Tuesday, May 17, 2011

May 17th

Last night, Keith shooed me out of my own kitchen with a dish towel.

"Go away," he told me. "Go sit down; I got this."

About half an hour later, he told me, with grand gestures: "Your dinner is served, m'lady. To the left you will find a plate and fork with your name on it."

He had prepared pizza and cauliflower with cheese sauce and was very proud of himself. It was delicious.

I went jogging this morning and I feel awesome. I have a little route established. I'm back to three stints of jog/walk, but that's ok. It won't be long before I'll be back to my usual level.

I have been having the hardest time with my writing lately.

The Ceallach story has simply sat at this one point for days now, while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on with it. I wrote it forward about three paragraphs, but in a completely different voice from my usual one.

I thought, what the hell, maybe it just needs to end? Maybe I need to completely rethink my fourth plot line?

This points out the futility of trying to plan out a story in advance. It's just pointless. I have no idea what story I'm writing until I'm writing it. I know lots of writers do that, plan it out, and I know it's more efficient. But I can't do it.

Well, I can. But it's just a waste of time. Anyway, what it is, is that I'm in the beginning of the end of the story and the ending of any story is always a quagmire. It's such slow going.

Then, with my other story, I had to sit down and do some research on world construct, in order to know how my characters are going to be able to move around in it. After I did that, it began to move forward again and I wrote this scene.

Excerpt: (Ishi no Torii)

Satoru tied a tightly wrapped white cloth around his wide head, above his eyes and below his pointed ears and began to bustle around the small kitchen area with focused eyes and obvious expertise. With a massive butcher knife in his clawed hand, he sliced green onions and a white and pink roll of naruto, and cut a hunk of blackly roasted meat into paper thin, rosy pink slices.

He dipped noodles into a pot of briskly boiling water, lifted them up to let the water stream off them, and placed them into blue and white ceramic bowls. Over this he gently ladled out a scoop of rich, golden broth, and poured it slowly over the noodles. Lastly, he deftly arranged the things he’d chopped over the top. He arranged these so beautifully that it was as though he were making a delicate landscape in miniature.

It was like gold, Gilly saw, when he placed her bowl in front of her. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Tenshio lifted his bowl in his left hand and drank from the rim. She did the same. The aromatic steam rose up into her face and melted her bones. At the taste of the broth, all the stress washed out of her; the skirt of her uniform lost its starch and her eyes took on the soft luminescence of a kerosene lamp.

Tenshio lifted out a pair of wooden chopsticks from a chipped ceramic mug on the counter top. Gilly did the same. She looked at them, and then she looked at Tenshio. He held the long chopsticks mysteriously in his hand with the long, curving claws and with them, was adroitly lifting the noodles from the bowl. The noodles glistened pale and golden in the lamp light, streaming with broth.

Gilly sighed in longing. She rearranged the long thin sticks in her right hand. When she tightened her hand, one stick went flying over the counter and the other into her lap. Grimly, she pulled another pair from the mug. Satoru lifted the lid off of a pot and held it in front of his face, his pointed, black ears visible above the metal rim. Tenshio ignored her.

She tried again. With whitened knuckles and the tip of her tongue showing, she got the chopsticks to stay in her determined hand. But, when she attempted to pull up noodles, all she managed to do was splash broth in a fine, golden spray up unto her face. Carefully, she removed a sliced green onion from one side of her nose, looked at it, popped it into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

When Tenshio had finished eating, he rested his left elbow on the counter and watched her, an amused look on his face. Satoru had lowered the lid, but never let go of it. At first, his shoulders had slumped in dismay, but then the corners of his wide, ferocious mouth began curling up in arabesques of hilarity.

Satoru turned his eyes to Tenshio, as if to ask where he had come across such a creature as the wilted, cross eyed girl covered in broth and clutching chopsticks, one in each hand. She sat hunched over, her face hovering over the bowl. Occasionally, she managed to fish up a few noodles and sucked them into her mouth before they could slip back down into the swirling heart of the broth.

After watching Gilly chase down a slice of fish cake across the counter top with her chopsticks clutched willy-nilly in her fist, and with the burning eyes of obsession, Satoru leaned forward.

“Give it up, little sister,” he whispered. “The chopsticks have won.”

“Never,” Gilly declared, passionately skewering the errant piece of meat with both chopsticks at once. She ducked her head and bit the slice off the sticks, before it could fall.

Tenshio sat up and took the chopsticks, one after the other, from her hands. “Idiot,” he said calmly. “Put out your right hand.”

She held it out. He moved her fingers and slid the chopsticks into them.

“You must use your thumb and forefinger.”

Awkwardly, but with delight, she maneuvered the chopsticks correctly for the first time. Tenshio pulled a clothe napkin from a wooden box and handed it to her. She wiped off her greasy face with her free hand, unwilling to release her new found grasp on the chopsticks.

“Thank you very much,” she said.

Her eating continued a messy business, but she managed to extract almost all the noodles from the bowl. By the time she saw the blue design inked onto the bottom, her fingers were cramped and aching. There was a blister on the inside of her middle finger, but she was replete with the tasty combination of victory and ramen.

“Thank you, please come again,” intoned Satoru, bowing from behind the counter, where he was mopping up the sticky mess Gilly had left behind.