Fiction – Page 41 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

Tag…One More Time – Part I Verduan of Nant – Chapter 1

Okay.

I shared a couple of chapters of Tag, a work-in-progress, last month and you can read the backstory there.

Well…I got about 80 pages written and realized I was rushing the story, not letting it develop the way it needed to, so I started over.

And here’s the rewrite of the first chapter.

Do let me know what you think.

Before I rewrite it again.

Tag – Part I Verdant of Nant – Chapter 1

Father Patreo looked up from his workbench. Well-soled boots crunched dry earth as someone made their way to his small cottage. A book lay opened to Patreo’s side, the pages illuminated with strange beasts. He used a leather strip to mark his place and closed it. Gray, yellow, and ochre powders lay in separate, small piles on his workbench and he covered them with a white, muslin cloth.

He closed his eyes and focused on the footsteps.

Male. Heavy. Healthy heavy, not sickly heavy.

Patreo frowned. Most visitors to his cottage came sickly.

A horse clomped and cart wheels squeaked from the opposite direction. The footsteps, horse clomps, and squeaking cart wheels combined into a strange rhythm, music from an unknown land; step step clomp clomp squeak, step step clomp clomp squeak, step step clomp clomp squeak. It made an interesting contrasts to the birds singing in his gardens.

Patreo glanced at the sunlight coming in his far window. Baron Konstigian’s mistress would be by soon. She carried the Baron’s child and Konstigian wanted no bastards in his court. If she did not rid herself of the child, the Baron would slaughter her before the child quickened.

He shuffled his stool to a clear space on his workbench and winced at the screeching sound it made on the hard wood floor, pulled over his mortar and pestle, and reached for pennyroyal and fenugreek. He crushed the leaves and stems by hand into the bowl then ground them into a fine powder, the cupping of the mortar and the turning of the pestle familiar, comforting motions, like the stars and planets, the sun and moon in their orbits.

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Tag…Again… (chapter 2)

Remember The Witch [[Tag/The Apple/The Seed??]] and Tag?

Remember my mentioning it was working itself into a novella or novel?

Remember my asking for title suggestions?

I’m working on turning it into a novella. Perhaps even a novellette. Maybe a novelina. It could still end up a novel and I doubt it at present. So far it’s a mystery of some kind (not the length, the story).

The anticeding event (discussed in The Witch [[Tag/The Apple/The Seed??]]) is now told in backstory. I’m much happier with the story’s doing this time around and also recognize it’s not finished yet. One thing throwing me is how short each chapter is (at least in this writing), basically a single scene and nothing more. This chapter is an example.

Read Tag Chapter 1

And, as always, happy to have your input.

Tag – Chapter 2

The witch’s hand climbed the lone black oak’s trunk like a strangely shaped, five-legged insect. Cartilage, sinews, and ligaments trailed from the wrist where Eric’s axe severed it from the witch’s arm. A moment earlier it held Julia tight as the witch pulled Julia into the oak’s dark bole, her den, but the sudden rain weakened her and Eric struck. The hand fell against the tree and it climbed towards the bole.

Tag…Again… (chapter 1)

Remember The Witch [[Tag/The Apple/The Seed??]] and Tag?

Remember my mentioning it was working itself into a novella or novel?

Remember my asking for title suggestions?

We’ll see…

And, as always, happy to have your input.

Tag – Chapter 1

Father Patreo looked up from his small cottage’s workbench. Well-soled boots crunched dry earth as someone came up the lane to his cottage. Male. Heavy. Healthy heavy, not sickly heavy. Most visitors to his cottage came sickly. A horse clomped coming from the opposite direction closely followed by squeaking cart wheels.

Them Doore Girls – Narration

Tim Curry invited me to take part in a Hallowe’en podcast with several other authors, each of us reading something we felt fit the season.

Hallowe’en is celebratory to me and mine, and I didn’t think that’s what Tim had in mind.

I have written horror, though.

No, not written horribly (okay, maybe, and I’m getting better (I hope)), and not quite of horrible things (although some of my work is dark, I’ll grant you), so that set me off on a search.

I came up with two things. The first, shared last week, is a concatenation of two chapters in The Shaman, each of which deals with a succubatic kind of creature, Ellewomen. That post is, strangely enough, entitled “The Ellewomen.”

This one, Them Doore Girls, is from a horror story first published in Haunts 1992 and again in my self-published Tales Told Round Celestial Campfires 2016.

FYI, the sound quality is wanting. I find it best through headphones.

Enjoy!

Sema (A Tale of the Northern Clan) now on Penumbra

Few things make me happier than knowing my work is appreciated.

By editors and publishers.

Readers, definitely. Other authors, oh yeah.

And editors and publishers? Yeah, you betcha.

Such is the case with Sema (A Tale of the Northern Clan).

The Northern Clan stories started out quite differently. The first one, written in the early 1970s, dealt with someone becoming aware of their magical powers and realizing the responsibility their use entailed.

What is it based on? Well, first, myself and my experiences (I’ve often stated I write autobiography).

Do I think I have magical powers?

Of course I have magical powers. I write stories, don’t I? What can be more magical than that?

And specifically, the story is a metaphor of growing up, becoming aware of one’s needs, abilities, and responsibilities in the world. More than growing hair in funny places, the original Tale of the Northern Clan was written before the concept of a Northern Clan existed and simply dealt with dealing with new feelings, new wants and desires, and deciding whether they would rule your life or you’d rule them in your life.

What teenager hasn’t experienced that?

For that matter, what late sixties-year-old hasn’t experienced that?

That original story received praise from early readers (we didn’t have the concept of “first readers” in the early 1970s) and I was never satisfied with it. The first version of Sema came out in 1988, went through several revisions, and now appears in Penumbra (it’s also in my Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires anthology), and somewhere in the middle of Sema‘s revisions I realized it and several other stories-in-progress were all part of a single mythology and thus The Tales of the Northern Clan was born.

That original story is still in progress and should be done early Spring 2022.

Meanwhile, enjoy Sema (A Tale of the Northern Clan).

Enjoy!