The Language of Fire excerpt

Below are the first three paragraphs (very much rough drafts) of a project I have been working on for quite some time now called The Language of Fire.

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In a world that had become shades of grey to me, the ballroom gleamed with color. As guest after guest stepped daintily down the marble stairs, I stared around in wonder, captivated by the beauty of it all. Each dress was a different color of shimmering fabric, floating around the dancer who flaunted it. The room seemed alive, everything moving in a blur of glitter. No one noticed me—not in such a world as this. This was to my advantage. When the dark man came, he did not see me either.

He arrived last, after the first dance had already finished and the second had begun, so that only those without partners witnessed his entrance. What set him apart was not his gloomy attire; rather it was his firm manner of moving. He looked very solid, while the dancers in the gaudy dresses seemed about to leave the ground. Everything he touched appeared less frivolous, and every eye that met his changed in some way.

Someone dropped a glass on the other side of the expansive room. The harsh tinkling of shattering crystal fit the dark man so perfectly that I shivered. When I turned back to look for the man, I could not find him. I expected to feel a lighter air about the ballroom now that his presence no longer weighed on the place, but nothing had changed. It was as if his body had gone, but his shadow still lingered. He had made the illusion hollow for me, and, without him to observe, I no longer found intrigue in the ball.

Beginnings

First sentences of writing projects I never finished and some comments on them:

 

1. As the sun set on the shore, the moon shone brightly through the clouds over the sea.

This is from something I wrote nearly six years ago. The rest of it doesn’t get any less cheesy. It was a phase of my life (which is probably ongoing) where I tried really hard to sound sophisticated, but in retrospect, I just laugh.

 

2. A voice carried over the waves, across time, riding on the wind.

Ah, the personification. I probably still overuse personification. To those, like me, who are fascinated with describing objects in unnecessarily artistic ways to make them appear very different than they actually are, I highly recommend The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, which I am currently reading.

 

3. In a world that had become shades of grey to me, the ballroom gleamed with color.

I am still working on this one, so I can’t make fun of it quite as much. I’m not even sure I fully understand what I meant by this sentence. When I wrote it, and actually the entire first page, I had no idea what the plot would be, who the main character was (not even a gender), or really anything at all besides a very particular image of a ballroom.

 

4. A sunrise stained the sky, oblivious to the ominous clouds opposite it.

More personification, of course! I’m a pretty auditory person, and I write very much by sound, so the accidental alliteration (ha! See what I did there? It was even accidental!) does not surprise me.

 

This has been a self-critique with Rachel. Tune in next time for something equally as unusual–or maybe not.

An Excerpt from an Untitled and Unfinished Short Story

I have always wanted to dance in the rain. To unleash myself on the world. But the world never wanted me. An outcast, an exile in the crowded cities, the barren deserts. A stumbling wanderer leaving no more than a microscopic smudge on history. A smudge, the evidence of a mistake, something that couldn’t quite be erased but was forgotten anyway.

Passion.

I love to read. To unleash my soul from this imprisonment called reality and to allow it to fall deeply, passionately, gently in love. To become entranced by fairies and terrorized by darkness. To lie in bed and breathe in the whispers of the ocean. To let the wind dance with my hair as a blanket encircles me, serving not as an anchor to the realm of the possible, but as a catalyst, a cloud, floating me to the stars where the unbelievable dwells. I am not flesh and blood.