November (Drabble)

[serai]

.
As a writing experiment, I thought I'd try to distill November, that long Zeke fic I posted the other day, into a drabble.

Here's the result:


November
by Serai


Zeke’s apartment surprises everyone who walks into it.

His interest in photography has filled his place with images glowing in black and white. They enchant the girls he brings here, each of them a link in a melancholy, erotic chain. All of them leading back to one image, one moment, one buried memory, denied its depth and relegated to the cool confines of art, the source of his fascination stripped away, leaving only sad, beautiful echoes.

Now the photos that have only been photos take on their true meaning, and he finally sees how he is handcuffed to the past.

---

Chapter 8 of High Contrast
Chapter 9

Comments

[gabi-fics.livejournal.com]

Very well condensed. Still gives me chills.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I do still love writing drabbles. The discipline is bracing. Doing this one made me think about expanding on the others I wrote so many years ago, exploring the stories they only hint at.

By the way, I posted a ficlet I got off The Virgin Suicides yesterday, in case you're interested. I watched that movie and was rather enchanted with Josh's character. Good gods, was he pretty. Had he been at my high school, I would most definitely have been one of the girls bringing him brownies. They'd have been special brownies, too.

[gabi-fics.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Someone else who calls Josh pretty. There's not enough of us. I missed it. I'll go check it out now.
I'd have been the shy girl wanting to kill every other skinny popular girl that got so much as a smile from him.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

*grin* Well, for a long time, I was too pissed off at him to acknowledge his prettiness. Yeah, I'm over that now...

[danae_b]

This is gorgeous. You do drabbles incredibly well, say so much with so little and not a single word is wasted. The last line right there? Packs a hefty punch, I love it.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Hey, long time no see! Thanks so much, hon. I've been writing longer pieces lately; November is actually the longest thing I've ever written on LJ, and it's liberating to take the time and space to really explore a story in all its details. But it's always fun to cleanse my palate with a drabble, Sharpens you up, as Alex deLarge would say.

[danae_b]

Hey! *hugs* I think I must have missed that one, I'll have to go back and give it a read as well. Drabbles are definitely good for that, it's one of the reasons I go back to them as often as I do!

*replies to the proper comment this time*

[aliensouldream.livejournal.com]

That's such an elegant summing up of the story. Remixes amaze me, hard enough to get this stuff out once, then to conceive it in a different shape.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Drabbles have been my favorite form since I started writing slash. There's something about being forced to strip out every extraneous word that really pinpoints a story's meaning. I found it interesting that the best way to do that with this one was to take as much of the sex out as possible, and make it about the meaning of all that sex. As much as I love writing the sex, it's never really about the sex - it's about the why. And drabbles are perfect for that.