A Little Off The Top

Well, I haven't been making as much progress on my novel as I'd like. Oh, I'm still on track to have a good chance of finishing it by the end of the month, despite its projected length being well over the 50,000 words prescribed by NaNoWriMo. But I haven't made as much progress as I'd like.

But more on that on Monday. Right now, there's something else I wanted to write about.

At first, if it occurred to me there was something I ought to add or change early on, I'd go ahead and make the change immediately. But as I went on, I've decided that it's probably better to get the whole first draft down first, and then go back and do the edits. So I've been making notes as to what edits are needed, but I'll take care of worrying about the details after the first draft is done.

Which is good as far as my NaNoWriMo wordcount, because one needed edit is going to chop off 2000-odd words.

I've been reading the Evil Editor blog as well as that of the late lamented Miss Snark (well, late in that the blog is no longer updating; at the time of this writing Miss Snark is presumably still alive), and have learned one thing I somehow missed before. Namely, that it's a good idea with a query letter to include the first three to five pages of the manuscript. And I've been considering whether the first three to five pages of my manuscript would really be a good sample, given that they mostly involve the protagonist emerging from a barrel, finding himself in a roomful of barrels, and then finding that there are other people in the room. Exciting? Maybe not. But it was, I thought, necessary, and anyway there were some bits in it—like the opening sentence—that I rather liked.

I've heard the advice before that a writer could try chopping off the first chapter or two of his novel, to begin in the action. A writer friend gave me that advice concerning a novel I'd written previously, without reading the novel or knowing anything about it. (The novel in question was the 170,000-word behemoth I mentioned in my first post.) In that case, as it happened, the advice didn't really fit. That novel already began with a big, attention-grabbing action scene, a scene that moreover introduced a number of important characters that wouldn't appear again until significantly later. (No, it wasn't a prologue, as my friend assumed when I told him this. It did lead directly into the succeeding scenes. The novel did have a prologue, but it was only a few pages long and it wasn't what I was referring to as the beginning of the novel.) Chopping off the first chapter would have deleted a lot of important set-up and left the novel starting with all the drama of the protagonist reading a magazine in bed, and even just chopping off the first few scenes, apart from delaying the introduction of some key characters, would have started the novel at a garden party. That novel, whatever its other flaws, I think was already starting in about the right place. (If one discounts the possibly unnecessary prologue.)

However, while chopping off the first chapter or two isn't one-size-fits-all advice that applies to every novel ever written... in some cases it may actually be a good idea. And I've come around to realizing that the first chapter of my NaNoWriMo novel should probably go. Oh, sure, it's got action in it, as the protagonist tries to evade guards and escape a room. But the action takes a while to get going, and isn't all that thrilling when it does. And there is a bit of somewhat important exposition, but nothing that can't be fit into the next chapter. And yes, there are some lines I'm fond of, such as that aforementioned opening line, that really can't go anywhere else and would have to be sacrificed completely if that chapter were deleted, but... well, I think that sacrifice may be necessary. So, yeah... at this point, I'm intending, when I rewrite the novel (probably in December), to chop the entire first chapter and start with what's now the second, inserting a few lines to patch some necessary details.

Since the first chapter is going to be deleted anyway, I figured I might as well post it below (after the jump), to give you an idea for... well, for what it was going to be, and to give you a taste of the story, albeit a taste that won't make it into the finished version. (Please keep in mind that this is an unedited first draft, not polished prose; the final novel is, of course, going to go through a lot of editing and rewrites before I consider shopping it around.)



The world turned inside-out, and Arac had a thousand simultaneous nightmares.

The worst of it was over quickly, but Arac still felt queasy, and he still saw things. There was nothing he should be seeing, except the tiny circle of light at the edge of the barrel lid above him, but every once in a while, just for an instant, he thought in the darkness he saw a leering red demon; or a spider with far more legs than any spider should have; or a floating black shape that was, impossibly, somehow even darker than the darkness of the barrel's interior. Maybe it was just his imagination; maybe he'd been hiding inside the barrel too long.

But the movement he was fairly sure wasn't his imagination. The barrel was moving, not just moving but swaying, yawing, tipping first in one direction and then in another. Arac didn't know what was going on, but he knew that something was seriously wrong.

Gathering his courage, Arac raised his head and carefully lifted one side of the barrel lid, just enough to see outside.

After what he had just experienced, what he saw was almost disappointingly mundane, though still unexpected. He was in a huge low-ceilinged room, made of some yellowish material that might be wood, though he didn't see any grain. He could see at least fifty more barrels, he thought, and beyond them nothing but the wall.

Then the barrel suddenly lurched again, and the entire room lurched with it. The barrel alone wasn't moving; everything around him was. Was he on a ship? He certainly wasn't still on the dock where he had hidden in the barrel. But he hadn't felt the barrel being loaded onto a vessel. Oh, the barrel had been moving, certainly, but in a way as if it was already on board; there had been no lifting, no transition... nothing except that weird, horrible, momentary feeling that everything was inverted and that all of space was twisting in on itself.

Not seeing anything obviously dangerous in the room, he went so far as to remove the barrel lid completely and stand up so that he could get a better look. Almost immediately he saw that his first impression of the room had been slightly off. The ceiling wasn't low at all; it was just that the barrel he was in was near the ceiling, stacked on top of layers of other barrels below. However he'd gotten here, he could at least count himself lucky he hadn't ended up in one of the barrels on the bottom.

Carefully, Arac climbed all the way out of the barrel and explored the room from his high vantage point, crawling gingerly over the tops of the other barrels, testing each one as he came to it to be sure it was stable. Judging from how much they shifted with his weight, all the other barrels were empty. (Which raised another question, for that matter... if someone had loaded the barrels onto a ship without him feeling it somehow, how would they not have noticed his barrel's additional weight?)

As far as he could see, there was only one exit from the room, a doorway that led to a narrow stairwell. From his current vantage point, he could only see the first few steps of the stairwell; there was no telling what was at the top. He was about to move over closer to the stairwell when movement caught his eye and he froze.

He wasn't alone in the room. There was someone else there, near the base of the stairwell. The stacked barrels blocked his view from where he was, and all he could see was the top of a head covered in grey-brown hair, but that was enough. He wasn't getting out of this room without being seen.

For a moment he considered just going back to the barrel he had been hiding in, or even hiding in a different barrel -- they seemed all more or less the same -- and waiting until whatever vessel he assumed he was on reached its destination and the barrels were unloaded. But that wasn't really practical; even if he could relieve himself in the barrels, he would need food and water. Besides, these barrels had to be here for a reason; eventually, whoever had put the barrels here would want to use them, and he'd be found. At some point, he'd have to get out, or at least find some food and water and preferably a more secure hiding place. That didn't mean he'd have to make a dash for it now -- it was possible that whoever was in the room wouldn't stay here all the time. But he might as well try to get a better look at what he was up against.

Arac cautiously crept forward at the top of the barrels, positioning himself where he could get a better view of the person below, and hoping whoever was down there wouldn't happen to look up. As he finally got to the edge of the top layer of barrels and peered down over it, he had a shock. There were not one but two people in the room, but what really shocked him was that one of them wasn't exactly a person. It was some kind of green monster with six hollow tubes for arms, and an earless, elongated head that bore three eyes arranged in a vertical line that took up the whole front of its head, leaving no room for a mouth or nose. Even the other, the one the top of whose head he had already glimpsed, looked mostly human but not entirely human; she had huge claws on the ends of her fingers, and her bright pink and purple ears were fanned like the fins of a blenny.

He realized he had let out an audible gasp, and froze for a moment fearing the creatures below had heard him. There was no sign that they had, however; with luck, he'd been too far away. Keeping his eyes on them, he slowly edged backward.

That was a mistake. Since he couldn't see where he was going, his foot caught on the edge of a barrel and knocked it briefly off balance. The barrel tottered for a moment before coming to a rest, but in that moment the sound of its wobbling was much louder than his gasp had been.

Arac held his breath and flattened himself against the barrel tops. His hopes that the noise from the doddering barrel went unheard were soon dashed by a voice from below.

"Did you hear that?"

For all the bizarre appearance of the two beings below, the voice sounded human enough... there was something a little off about it, maybe; it seemed a bit too sibilant in a way that human voices generally aren't; but that could possibly just have been an odd accent. The voice sounded female, so he guessed it came from the woman with the fin ears, though for all he knew the green monster could have been female too.

"I heard it."

No, that was the green monster: a wet alien voice that seemed as if it ought to belong to a sponge.

Arac didn't dare move; he still clung to a desperate hope that maybe if they didn't hear anything else they'd ignore it. But then the woman called up.

"Ahoy there!" Even aside from its strange sibilance, there was something unpleasant about the woman's voice; something about her tone gave the impression that she was the type of woman who very much liked things to go her way, and could become very cross if they didn't. "Anybody there?"

Arac still kept motionless. He thought about hiding in a barrel again, but didn't want to risk the noise.

There was silence for a moment, and then a new sound. A scraping, clacking sound that Arac couldn't place at first. And then he realized what it was. Someone was climbing the barrels.

Well, staying motionless wouldn't do any good now. Arac quickly pulled the top off the nearest barrel. But it was already too late; he saw a sudden bit of green out of the corner of his eye which when he turned to look at it proved to be the monster's head emerging over the barrels. Those rubbery limbs seemed to have allowed it to climb unexpectedly quickly. And when it reached for another handhold, Arac saw why; out of the hole at the end of the creature's arm emerged a half-dozen smaller tendrils, each one snaking independently over the barrels to find its own grip.

Arac didn't intend to let the monster get any closer. He lifted the lid he had pulled off the barrel and hurled it like a discus, as hard as he could, right at the monster's head.

He had half-expected to miss entirely, but his aim was better than he had thought. The monster raised one of its arms to ward off the blow, but was still knocked back by the force. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to dislodge it from the barrels; it staggered a bit, but then kept coming. Arac slipped down between two of the barrels on the top tier and then tried to push outward at a barrel at the next layer down, hoping to dislodge it. Just as he saw the monster's top gray eye glare at him over the barrel above him, it worked; the barrel he was pushing at came free and toppled, and the monster went down with it.

Arac ventured to go over to where the monster was and look. Some of the barrels that had before been so neatly stacked were now in disarray in the formerly clear area near the stairwell, and the monster was down there among them, but neither it nor the woman seemed to have been significantly injured. The monster started toward Arac again, but Arac pushed down more barrels on top of it, and then started grabbing the nearest empty barrels and hurling them down at the two below. Both of them cursed at him, but didn't seem too deterred, but at least he thought he'd slowed them enough to buy him some time.

If he hid in a barrel again, would they bother to look for him? Of course they would; there was nowhere else he could be hiding. Still, while it seemed like a stupid idea, he couldn't come up with a better one offhand, and maybe at least he could take them by surprise. Tossing down a few more barrels to delay the pursuit, he scampered nimbly back over the remaining stacked barrels near the back wall and picked one at random to hide in.

He heard movement outside. They were looking for him, naturally. But there were a lot of barrels in the room; maybe they wouldn't bother looking through them all. That didn't seem likely, but it was the only hope he had. He wished he had some sort of weapon, but the barrels were completely empty, and he had nothing on him at all. Nothing but his teeth and nails... though maybe that would be enough to tip the scales.

"I don't see him anywhere," he heard the monster say, and allowed himself to think that maybe they would be stupid enough not to look in the barrel.

"He's in a barrel, of course," the woman said, quickly putting an end to that.

Arac heard them moving nearby; he heard barrels opening and closing. They were getting closer. He heard them look into a barrel next to his, and he hardly dared breathe. But then instead of his barrel, they opened another adjacent one.

Then the scrape of wood was louder, and the thin curve of light above him got slightly larger. They were opening his barrel.

Before they got it all the way open, he threw off the lid himself, leaping out, and sank his teeth into the arm of the fin-eared woman. She yelled, and the monster came from the other side, and he kicked out his foot and connected solidly with its face, following that with a punch to the woman's gut. Before either of his opponents could recover, Arac leaped down the now rather untidily heaped barrels and managed to reach the staircase. He heard the woman and the monster not far behind as he ran up the stairs, only to find a latched door on the top. Fortunately, the latch was easily undoable from this side, and he quickly pulled the latch and opened the door.

And then he saw the sky.

The sky was so totally wrong, so utterly incomprehensible, that he couldn't help stopping and staring at it.

"Gotcha," said the woman, as she and the monster grabbed him from behind.