#md&ws

Summary

Clara Stahlbaum is forced to prematurely shelf her ballet career after a severe injury. Feeling lost and alone, the former ballerina leaves the comfort of her home in the countryside to help her godfather run his toy shop in the city while she recovers from her mental and physical strife. After an encounter with Hans Peter, a peculiar stranger with wooden hands who speaks of a fairy that can undo all injuries and ailments, Clara is pulled into a plot of curses, tragedy and lost personhood.

Story Tag; #md&ws

The Alchemists (WIP title)

Genre: Historical dark fantasy, adult fiction, dark academia.

Setting: A fictional city inspired by early 15th century medieval Europe, with a hard magic system fuelled by alchemy and humorism.

This universe is essentially fuelled by the principles that medieval alchemists believed to be real, and its magic system borrows from medieval alchemy and humorism. The heart of the story is about processing grief and loss, as well as an exploration of death as a concept. Wendelin and Hamlin have a complicated relationship that serves as a driving force to the story.

Summary

A young and recently orphaned girl, Wendelin is taken under the wing of the eccentric alchemist Nicholaus Hamlin after he hears whispers of Wendelin's accidental and temporary revival of her parents shortly after they had succumbed to a plague that has spread from the outer regions. While Hamlin seeks to teach her everything he knows to unlock all of her potential as an alchemist, Wendelin seeks to learn all that she can to perform a proper resurrection of her parents. Together the pair embark on a quest to create an elixir of life and defy death.

Story Tag; #alchemists

Animal Arbiter

Genre: Gothic folk horror with a pinch of mystery.

Setting: Mid 1970s in the Scandinavian countryside.

Originally a short story that later expanded into a novella.

Summary

In hopes of escaping her burdens at home and earn some money, the twenty-year old Nora Gaarder decides to spend her summer out in the countryside to babysit fourteen-year old Anette Due, a rich man's daughter. During her stay, Nora begins to uncover the history that haunts the local community, and her desperation to find the truth whilst ignoring her own past soon develops into an obsession.

So the first chapter is mostly dedicated to establishing the situation/setting, Clara’s character and her relationship with her mother. For context, Clara’s been sent off to go live in the city with her godfather, Drosselmeyer, and this is the opening paragraph!

Clara Stahlbaum never defended her mother’s state of mind, lest she also be labeled a hysterical woman. She’d packed a single suitcase and taken the first train out of Marburg’s countryside, not to pursue womanhood nor stardom the way her mother had, but to “seek respite”, as her father put it. Very few traveled further north during the month of November. Winter’s reach had expanded with each year, powdering the land in white to claim every valley and pine forest as her own. Godfather Drosselmeyer would regularly report on the local rumors within the city in his letters–about the snowflakes acting as spies for a fairy queen further north, or that a vengeful curse had overtaken the land–and Clara read each and every one of them as thrilling stories before bed. Such rumors aside, the harsh winters didn’t frighten her, but spring had never felt as distant as it did now, as Clara steps onto the locomotive that will plunge her deeper into winter’s grasp.

Honestly, I’m always very unsure of how to start a story, and I’m still not completely sold on this first paragraph, but I think it functionally does what I want it to do, so I’ll probably rephrase and restructure it in a different draft.

This is just a random excerpt that I sort of liked:

Her mother had always said that to get all the strands of Clara’s hair slicked back and neatly assorted into a tight bun was an undertaking, as if her hair refused to comply with the disciplines of ballet, her hairline embellished with golden baby curls in defiance. In her mother’s absence, Clara had wondered if her hair would refuse to be slicked back into a bun ever again.

I will probably move this part to a different chapter at some point ^^;

Here’s an excerpt of Clara reminiscing on the train. It’s a continuation of the previous excerpt except I have no plans of moving this part (for now). 

The scene of her mother bowing on stage as the applause drowns out all other sound, even her own heartbeat, is fresh in Clara’s mind despite its age, onlookers tossing out fresh bouquets of camellia and sealed yellowed envelopes to proclaim their admiration for the prima ballerina. Such admirers had remarked how Clara was the spitting image of her mother. She believed that anytime she watched her mother’s performance, she’d been staring straight into her own future, and she held onto that promise with pride. But then her mother’s hair grayed, her eyes sunken in, and her skin clung to her bones in a way that could only be considered flattering on a young woman. The convictions that once made her attractive and lively made her difficult to work with, the perfectionism that once made her brilliant made her controlling, and Clara could no longer aspire to such a future.

Initially, I want to present Clara’s retirement from ballet as if it was something she did by choice to avoid her mother’s fate, because that’s exactly how she copes with her injury (which is the actual cause behind her early retirement). She’s mentally trying to reframe her retirement as something she did by choice, rather than something she did out of necessity, because she already has a bunch of reasons she could have chosen to retire early.

That’s all I really had to share from the first chapter since I’m still reconstructing it, but I hope it wasn’t too short/long of a read! I’d love to make a post about character creation or constructing character psychology or something along those lines one day, so maybe I’ll do that if it’s something people would be interested in? Or anything fairytale related, let me know!

Tag list: @sam-glade @strangerays @writing-is-a-martial-art @amywrites256​ @eurydicefades​ @serenanymph

Explaining the Dualistic understanding of the world

As the steampunk setting might imply, this story takes place in a mostly secularised country, where the concept of gods and deities are largely absent from every day life. Technology and humanity has dominated and domesticated nature, and they very much live in an era of creation, creativity, invention, etc. The human mind is revered as exceptional with its unlimited potential to bend reality to its own will with the right understanding and components.

In contrast to this, you have the fairies, which have become mythologised by the majority of the population. Fairies, being so closely interconnected to nature, are thus viewed as meddlesome and erratic, punishing humanity's enlightenment with long and violent winters, famine and illness. The culture is very much based on this human/science/technology vs fairies/magic/nature dichotomy, though, again, most people view fairies as mythological representations of nature (much like how many western cultures view them). To humans, magic is not only seen as unrealistic and irrational, but also as chaotic and unpredictable, as opposed to science, which follows a set of laws that allows humans to understand and use it.

Death as an Adversary

So when there's a lack of gods or religious laws, and it's paired with their aversion to magic and anything unnatural, the concept of death and the afterlife become very demystified as well. The afterlife is seen as far too hypothetical and contains very diverse outlooks, but death is just the natural order of organic beings. And because the cycle of life and death is a law that can be understood scientifically, the people, likewise, believe death is something they can learn to understand and control as well (this is a plot point in the story, as Hans gradually loses his human body in exchange for wooden one, which, in turn, strips away his human mortality).

To put it this way; in this culture, death represents nature (as it is a natural part of life, but it has a spontaneous, mystical aspect to it that humans have yet to understand), while the pursuit of immortality (to understand death and defy it) represents humans. Death is terrifying because humans can't control it, but they believe that fairies can, so their fight against fairies is represented by their fight against death as well. Death, in many ways, puts a stop to the human mind and their ability to dominate their surroundings, and thus becomes an adversary in a culture that places such great value on what death takes away from them!

Because of this, death isn't really all too sanctified, and the dead are buried on burial grounds that are a significant distance away from any large towns or cities, creating a stark line between the living and the dead. Again, while the population is largely secular, there's always an underlying fear of magic and fairies, which can't be understood nor controlled by human science. This fear is what mainly influences their behaviour and outlook on things, even if they aren't wholly aware of it. They treat dead bodies as a very "out of sight out of mind" thing, and people are generally expected to move on relatively quickly. They can't control death, but they believe one can control one's own emotions, and that becomes their way of coping.

Outro