent on removeing all the bad spots from an otherwise yummy varietal apple or other fruit if it was in season.
But it was not a paring knife! It was a sword!
And the moment she saw it, she knew who she faced. His name was a legend among those who had no reason to fear legend, for they themselves were creatures of the everlasting Dark. And yet he was not even a score of years old, and still with the flush of youth about him, which, truth be told, enticed Elisabetha very much.
This was the Direwalker, the Vampyre-Hunter.
Like his prey, he felt no fear or mercy, but unlike his prey, which is to say Elisabetha, he had been trained by this secret sect of British recluses to do battle with the forces of Darkness. Forces like Elisabetha.
'Oh, hallo, Damon,' said Lord Frottington. 'I appear to be bleeding.'
*****
The scary part is that I didn't write that for the contest. How I came to have such a copious pile of honeycombed tripe lying about my computer is another story altogether, and will get a separate post. For now, all you need to know is that reading it aloud will probably kill birds. (Poor Damon gets no respect.)
But that's not all the pain I have in store for you. Sargon dropped this chunk of literary wolf-bait, which caused me to cough up a kidney when I first read it. It is not as long as mine, but that means that, word for word, it is only more atrocious. I hate for this to be the first example of his writing that you see . . . my husband is a more talented writer than I am, really, though I doubt this will convince you of it.
The Dream of Orlando SilverWillow
Orlando awoke for the dream that he had never had before, except the one time when he was in the castle of King Krak. So he knew at once that he must be there again. The elven thief awoke in the cell that they had put him into the night before, even though he had until just now forgotten it. Until the dream. That dream, that dream he had always hated so very much, with an extremity of hatred that made his silver hair stand up on his neck, as though stirred by the unseen wind of a ghost monster of some kind.
Awake, he surveyed his cell, though it was too dark to see anything, but his keen elven sight perceived nothing of use. Walls are stone, and heavy with the slime of things. Suddenly a door! Under his fingers the door was a play that had been written by some famous person. Very articulate and sad. His skilled digits probed and slapped at the wood, feeling for the weaknesses he knew were there. He remembered the words of his elven thief teacher Arathorn the Gay, as he described the many ways to feel things. No one needs eyes, he would say, you only need the meaty digits at the ends of your hands that you can use like fingers to peel away the shadows and read a door like a poem written by some bored princess locked away in a tower with a bunch of jewels and other stuff.
Orlando had felt no weaknesses in the door, nowhere he could feel anything. The door was like a block of wood bound with iron. The wily elf sagged back to the stones, trying to remember his magic words for opening doors. Was it "Eeeny Ooony Wannahh" or "Klattu Barada Nikto" he would always get those confused. And confusing them, he would conjure the wrong thing up. He would have been calling up fire instead of opening the door he wanted opened, or whatever. He rubbed his eyes, and discovered that he was blindfolded! That was why the elf could not see anything! The thief wrenched off his blindfold and saw that the cell was indeed still dark, and indeed was too dark for a thief to have seen anything anyway, so he sighed and put the cloth back on.
But the dream! The Dream from which he had just awakened! That would have told him the purpose of the dreadful King Krak holding him here in this dark unformed cell. It was so vivid, also dramatic and strange. He could remember everything about it. In the this cell, with a blindfold on, in the dark, the elven thief who was also a prince of the realm of Gondorhan would have remembered everything about that horrible dream. Orlando screwed up his face and pouted, trying hard to remember what he already knew. Suddenly, he realized he had been hearing a sound the whole time! It was a buzzing sound, or kind of a grinding. He had no idea what it meant or where it came from. It probably wasn’t important, decided the wily, handsome, rakish rogue.
*****
Do you see why I love him so much?
It must be his impossibly blue eyes.
link