Maybe it's just the fact that I'm so tired, but I've just had a bit of a light bulb regarding fiction and me. (We'll see if it still make sense in the morning.)
The thought I had is this: I have a lot of trouble coming up with motivation for completely original characters. In the case of fanfiction, a lot of the back-story that drives a character has already been created. For me, writing fanfiction is kind of like connecting the dots: certain points are already laid out and I fill in what's left, making any sort of design I can pick out from between them. I've been freeing up when trying to do original stuff lately. I have a theory. I myself don't have a lot of inertia lately, and it's bleeding over into my writing. My characters are static because I, personally, am at a standstill on many different levels. I have to struggle to see the purpose in things. Somehow, this cloudy vision is spreading. I can't see why characters would do any of the myriad things that a character could do.
It's frustrating, because I've got a lot of ideas and I don't feel like I have a lot of outlet for them. I'm not making any progress. I feel like I've been relegated to second-tier with fanfics. Not that I'm saying that fanfiction is second-rate. I'm frustrated because I can't do what I want, so I'm doing the next closest. (Sometimes I get a little stuck when I get an idea of "this is what I have to do." I am loathe to use the word compulsion, but that's kind of what it is.)
I am compelled to write these ideas and stories, but I can't let the compulsion go because I haven't finished doing it. I've been blocked somewhere between the start and the end. And it's an unreasonable, invisible obstacle. It's not like I've broken all my limbs and am in traction and am forced to dictate my writerly thoughts to an elderly and hard of hearing relative. (Knock on wood) my computer isn't broken. I am practically swimming in writing implements.
I need to stop whining about my mysterious lack of motivation and go to bed.
~Later
P.S. If a story could either go with a warm-fuzzy ending or a miserable-but-character-developing one, which would you choose? Or would it be better to give the reader the option to read both?
21 September 2009
10 September 2009
Prologue Complete
Yes, at some point in the near future, this will become relevant to the present story. I wish I'd put it up sooner...but it kind of didn't exist too long ago. Regardless, I hope you enjoy!
Prologue
-------
It had taken Sasuke nine years to get this far. Nine years of hating and growing and training. Nine years to shape himself, nine years of failure and doubt and killing off everything in himself that stood in the way. Nine years to hunt his brother down for the final fight. And now here he was, laying next to his brother’s still-warm body. He was exhausted. He was numb. Itachi’s corpse was still bleeding and he felt the need to get away from it, but he couldn‘t move. He lay there and the blood seeped into his clothing.
And then Madara came and snatched Sasuke’s proof of victory away. Sasuke made to chase, but he too collapsed in an abortive attempt to stand. He woke in a cave, prostrate on a makeshift bed. Madara explained everything and Sasuke’s world broke apart again. He twisted around to see the curse seal on his shoulder. It was still there, but it had changed. Sasuke touched it, and it was like live electricity tearing through him. His vision swam. He fainted.
When he woke for the second time in the cave, Madara was dead. His corpse continued to burn with the Amaterasu’s black flames. It seemed even he could not escape the attack, however instinctive its origins were. Sasuke struggled up off the pallet on the floor. He drew his sword and cut off Madara’s head. That face, nearly untouched by the fire, looked eerily similar to Itachi’s. Sasuke’s left eye opened wider and wider. Fire leapt from it. Madara’s head burned itself out and Sasuke dripped tears of blood.
He staggered down passageways, leaving smears of blood where he rested against the walls. Eventually, Sasuke came to a huge chamber with an seven-eyed statue. No, wait. It had nine eyes, but only seven of them were open. And then he saw his brother’s body at its foot and he didn’t care about the statue‘s eyes anymore.
Sasuke sat beside it--the body (his brother)-- for an indeterminate amount of time. He couldn’t make himself look at it. At him. At what he had been. He began to prepare for the disposal of Itachi.
The smoke and ash bit into his eyes. He breathed his brother in, held his breath until his lungs burned before he exhaled. Sasuke looked upward, watched the smoke spiral around the top of the cave. For the second time, he noticed the statue. This time, though, he realized what it was. He could see that it was beginning to destabilize. Sasuke hadn’t planned for this, didn’t think he’d ever have the misfortune. His options were simple: let it fall apart and be blown up by proximity when the bijuu escaped, or find a way to fix it, at least long enough to get away. What Sasuke really needed was more time. He wanted time to rest and think, but if he didn’t do something now, didn’t start to repair the damage now, it would be too late and he would be dead. The stress of the work still might kill him, but inaction definitely would. Sasuke took a deep breath with his eyes closed. He opened them, Sharingan swirling. He began.
Nine days later, it was done. Sasuke had re-structured the statue and its dangerous contents. When Sasuke finally looked up from his work, he saw that there were four people--no, seven--in the room with him. Karin, Suigetsu, and Juugo made a rough triangle around him. Protecting? Watching over? Sasuke wasn’t sure why they were doing it. But they stood between him and the other four. The others all wore Akatsuki cloaks.
Sasuke’s muscles screamed when he tried to stand. He batted away Karin’s manicured hand, instead allowing Juugo to pull him to his feet. Karin handed him a handkerchief. He gave her a look and she pointed to his nose. He wiped. The cloth came away bloody.
“Nice work,” said one of the cloaked figures.
Sasuke recognized him. It was his brother’s partner. Sasuke wracked his brains, trying to come up with a name. The thinking made his head pound. Or made it worse. He wasn’t really sure, at this point.
“Kisame,” said Suigetsu. “So nice to see you again.”
He bared his teeth in imitation of a smile. Kisame ignored him.
“You missed a spot,” said Kisame.
He pointed to Sasuke’s neck. Sasuke looked. His entire chest was streaked with red and brown. He scrubbed at it halfheartedly and it flaked off a bit at a time. His white shirt was a gory mess at the collar.
After the introductions were over, Sasuke explained that what he wanted was to destroy Konoha. Wipe it off the map. Why should the Akatsuki follow him? Well, aside from killing Itachi and Madara, Sasuke had fixed the statue, permanently. They were blocked from their ultimate goal, more or less for forever. And hadn’t it been Madara’s fondest wish to destroy the Leaf as well? Of course, he was in no position to force them to follow him. And, in fact, aside from what was bound to be a good fight, he had little to offer them. Zetsu tried to decline and Sasuke cut off one of his leaves in the blink of an eye. The next person to say no would lose a limb.
Pein and Sasuke actually got along well, their ideas of total destruction running along the same lines. Konan followed Pein without question. Zetsu was distinctly unhappy, but he could afford to wait for revenge. And Kisame…Well, Kisame was somewhat indifferent. He admitted, with a toothy grin, that he was curious to see what his former partner’s brother could really do. As nice as Sasuke’s work on the statue was, he wanted to see some fireworks.
And so they set out to destroy Konoha, eight against an entire village. They all knew it was a suicidal plan, but they just didn’t care, either from actual indifference or a lack of belief in their own mortality and fallibility.
The battle took nine hours. The village was almost completely destroyed. Sasuke’s forces were gone, and he himself was unconscious now, surrounded by a diminished group of former classmates and colleagues. Blood leaked out from underneath his eyelids. They watched him draw breath. They discussed what to do with him with hand signals, lest they wake him by speaking. They did not turn their backs on him. Night swept over the valley and stars blinked into the sky.
Nine minutes into Kakashi’s birthday, nine minutes into the night following Sasuke‘s return, Sasuke was unceremoniously dumped into Kakashi’s arms. Kakashi looked over the group. Tension knotted and strangled any possible conversation. He nodded and left them in the rubble of Konoha. He took Sasuke to Sakura for healing. A tent city sprawled outward from the hospital, and he wandered through, finally catching sight of her pink hair above the crowd. She treated Sasuke silently, her mouth held tight. Kakashi felt her eyes on his back as he carried his burden to ANBU headquarters. He felt nothing as he turned Sasuke over to Ibiki. All through this, Sasuke didn’t once stir.
-------------
Well! Wasn't that fun? I hope it wasn't too much like boring expository narrative. (I hope it was at least interesting expository narrative!) Just to be clear, this is the only chapter that's even close to being from Sasuke's perspective. Maybe that's because this was the only part of the story that was really his alone? I'm not really sure.
Anyway, I'll be slaving over chapter twelve for the foreseeable future and keeping the prologue-derived plot on the back burner. Kakashi and Sasuke need to work on their interpersonal issues, hahahahaha.
Later!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
Prologue
-------
It had taken Sasuke nine years to get this far. Nine years of hating and growing and training. Nine years to shape himself, nine years of failure and doubt and killing off everything in himself that stood in the way. Nine years to hunt his brother down for the final fight. And now here he was, laying next to his brother’s still-warm body. He was exhausted. He was numb. Itachi’s corpse was still bleeding and he felt the need to get away from it, but he couldn‘t move. He lay there and the blood seeped into his clothing.
And then Madara came and snatched Sasuke’s proof of victory away. Sasuke made to chase, but he too collapsed in an abortive attempt to stand. He woke in a cave, prostrate on a makeshift bed. Madara explained everything and Sasuke’s world broke apart again. He twisted around to see the curse seal on his shoulder. It was still there, but it had changed. Sasuke touched it, and it was like live electricity tearing through him. His vision swam. He fainted.
When he woke for the second time in the cave, Madara was dead. His corpse continued to burn with the Amaterasu’s black flames. It seemed even he could not escape the attack, however instinctive its origins were. Sasuke struggled up off the pallet on the floor. He drew his sword and cut off Madara’s head. That face, nearly untouched by the fire, looked eerily similar to Itachi’s. Sasuke’s left eye opened wider and wider. Fire leapt from it. Madara’s head burned itself out and Sasuke dripped tears of blood.
He staggered down passageways, leaving smears of blood where he rested against the walls. Eventually, Sasuke came to a huge chamber with an seven-eyed statue. No, wait. It had nine eyes, but only seven of them were open. And then he saw his brother’s body at its foot and he didn’t care about the statue‘s eyes anymore.
Sasuke sat beside it--the body (his brother)-- for an indeterminate amount of time. He couldn’t make himself look at it. At him. At what he had been. He began to prepare for the disposal of Itachi.
The smoke and ash bit into his eyes. He breathed his brother in, held his breath until his lungs burned before he exhaled. Sasuke looked upward, watched the smoke spiral around the top of the cave. For the second time, he noticed the statue. This time, though, he realized what it was. He could see that it was beginning to destabilize. Sasuke hadn’t planned for this, didn’t think he’d ever have the misfortune. His options were simple: let it fall apart and be blown up by proximity when the bijuu escaped, or find a way to fix it, at least long enough to get away. What Sasuke really needed was more time. He wanted time to rest and think, but if he didn’t do something now, didn’t start to repair the damage now, it would be too late and he would be dead. The stress of the work still might kill him, but inaction definitely would. Sasuke took a deep breath with his eyes closed. He opened them, Sharingan swirling. He began.
Nine days later, it was done. Sasuke had re-structured the statue and its dangerous contents. When Sasuke finally looked up from his work, he saw that there were four people--no, seven--in the room with him. Karin, Suigetsu, and Juugo made a rough triangle around him. Protecting? Watching over? Sasuke wasn’t sure why they were doing it. But they stood between him and the other four. The others all wore Akatsuki cloaks.
Sasuke’s muscles screamed when he tried to stand. He batted away Karin’s manicured hand, instead allowing Juugo to pull him to his feet. Karin handed him a handkerchief. He gave her a look and she pointed to his nose. He wiped. The cloth came away bloody.
“Nice work,” said one of the cloaked figures.
Sasuke recognized him. It was his brother’s partner. Sasuke wracked his brains, trying to come up with a name. The thinking made his head pound. Or made it worse. He wasn’t really sure, at this point.
“Kisame,” said Suigetsu. “So nice to see you again.”
He bared his teeth in imitation of a smile. Kisame ignored him.
“You missed a spot,” said Kisame.
He pointed to Sasuke’s neck. Sasuke looked. His entire chest was streaked with red and brown. He scrubbed at it halfheartedly and it flaked off a bit at a time. His white shirt was a gory mess at the collar.
After the introductions were over, Sasuke explained that what he wanted was to destroy Konoha. Wipe it off the map. Why should the Akatsuki follow him? Well, aside from killing Itachi and Madara, Sasuke had fixed the statue, permanently. They were blocked from their ultimate goal, more or less for forever. And hadn’t it been Madara’s fondest wish to destroy the Leaf as well? Of course, he was in no position to force them to follow him. And, in fact, aside from what was bound to be a good fight, he had little to offer them. Zetsu tried to decline and Sasuke cut off one of his leaves in the blink of an eye. The next person to say no would lose a limb.
Pein and Sasuke actually got along well, their ideas of total destruction running along the same lines. Konan followed Pein without question. Zetsu was distinctly unhappy, but he could afford to wait for revenge. And Kisame…Well, Kisame was somewhat indifferent. He admitted, with a toothy grin, that he was curious to see what his former partner’s brother could really do. As nice as Sasuke’s work on the statue was, he wanted to see some fireworks.
And so they set out to destroy Konoha, eight against an entire village. They all knew it was a suicidal plan, but they just didn’t care, either from actual indifference or a lack of belief in their own mortality and fallibility.
The battle took nine hours. The village was almost completely destroyed. Sasuke’s forces were gone, and he himself was unconscious now, surrounded by a diminished group of former classmates and colleagues. Blood leaked out from underneath his eyelids. They watched him draw breath. They discussed what to do with him with hand signals, lest they wake him by speaking. They did not turn their backs on him. Night swept over the valley and stars blinked into the sky.
Nine minutes into Kakashi’s birthday, nine minutes into the night following Sasuke‘s return, Sasuke was unceremoniously dumped into Kakashi’s arms. Kakashi looked over the group. Tension knotted and strangled any possible conversation. He nodded and left them in the rubble of Konoha. He took Sasuke to Sakura for healing. A tent city sprawled outward from the hospital, and he wandered through, finally catching sight of her pink hair above the crowd. She treated Sasuke silently, her mouth held tight. Kakashi felt her eyes on his back as he carried his burden to ANBU headquarters. He felt nothing as he turned Sasuke over to Ibiki. All through this, Sasuke didn’t once stir.
-------------
Well! Wasn't that fun? I hope it wasn't too much like boring expository narrative. (I hope it was at least interesting expository narrative!) Just to be clear, this is the only chapter that's even close to being from Sasuke's perspective. Maybe that's because this was the only part of the story that was really his alone? I'm not really sure.
Anyway, I'll be slaving over chapter twelve for the foreseeable future and keeping the prologue-derived plot on the back burner. Kakashi and Sasuke need to work on their interpersonal issues, hahahahaha.
Later!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
Taking a step backward...
Remember a while back when I mentioned a possible prologue? Well, I've come to the conclusion that is is integral to the overall plot of Entropy. I've been editing it, and I expect to post it tomorrow after a final once-over. (Truthfully, it's more or less my favorite part of the story to date, despite writing it way after everything else.)
The content of chapter twelve has to be changed radically in order to get it in line with chapter eleven and the chapters that are yet to come.
It occurred to me today that I've been working on this story for eight months now. Eight months is a long time. Although I haven't been dedicating those eight months solely to this story, I haven't ever completely put it down. Other ideas have come and gone, but I appear to have committed myself to this one.
I have plans for a new, entirely original story. So far I have a general plot (and some specific points as well) but I have no characters to put in it. You would think that plot would kind of come with characters, but I have none, except in the most general of senses--there have to, logically, be people for the setting and environment to have meaning, but specifically, I somehow don't have a place for them to go. My admittedly over-elaborate background work appears to be crowding out the characters. At this point, the people are just vehicles for the what-if scenario I'm so interested in. But! It can be fixed...I hope.
I must go to bed before I turn into a brain-sucking zombie.
Later!
The content of chapter twelve has to be changed radically in order to get it in line with chapter eleven and the chapters that are yet to come.
It occurred to me today that I've been working on this story for eight months now. Eight months is a long time. Although I haven't been dedicating those eight months solely to this story, I haven't ever completely put it down. Other ideas have come and gone, but I appear to have committed myself to this one.
I have plans for a new, entirely original story. So far I have a general plot (and some specific points as well) but I have no characters to put in it. You would think that plot would kind of come with characters, but I have none, except in the most general of senses--there have to, logically, be people for the setting and environment to have meaning, but specifically, I somehow don't have a place for them to go. My admittedly over-elaborate background work appears to be crowding out the characters. At this point, the people are just vehicles for the what-if scenario I'm so interested in. But! It can be fixed...I hope.
I must go to bed before I turn into a brain-sucking zombie.
Later!
08 September 2009
Chapter 11 is done!
Well, okay. It's probably not completely finished, but it's a heck of a lot better and I feel somewhat confident in its lack of suckitude. If I do any more on it, I'm going to get confused and start taking out the good parts.
Chapter 11
------
Even though the house wasn’t very big, Kakashi and Sasuke still rattled around for a few weeks, tried to find places for things and for themselves. They each had a bedroom, and they shared the living room, bathroom, and kitchen. During the construction phase, Sasuke had argued for a week about which bedroom would be his: the one in the northeast corner. But, upon moving in, he decided that Kakashi’s was better and he took it over--when Kakashi had poked his head in, Sasuke had staked his claim with packs of gear on the bed. Kakashi merely sighed and kept unloading crates from the borrowed cart.
For a while, the boxes went round and round on an endless parade through the house as Kakashi or Sasuke changed his mind about what should go where. But everything found a place eventually, and Kakashi and Sasuke now faced the task of carving out niches for themselves.
Sasuke spent almost all of his time in his room. When he wasn’t eating or showering, he was sitting on his bed--or the roof above it--staring into the perpetually dark forest. Kakashi was frequently in the living room, lounging across the couch and thumbing through the same books he‘d been re-reading for years. When he tired of that, he went into the small cleared area in front of the house and made plans to develop a training yard there. The churned up dirt, left over from construction, acquired grass and flowers and plants Kakashi didn’t care to identify.
Sasuke took to yanking up the plants. When Kakashi asked, Sasuke gave him the “you’re an idiot” look. They were weeds, and yards don’t grow weeds. Kakashi questioned the logic in this, seeing as most of the yard was in fact forest. Sasuke refused to stop pulling weeds, and Kakashi decided this vigilante-ism was a tolerable character flaw. Besides, it was ultimately helping his goal of a training yard. Those plants would all get plowed under anyway. Not that Kakashi was in any hurry. He relished the planning.
Creating a training yard required nearly as much thought as that of planning a house. There were so many little details to think on. Kakashi wanted it to be as naturalized as possible; in his travels, he’d seen indoor and outdoor facilities with varying levels of sophistication. He found the obviously artificial ones distasteful. What was the point of training in a space that would never, ever occur in the field? Kakashi wanted a visceral setting, one that punched him in the gut and said “this is real.” He wanted the scents and sounds of nature around him, preferred the roughness of tree bark to the smoothness of a man-made climbing wall and sunlight to the incandescent floodlights of indoor arenas.
This was not to say that he wanted the training ground to resemble solely the forests of Fire country. Kakashi envisioned bits and pieces of foreign landscapes; the sand and rocky scarps of Wind country; the plains bordering Earth country with their six-foot-high grasses and deceptive horizons. He knew there was no way he could replicate the mountains in Snow country, but he gave himself better than fair chances of success with the coastal marshes that led to the Water country archipelago. He also had vague notions of water features--slippery rocks to climb and leap across, water to walk on. The thought alone made his heart pound harder with anticipated excitement. Kakashi wondered briefly if Sasuke had a favorite terrain.
These plans were time and energy consuming, which was, as far as Kakashi was concerned good. There were plenty of other thing he didn’t want to think too hard about, not the least of which was the distinct lack of training he’d been doing lately.
Kakashi was approaching ninja middle-age. Despite no lingering injuries or permanent damage, the hard life he’d lived for nearly three decades was taking its toll. He woke up with stiff joints and odd twinges. These faded away after stretching and working out for a short while, but they kept coming back. Rainy days, much closer together this far into the forest, left Kakashi feeling like he’d completed a particularly challenging mission not long ago.
His body missed the lack of constant exercise training provided. Kakashi told himself it was just readjustment to a lack of adrenaline coursing through him. He felt like he was walking underwater half the time, moving too slowly toward a future he couldn‘t see, even with his Sharingan flaring and wild and calling to the scattering of Uchiha blood in his veins.
Kakashi’s left eye had started hurting again, like back in the early post-transplant days, when he had struggled to integrate it. The eye burned in the socket, seared into his skull and left him much weaker-feeling than he’d like to admit. He tried, very hard, to ignore the un-ignorable parts of his life.
Kakashi felt a certain amount of guilt while trying to keep his head in the sand--just as he hadn’t been training, he hadn’t gotten within throwing distance of the memorial since Sasuke had come to live with him. He hadn’t had time. Or energy. Or something else necessary to do what he had to do, what he felt driven to do. He was recovering whatever it was that had been missing before. The guilt was becoming relentless and the urge to sit atop the memorial stones unremitting. Kakashi was half-surprised at the guilt he’d accrued over the past months, how heavily it weighed on him. It made him sloppy. It was distasteful and oddly disgraceful.
He could have been killed, literally killed, dozens of times over through that carelessness--by slipping up with Sasuke; by hostile nin while he remained only half-aware in his fugue of self-recrimination; or even in accidents that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been preventable. As much as it pained him to admit it, Kakashi couldn’t keep ignoring his dereliction. He needed to go to the monument again.
--------
I know it's not a very active chapter, but I just couldn't get to where I wanted to go without all this almost-extremely-boring narrative. I suppose it's a transitional chapter. The worst part of re-working this was, quite honestly, telling myself it was okay to chuck out the parts that weren't fitting. I get stuck with that all the time.
I cringe at setting aside what I've already written, but the idea of the story keeps changing. (Seriously. I've got at least three different plots that I could implement at this point...and more if I go back and change things from the beginning.) The heart of this story isn't static, and it's damnably hard to pin down and elucidate what, for now, is only a sort of vague instinct about how things are going to play out--despite me already knowing the plot and knowing what is going to happen, all roads leading to Rome and all that. Even the littlest changes now will affect the main plot points in future.
Ramble, ramble, ramble. Who the heck knows when chapter twelve will be done? I may skip right ahead to thirteen, if twelve proves inconsequential.
Later!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
Chapter 11
------
Even though the house wasn’t very big, Kakashi and Sasuke still rattled around for a few weeks, tried to find places for things and for themselves. They each had a bedroom, and they shared the living room, bathroom, and kitchen. During the construction phase, Sasuke had argued for a week about which bedroom would be his: the one in the northeast corner. But, upon moving in, he decided that Kakashi’s was better and he took it over--when Kakashi had poked his head in, Sasuke had staked his claim with packs of gear on the bed. Kakashi merely sighed and kept unloading crates from the borrowed cart.
For a while, the boxes went round and round on an endless parade through the house as Kakashi or Sasuke changed his mind about what should go where. But everything found a place eventually, and Kakashi and Sasuke now faced the task of carving out niches for themselves.
Sasuke spent almost all of his time in his room. When he wasn’t eating or showering, he was sitting on his bed--or the roof above it--staring into the perpetually dark forest. Kakashi was frequently in the living room, lounging across the couch and thumbing through the same books he‘d been re-reading for years. When he tired of that, he went into the small cleared area in front of the house and made plans to develop a training yard there. The churned up dirt, left over from construction, acquired grass and flowers and plants Kakashi didn’t care to identify.
Sasuke took to yanking up the plants. When Kakashi asked, Sasuke gave him the “you’re an idiot” look. They were weeds, and yards don’t grow weeds. Kakashi questioned the logic in this, seeing as most of the yard was in fact forest. Sasuke refused to stop pulling weeds, and Kakashi decided this vigilante-ism was a tolerable character flaw. Besides, it was ultimately helping his goal of a training yard. Those plants would all get plowed under anyway. Not that Kakashi was in any hurry. He relished the planning.
Creating a training yard required nearly as much thought as that of planning a house. There were so many little details to think on. Kakashi wanted it to be as naturalized as possible; in his travels, he’d seen indoor and outdoor facilities with varying levels of sophistication. He found the obviously artificial ones distasteful. What was the point of training in a space that would never, ever occur in the field? Kakashi wanted a visceral setting, one that punched him in the gut and said “this is real.” He wanted the scents and sounds of nature around him, preferred the roughness of tree bark to the smoothness of a man-made climbing wall and sunlight to the incandescent floodlights of indoor arenas.
This was not to say that he wanted the training ground to resemble solely the forests of Fire country. Kakashi envisioned bits and pieces of foreign landscapes; the sand and rocky scarps of Wind country; the plains bordering Earth country with their six-foot-high grasses and deceptive horizons. He knew there was no way he could replicate the mountains in Snow country, but he gave himself better than fair chances of success with the coastal marshes that led to the Water country archipelago. He also had vague notions of water features--slippery rocks to climb and leap across, water to walk on. The thought alone made his heart pound harder with anticipated excitement. Kakashi wondered briefly if Sasuke had a favorite terrain.
These plans were time and energy consuming, which was, as far as Kakashi was concerned good. There were plenty of other thing he didn’t want to think too hard about, not the least of which was the distinct lack of training he’d been doing lately.
Kakashi was approaching ninja middle-age. Despite no lingering injuries or permanent damage, the hard life he’d lived for nearly three decades was taking its toll. He woke up with stiff joints and odd twinges. These faded away after stretching and working out for a short while, but they kept coming back. Rainy days, much closer together this far into the forest, left Kakashi feeling like he’d completed a particularly challenging mission not long ago.
His body missed the lack of constant exercise training provided. Kakashi told himself it was just readjustment to a lack of adrenaline coursing through him. He felt like he was walking underwater half the time, moving too slowly toward a future he couldn‘t see, even with his Sharingan flaring and wild and calling to the scattering of Uchiha blood in his veins.
Kakashi’s left eye had started hurting again, like back in the early post-transplant days, when he had struggled to integrate it. The eye burned in the socket, seared into his skull and left him much weaker-feeling than he’d like to admit. He tried, very hard, to ignore the un-ignorable parts of his life.
Kakashi felt a certain amount of guilt while trying to keep his head in the sand--just as he hadn’t been training, he hadn’t gotten within throwing distance of the memorial since Sasuke had come to live with him. He hadn’t had time. Or energy. Or something else necessary to do what he had to do, what he felt driven to do. He was recovering whatever it was that had been missing before. The guilt was becoming relentless and the urge to sit atop the memorial stones unremitting. Kakashi was half-surprised at the guilt he’d accrued over the past months, how heavily it weighed on him. It made him sloppy. It was distasteful and oddly disgraceful.
He could have been killed, literally killed, dozens of times over through that carelessness--by slipping up with Sasuke; by hostile nin while he remained only half-aware in his fugue of self-recrimination; or even in accidents that, under ordinary circumstances, would have been preventable. As much as it pained him to admit it, Kakashi couldn’t keep ignoring his dereliction. He needed to go to the monument again.
--------
I know it's not a very active chapter, but I just couldn't get to where I wanted to go without all this almost-extremely-boring narrative. I suppose it's a transitional chapter. The worst part of re-working this was, quite honestly, telling myself it was okay to chuck out the parts that weren't fitting. I get stuck with that all the time.
I cringe at setting aside what I've already written, but the idea of the story keeps changing. (Seriously. I've got at least three different plots that I could implement at this point...and more if I go back and change things from the beginning.) The heart of this story isn't static, and it's damnably hard to pin down and elucidate what, for now, is only a sort of vague instinct about how things are going to play out--despite me already knowing the plot and knowing what is going to happen, all roads leading to Rome and all that. Even the littlest changes now will affect the main plot points in future.
Ramble, ramble, ramble. Who the heck knows when chapter twelve will be done? I may skip right ahead to thirteen, if twelve proves inconsequential.
Later!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. All rights remain with its original creator, Masashi Kishimoto. I make no profit from writing these stories.
04 September 2009
Salty language ahoy!
I'm chalking this one up as a particularly sloppy character exercise. I have no interest at all in continuing it. It's a snapshot of two unhappy people, Paul and Tina. This is vaguely based on some eavesdropping I did over the weekend, but mostly I made it up. I am not convinced Tina is the right name for the female lead, but I can't think of anything else right now. I'll probably come back later and change it to something better.
Again, warning for persistent profanity.
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PAUL AND TINA ARE IN LOVE
It’s so stupid. Paul keeps accusing Tina of flirting with customers while she pours coffee and takes orders at Dunkin Donuts. Every day he yells a little louder, as if hitting a certain range of deafening will suddenly cause her to crumble and confess that, when men come up and order the four pack of munchkins and a small coffee, she goes out back with them and delivers the best and worst sort of customer service Paul can imagine.
Paul is a confirmed cheater. But that doesn’t matter. Oh no. That has nothing to do with his rampaging against her imagined flirtations over bagels and cream cheese and coolatas.
Sometimes she thinks it’s a competition, to see who can say “fuck you” the most. Tina slams the front door and he comes out after her, drags her back inside and kicks the door closed himself, louder. So she goes into her bedroom--their bedroom but for the moment it is hers--she slams the bedroom door once, opens it, slams it again and opens it and slams it a third time in Paul’s face.
Tina cries a lot during this extended argument and he says fuck you, stop crying you bitch I don’t fucking care if I make you cry. And she screams back at him; Tina’s not crying because she’s sad and he’s hurting her feelings. She cries because she is so angry and so sick of this fight because goddamnit it’s not true! He’s the one who cheated, not her!
Paul’s taken to dropping in at Tina’s work, no doubt trying to rack up evidence against her in his mind. She knows he doesn’t understand that customer service means being friendly and smiling, making small talk if Tina wants to keep her job. He tries to drag her down, yelling that she’ll never stop working there, working that shitty job and coming home smelling like burned coffee and deep fried sugar. It makes him want to puke on her.
At least it pays the rent, keeps them off the street and from starving to death. So what if it’s not a great job with perks like paid vacation and health insurance? You’re fucking lucky to have a steady job right now at all! Where’s your half of the rent, you fucking bum? Oh that’s right, you don’t have it because you haven’t been able to get hired again since the last time when you punched out the manager and threw a wrench at the customer who said you’d done a bad job on his car. Paul keeps getting fired for being an asshole.
Tina’s myspace has “Paul+Tina 4ever!” plastered all over it. Maybe she hasn’t been on in a while, because today is the fifth day in a row they’ve been fighting.
-------
Honestly, I think both Tina and Paul are unsympathetic characters. If I were to continue it, I'm sure they'd get into a physical fight with each other. Mutual domestic abuse. Blargh.
Anyway, let me know what you think!
Later!
Again, warning for persistent profanity.
------
PAUL AND TINA ARE IN LOVE
It’s so stupid. Paul keeps accusing Tina of flirting with customers while she pours coffee and takes orders at Dunkin Donuts. Every day he yells a little louder, as if hitting a certain range of deafening will suddenly cause her to crumble and confess that, when men come up and order the four pack of munchkins and a small coffee, she goes out back with them and delivers the best and worst sort of customer service Paul can imagine.
Paul is a confirmed cheater. But that doesn’t matter. Oh no. That has nothing to do with his rampaging against her imagined flirtations over bagels and cream cheese and coolatas.
Sometimes she thinks it’s a competition, to see who can say “fuck you” the most. Tina slams the front door and he comes out after her, drags her back inside and kicks the door closed himself, louder. So she goes into her bedroom--their bedroom but for the moment it is hers--she slams the bedroom door once, opens it, slams it again and opens it and slams it a third time in Paul’s face.
Tina cries a lot during this extended argument and he says fuck you, stop crying you bitch I don’t fucking care if I make you cry. And she screams back at him; Tina’s not crying because she’s sad and he’s hurting her feelings. She cries because she is so angry and so sick of this fight because goddamnit it’s not true! He’s the one who cheated, not her!
Paul’s taken to dropping in at Tina’s work, no doubt trying to rack up evidence against her in his mind. She knows he doesn’t understand that customer service means being friendly and smiling, making small talk if Tina wants to keep her job. He tries to drag her down, yelling that she’ll never stop working there, working that shitty job and coming home smelling like burned coffee and deep fried sugar. It makes him want to puke on her.
At least it pays the rent, keeps them off the street and from starving to death. So what if it’s not a great job with perks like paid vacation and health insurance? You’re fucking lucky to have a steady job right now at all! Where’s your half of the rent, you fucking bum? Oh that’s right, you don’t have it because you haven’t been able to get hired again since the last time when you punched out the manager and threw a wrench at the customer who said you’d done a bad job on his car. Paul keeps getting fired for being an asshole.
Tina’s myspace has “Paul+Tina 4ever!” plastered all over it. Maybe she hasn’t been on in a while, because today is the fifth day in a row they’ve been fighting.
-------
Honestly, I think both Tina and Paul are unsympathetic characters. If I were to continue it, I'm sure they'd get into a physical fight with each other. Mutual domestic abuse. Blargh.
Anyway, let me know what you think!
Later!
03 September 2009
Are you as bothered by my lack of updates as I am?
Okay, I really have no good excuses. I've been completely side-tracked from pretty much every creative project I have going, including writing. I've lost my motivation over the past few weeks. I'm consumed by the internal things that, on occasion, drive me to write. I'm not in the figurative driver's seat as much as I want--and need--to be in order to move forward. I have done precious little editing of Entropy's chapter eleven, and no actual writing of it.
Nonetheless, I sat down this morning (Wednesday) and started to write something new and original and wholly mine. I'm not sure whether it will grow into something larger, or if I should think of it as a back-in-the-saddle sort of exercise. It is marginally true, but most of it is my imagination running wild with some overheard conversations.
I woke up this morning full of creative ideas-- story fragments and crumbs of plots and unwritten, ungainly poetry. I've been physically sick all day and have ignored all but the aforementioned one...and I haven't looked at that one beyond glancing at the screen while typing. (Yeah, I'm one of those people who looks at the keyboard. I can manage looking at the screen, but I really do better focusing on my fingers. Typing classes in school were interminable.)
I'm hesitant to post the new stuff right this second, even though I'm sure it would be satisfying. I need to give it (at the least) a quick edit. I may decide it's not worth my time. Or I may find that the subject is something I want to explore further..in which case I'll probably post some sort of teaser.
Holy cow. It's time for bed or something.
Later!
Nonetheless, I sat down this morning (Wednesday) and started to write something new and original and wholly mine. I'm not sure whether it will grow into something larger, or if I should think of it as a back-in-the-saddle sort of exercise. It is marginally true, but most of it is my imagination running wild with some overheard conversations.
I woke up this morning full of creative ideas-- story fragments and crumbs of plots and unwritten, ungainly poetry. I've been physically sick all day and have ignored all but the aforementioned one...and I haven't looked at that one beyond glancing at the screen while typing. (Yeah, I'm one of those people who looks at the keyboard. I can manage looking at the screen, but I really do better focusing on my fingers. Typing classes in school were interminable.)
I'm hesitant to post the new stuff right this second, even though I'm sure it would be satisfying. I need to give it (at the least) a quick edit. I may decide it's not worth my time. Or I may find that the subject is something I want to explore further..in which case I'll probably post some sort of teaser.
Holy cow. It's time for bed or something.
Later!
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