Prologue

A scream ripped through the silence. This had been going on since dawn, and the tension in the house was tangible. Another, louder shriek pierced the air, then trailed off. Servants in the hall outside froze and held their breath. A few seconds later an infant’s cry rang out; the staff relaxed. All resumed their duties with renewed energy and started chatting cheerfully amongst themselves. Broad grins could be seen on every face as the news spread.

Relief washed over Nikavia as her body relaxed, finally released from the excruciating pain. Her tangled black hair billowed around her head as she lay limply on her bed.  She inhaled shakily, fatigue setting in. She needed sleep…but not yet. She forced her eyes open and turned to the woman holding her child.

“Give him to me. I want to hold my son,” she rasped, her voice hoarse.

The plump woman paused, in the process of cleaning the newborn. The child lay in a porcelain basin, almost submerged in red water. The midwife kept her hand under its head as she turned toward Nikavia. Her eyes were wide, and she didn’t speak.

Irritation overcame exhaustion. Nikavia pushed herself up from the bed, arms shaking.

“What are you waiting for? Bring me my son. I’ve waited for this for so long…” A sob escaped her.

The midwife held the baby close to her chest with trembling hands.

“My lady, the thing is…the child is a girl.”

Nikavia’s heart stopped. She dropped back onto the pillows, tears leaking from her eyes. Her breathing started increasing in pace until she screamed with rage. She threw her arm over her eyes and sobbed.

“I must be cursed. I have failed my husband yet again; I’m sure he’ll divorce me this time. What good am I if I cannot produce an heir?” She looked up at the ceremonial dagger that hung above her bed. “Better to die now than to be disgraced when Atsumasa finds out.”

The midwife shrieked as Nikavia lunged for the knife.

“Wait! Don’t be hasty, my lady. There must be another solution. Perhaps…”

Curiosity stilled Nikavia’s hand. She peered out from the dark curtain of hair that surrounded her face. Her knuckles turned white as she squeezed the sheathed dagger.

“What are you suggesting, Odna?”

“What if - what if this child could act as heir, temporarily?”

Nikavia scoffed. “What nonsense are you babbling? A female heir would never be accepted, even temporarily.”

Odna took a small step forward. “I know. But if the child were to be raised as a boy…”

Nikavia froze, eyes wide. A small seed of hope began to take root in her chest. Her hands slowly relaxed their grip on the dagger until it fell to the bed. She stared at the ornamental design that had imprinted on her palm. Raise the child as a boy…it sounded insane, but perhaps she could make it work. Atsumasa would be gone for another two years. If she could make everyone believe the child was male before he returned, it was likely he could be fooled too.

The baby burst into tears, wailing loudly. Odna bounced her up and down while shushing quietly. The midwife looked timidly at her mistress.

Renewed irritation broke through Nikavia’s thoughts. She brought her hand up to her forehead as a headache developed.

“Yes, that’s what we’ll do,” she snapped impatiently. “You’ll be the one to raise it. Keep it isolated, and make sure it appears to be male in both behavior and presentation; if anyone finds out what we’ve done, it will be your head. Now get that noisy failure out of my sight; I want nothing to do with it.”

The stout woman bobbed her head in response and rushed for the door, the child in her arms. The room went silent as the door shut behind them. The heavy curtains obstructed the natural light, the single lamp emitted a dull glow. The earthy smell of the midwife’s calming incense still hung in the air.

Nikavia sighed as she fell back. The soft mattress embraced her weary body. Her fingers absentmindedly brushed over the discarded knife as her mind churned. It would be both difficult and risky; the disgrace she and her family would face if they were found out would ruin them. But Atsumasa would finally have an heir from her. That’s all that really mattered right now, wasn’t it? A soft smile crept onto her face as she drifted off to sleep.

Reviews

[Rawiya Scarlett]

Holy crap! Wow! This was so good I really enjoyed it. It pulled me in from the first paragraph. It's written really well. I already feel sorry for the daughter for what she has to go through to prove that's she's a boy till she gets a baby brother. And the mother, wow! Like I don't know what to say about her but she's ruthless and cunning.

[sinclairrb]

Thank you so much! That means a lot to me. I'm glad you've enjoyed it so far; hope you like the rest if you decide to keep reading! :D

[JayG]

You write well, and you've obviously worked hard on this, so I thought you would want to know. Based on the writing, I'd say that you write as part of your profession. And that's the problem. This is not, as a publisher views it, a story. It's a report, fact-based and author-centric, of the form: "This happened...then that happened...And after that...And by the way, here's why that matters...And then..."

You're thinking in terms of events and actions as you explain the flow of the story. Informative? Absolutely. Entertaining? No because the only viewpoint presented is the dispassionate voice of the narrator, who is focused on the progression of events. In short, you're telling a blind and deaf person what's happening in the film that YOU'RE watching. And you're doing that without the emotion you would place in your voice, and the emotion the audience would get via your performance.

I'm certain you've heard the old observation on what happened douing a lover's quarrel having three versions: There's what he says happened, what she says happened, and what really happened. Most hopeful writers, because our schooling trained us to write in a nonfiction style, believe that our job is to tell what really happened in an interesting and exciting way. In fact, I've asked lots of hopeful writers if that's true and every one of them so far, has agreed with that view.

If only.

But nothing could be further from the truth, because why and how people behave is a function of them viewing what's happening through the filters of their misconceptions, beliefs, needs, and resources. And in this you provide none of that, except in overview given by a voice devoid of all emotion. But Mark Twain's advice relates: “Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”

Never forget that while you can tell us how a character speaks their lines you cannot make the reader know how the narrator does. So all the reader gets is a monotone, modified by the suggestions made by punctuation, and what the words suggest to a given reader. But since we don't know what a given line says till AFTER we read it, that's not all that much help. And that reader's background, age group, experience, and even gender will probably differ from yours.

There's a lot made of the advice to show, not tell. And one of the problems a new writer faces is that the meaning of words within a profession differs from what's accepted for day-to-day usage. A scene, for example, is related to scenery, or a thread of time in a play or film, while it's a unit of tension in fiction for the page. But do we know that, and the ramifications when we begin to write? No. Nor do we know that the term "showing," is unrelated to the visual, on the page, so we take it to to mean detailed descriptions of what can be seen, were we on the scene. And as a result, we spend a lot of time talking about cinematic presentation. In reality, there's another word for showing that's more accurate: viewpoint.

Why that matters is that your reader isn't seeking to know the sequence of events. That's boring—like studying a detailed history. Think about yourself, were you to read a horror novel. Do you want to be told that the protagonist feels terror? Or do you want the author to terrorize you, and make you afraid to turn out the lights? For a better idea of what I mean, take a look at the same scene through the perception of different people.
https://wordpress.com/post/jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/454

The problem you face, one we all face, is that no one, during our school years, points out that like any other profession, we learn to be a fiction writer as an addition to the general skills we're given in our school years. We recognize that we're not ready to write scripts, or be a journalist, but we assume we have what we need to write fiction. In reality, we leave our school years exactly as well prepared to write fiction as to perform surgery. Lucky for our friends, we know we're not ready to slice them open without more training. But the online forums are filled with people who assume that writing is writing, and so they have that part of the profession taken care of.

But the writing skills we learned in school are nonfiction skills of use to our future employers. They're fact-based and author-centric, as is your writing today—designed to inform, clearly can concisely. But the task of fiction is to entertain, and that takes a methodology that's character-centric and emotion-based, an approach to writing that our teachers never mentioned. But why would they? They learned their own skills in the same classrooms.

So the solution is both simple and a real b***h. Simple because all you need do is pick up the tricks of fiction. It's a b***h because there's a LOT to it. And making it worse, your present writing skills have been practiced till they feel intuitive. And when you try to use another approach they are going to grab for the controls and fix the prose to "sound right." And you won't notice it happening, simply because it does. But when you do make those skills yours, you have the wordsmith skills need to write fiction well. You'll have traded the sturdy cart-horse we're issued in school for Pegasus. And mounted on a flying beast, who knows where you'll go.

My personal suggestion is to pick up a copy of Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's not an easy book, but it will give you the tools, the knowledge, and the understanding of what they can do. Swain won't make a pro of you. That's your job. But he will give you the tools to become one.

As an example, Take a read of this article: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

It's a condensation of one of the techniques Swain mentions, and a very powerful way of showing the protagonist's viewpoint—what matters to them in the moment they call now. It can give your story immediacy, and make the reader care, by calibrating the reader's perception of the scene to that of the protagonist. Used well, and if someone tosses a rock at your protagonist the reader will flinch.

So have at it. You have the stories. Why not display them in the best possible way? But whatever you do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/

[sinclairrb]

Thank you so much for taking the time to give me all this feedback, as well as for the links you provided! I rewrote the prologue with your suggestions in mind; if you have a chance to read back over it, I'd love to hear whether you think I'm on the right track now.

[JayG]

Dramatically better, as I'm betting you've already noticed. But remember that I said your existing writing reflexes are going to get in the way?

• A scream ripped through the silence. This had been going on since dawn, and the tension in the house was tangible.

But, who is that person, and what was their reaction to hearing the scream? No way to tell. So we cannot be on the scene. Instead, we're with the narrator, not the protagonist. Is it a woman's scream? A man's? An animal's?

See what I mean? So don't just let her scream and leave the stage while you explain,. Let the reader become her. Place them on a self guiding trail that provides its own context as it goes. Given that at this point we don't know who we are, where we are in time and space, or what's going on, why do we care that unspecified servants of an unknown person are happy that the baby is born. (and in any case, a newborn baby's cry hardly rings out to be heard beyond a closed door).

Narrow your focus to what matters to HER in that tiny slice of time she calls now. Suppose you'd opened with something like:
- - - -
The pain grew, until it filled Nikavia's world—greater than before—greater than she would have believed possible. Somewhere close, a woman was shrieking in agony. But that was unimportant. All that mattered was expelling the thing that was tearing her body apart.

And then, in a moment of rapture that devoured the pain, the baby was gone from her body, allowing her to relax for the first time in what seemed an eternity. The scream died in her aching throat, now a sigh of relief.

It was done, and the midwife's comment of, "The child has arrived, M'lady," seemed absurdly unnecessary.

As she gathered herself together, a sharp slap, followed by tiny cries of outrage brought a smile. Yes, it was done. And the knowledge that Atsumasa would finally have his heir, combined with the ebbing pain, brought a feeling of pure bliss.
- - - - - - -
Your character? No. Nor is it great writing, only a quick parallel to show how it might appear when shown in her viewpoint. Notice that's told in a series of beats, or clock ticks, that keep the reader poised in her moment of now. And each tick is preceded by the real-world event that motivates her to respond to it, to give the reader the feeling that time is passing in the story at the rate it's passing for them.

• We open with pain, and the elements to it that cause her to react by deciding that, only birthing the baby matters (though that's implied but not specified at this point.)
• The baby is expelled, bringing relief, and the realization that she was screaming.
• The midwife's comment causes her to react with amusement as her joy builds.
• The child's cry is reacted to with the knowledge that all is well.

This joy—in her viewpoint—will help place the reader into the way she feels, by calibrating their response to hers. That way, when she learns that the child is a girl, the reader won't have to be told it's a disaster, and they will feel her emotions crash because theirs will, in parallel with hers. Then, when they're saying, "Oh crap...now what do we do, and thinking over what they would advise, she solves the problem in a way the reader will find interesting. 'Raise her as a boy," they say. "Interesting. Tell me more." And isn't that last phrase your objective on every page?

And by doing it that way, the protagonist is the reader's avatar, not just someone being talked about.

Make sense? Here's an article, a condensation of one of the techniques you'll find in that Swain book, known as motivation/response units:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

Chew on it till it makes sense. I think you'll find itr a really handy way of keeping your reader in her "now," and forcing you to always think from the protagonist's viewpoint.

Some generalities:

• Broad grins could be seen on every face as the news spread.

They COULD be seen, but so can lots of things. It's an expression that acquiring editors hate because it's generic, and can only ben authorial interjection.

• Nikavia’s heart stopped.
Okay, she's dead and the story is over ;😀 Seriously be careful with idiomatic expressions. Because the narrator's voice is lifeless, and all-knowing, what the narrator says is taken more literally than you might want.

• I have failed my husband yet again;
Minor point: Were you her, would you say it that way, or would you use a contraction? Sometimes, or with specific people to show they they are fairly formal in behavior, we may be more formal. But she's not speaking our language, in any case, so if you're translating her words, make it the equivalent in today's language.

• She looked up at the ceremonial dagger that hung above her bed.
Wait...in what country do they have "ceremonial" daggers hung above the bed in reaching distance? What ceremony would have people using daggers on each other in bed? I don't think I'd want to live there—or sleep knowing that if my partner was really pissed at me... 🙄

• Something to think about: Were this a first person story, when she refers to herself it would be "I" The third person equivalent to that is "she," not her name. Only the author will use her name, so unless it's necessary, so as to know who you mean, use she, after the reader knows her name, and who's in the scene.

• And finally, a comment or two from chapter two.

1) The authorial narration is far less noticeable there. But: We begin reading with the knowledge of who it is, so the abrupt change to "her" after being informed of her gender seems a bit contrived.
2) I've worked with kids. She's supposedly been trained with a bow for some time. For her to be so inept she can't even hit the target doesn't work.
2) Her mother informs her that she's a female? And that's it? Goodby? This is really hard to buy for lots of reasons.

The average peasant had a one room house. So she would have seen the woman who's raising her naked. And she would have seen naked babies running around in summer because that's a lot easier than washing fouled diapers. And of course, she'd have seen animals and know that they come in male and female, and that she's female.

So, no way in hell would the news come as a surprise. In fact, her nursemaid would have been careful to make her know why it was critical that no one know.

Hope this helps.