Short Fiction

I will be redoing most of this website over the next several weeks. Blogs will be back on schedule after March 15th. Thank you for reading!

In an entry in my Fiction Blog, I discussed how Fiction and Poetry have certain commonalities. They are separate genre’s, but the interlacing can also create answers to problems faced in one genre by using other genre. Here is an example of such a problem: Have you ever had difficulty getting inside of a character’s mind? If so, have you ever thought of writing a poem?

Some of my readers may have blinked when they read that last question. It is a technique I have used for years for creating villains and heroes and those who are just there to serve a purpose. I will take the character and a setting and poetically describe them both. I do not spend time rewriting these poems and manipulating the timing and the rhythm of the words like I would other poems. I do not intent to submit them anywhere for publication. However, they are an instant tool to be used when working on a story.

You come to a setting or have “painted yourself into a corner” and ask, what would this character do? Not what “would I do an an author,” but how would the character think and act? You may have taken notes on the character and be able to manipulate him appropriately. But, looking at a poem of that character has the same effect as looking at a photograph of that same character and include his emotional essence into it. Here is an example of one I wrote for the Space Western, Herne’s Law, that I am working on:

Shiloh’s Reborn
© David Alan Lucas 2010

Walking through a forest
Which haunts my sleepless mind
Since the long days
Where the hammer and the anvil
Of bombs and blizzard pounded
The metal of the boy into a man.

The three moons bathe
The forest who gave its name of peace
In the ancient tongue
To the bloodiest battle of a war
Fought between brothers
Whose blood froze on fields of Shiloh.

Days and nights that haunt
My soul and trap me among beaten trees
Who withstood thunderclouds
Dropping snow and bombs bursting
Ripping their wooden flesh
Falling with metal and snow on all below.

Many a brother I remember
From the days of fighting and the distant
Haunting sound of the others
Whom I exchanged flying flechette
Into the blinding snow
Unable to see my screaming enemy.

From the tree line I step out,
Wishing the haunting memories of war
Would stay among battered woods,
In to the valley where a creek once ran
Red with the blood of the dying
As they crawled to drink a final sip.

Now the creek peacefully reflects
The planet’s jeweled rings high above
On this cloudless night, far different
From the night of falling shroud of snow.
I bend to taste the cool clear water
That has forgotten those who died.

I swore I would leave this land
Roam the worlds once more
When the blizzard ended its burial of living
And dead, but I think my soul died
Entombed in ice on Shiloh’s floor.
Flesh remains alive and cups its hands
Lifting the cleansed water to lips.

I shiver in the arctic night
Snow blanketed land peaceful as its name
And I sit on the banks and stare into oblivion,
Not knowing I am no longer alone
Until I hear thunder once more
Coming over the land. Approaching storm?

My eyes scan the cloudless sky
No storm in sight, but the thunder roars deafening
Until I see, lowering my eyes to the field
Snow storm raised by galloping mustangs,
Reborn from ancient Earth
Running free toward Shiloh’s creek

They stop and drink, ignoring me
As if I do not exist in this world of peaceful beauty
But their wild spirit calls to mine long dead
And my heart beats again, longing to canter
With them across the fields of snow
Purified and reborn colt of a man who was lost
Able now to flee the haunted valley of Shiloh.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the blogs, stories, poems, and articles I write.

The 2010 Big Read Adult Writing Contest
Based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
By Mark Twain
The deadline is looming for the 2010 Big Read Adult Writing Contest. In fact, it’s this coming Wednesday, February 10. If you can get your entries in the mail by Wednesday, you could win! Second and Third place winners in each ...category will win gift cards to local bookstores. First place winners in each category will be published in the Post-Dispatch. What are the categories? There is a Theme Writing Category: Write an essay of between 250 and 1,000 words in response to the question: “How do you think the American Childhood has & hasn’t changed since the 1840s?” There is also a Story Writing Category, in which you can enter an original short story in the writing style of Mark Twain. So, spend some quality time with your jumping frog, wax your mustache, and get to writing!
Want more info? Go to
http://www.bigread.net/big_read_big_write.html

In my recent Fiction Writing blog I discussed how poetry is and should be written like a story. I do mean style or word choice when I take this position, but rather the elements of opening, middle, and end and the painting of a picture that can stand on its own like a well written story. The closest fiction that a poem can be identified with is flash fiction. Flash fiction is a very very short story and the best description I have heard is imagine that you pass in front of an open window and hear a conversation. The entire story is from when you first heard the conversation until you walked too far away to hear it anymore.

A poem is the same conceptually speaking, It is a brief moment of time or a brief bridge crossing time and thought presented in picturesque words to describe the theme or thought. It draws on the emotions, the memories, and the imagination of the reader or listener. It is within this seed that the germ of the idea of the poet resides and is planted into the audiences mind to grow and change how that person thinks or sees their world.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the blogs, stories, poems, and articles I write.

It is amazing how things can change—some you can predict even when you try to keep things going as planned and others take you by surprise. Last week I posted a blog entry about my new short story I was going to write. The short story was going to be a Space Western. Well, it is going to be a Space Western. But it is not going to be a short story. Instead, it is going to be what I feared it would be—a novel. Many of my readers probably saw that coming an astronomical unit away.

The surprise change that took me by surprise is the main character. I originally designed Herne to be based on my Welsh part of my ancestry. However, several thoughts have caused this to change. As I was planning to design the “universe” in which the story was set I was thinking about the American Old West. My nation was created through the sweat and tears of many races: there were White cowboys and settlers, Black cowboys (a great number of cowboys were Black—a fact that is often forgotten) and settlers, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Hispanic cowboys and settlers.

As this was on my mind, I had a conversation with a friend about a Mexican comedian she had seen. Part of his routine was about science fiction. He joked, according to her, about Star Wars being an example of the future—“filled with Whites, some Blacks, but where were the Hispanics,” he asked. This statement, as a seed on plowed earth, began to take root. I thought about all of the science fiction I have watched and read. Hispanic characters are rare. So, I have now designed Herne to be of Hispanic descent.

I will soon be starting a new blog dedicated to Herne’s Law, so please watch for it.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information about the novels and blogs that I write.