Like ‘The Green Monkeys‘ and the recently published ‘A Choice of Kings‘ this is set in the same fictional world as my novel ‘Exile‘. In this instance though the time period is about a generation earlier.
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The Iron Hills
Out beyond the palisades, and the ridge of ancient earthen ramparts cut into the hillside, the flat southern fields lay furrowed but unsown. They had been kept fallow through winter, until the Airu moon had risen anew. Then the ploughmen had harnessed up their oxen and set their ploughshares to gouge long wounds into the dirt.
At night, when they returned to the taverns, or to the fire in the market square, they were welcomed and admired. A good ploughman kept his furrows straight and close so that the yield from each man’s strip would be the greater. The ploughmen would sit together and complain each night that the soil was still too hard or, if there had been rains, that it was too soft. They cursed the rocks that hid underground and dulled their ploughs. They would blame the Other Folk, the faeries and gremlins and the mischievous sprites of the fields, for all manner of misfortunes, and then, when the ale had taken its effect, they would laugh and tell tales until the sun was gone from the sky and their sleeping pallets beckoned.
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This is an unpublished Fantasy Short Story complete ate 7,000 words.
July 10th, 2012 at 12:25 pm
hey buddy. thanks for the hat-tip, and all the best. I have no doubt you’ll meet with more success soon.
i like yr excerpt, keen to read on. just two things jumped out at me.
the first is telegraphing too obviously which characters the reader is supposed to like and dislike. in such a short excerpt, i thought the spitting, squinting, nasally, bitter, screwed-up-face, complaining, boasting, lying, impish, mocking, evil, mischievous, menacing Cassan-prick thing was laid on a bit thick. i am with you on vonnegut’s ‘make each sentence advance action or reveal character’, but the character being revealed seems excessive in his brazen heinousness from the get-go.
Or perhaps at least in this brief excerpt, it violates another of vonnegut’s dictums, ‘give the reader at least one character to root for’. I’m ok with that character being Eoghan, but if Cassan is his only friend it makes me wonder what sort of loser Eoghan must be to have only one mate, and that mate is a major cocknocker.
Anyway. I couldn’t claim to be a fan of vonnegut, so who cares what he thinks?
The other is this sentence: “Beyond the empty fields with their shining rows of sillion dark, distant lumps rippled across the horizon: the Iron Hills.”
It may just be the page formatting, but here’s how I read it:
Beyond the empty fields with their shining rows of sillion dark
distant lumps rippled across the horizon
the Iron Hills.
I was giving you huge kudos for the poetic turn of ‘sillion dark’, until i realised you meant ‘dark, distant lumps’. I still prefer it reading as ‘sillion dark’. But really it was some of the other terminology here which stuck in my craw a little (it’s not hard). The first is ‘lumps’, which i associate with breast cancer or brain tumors or porridge and not with hills or mountains, even at distance. The other is ‘rippled’, which to my mind gives a strong impression of visible movement, although I understand the shape you are describing. I won’t make recommendations about how the sentence could be written otherwise, just thought i’d mention for your consideration. small things, picky minds.
looking forward to reading the whole piece once its published. keep up the good work.
July 10th, 2012 at 2:16 pm
Thanks for the feedback mate.
To Cassan later, but first – that sentence, and perhaps the first, gave me so many headaches. I wasn’t 100% with the structure of it but I kept in in because:
1. I wanted the juxtaposition of the sillion lumps and the hills as lumps, the former shining and the latter obscure.
2. I liked that the antithetical ‘shining’ and ‘dark’ were so close and probably, if I’m honest, was prepared to encourage the ambiguity (which I’m normally loathe to do in a syntactic sense – thematic ambiguity is great but syntactic ambiguity is usually just a barrier for the reader or a bad pun).
3. I liked the alliteration of ‘dark, distant’.
4. I was hoping to solve the problem with improved punctuation, notably comma placement, but then it just looked over-punctuated.
As Joe says in Reservoir Dogs: “I should have my fuckin’ head examined, going on a plan like this when I wasn’t 100%”
Anyway, that bit in the post about re-reading and editing: this is why.
Cassan:
I am a bit of a fan of Vonnegut. Not an apostolic level of fandom, but I do like his ability to write in such an unusual and idiosyncratic style and yet make the writing appear so natural to the reader. I think the two pieces of advice you quote are apt. The first especially for the efficiency of language demanded by the form of short fiction. The second because I hadn’t considered your perspective on how Eoghan and Cassan’s relationship reflects on Eoghan.
It’s possible I’m trying to do too much too quickly with Cassan. Of your string of adjectives I was going for impish, mocking, mischievous, so happy to see them. Not so keen to see evil, and prick. That may imply I’ve gone too hard too early.
He enters the scene as an exaggeration of himself, but I think we’ve all met those boys in their early teens who puff up their chest with exaggerated machismo and defiance. In later scenes his more vulnerable side is shown and perhaps some context for why he is the way he is, but he does commit two very significant acts which will do nothing to endear him to the readership. Trying to build an arc for a secondary character wherein he moves from initial distaste through sympathy to the fall in a 7,500 word story is a challenge, but I think it’s worth it as a counterpoint to Eoghan’s own arc.
July 10th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Are you sure you didn’t include that sentence as a small homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins?
July 10th, 2012 at 5:34 pm
He is indeed the source, but really it’s because sillion is such a specific word, it so accurately describes the image and it just had an inherent beauty.
Right word, right place. Isn’t that the core skill of the writer?