FIC-IN-THE-WORKS MEME (from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kennahijja)
Jul. 29th, 2005 06:00 pmfpbIf you happen to be working on some creative writing project, post exactly one sentence/paragraph from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else -- this is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).
Well, I will start by breaking the rule into tiny little bits. I do not want to single out one paragraph from the following:
Tamsin and Kirsten
“Hey,” shouted Parkinson to the dorm, “listen to this! Johnson’s Mum doesn’t even want her home for Yuletide!” And she started to read the letter aloud to the other girls, to shrieks of glee from all sides. Suddenly, the door opened. The girls all fell silent, but too late: Professor Snape had entered the room, leaving the usual impression that the temperature had suddenly fallen by ten degrees.
“Good evening, ladies. May I ask you what is so urgent as to keep you from your sleep?” he asked sarcastically. Deep silence answered him.
“I see. Too important to let your Housemaster know. Ten points from Slytherin” (there were gasps from various corners). “And since you seem inclined to overuse the light, Obscuro usque ad meridiem!” And all the lights vanished, leaving the dorm in deep darkness. “You need to sleep, ladies, and I will see to it that you do.” Then they heard the swoosh of his black clothes, and the click of the door closing.
With the dorm in magical darkness, Kirsten had no more chance – if she ever had any – to recover her letter from Pansy. And it seemed that Pansy, too, had realized it. A giggle came from her direction, and then her brutally cheerful voice – unmistakeable, even in a whisper.
“You don’t belong in Slytherin, Johnson. And you have just began to find out.”
Two days later, however, she got another letter.
Dear Kirsty,
I write this secretly from Mum to tell you dear Kirsty that it is all lies and it is not true that your room is not fit and that Mum has been seeing Douglas. She wants to be with him again and that is why she doesn’t want you here. If you come at Easter perhaps you will find Douglas here he is spending the Holidays here. I hope not because I think he is a creep and I don’t care if he is my Dad other girls’ Dads don’t run away from their Mums and don’t pretend they are gay don’t come back when they please he has no guts dear Kirsty. Dear Kirsty I hope everything is well and please write to me, I miss you.
Tammy
Liberties and liberty (Opening paragraph)
My view may be extreme, but I have seriously come to believe that history should not be taught at any level below university. I suppose that many of us will have been reading horror stories about politically correct history teaching in high schools and ignorance of the supposed basics of our past; but if anyone imagines that a Golden Age ever existed, you are wrong. History in the fifties, the forties, the thirties, in the time of our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, was always taught as propaganda, according to which kind of belief the school system of the time wanted drummed into the children’s heads. In other words, as history, it was always a pack of lies; royalist lies or republican lies, Prussian lies or Austrian lies or French lies or British lies, liberal lies or conservative lies, colonialist lies or multi-cultural lies, Christian lies or atheist lies, Fascist lies, Communist lies. From the rise of compulsory national schooling in the eighteen hundreds, generation after generation has left school with a number of vague and largely fraudulent ideas about their national past, never designed to be “history” – that is, an intellectual and scholarly enterprise of research into the past for its own sake – but only to form their minds according to the kind of citizen the schools wanted to form.
A four-age structure inside the epic of Troy
When Helen left with Paris, her eldest daughter by Menelaos, Hermione, was 9; which has to mean that ten years had passed from the marriage. Then we know that it took ten years to organize the revenge expedition (including the failed onslaught on Telephos’ people), and that the war itself took ten years; finally, the whole cycle of the Returns took ten years to the day when the last of the Returners, Odysseus, makes his terrible and truly apocalyptic return to his desecrated halls, punishing the wicked and compensating the good. This is obviously a parallel structure to that of the Four Ages themselves: an age of peace and joy, in which the gods walk with mortals - showing at the wedding of Peleus and Thetys, as with Thetys herself wedding Peleus and Helen, another goddess marrying a mortal, wedding Menelaus; an age of division, during which the rights of the king of the world (Agamemnon) are asserted, and the lesser kings accept his leadership; an age of war; and an age that represented the confused aftermath of the Great War, with the true kings hidden or threatened and usurpers swarming, with wandering, decline, and the progressive vanishing of the gods.
Well, I will start by breaking the rule into tiny little bits. I do not want to single out one paragraph from the following:
Tamsin and Kirsten
“Hey,” shouted Parkinson to the dorm, “listen to this! Johnson’s Mum doesn’t even want her home for Yuletide!” And she started to read the letter aloud to the other girls, to shrieks of glee from all sides. Suddenly, the door opened. The girls all fell silent, but too late: Professor Snape had entered the room, leaving the usual impression that the temperature had suddenly fallen by ten degrees.
“Good evening, ladies. May I ask you what is so urgent as to keep you from your sleep?” he asked sarcastically. Deep silence answered him.
“I see. Too important to let your Housemaster know. Ten points from Slytherin” (there were gasps from various corners). “And since you seem inclined to overuse the light, Obscuro usque ad meridiem!” And all the lights vanished, leaving the dorm in deep darkness. “You need to sleep, ladies, and I will see to it that you do.” Then they heard the swoosh of his black clothes, and the click of the door closing.
With the dorm in magical darkness, Kirsten had no more chance – if she ever had any – to recover her letter from Pansy. And it seemed that Pansy, too, had realized it. A giggle came from her direction, and then her brutally cheerful voice – unmistakeable, even in a whisper.
“You don’t belong in Slytherin, Johnson. And you have just began to find out.”
Two days later, however, she got another letter.
Dear Kirsty,
I write this secretly from Mum to tell you dear Kirsty that it is all lies and it is not true that your room is not fit and that Mum has been seeing Douglas. She wants to be with him again and that is why she doesn’t want you here. If you come at Easter perhaps you will find Douglas here he is spending the Holidays here. I hope not because I think he is a creep and I don’t care if he is my Dad other girls’ Dads don’t run away from their Mums and don’t pretend they are gay don’t come back when they please he has no guts dear Kirsty. Dear Kirsty I hope everything is well and please write to me, I miss you.
Tammy
Liberties and liberty (Opening paragraph)
My view may be extreme, but I have seriously come to believe that history should not be taught at any level below university. I suppose that many of us will have been reading horror stories about politically correct history teaching in high schools and ignorance of the supposed basics of our past; but if anyone imagines that a Golden Age ever existed, you are wrong. History in the fifties, the forties, the thirties, in the time of our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, was always taught as propaganda, according to which kind of belief the school system of the time wanted drummed into the children’s heads. In other words, as history, it was always a pack of lies; royalist lies or republican lies, Prussian lies or Austrian lies or French lies or British lies, liberal lies or conservative lies, colonialist lies or multi-cultural lies, Christian lies or atheist lies, Fascist lies, Communist lies. From the rise of compulsory national schooling in the eighteen hundreds, generation after generation has left school with a number of vague and largely fraudulent ideas about their national past, never designed to be “history” – that is, an intellectual and scholarly enterprise of research into the past for its own sake – but only to form their minds according to the kind of citizen the schools wanted to form.
A four-age structure inside the epic of Troy
When Helen left with Paris, her eldest daughter by Menelaos, Hermione, was 9; which has to mean that ten years had passed from the marriage. Then we know that it took ten years to organize the revenge expedition (including the failed onslaught on Telephos’ people), and that the war itself took ten years; finally, the whole cycle of the Returns took ten years to the day when the last of the Returners, Odysseus, makes his terrible and truly apocalyptic return to his desecrated halls, punishing the wicked and compensating the good. This is obviously a parallel structure to that of the Four Ages themselves: an age of peace and joy, in which the gods walk with mortals - showing at the wedding of Peleus and Thetys, as with Thetys herself wedding Peleus and Helen, another goddess marrying a mortal, wedding Menelaus; an age of division, during which the rights of the king of the world (Agamemnon) are asserted, and the lesser kings accept his leadership; an age of war; and an age that represented the confused aftermath of the Great War, with the true kings hidden or threatened and usurpers swarming, with wandering, decline, and the progressive vanishing of the gods.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 07:03 pm (UTC)The essays sound good. Will you post them once you've finished?
no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-29 07:22 pm (UTC)