Category Archives: Resources for Writers

Exquisite Words had a great time at SiWC

By | | ,
Comments Off on Exquisite Words had a great time at SiWC

Today’s snippet is from Stephen King’s It.

The lightning plays fitfully across his face and although he does not know it, the day has just turned. May 28th, 1985 has become May 29th over the dark and stormy country that is western Illinois tonight; farmers backsore with plantings sleep like the dead below and dream their quicksilver dreams and who knows what may move in their barns and their cellars and their fields as the lightning walks and the thunder talks? No one knows these things; they only know that power is loose in the night, and the air is crazy with the big volts of the storm.

We have a character on a journey here, and this conveys that–time passing, miles traveled, and storms ahead.

There should be a review of It up soon on Tor.com, by the way, as part of my look at Eighties horror.

Whimsy from William Gibson meets Exquisite Words

By | | ,
Comments Off on Whimsy from William Gibson meets Exquisite Words

I love the humor in this fragment, and the way you can see the scene so clearly.

“You’re mumbling again, big guy,” said Memory, shivering into hallucinatorily clear focus on the rumpled sheets, her thighs warm and golden against the Royal Stewart flannel. She adjusted the nosecones of her chrome bustier. “Also, you’re on the verge of a major fashion crime.”

I froze, the starched white tails of an Elmore of Shinjuku evening shirt half-tucked into the waistband of a favorite pair of lovingly-mended calfskin jodhpurs. She was right. Pearl buttons scattered like a flock of miniscule flying saucers as I tore myself out of the offending Elmore.

–William Gibson

Exquisite Words is back from VCON

By | | , ,
1 Comment

This is my favorite paragraph from my favorite Erik Larson book, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I can see and hear and smell this all so clearly that it’s hard to remember I haven’t been here:

Other ballots followed. Daylight faded to thin broth. The sidewalks filled with men and women leaving work. Typewriters–the women who operated the latest business machines–streamed from the Rookery, the Montauk, and other skyscrapers wearing under their coats the customary white blouse and long black skirt that so evoked the keys of their Remingtons. A lamplighter scuttled along the edges of the crowd igniting the gas jets atop cast-iron poles. Abruptly there was color everywhere: the yellow streetcars and the sudden blues of telegraph boys jolting past with satchels full of joy and gloom; cab drivers lighting the red night-lamps at the backs of their hansoms; a large gilded lion crouching before the hat store across the street. In the high buildings above, gas and electric lights bloomed in the dusk like moonflowers.

Exquisite Words likes the short stuff

By | | ,
Comments Off on Exquisite Words likes the short stuff

This is from a very short story called “Fairyland,” by Darin Bradley. You can read the whole story here at Coffinmouth.

Here’s the snippet. It’s a terse little stream of images that add up to a quite clear picture before easing into character stuff:

A valley. Pastures, which had gone bad. Empty. Haze obscured the surrounding hills. It was what Gil had expected of The Bomb. An Indian Summer twinkling radioactive ejecta. Refracting sunbeams like farm dust or smog. Or burning magnesium. He thinks of his own ghosts, and wonders if they burned up somwhere else, in the past. Maybe the whole world was dead already. Maybe we were all eaten up and spat out in radioactive chunks.

(The story originally came to me via Snuffy‘s twitterfeed.)

Exquisite words revisits Eighties Horror

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Exquisite words revisits Eighties Horror

A nice little bit of stage-setting from Peter Straub’s Shadowland. He gives you the images without saying, specifically “there’s a desk here, a candle there.” Your imagination paints in the corridor easily, given the basic set pieces–staircase, desks, firelight and the boys. You get that first day of school anxiety, too, and in the broken fuse, a sense of something already gone wrong.

Registration Day: 1958
A dark corridor, a staircase with an abrupt line of light bisecting it at one end, desks with candles dripping wax into saucers lined along a wall. A fuse had blown or a wire had died, and the janitor did not come until the next morning, when the rest of the school registered. Twenty new freshmen milled directionlessly in the long corridor, even the exceptinally suntanned faces looking pale and frightened in the candlelight.