Sentence Sunday

[alanajoli]

melissa_writing has declared a Sentence Sunday. Since I haven't done one of these before, I'm posting her whole explanation here.

Rules:
For those of you new to this game, here's how it works:

1) It's done on a day that includes "-day" as the last three letters.
2) You pick a bit of text in keeping w the request. (Today it will be page 123)
3) You share.
4) You tell us what you like abt it.
5) We all get to read.
6) There's a tendency of others to reply to each other. (I like this, btw.)

THE REQUEST: Again, the request this time is "page 123" . . . Go there in one of your manuscripts. Start at the first full sentence, and give us a short excerpt.

My Excerpt:

I thought about doing one from Into the Reach or Departure, since those are still hard to track down, and I know not everyone has read them. But my desire to show something new won, so this is a bit from p. 123 of the (still unedited) manuscript for Regaining Home.


“Tell Nara I tried,” the halfling whispered. “The Krieggs spotted us. Maybe twelve of them. Knew we were watching. Tried to save them.”

Pareesa felt the blood draining from her face when she realized what he meant. “All the scouts?” she whispered.

The halfling tried to nod, but his head lolled back in her arms as he let out a final, shuddering breath. Eoin rose, swearing, and walked back toward the wall. “Tell the healers it’s too late,” he said. “We’ll walk around to the gap. Keep the archers guarding us until we get back in, just in case they’re planning an ambush.”

He walked back, each step angry as it pounded the ground next to her, rocking through her body as she held the blurry form in her arms. She blinked her eyes to clear them but didn’t speak. Eoin tried to take the halfling from her arms, but she resisted, trying to stand and carry the tiny man’s weight on her own.

“You said they’d be all right,” she said tightly at Eoin.

He looked out at the Reach around them. “I thought they would be,” he said. “I’m sorry, Pareesa.” He reached out again as she struggled with the weight and removed the small body from her arms. This time, she let him.

As they walked along the wall, voices called down, most of them recognizing the halfling, Frass the stable keeper, and calling him by name. They watched as the General carried the body, and Pareesa could see on their faces that this treatment marked Frass as a hero. Others realized what it meant that only Frass had returned, and he, too, was dead. When she and Eoin finally reached the gap in the wall, right along the Wild Way, pointed directly toward the Stones of War, a procession awaited them. They took the body of Frass and carried him through the streets.

Pareesa ducked between the wall and one of the houses and threw up.

What I like about it:

Writing an all-out war was a new thing for me, an undertaking that was much bigger than I realized it would be. So in order to handle something that *big,* I tried to capture little moments of it that would show the scope, but also make it personal. I think it worked.

Your turn
melissa_writing has an excerpt up from Ink Exchange. Six or eight other writers (I was going to list them, but there were too many) have played back over in the comments, so there are plenty of excerpts to read today!

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Please clarify: Are we all supposed to go to our own manuscripts and see what's on page 123 and quote from it? I've done reasonably well on Old Catholics, but I'm not that far yet. Or...did you choose page 123 because it embodied an interesting writer's issue for you?

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Melissa picked p. 123 for today's excerpt, which is why I used that page. I'm not sure if she picked it because she particularly liked that page in her book or because she picked a random number. ;) I'd bend the rules and say if you're not at p. 123 yet, you should just drop the 1 and go with an excerpt from p. 23.

[bccreations.livejournal.com]

For as much as I play D&D, you'd think I'd like this type of thing. But for some reason, as soon as I read a story that includes an elf, dwarf, or halfling, I immediately get turned off. Not to say that anything you wrote above is poor. But it has a halfling. And healers. I like those in my D&D but not my fiction (unless the healer is an herbalist or something else folksy). Thing is, just the slightest twist and I'm perfectly willing to accept them. Tad Williams' most recent trilogy has a race called Funderlings which is essentially a dwarf (although without the big beards or constant beer swilling). They don't bother me in the slightest.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I do understand where you're coming from, though I don't share the same preference. I met elves and dwarves first in fairy tales and later (alongside halflings--because the hobbits do carry that name as well) in Tolkien. So while the ones above are primarily the D&D style (because it's shared world fiction for a campaign setting), I don't think of those races/creatures as a D&D thing in non-RPG fantasy fiction. Most of the time, I'd actually prefer them to be called elves, dwarves, or whatever--if they obviously have many of the traditional fairy tale qualities--than rename the race and use all the baggage that goes with it anyway. But I haven't read Tad Williams, so I don't know how that would strike me outside of your comment. ;)

[bccreations.livejournal.com]

I don't necessarily associate them with D&D, so much as I do with the vast overuse they've received from authors since Tolkien's published works. Kind of like vampires. I've heard nothing but good things about The Black Company but as soon as I realized it was a vampire story, I put it down. I can't stomach vampire stories any more. They've been overdone. And they've been overdone in such a way that authors don't even challenge the norm. They just tell their story with that same old trope. Blah! [/rant]

If you want a good one-novel introduction to Tad Williams, read War of the Flowers. It's an amazing novel that offers a great twist to those fairy tales you grew up with.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Yup, I have friends who can't do the vampire or werewolf thing either, but I think that's not so much because they're overdone, but because they just don't like stories about those creatures. :)

I'll keep the Williams in mind! He's been on my to-be-read list for a long time.

[bccreations.livejournal.com]

Tad Williams kept me from growing out of fantasy literature. Who knows, maybe I'd be writing in a respectable genre otherwise. ;)

There was an author at ReaderCon last year reading an excerpt from his newly published book. I sat there for five minutes listening to him describe the vampire and how it needed to feed. I just wanted to shout, "White Wolf called. They want their high school Masquerade fanfic back!" I think he secretly masturbated to his own manuscript about vampires.