The beginning of Something

So "Something" is what I call it, as good a name for a novel as any.  "Last year I died" is what the computer calls it because the program it was originally composed in, likely some now long out of date version of Microsoft Works or Word, took the first few words of an untitled work to automatically generate a file name, this has got to be going on ten years old now, if not older, and Open Office says I got 94,987 words into it.  But Open Office has been known to exaggerate on the word count.

Unfortunately, most of those words were, sort of, crap.  So one day, after stalling going forward again, I read back over a pile of largely crappy words, and I haven't really been able to get back into it since then, because most of my "progress" wasn't really progress, it was crap.  And the rising and falling tension doesn't lend itself to any traditional plot structure, and... stuff.  And no matter how hard you try to explain that nearly two thousand years of indoctrination of the masses by evil-overlord forces evil-overlord to send goons starting with the least powerful and making one step up each time rather than skipping to ultimate killing machine lest he short circuit the indoctrination and topple the theoretical framework on which his empire is based... it still sounds like a cop out.

And stuff.

Plus the very beginning probably needs to be rewritten because it's too negative for the ending.

Anyway, month of beginnings, here's the beginning of Something, a novel I had originally hoped to have completed by the time I graduated high school:

-
--
-

Last year I died. It’s no big deal; happens all the time I’m told. They come in with a zapper -defibrillator it’s called- and boom you’re no longer dead. So simple right? Dead, not dead. All over like nothing happened.

Except it’s not.

Dead people aren’t s’posed to come back. It was only a matter of time before something went wrong, before something came back with us. I guess it was just Murphy biting me in the ass that made it be me. I always thought that I lived, and of course so did everyone else, between life and death. I mean think about it, you’re never truly dead till you are, and who have you met who’s fully alive?

Course it’s not like I had a choice afterwards, I had to pick one or the other. It’s always been true that the closer you are to death the closer you are to life, I guess being dead let me live.

1

I woke up to an angelic face. She was beautiful; exactly what I would consider perfection. Even the flaws were beautiful, her right eye was bigger than the left, it was also lower, but it evened out with the tilt of her head. Her eyes were dark green, with little yellow and orange flecks, no doubt they changed colors from time to time.

And the smile, I loved that smile. White teeth, all perfectly in line. Canines were a bit longish, but otherwise as perfect as a toothpaste model. Red hair, there is no better color, although I’m convinced that with the proper shade and highlights one could make green or purple hair that good looking. Freckles, no face could be complete without freckles. They blended well, not like the ones that stand out and don’t seem to belong there, the ones that seem like if you took them away the person would be incomplete.

She had something I didn't recognize, but did. Like something you know, but don't know where you know it from. It was a- I’m not sure what it was, a group of hair -not braided- that was like a ponytail at the side of the face. Held together by a crisscrossed leather strap. It was cute, like the intentional version of the one strand falling the face you see so often.

Of course after that I didn’t see her. They attributed it to a post death hallucination, said no one was in the room until the doctors came in the next time I opened my eyes. I didn’t see her come, obviously, and I passed out again after getting a good look at her. Other than the fact that the rest of her was attractive in kind I don’t remember much except her face.

[more]