The Dying Cycle, Ch. 3, Original Work

Chapter 1, Notes, and Acknowledgements
Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Learning English

Ghanior did not like to admit, even to himself, how afraid he was. What frightened him was nothing more than physical pain, the banal intruder into his higher consciousness. An Ash'torian soldier should not operate in that domain, like an animal. A man who had nothing but duty left had no right to balk at performing his duty. But he was tired of hurting. He had hurt from the moment his ship had Walked through, and even though the ship had been programmed to follow the current and Ghanior's own Jana band had been minimally active, Jana had kicked him in the gut as always. And since he'd Walked to Ishan's house, he hadn't thrown off the pain behind his eyes. And now he had to hook his head into this damn machine.

In the waning afternoon, he sat in the dust and ate half a sandwich, torn between hunger and the virtual certainty he'd throw up when this language printer stuck into his nervous system. He welcomed the wilted leaves and soggy bread and overprocessed meat-like product. Good food would only have made him remember the possibility of relaxation.

Ishan and Mei paced up and down like spiders weaving a web from the central axis of the ship, testing the range of his makeshift diffractor. He kept pulling his eyes forcibly off Ishan. He looked so young, so not very different from the boy who'd fallen into Jana all those years ago. A decade ago he'd returned (like a dream), like a ghost... like the long-fleeing brother. Even the cut of the long, black hair he let fall around his shoulders was the same. Ghanior planted his eyes on the ship.( Read more... )

30 Days of Fan Fiction Meme, Day 4

4 – Do you have a "muse" character, that speaks to you more than others, or that tries to push their way in, even when the fic isn't about them? Who are they, and why did that character became your muse?

Not really. I write a fic about a character because that's my exigency for writing fic (ex. if I want to write about Katze, I write a Katze fic), but I don't write about one particular character especially recurrently. Occasionally, I do a challenge that asks me to write a character I wouldn't ordinarily choose (ex. I wrote a Vila-centric fic for vilakins), but once I've picked my task, I do my best to be true to that situation. If I'm writing Vilafic, I'm writing Vilafic.

I think this is actually very important to who I am as a writer, reader, and person. Staying "on character" and not letting one character dominate my brain is an aspect of dialogic thinking: seeing a story as mix of different voices, each speaking from their own center. I also see the world this way and am annoyed by literature (or life situations) in which one person, couple, whatever is privileged as being objectively/externally "more important" than the rest. At certain times (in life and art) one's focus is on a particular person or situation, but that's subjective, and if one's focus is called to be somewhere else, it should be somewhere else for the duration of that need.

( Rest of Questions )