12 Days Of Writer Self Love Day 4: Blood

12 days of writer self love day 4: blood

This is an angsty piece I wrote 3 years ago, and was the first thing I thought of with the prompt. When I wrote it I was super proud of it, so now is its chance to see the light of day.

Bella was making breakfast in the kitchen when it happened. It came out of the blue since she hadn’t had a blood surge in a while - the last one happened a few days ago before she met Zach. As unexpected as it was, she’d had some warning; a slight dizzy spell which prompted her to set down the pot she’d been preparing on the paraffin stove which she’d found in a junkyard and miraculously managed to salvage.

She let out her breath in a huff as her joints and muscles tightened. She tried to keep herself upright, but the pain surged and she collapsed with a dull thump, which alerted Freddie, who was reading on the couch waiting for breakfast.

“Bella?” he called out, concerned. Through the fog of pain, Bella heard the creak of the couch as he got up and the padding of his feet on the metal floor. With what little concentration she had left, Bella tried to reach for the chair near her to prop herself up before Freddie saw her helpless form sprawled out on the floor. She didn’t want to worry him, he had enough problems; even if he didn’t share them she could see the melancholy in his eyes. Unfortunately, another wave of pain washed over her and her outstretched arm hit the floor, creating even more agony. She groaned quietly. A gasp moments later told her that Freddie finally found her.

“Oh my goodness,” Bella heard the panic build in his voice. His book fell to the floor with a thud, not helping her throbbing head. “Zach? Uh, Zauch?! Can you come please? Now!”

Zach tottered out from his section of the bunker. Grumbling and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Freddie, what is it? I just woke up. Can’t this wait?” Zach’s footsteps stopped abruptly, before growing louder and faster, banging across the floor, slightly increasing Bella’s pain.

“Shoot! What happened, Freddie?” he sounded more awake now.

“I have no idea,” Freddie replied. “I heard a thump and come over, and she was just lying on the floor.”

The next surge brought the pain level close to the blood surge, which had made her black out. Her ears started ringing, and the boys’ voices grew muffled. She caught the words “move” and “couch”, before feeling pressure by her ankles, a light touch behind her head and a sudden weightlessness. Mere moments after leaving the cold, hard ground she barely felt the embrace of the couch while her pain level peaked. Lights and voices swam about in her mind, memory and present mixing together, imagination and reality becoming an indistinguishable blur as she flitted in and out of consciousness.

Slowly, the pain reduced and Bella regained some control of her muscles. She opened her eyes gradually, not realising she’d shut them under her body’s stress. She sat up gingerly, propping herself against the back of the couch, swinging her legs onto the floor, and twisted her neck slightly, hearing the joints pop. Bringing her attention in front of her, she saw Freddie and Zach sitting cross-legged on either side of her feet, looking expectantly up at her. Freddie looked lost and a little traumatised, his world shaken up by Bella’s weakness, while Zach seemed concerned and somewhat angry.

“What the heck was that?” Zach demanded hotly.

“Uh, to be honest, I’m not really sure,” Bella answered honestly and vaguely, grimacing at the scratchiness of her voice, which sounded like she’d been gargling nails and only amplified Freddie’s uneasiness.

“Well, tell us what you do know,” Zach’s tone took on what Bella could only describe as an air similar to an official interrogation, which was a skill she attested to being learned from his police officer father.

“Give me a second,” Bella stalled as she got up, wincing at the lingering ache in her muscles. She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, taking a swig as she sat down with a hiss, her body protesting at the movement. She waved Freddie away, who’d gotten up to help her, before continuing.

“I call them blood surges. It’s the most accurate description I could come up with - it feels like my blood is boiling in my veins, and there are random surges of pain during it.” Zach frowned at Bella’s words. She kept speaking, disregarding the older boy’s darkening expression, before continuing her explanation.

“I lose most sometimes all control over my body, which is why I collapsed before.”

Zach cut her off before she could continue, “So this isn’t new. It’s happened before.”

Bella nodded, “The first time was right after the green gas was released and I had a few more after that, sometimes while running from the infected.” After grimacing at the memory of the panic she’d felt in those situations, she gave Freddie a weak smile, hoping to cheer him up by using his terminology. However, his expression remained shell-shocked.

“So this happens regularly?” Zach tried to specify.

Bella shook her head no, “This is the first time it’s happened since you’ve arrived. So it’s pretty irregular, and I generally have little to no warning beforehand.”

“Why didn’t I notice?” Freddie spoke up for the first time since the incident started.

Bella shrugged, “You were out scavenging I think.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?!” hurt and heat built up in his voice.

“It was unimportant.”

“But I could’ve helped. Saved you some pain. Something!” Freddie’s voice cracked.

Trying to remain calm, but struggling slightly Bella replied, “I had it under control. It didn’t endanger us. Besides, we’re all entitled to some secrets. Don’t pretend that you’ve told us everything about you, I’ve seen it. You’re not the only genius around here!”

“Yeah, well-”

“ENOUGH!!” Zach interrupted, sensing the situation escalating. Freddie took a calming breath, he seemed to be tense, a little jarred after losing his cool. Bella saw the wheels start turning in his mind, thinking over solutions for a problem he was yet to share, and she smiled slightly, comforted by the return to order.

“What do you think this is linked to?” asked Freddie. “The gases perhaps? Seeing as that’s when you said it first occurred.”

Bella’s curiosity was kindled. She tilted her head back to rest on the back of the couch and started to ponder the seemingly endless possibilities for her “affliction”.

Zach awkwardly cleared his throat, intimidated and isolated by knowledge he didn’t understand, and interrupted Bella’s train of thought. “Is something burning?”

“Oh no!” she cried. “Breakfast!” She started to stand up, but Zach pushed her down gently.

“I’ll get it. Don’t strain yourself after what just happened.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine,” Bella reassured both boys, brush Zach’s hands off and standing up fully. She staggered, what she hoped was the last of the pain hitting her like a wall. Zach shot up and grabbed her shoulder, stabilizing her. He seemed skeptical of her proclamation.

“Really,” she insisted. “It’ll be okay. You don’t know how to do breakfast anyway.” With that she strode off to the kitchen leaving behind a frowning Zach and Freddie reading on the couch once more.

reblog to give the person you rb’d this from a hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows

The events in your story must be believable...

No, I don’t mean curb your imagination and never write fantasy, sci-fi, or any other sort of speculative fiction. No, I don’t mean avoid writing the type of romance so many of us wish we could experience in real life. What I mean is that what happens in your story must be believable within the context of the story. When I was a creative writing student in university, I disagreed with many of my professors’ rigid rules, but one piece of advice I always agreed with was this one. 

Somebody in class would write a story, a few of us (or more) would call bullshit on the sequence of events, and they would reply, “But this actually happened!” 

Honestly, it doesn’t matter if what you’re writing about actually happened. It’s a cliché, but truth really is often stranger than fiction, and it can be interesting to hear those anecdotes when you’re talking to someone in real life. However, when you’re reading a novel or even just a short story, it doesn’t work the same way. The events of the story have to follow some sort of internal logic. Here are some antitheses to a story’s internal logic.

1) Character inconsistency. Characters should be complex, and they often change over the course of the story, but if, out of nowhere, a character does a complete 180 with no possible motivation for those actions, readers will be thrown. Many great plot twists come from characters turning out not to be who we thought they were, but remember that characters should be like real people rather than plot devices, three-dimensional rather than flat. Their actions have to make sense; there must be a reason for their actions beyond moving the plot forward because you, the author, want or need it to move forward. 

2) Unrealistic consequences. This is one of my personal least-favorite things to see in a story: when a character makes a huge (and often very damaging) decision, and there is hardly any fallout. I’ve seen it most often when the main character gets away with things that no one would ever be able to get away with so cleanly, but the main character can because they’re supposedly special. (Hint: they’re not.) People don’t forgive hurtful actions easily, and, except in the world of the extremely rich and powerful, egregiously bad decisions don’t go unpunished. Even if the reader identifies with the main character (and, naturally, we want things to go well for characters we identify with, just as we want them to go well for ourselves), this is not satisfying. It feels like something is missing, because it is.

3) Deus ex machina. This is Latin for “God out of the machine,” and it refers to “a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence” (I got this part from Wikipedia. Don’t judge me! They sum it up well!), as if God or a higher power of some sort just popped in out of nowhere fixed everything for the characters on a whim. Real-life instances of deus ex machina are cool to hear about precisely because they’re so unbelievable, yet they really did happen, and it just adds to the mystery of the universe. In fiction, deus ex machina is just anticlimactic. There’s nothing rewarding about reading your way through a character(s)’ mammoth struggles and having none of it pay off or come to anything because an external factor, which has never appeared in the story before, suddenly enters and ties things up neatly. If you must use deus ex machina, do it sparingly and with small events rather than the main conflict or showdown of the story.

Any one of the above, and especially a combination of them, will lead to more plot holes than a reader can willingly accept. These shortcuts aren’t worth the substance they remove from what could be a great story.

i have the writing itch right now and work to procrastinate, so please PLEASE if you have time send a prompt or request of something to write (preferably with my characters)

If you think about it, the phrase “a bowl of mac and cheese” fits the format for generic YA fantasy titles

art for the character intros of Slips of the Stars! Click for better quality :)