[ferretchucker]

I have about 50 unfinished novels on my computer. The best one so far is my retelling of the snow white story. I just find it so hard to drag things out that long. It's like my beginning takes 3 pages, the middle about 10, then by the end I've only got a 20 page "novel". Here's what I've got so far on the Snow white one.


The seven dwarves


I

It was a cold and stormy night. Rain drops pattered on the castle and dropped down to the floor. The soaking wet grass was littered with puddles and small streams. Worms came to the surface to writhe and wriggle in the soft mud as they did their duty to the garden and consumed all of the bad substances in the earth. A snail came out of its shell where it had been hiding from the birds and squelched through the puddles on the road. There was a leaf of cabbage the cook had thrown out the window of one of the towers after the cat had found it and it was laying there on the road just waiting to be consumed.
The snail slowly moved along to it leaving a glistening silver slime as it went like a long thin mirror. A sickening crunch then squelch. A carriage wheel smashed the snail and turned him into a puddle of green and grey. The black carriage bumped along the concrete splashing the green bushes as it went. Two coffins lay within it. The two boxes jumped a few inches up as the cart went over bumps in the road.
Two large wooden doors swung open to administer the hearse. Two white horses trotted along the cold stone floor and were released into their stables. The king’s chief Butler walked from the stairs over to the cart with eight other men. The carriage driver recognised one of them as the king’s second child Isaac. He looked solemn and slightly surly. The driver expected he had been drinking. They opened the back doors of the cart causing one of the coffins which had been bumped over to the door to fall out. As it fell the lid fell off revealing a sight that made one of the men shout out in prayer.
“You blundering fool!” screamed Isaac at the top of his voice, tears dripping down his face, “My father specifically asked you to drive carefully in case this happened!”
“I am sorry m’lord but if I drove any slower, they would have caught up with me. I couldn’t risk that, not after what’s happened.”
Another one of the men looked horrified and turned tense.
“You are not trying to tell me they followed you?” asked Isaac sounding even more scared then when the coffin, which still had not had it’s lid replaced, fell open. As if on cue a scratching sound came from several yards away at the door. All ten men looked over there. Bartholomew, the Butler ordered one of the men to go over and check it out. James, the fattest of the ten crept over to the door. He undid the bolt and opened the door a crack. The pale moonlight shone in and illuminated the coffin which had fallen open. One of the men was sick.
“Nothing there,” said James, the man, slowly. The driver was walking over as James opened the door a little bit wider. Suddenly, the entire mood changed. There was banging and screaming as James’s head was pulled through the door. Five of the men including Bartholomew, Isaac and the driver ran over to him and grabbed onto his limbs trying desperately to pull him back. A deafening screech filled the air as lighting flashed and the rainwater trickled in. It was red.
They made one final pull and managed to pull in James. There worries weren’t over though. The door was opening as one of the creatures arms shot through and started thrashing around for more. Bartholomew ran over to the left side of the door and threw all his weight at it, Isaac did the same. Shrieks cut through the clanging as the creatures arm was slowly crushed. Bones crunched and splintered as the arm thrashed more wildly. Blood started to appear trickling down the wooden doors and one finger turned blue. A blood stained bone cracked and shot through the skin. A tear formed along the pale, strongly veined flesh shooting wildly down the creatures arm and muscle, veins and bone were revealed. Finally, the doors shut together. The screams of the creature almost shattered the windows. The men just managed to hear a window upstairs open as the cook poked her head out to shout at what she thought were no good homeless teenagers . A thud as one on the creatures jumped up the roof of the smaller tower and grabbed the head cook. Her screams met with that of the one armed creature as she was thrown down. The men could hear her being dragged off into the woods. Isaac ran over to James only to see that he was not breathing. He was not breathing because the front half of his head had been bitten off. Finally, the man who had been sick fainted with a small thud.