This is the place to find writing by NightBeck. If you're looking for original fiction and poetry, this is the place!
Watch this space for a more comprehensive guide once more of the writing goes up.
My personal space: living underwater
- Created By NightBeck
[Poetry] Life Underwater
Decided to start posting things here again! 'tis a bit quiet, but I never let that stop me before. Here's another poem that I wrote in the midst of an epic three-day rainfall in the spring of 2007. My poetry teacher, deciding that MFA-leve...[Poetry] Siren
And, for the first of the poems, this is Siren, which I wrote a few years ago. I'd love to write a full fairy tale someday, but for now, here's my first attempt.
And remember: if you're reading, it's helpful for me to hear what you think! I know some people don't like leaving comments, but when no one does, it's natural to assume that no one's reading. Don't make Mimmi do all the work - she's seen a lot of this already!
Siren
I heard once
that across the Red River,
thirty miles south of where
the thornbushes grow wild into a
solid wall, there is a ghost town
in the valley surrounded by mountains.
A ghost town in ruins, each house
missing a roof or a wall, sometimes
just stripped down to its foundation,
and an impermeable layer of black
smog hanging around its streets. Some
people say it was ravaged in the war
a few years back, and some say that
everyone just left one day, and the
still-lit empty houses tore themselves
apart in their loneliness.
One stayed behind.
A small girl in a blue dress that has
grown grayish and dirty with
too much wear, and long,
ash-colored hair that covers her face.
They say if you're very quiet,
and very still, she'll approach you,
tilting her head back to let her
hair slide back off her face. Her eyes
are wide, deep and white
and so large they threaten to swallow
her face whole, and she smiles simply
and says in a small voice: "Listen,
traveler, can I sing you a song?"
And if you refuse, she will follow
you all the way to the mountains,
empty eyes pleading, asking
over and over and over,
her voice echoing in your ears
long after you leave.
But I've been told that that one day,
a man came to that town
with no baggage and no destination,
and he leaned up against a ruined wall,
waiting for her. And when he was asked,
he smiled back, a bright smile
that lit his gaunt, sunken face. "Please."
Her voice is the center of the sun,
the hot core pouring from her lips
and covering the entire valley
in melted light, and it paralyzes
his every nerve. At first, it is just
tiny fingers drumming up his
spine as each blood vessel vibrates
to her song, the sharps and flats
of a tune vaguely familiar, but
lost somewhere in his memory,
and then it is a numbness sweeping
through his limbs, heart, and mind
until he is detached from his body.
They say she'll be young, they'll both be
young, as long as she keeps singing,
so her song keeps going, repeating,
a little different each time she reaches
the refrain, until her voice breaks
in her throat. She opens her mouth
wide to begin again, only to swallow
cold, silent air.
[The Imperial Guard] Chapter One
I guess we'll continue on with this one for the moment! And I think I finally have a handle on how to post here. Let's test that theory, shall we? Keep in mind, if you didn't read the prologue, this will make no sense to you whatsoever. So please ...[The Imperial Guard] Prologue
[EDIT]: Hopefully this will work. So let's just jump right into it, shall we? I'm still messing with formatting and such, so if this fucks up somehow, it means I'm fixing it as you read this, haha. Some of you may have read t...An Introduction
Welcome to my World, everyone!
Sorry about the ugliness of everything. It took me way too long to figure out how to make this place, and even longer to figure out how to post! I am obviously a computer genius.
Anyways! If you're here, it means that you have, at the very least, a marginal interest in my writing. So first of all, thank you! I do not demand feedback from the members of this world; if you read and enjoy, then it's enough for me. However, it is extremely rewarding to know that people read my work, so feedback is definitely appreciated.
Now that that's out of the way! Here's what you can expect to find on this journal:
Original fic. This is the big one, guys. The majority of the words I type every day have to do with one of my original stories. I write everything: suspense, fantasy, adventure, realistic, slice-of-life, and sometimes, crazy genre-blending combinations of those. These original stories may sometimes have mature material, such as violence, cursing, homosexuality (and heterosexuality - hey, who knows, some people are offended by straightness), and so on. However, my stories rarely rise above a strong PG-13 rating.
What kind of stories can you expect to see? Well...
In Descending Order- My first novel-length story, begun in my senior year of high school and completed, literally, the night before I moved into my first college dorm. It's a twenty-four-chapter suspense-black comedy fusion about a pragmatic doctor, his math-genius sister, and the group of mercenaries they take up with after their city burns to the ground. Will you see it here? Well, I'm not sure. I'm very fond of it, mainly because of the memories it involves, but my writing style has improved a lot since then. If it shows up here, it'll be after editing. But because I learned so much from writing it, I'll definitely talk about it often.
Catalyst- A former cowriting project, which I took the baton for after my cowriter lost interest. This is a fantasy story with heavy political overtones, concerning two best friends in a military-run academy with a somewhat different student population. This story is currently undergoing rewrites in all fourteen chapters, due to some plot reworking on my part, so when I post it here, you'll be getting the new, improved version.
The Imperial Guard- This one is, quite possibly, my baby. I came up with the original concept about a decade ago, and though it doesn't resemble the old idea at all, it's been reinventing itself since its first incarnation. Finally, I reached a point where I could write about it. This is an adventure/political drama (with plenty of dark humor) about a young nobleman, sold into slavery after the subjugation of his country, who - to his great annoyance - gets swept up into the war for independence. In-progress, currently nine chapters long, but will definitely end up as one of my longest stories; currently, two novel-length parts are planned.
This Morning- My newest story, possibly going to be written for a senior creative writing thesis. This story is a mix between suspense and slice-of-life, told in first person from several different perspectives. The primary two characters are a pair of foreigners in Tokyo: Sol, an exchange student whose roommate goes missing, and Jae-sun, a Korean intellectual who's just been fired from his lucrative job. Expect a little preview soon.
Short fiction - Not often, but I have a few short stories that I'm fond of. I'll toss those up here at some point.
Poetry. I don't write poetry nearly as often as I write fiction, but I do write it. And I have a fairly large portfolio of work I don't hate. I'll throw some of those poems up here.
Fanfiction. This is probably the thing you'll see the least of. I only write one-shots, usually at someone else's request (unless the idea was just too good to pass up), so I don't write a lot of fanfic at all. However, I've written a few fanfics, and I occasionally open up drabble requests with a list of fandoms I'm willing to write for. Watch for it!
And that just about sums it up. Questions? Comments? Anything you'd like to see first?
