Bump in the Night - Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Halloween, the sci-fi/fantasy junkie’s most beloved holiday, is only five days away. To me, Halloween is a time to take risks and let your unconventional side roam free. In today’s post, therefore, I am not only going to challenge you to explore your own writing through a prompt, but also to get involved in the most thrilling event in a prolific writer’s year: National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). From the NaNoWriMo website (www.nanowrimo.org):

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

Now, I realize that not everyone has the time (or even the inclination) to write 50k words in 30 days, so my challenge to you is to write the first chapter of a novel by the end of November. The official NaNoWriMo values quantity over quality, but I think the most important thing it offers is an opportunity to begin to unleash your bottled-up creativity. To foster the communal spirit of National Novel Writing Month, you could start a club at your school or join up with a bunch of friends to meet once a week during November to write. You may find that you enjoy it so much that you want to keep working on your novel through December and beyond!

At the end of November, I will try to post a novel chapter of my own and find a place where readers of this blog can share their work (the Teen Ink bulletin boards may be one contender).

Ok, now on to the Halloween prompt!
It is a dark and stormy Halloween night. Too old (or cool) for trick-or-treating, you find yourself curled up on the couch in front of a classic horror movie. Suddenly, you hear a knock on the door. Nervously, you tiptoe across the room and open it. No one is there. When you turn back towards the living room, the TV is gone and something sinister is sitting at the bottom of the stairs…

Although mummies can be traced back to ancient Egypt, the concept of them as zombie-like monsters is a 20^th century fantasy. Accordingly, this week’s Creature Feature will be presented in a 20^th century format – the celebrity television tell-all interview!

Interviewer: First, let me thank you for traveling all the way from the Valley of the Kings to meet with me today.
Tut: It’s my pleasure. One of the perks of being embalmed for 3,000 years is a resistance to jet lag.
I: Fascinating. I’ve always been interested in the whole embalming process – just the idea of preserving a dead body has always seemed a little strange.
T: It’s really quite simple. After death, priests, with Anubis’s help, remove your organs and place them in canopic jars. They fill your skull with resin, to keep you smelling your best, then dry you out with natron – something like salt – and wrap you in white linen to protect you from the elements. After about 70 days, you are ready for burial.
I: Excuse me for seeming nosy here, but is it true that your brain was removed…?
T: But of course! Everyone knows that the brain serves no useful function in the body. During the embalming process, priests removed my brain through my nose with special hooks.
I: I see…But why go to all that trouble simply to preserve a corpse?
T: Ancient Egyptian culture focused heavily on the afterlife. We believed that if a person’s body was not preserved after death, he or she would be condemned to wander for eternity in the next world.
I: How interesting. Along a similar vein, I’ve heard that Egyptian tombs are pretty elaborate. What use does a mummy have for books and jewels?
T: The objects in a person’s tomb serve two distinct purposes. Funerary literature, called “pyramid texts” for pharaohs and “coffin texts” for everyone else, was designed to help Egyptians pass the trials of admittance to the underworld. “The Book of the Dead” is the most well-known example. Everyday objects, including plates, bowls, combs, and jewelry, were added to tombs so that the dead could use them in the afterlife – which is really quite similar to life before death.
I: So they tax the daylights out of you there, too?
T: …
I: Uh – moving on….As you may be aware, some rumors have sprung up in recent times –
T: Not this again…
I: – about mummies that rise from the grave for revenge or to curse the living. Maybe you can set the record straight.
T: Look, I’ve heard all these outrageous allegations before. It began when some of your archeologists discovered that we had been buried with our mouths open. We just wanted to be able to breathe in the underworld, but you had to go and make up silly legends of mummy monsters. Now I can’t walk past a cinema or a Halloween store without seeing a cruel caricature of myself and my fellow mummies.
I: And the curses?
T: What can I say? People will believe almost anything. It’s only a coincidence that those explorers died after opening my tomb. You have no legal evidence of any wrongdoing on my part!
I: There you have it, folks – straight from the mummy’s mouth. Join us next week for an exciting two part expose: “Big Foot and Lock Ness: A Forbidden Love Revealed.”

I have always been intrigued by literature that weaves elements of traditional fantasy – magic, monsters, and apparitions – through what seem on the surface to be entirely realistic narratives. More subtle than frankengenre-ism, this style of writing leaves the reader unsure of what is pure imagination, embellishment, or merely unlikely truth. Beginning with folklore and progressing through the “magical realism” of the works of some South American authors in the mid-20th century (Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one example), this genre invokes a child-like joy of finding the remarkable in the mundane. Following this theme, today’s prompts are designed to help you integrate your every-day experiences as an author with your wildest fictional creations.

• Think about any event in your life. It can be something significant, a once-in-a-millennia type of experience, or an example of a routine that you follow almost every day. Write a short story about this event that incorporates elements of fantasy to emphasize its most important aspects. For example, instead of missing the bus and getting rained on, you could describe missing the bus and being chased by hungry shadow-creatures to your school.

• Write a description of the town or city where you live. Begin with obvious, incontrovertible statements (“City X is in state Y”) and progress to complete fabrications (“the grass in city X eats pets and small children; dogs barking at night are alarmed victims of man-eating vegetation”). If you want to make this a little more elaborate, you can write it from the point of view of a new resident of the city or an FBI agent who is investigating strange claims.

• Have you ever threatened to do something that you would never actually do because it is illegal/immoral/defies the laws of physics (“I’d like to kill that person” is one obvious example)? Imagine that you actually followed through on your threat. What would have happened?

Have fun writing!

In sci-fi/fantasy as in real life, the highest passions of humanity (or any other race) are concentrated in love, politics, and warfare. Few things can excite a reader more than a tactically skillful, hard fought battle between the forces of good and evil. While I am no expert on military strategy, I can give you a few insights on how to write an effective large scale battle from my experiences as a writer and a reader. If there is anything that irks you about mainstream sci-fi/fantasy battles or that you’ve found helpful in your own fighting exploits, please leave a comment!

Tactics
The range of military tactics that have been used throughout history is nearly endless, so I will stick to the basics. In most large-scale battles, the goal is not (as it is usually portrayed in fantasy) to obliterate your enemy; rather, it is to starve, frustrate, evade, or spook him into submission. There is no need to have your protagonist’s army march in a frontal assault against the Dark Guard when an ambush or siege would do just as well with a much lower casualty rate. Now, granted, a month-long wait at the antagonist’s citadel is not nearly as dramatic as the forces of light and dark clashing across a sun-kissed field, but if you are determined to portray a traditional battle in your writing, be prepared to deal with some traditional unpleasantness. Depending on how technologically advanced your characters are, hundreds, thousands, or possibly even more will die. At least half of the dead will be allied with your protagonist, including major or sympathetic characters (spare them and risk breaking your reader’s suspension of disbelief). Your heroes will witness things that sicken them and permanently change them in ways that are not always entirely desirable….

Weapons
Most of the confusion involving weapons in sci-fi/fantasy can be resolved through common sense. Arrows fired into the heart of a raging battle cannot distinguish between friend and foe; this is why the archers of opposing armies traditionally fired at one another before a battle began in earnest. Cannons and catapults, while useful, cannot be reloaded very quickly and are prone to breaking. Guns, if modeled on those in use before the 19th century, are notoriously inaccurate. It is extremely difficult to (squeamish readers skip this part!) cut someone’s head, limb, or mount’s head or limb off in a single blow. In medieval executions, it sometimes took three or four attempts to achieve this end - and that was without all of the confusion of a battlefield.

Contrasts
No matter how ugly or dirty the fighting becomes, it should always be clear which army represents Good (your protagonist’s!). This is trickier in practice than it sounds in principle. Your protagonist’s army must fight valiantly to win the respect of your reader, but it must also fight fairly and mercifully to gain his or her sympathy. If possible, your protagonist should never kill innocents or civilians in battle (even if that stretches believability). He or she should feel some remorse after killing enemy soldiers, especially during his or her first battle.

This week, write a short battle scene that incorporates fantastic elements while maintaining a basis in military reality. Have fun!

Here’s an excerpt from an original book I’m writing. Enjoy, world!
Teen Ink Spooky Story Contest
By Erin Lavitt, from her original book Shadowchasers Part One: Clarus
Daphne Blake, resident party girl and purported shallow cheerleader, was walking home along the Miami streets from an eighteen-and-plus club in her best outfit, long black hair whipping around in the wind of a fall rainstorm. She shivered a bit and clutched her designer trenchcoat a little tighter around her enviable half-Asian sixteen-year-old body.
As her Jimmy Choo heels clipped on the sidewalk, she looked around and realized she’d taken a wrong turn, into a bad neighborhood like most of Miami. She really should have let Andre wake her home. But what happened in Club Vegas, stayed in Club Vegas…
Daphne clutched the Mace in her pocket pitifully when shadows darted behind alley walls. The stars began to shine, soothing some of her shattered nerves. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be a hurricane after all.
Too fast for warning, what Daphne first mistook for a guard dog pounced on the girl. It was the most horrible thing she had ever seen. Too big for a wolf, not quite big enough to be a bear. The only explanation she could possibly think of was a saber-tooth tiger… but it had a distinctly canine shape. Then, it spoke.
“It will taste wonderful…” the monster breathed, and sunk its fangs into the helpless girl’s neck.
Daphne’s fevered, shocked brain reacted to the touch of silver teeth, and became something else entirely. “Get off me, dog,” she said in a gruff voice that sounded quite unlike her. She shoved it off her, took the thing by its tail, and swung the werewolf around like a ragdoll.
It hit against a lamp-post, and whimpered, then began to snarl. She ran as though posessed, the streets blurring past, her steps running through fog, and found herself back home, hoping it had all been a dream.
Except the two silver teeth marks were still on her neck.

That’s for all those who are sick of the cheerleader (not that I’m a cheerleader) dying in horror films! Comment please! And I’m sistergrimm by the way, author, poet, and in the business of misery.