I read a story and I would like to share my thoughts with you.
I read a short story, published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, called The Weaver and the Snake By Blaine Vitallo. You can find it here in audio format and ebook format. Before I dive into the story, I want to say that for fantasy writers, Beneath Ceaseless Skies is among the best. They pay a professional rate of 6 cents per word and are looking for submissions under 15,000 words.
Synopsis. Do not read the synopsis until you have read the story.
Let’s get started, shall we? Our main character is Reilitas, who we learn right away is one hundred and three years old. She’s a weaver, but weaver is an overbroad term applied to her profession. I’d say she’s an artist who works with the dead beasts. She creates things from their bodies, their skins, their bones, their teeth. She is the best weaver in the kingdom.
SPOILER ALERT. READ THE STORY BEFORE CONTINUING.
Reilitas lives in Adamondor - and has lived there performing weaver tasks for some time. But just as we are meeting Reilitas, a great chasm opens and spits forth a great snake. Or so we learn through rumor and hearsay. And the snake causes the destruction of many cities by consuming them whole (not the inhabitants mind you - the snake only wishes to consume the buildings) and fear in Adamondor grows.
Adamondor begins to fill with displaced inhabitants of other cities, who of course need fed, but food grows scarce. Soon the citizens of Adamondor barricade themselves in their homes, for they are being killed by the hungry masses. Reilitas has done the same - she no longer leaves. One morning, after a brutal night - we learn that the snake has died. It tried to consume its own tail and choked to death. But this is no comfort to Reilitas for the snake took everything from her - all her art has been destroyed in the fighting within Adamondor. She has seen it.
And so she makes one final piece of art, for herself, please comment below what it is.
Review
The prose is wonderful. Description, which I usually find tedious, is pleasant in this piece. And for me - the description slowly added weight to a scale that eventually tipped and when it tipped - the truth of the story was revealed to me. Or at least the truth as I see it at this time in my life.
Fear born from rumor and hearsay has the power to destroy the very things we hope to protect. The city of Adamondor was never attacked by the snake, but its citizens were consumed by the inevitability of its destruction long before they wiped it out themselves.
I don’t know if Blaine Vitallo meant that to be the message in this story, but for me it clicked. I think at least part of the reason for consuming a short story is the ‘click’ we feel when we read something that hits home.
Of course, another reason why I read is to inform my writing. And what I take away from The Weaver and the Snake is that I want to learn how to combine my description with action. If you read the story, you will know what I mean when I say that. This story contains a lot of description - wonderful and rich - but it also contains action. I will give a small example, "Even the slaves whisper of the snake, their supposed Great Deliverer, from within their bamboo cages as they are carried on wooden carts across the desert, under the light of the moon." There is action here, but it also wonderfully detailed. It just works for me as a reader, and I want to steal this concept and add it to my writing (in my own way of course) to improve it.
War Room / Write Club
Thanks to @jordan.lesich and everyone who voted to bring me back to take part in War Room / Write Club, even though I only made it half way through Write Club. I am so glad to be a part of this group. I will do everything I can to improve my writing, and there's nothing that works as well as a steady diet of reading, writing and editing. Thanks.
So, she constructs an hourglass, her final work. A simple thing and yet the pièce de résistance of a centenarian artisan's life, the dust of a single scale of a destroyer of cities running through glass to measure the last years of her life.
I love that you took fear as being the killer of the protagonist's city (and perhaps herself). You looked deeper that I will admit to.
The snake I saw as a metaphor for time, which consumes all the works of man until they are just dust billowing on the wind.
In short, I much preferred your review to the story itself.
HOURGLAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSS.
I took it as something like when people are faced with a certain inevitability, they turn on each other. They give up. They live but they live with the notion that the end is coming, so they don't really live at all.
In the case of Reilitas, this is undoubtedly true, except for one difference. Yes, she thought everything she ever loved was destroyed but instead of simply throwing in the towel, she created something. A final thing. Simple but beautiful, as she put it.
Beauty, as I took it, in the time she had left. Not in the time itself, but in the manner in which it was presented.
I saw the Great Destroyer as a beast that showed the world what it would be without its materialistic desires. But also what would happen if people merely gave up hope.
I did indeed read this story, so I know that the artifact was an hourglass.
The prose was very beautiful, but for me was almost too much. Maybe because I've been working so hard on word economy in my own writing, now when I read things with lots of description, I think "Yes, but you could have told me this in way less words!"
That doesnt detract from the actual power of this story though, how the snake was not needed to devour the city, and how fallible the works of man are, no matter how glorified they may seem in their heyday. It just felt a little slow getting there, in my opinion.
Thanks for sharing this story with us, Greg!
I dig fantasy like this that really pokes at real-life dilemmas, like the finite nature of, say, buildings or your work or your namesake.
It's fun to think about what the snake could be. It's a little too late for me to come up with something super profound, but it could be death (which is odd, since no one really got killed. But! Death is the ultimate changer-of-shapers. Like, death changes the form of things, like the snake does to the building) or time (which explains the hourglass and why the snake was made into it. Time brings death and change and all that neat stuff.)
Too many parentheticals?
Never!
Greg, let me start by saying this was a fantastic story. Excellent choice. I love it when an author can take a commonly accepted writing rule (don't over describe) and stand it on its head.
Each of these items are a means of conveying a place, a time, and meaning to his audience. And as you mentioned in your article, the author also uses the description to link the world that he built directly to the action. Tim O'Brien does this in 'The Things They Carried', and I have to admit that it kicks my ass a little when used well.
And hey, if we're gonna talk about metaphors, the snake definitely stood out to me as a metaphor for time. What's interesting is that the author spared the people but destroyed civilization, allowing us a quick snapshot of what it would be like without it. Which is pretty cool.
Like the main character, we expect our creations to live beyond us. Perhaps if we can't live forever, our impact in society can, right? But to Blaine Vitallo, it's all futile. Everything we build eventually crumbles because only entropy is eternal. It might a bummer ending, but it doesn't make it any less true.
So why do anything?
I think the answer can be interpreted a few different ways, but as @xanderslee mentioned, the main character continued despite all of her creations being destroyed. My guess (maybe I'm just projecting my own beliefs here) is that the simple act of doing things is a way of coping with nothingness. Sort of like an existential moral built into the story.
Pretty neat.
Well, that's my nerd-out session for the evening. Excellent story, Greg. Way to kick things off.
Wait. If I comment the final piece of art here, couldn't people just look at my comment and copy it? :P
Ooo ooo! Pick me teacher! I know the answer! Ooo ooo ooo!
Well, you could be first. There are time stamps :P
I must say I was definitely not impressed by many aspects of this story. The fact that it has a morale and something to say which is a critique of our time would be the best part of it. But for me it was too over-drawn and too obvious to really have an impact. I didn't get to think for myself.
Of course I should perhaps mention that this is exactly the kind of writing that makes me dislike fantasy. Even though I write fantasy every now and then, never like this. Someone commented on how the description and the action were nicely merged--well, this is exactly why I didn't like it. I want to be able to skip the descriptions, because I just don't care. Especially not when there are details about some beast being slaughtered and a wedding feast, and in the end it has no connection to anything else, it doesn't give me more info about her, and doesn't help build up something for the story.
Much of this might be personal taste. As I said, I do like that it has something to say that has meaning (disaster, how to deal with fear, the power of rumours) but it's repeated and mentioned so often that it started to annoy me.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this story, and great to read the feedback of others.
So, Beneath Ceaseless Skies is 'literary fantasy' which can have a tendency to be overblown. However, I've read plenty of fantasy which is simply fun. The problem is that most were novels, I don't know if there is a market that publishes fun fantasy in short story form. One of the things I wanted to do was highlight a publisher of sci-fi/fantasy that would pay an author well, because that's what I tend to write (actually I tend to write only sci-fi, but I read both - and they get lumped together). For me this story broke through as I am not a huge fan of overly descriptive writing, but I got gripped and fell in. I think I knew that it wouldn't work for everyone, so I'm sorry you fell into that category. Thanks for reading it and for joining us. I look forward to becoming a better writer with you.
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