February 2010
17 posts
3 tags
Tom Lowe
‘She was twenty-one the first time she died. She arrived on my doorstep with bleeding hands.’
(I’m changing Death, Etc. into a novel.)
- M. R. Wallis
The Love of a Writer
‘It is the love of a writer, poised and bent over his pages or his writer’s instrument, his fingers hanging there a hair’s breadth away from the keys; quivering as he takes in a calming breath to collate the image that has formed in his mind. Sitting, patiently, and somewhat unimposing - yet weighted with fear. His instrument, black and decorated in dust and spills from food and...
4 tags
A Condition Known As Love
‘I would dine on anything that would be given to me. Any opportunity that dropped on my lap, I’d cherish, in my own way that few can really identify with but those who have experienced that certain and unknowable lust for anything and everything—knowledge, love, sex, food, hunger, drink, drugs, the insatiable appetites of what it is to be human and to exist within humanity. I would take...
WatchThis is by no means meant to be art.
5 tags
Sourtom
‘‘It was a cold night, a very cold night, when Sourtom came.’
In another world, in a city girdled by high walls, with helicopters and automatons and a girl born without a heart; in another world, where a mysterious gentleman visited those in need, in an alleyway: a man leant forward on his thighs with his chin in his palms; his angled, sharp elbows digging into his thin legs.
‘This is...
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The Seams of the World
Continued from Egalturn.
‘Peering through the telescope Egalturn clucked his tongue and smiled. There, in the darkness of the sky - hidden occasionally by the sudden bursts of the fireworks and the flames from the city procession below - within a small section, the approximate length of an encyclopedia, or a textbook, was a pane of air the colour of daytime. And, threading out, in a...
6 tags
Her Majesty Madness
This is an extract from the beginning of Simulacrum. The first part of volume one is set around All Angels’ Eve night on the 32nd October. All of the narratives are eventually interwoven, but for now I’m writing them separately. The Solar Society is an offshoot of the Royal Society (scientific institution). Euphemia is an orphaned maid. ’The woman sat enthroned with cushions...
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A Colourful World
The opening to Simulacrum:
‘There is something you must know about how it ends.
It concerns a girl born without a heart. Instead residing within a crevice in her chest and wrapped in a bloody dressing is a brass pocket watch: ticking. Now a woman and drenched with rain, she lies on a grassy knoll; a man clutches at her as she gasps in his arms and steadily that brass pocket...
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Coral Sevenglass
‘If she had had a little more happiness in her life Coral Sevenglass would have been a pretty girl, for it was not her features that made her ugly. She had blonde hair the colour of dandelions just as they are about to wilt; fat lips, quite in proportion with the rest of her jaw; her nose: slender, with barely a blemish; her cheekbones not too prominent, nor too soft. Rather it was her...
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Egalturn
Egalturn is a crazy, literally, astronomer who lives in an observatory on the tops of the city’s vast walls. His story is one of (duh) discovery. But also, oddly, adventure as he escapes the observatory to bring the Queen’s maid (Euphemia) news of an anomaly in the sky. Needless to say his speech is meant to be ridiculous.
‘High above the metropolis, fitted upon a long and...
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Drust
To put it into perspective, Drust is a character from my Simulacrum universe. The Simulacrum series of books follows ten (or so) subplots which develop over a twenty (or so) year period as the city evolves around them, too, leading to an eventual revolution and evolution of all involved; the ‘pottle-dens’ mentioned are basically brothels.
Out of the darkness of this one night Drust...
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