So it's good that I have lots of choices for these, and I'll pick some fairly obvious ones since I don't want to take the time to dig out the less obvious. Really I should show off and select parts of the books, but that would take even more time, so you get fic.
#7: 7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
From Children of an Idle Brain:
Finch dreams wildernesses of poetry, absurdities sprouting from the soil of his measured mind, tendrils seeking the sun.
It's said that dreaming is how we work out the problems of our daily lives. Since Finch spends all his days solving problems, his nights perhaps require that sense and logic be put aside. Nathan once joked that he must dream in code. And it's not that he hasn't; but it was the code of miracles, of cloud-castles and star-networks and unimaginable power, imagined. He could have built anything with that code, if only he'd remembered it on waking. But he can't reconstruct the miraculous, only its shadow. All his work is like that, he sometimes thinks: like painting in a mirror, like fiddling with live wires in the dark. The blind engineer, using another's eyes as his hands; and he's done it well, if never perfectly.
In dreams he can do anything, though, and he does. He's been known to fly; he's not above puns or triteness, though when he shows up at the class he's failed to attend all semester he still aces the exam, hacking directly into the teacher's brain if necessary. It's a trick he wishes he could replicate in daylight, if only because it would save so much time. Skating along neural pathways as over smooth black ice, he sees memories frozen underwater, gazing up with pallid eyes. Slicing through the ice hurts, and what he wants is usually on the surface anyway. But he's used to pain, and in dreams he can swing a pickax or throw a stone. He might draw lines on the ice with a finger like a bone saw, and watch it fracture, but the mathematics would swallow him, and in dreams he does not abjure rough magic. When it's John's face under the water, he uses his fingernails. When it's Grace's, he sits back on his heels, a pose he hasn't managed waking in several years, and wishes he'd given her a diamond ring; emeralds are not hard enough to mark the fire-toughened barrier between them. She is perfectly preserved in the shallow grave, warm and living, but he knows she'd rather fight her way out and join him in the cold.
A bell tolls and the dream-structure tilts like a Coney Island ride, shifting to vertical: a window, many windows overlapping on a screen, lakes and rivers and canals, a massive weight of liquid threatening to overflow. He stuffs a finger into the hole in the dike, and holds back the flood. The pressure mounts, cracking his bones one at a time. "Give it to me, Harold," the water whispers, gleeful at his torture. "Give it up. You know you want to tell me." And he does; he wants to shout out the news of his creation: the heavens and the earth, and darkness upon the face of the deep. No man is an island, he remembers, but he is one; water laps in a circle around him, washing away clods and promontories and numbers, and he is all things insular, inaccessible cliffs and Galapagos finches, cotton candy and Dickens and passwords that change every two hours. Isolation is his hallmark; it's stamped in little greeting cards all over his skin, each of them yearning to be opened.
"A September eleventh card," John murmurs, clutching a bouquet of white lilies. "I thought you'd forgotten, Harold." They have eggs Benedict and beer, sitting by the river. It's chilly in the wind, and he unbuttons John's coat to get at the warmth inside, puts his hand over the beating heart; the diamond ring on his finger cuts through flesh and bone like a saw, and inside it's all gears and circuits, and lines of code flowing like blood under the surface. He knows the code, intimately, possessively; he knows it in the biblical sense. Be fruitful, and multiply. I know, because I built it.
The robot isn't John any longer; it's Nathan, and it laughs at him and steals his ice-cream cone and pushes him into the deep end of the pool and he swims.
*
Reasons I am proud of it: SO MANY WORDS, dream-logic and dream-language, flowing associations, canon references and character insights, sense-expressions that sing and shiver and groan. I couldn't (and shouldn't) write like this all the time, but I'm glad it happened here.
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Date: 2015-03-09 03:15 pm (UTC)From:#7: 7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
From Children of an Idle Brain:
Finch dreams wildernesses of poetry, absurdities sprouting from the soil of his measured mind, tendrils seeking the sun.
It's said that dreaming is how we work out the problems of our daily lives. Since Finch spends all his days solving problems, his nights perhaps require that sense and logic be put aside. Nathan once joked that he must dream in code. And it's not that he hasn't; but it was the code of miracles, of cloud-castles and star-networks and unimaginable power, imagined. He could have built anything with that code, if only he'd remembered it on waking. But he can't reconstruct the miraculous, only its shadow. All his work is like that, he sometimes thinks: like painting in a mirror, like fiddling with live wires in the dark. The blind engineer, using another's eyes as his hands; and he's done it well, if never perfectly.
In dreams he can do anything, though, and he does. He's been known to fly; he's not above puns or triteness, though when he shows up at the class he's failed to attend all semester he still aces the exam, hacking directly into the teacher's brain if necessary. It's a trick he wishes he could replicate in daylight, if only because it would save so much time. Skating along neural pathways as over smooth black ice, he sees memories frozen underwater, gazing up with pallid eyes. Slicing through the ice hurts, and what he wants is usually on the surface anyway. But he's used to pain, and in dreams he can swing a pickax or throw a stone. He might draw lines on the ice with a finger like a bone saw, and watch it fracture, but the mathematics would swallow him, and in dreams he does not abjure rough magic. When it's John's face under the water, he uses his fingernails. When it's Grace's, he sits back on his heels, a pose he hasn't managed waking in several years, and wishes he'd given her a diamond ring; emeralds are not hard enough to mark the fire-toughened barrier between them. She is perfectly preserved in the shallow grave, warm and living, but he knows she'd rather fight her way out and join him in the cold.
A bell tolls and the dream-structure tilts like a Coney Island ride, shifting to vertical: a window, many windows overlapping on a screen, lakes and rivers and canals, a massive weight of liquid threatening to overflow. He stuffs a finger into the hole in the dike, and holds back the flood. The pressure mounts, cracking his bones one at a time. "Give it to me, Harold," the water whispers, gleeful at his torture. "Give it up. You know you want to tell me." And he does; he wants to shout out the news of his creation: the heavens and the earth, and darkness upon the face of the deep. No man is an island, he remembers, but he is one; water laps in a circle around him, washing away clods and promontories and numbers, and he is all things insular, inaccessible cliffs and Galapagos finches, cotton candy and Dickens and passwords that change every two hours. Isolation is his hallmark; it's stamped in little greeting cards all over his skin, each of them yearning to be opened.
"A September eleventh card," John murmurs, clutching a bouquet of white lilies. "I thought you'd forgotten, Harold." They have eggs Benedict and beer, sitting by the river. It's chilly in the wind, and he unbuttons John's coat to get at the warmth inside, puts his hand over the beating heart; the diamond ring on his finger cuts through flesh and bone like a saw, and inside it's all gears and circuits, and lines of code flowing like blood under the surface. He knows the code, intimately, possessively; he knows it in the biblical sense. Be fruitful, and multiply. I know, because I built it.
The robot isn't John any longer; it's Nathan, and it laughs at him and steals his ice-cream cone and pushes him into the deep end of the pool and he swims.
*
Reasons I am proud of it: SO MANY WORDS, dream-logic and dream-language, flowing associations, canon references and character insights, sense-expressions that sing and shiver and groan. I couldn't (and shouldn't) write like this all the time, but I'm glad it happened here.