Short Story - Filling in the Blanks

I have two short stories on my mind tonight: the science/magic one, and one I have agreed to workshop for the writers group I belong to. I have a tendency to focus on the style of my writing and less on the plot, but the latter story was looked over by an actual professional editor and drastic changes were made at his request. He liked the finished product, but he couldn't use it after all because it did not fit with the tone of the rest of the stories in the anthology. I'll be very interested what the group has to say about it. I suppose I should submit the final version of it, even though I and a friend of mine prefer the first version.

Anyway, that shall be re-visited, but that would not make for an interesting entry, and I did mean to write something interesting tonight. Tonight I shall be fleshing out the science/magic story, and I was thinking about this as I was walking home from a bookstore. Sometimes on these walks I focus on the big picture, but sometimes I get stuck on little details. Tonight, it was little details.

The MC, whom I've tentatively named Jemma Grienyte, is working on her PhD magiphysic cosmology, known among the grad set as "astral physics." The working title of her thesis is "Angels on the Head of a String: the New Approach of Magiphysic Cosmology to the Age, Size and Composition of the Universe." While she's attempting to write this very ambitious work, she's working as an intern at something like the Large Hadron Collider of this Earth AU. It's rather more boring than the LHC, though - no chance of blowing up the planet. They're doing something scientific with lasers and such, except they're shooting the lasers through the center of a very simple but fairly powerful magical artifact.

Jemma wanted to work there so she could get the measurements as soon as they came out, but LHC wanted her because she has done a little bit of work in rune-smithing. Runes are what magical artifacts generally are called; no one actually draws runes on things anymore. They were found to be far too unstable, compared to actually cutting the artifacts and using more natural designs. That is, if you want to call for strength, for example, it's much more reliable to draw a simple tree than to draw the rune for it and hope your source is good.

Anyway, that's not important. See, all these details ensnare me, and I wanted to have something substantive in this post! Oh well, maybe I'll change gears and go with the detail flow tonight. I like to think that this rune v. picture (the technical term is hieroglyphics) debate raged on for centuries until scientists, doing something very similar to what LHC is doing now, proved that hieroglyphics yielded stabler runes than... well, runes.

So everyday, Jemma actually gets to go up to the LHC and touch (!!) the simple silver cube with the hole cut through the center to make sure the spell is holding steady. It's a very simple spell, just the charm all graduate students have somewhere in their rooms to encourage the flow of knowledge and creativity. The point isn't to measure the effects of a particular spell; it's to see how the lasers act differently, if they do at all, when run through this low-level but steady magical field. If the spell feels like it's waning - it wears out quickly because of the nature of the experiment - she takes her trusty little stylus and writes the spell on the cube again. The hiero is sort of a head and sort of a sun.

Her trusty stylus is just a piece of sharpened wood, about the size of a big novelty pen, with the sharpened end all charred. She renews it by wrapping the tip in the special herb blend, touching the whole thing to a special oil mix, and burning it just for a minute or so. She gets teased on occasion for carrying around a magic wand, and that is probably why her subconscious seized on the charred stick as her rune-smithing tool of choice.

Okay, this entry is getting to be quite long enough. Maybe I'll interview Jemma Grienyte for my next one!