Hey, I'm Sekhra, a lover of mythology, philosophy, the English language, correct usage of the English language, large dogs, the color grey, and music in general. I like my stories with psyche and a side of sensationalism.
THE STORIES
A couple themes that run throughout my stories:
Immortality does not exist. Some creatures are hardier than others, some live longer lives, but nothing lives forever. Eternity is a concept that will always be intangible. I create characters based on words that drive their personalities. Kali is curiosity. Bel is shame. Lucan is duty. You get the idea. I also enjoy incorporating traditional values, beliefs and stories and twisting them almost beyond recognition. As I said earlier, I like sensationalism.
key:
IP-- in progress
U&C-- up and coming (this means I will probably post it on fp someday, when I've gotten far enough in my IP stories to admit to having written it)
C-- complete (yeah, I wish)
FOR SALE (IP)
For a story that began as a bit of whimsy I posted on fictionpress as part of a trial-run (to see whether I was comfortable sharing my work online, you see), this baby's done exceedingly well for itself. Now it's my main project, rather than my sacrificial lamb. (Ha ha ha... Biblical reference...) It involves Satan, God, the internet, and a teenage girl. However, I kind of want to rewrite it where Kali (the girl) is older and no internet is involved. The story treats the Bible as mythology rather than fact, so if you're uncomfortable with that, you'll want to avoid this piece. However, if you're willing to enter a universe where God is currently a black woman, Hell is a 15th century monarchy, and curiousity is deadly, be my guest.
I did some drawings and model-searching for the characters, because I love them but somehow cannot write about them. Anyway, I thought I might share.
Aeriel has always been made in the image of Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. I don't actually listen to My Chem, but the short, silver hair and deep-set eyes have always characterized Aeriel--and Gerard-- for me. (Sorry, two links because when I try to access the first from fp preview I get an error message. The first picture is better. Just add a percent sign between "Gerard" and "20Way" in the 5th set of brackets.)
Lucifer didn't actually have a model until I did a google image search for "bright red hair" and found this guy. His name is Die, he's in a band called Dir en Grey (another band I don't listen to!) and he looks so disturbingly similar to the Lucy in my head that I'm a bit worried.
I drew a picture of Aeriel and Lucifer that you can find here.
Xian is a character you haven't met yet, and won't for a while, but he's one of my favorites. I didn't really have a concrete image of him until I found a picture of Huang Xiaoming and thought, that's him. Because I love my angel boy so much, I drew a picture of him, too.
EROS (IP)
Currently, this story is sort of on hiatus. Not by my choice, but because I really have no inspiration for it at all. Sorry?
Eros is a retelling of the myth about Eros and Psyche. Psyche was a girl so beautiful that the men of Greece hailed her as Aphrodite, which ended up pissing off the goddess so much that she recruited her son Eros (his name is Roman-ized as Cupid) to make her fall in love with the most hideous creature he could find. Eros fell in love with Psyche instead. An oracle told Psyche's parents to abandon her on the nearest mountainside, and the wind blew her off and into Eros' palace, where she was surrounded by invisible servants and spent every night with a man who commanded that she never light the lamps to see his true face. Eros allowed Psyche's sisters to visit her, and they, jealous of her palace, gave her the idea that the man she'd spent every night beside was actually a serpent intent on eating her. Psyche then lit a candle that night to make sure her husband wasn't a monster (wouldn't she be able to tell, if she'd slept with him so often?) and found out that he was Eros, but she dripped some candle wax on him and was discovered. Eros then flew away from her. Psyche spent a while wandering the earth, begging various gods for help and exacting revenge on her sisters, and finally pleaded with Aphrodite. Aphrodite set her a series of impossible tasks which Psyche completed with the help of her animal friends. The final task involved retrieving a box of beauty from Persephone in Hades, but once Psyche was home free she decided to open the box. (What is it with Greek women and opening boxes?) Eros swooped and saved her from his mother's wrath, and they all lived happily ever after, or so the story goes.
I've got some issues with the traditional story. 1) Eros is so compliant. "Oh, I've found the love of my life! What, mother wants me to leave her? Sure, okay." 2) Psyche is an idiot. "Wow, I've spent every night having amazing sex with this awesome guy! What? My sisters say he's actually a giant snake that wants to eat me? Oh, yeah, that makes such perfect sense that I'll blatantly ignore the clear orders of the man I love and jeopardize all my happiness!" 3) Psyche is helpless. When Eros leaves, the best she can do is go off to kill her sisters before prostrating herself in front of any god who will listen. When she finally visits Aphrodite (wow, what an obvious solution. It's amazing how long this takes her to figure out), she can't work hard to get back the man she was willing to die for, but instead sits by and lets some creatures straight out of a Disney movie do everything for her.
Please, those values died with the Greeks who made them up. My Psyche is an immature, stubborn and independent wench who wants to prove herself. And guess what? She's actually kind of smart. Eros is a blind, sarcastic and termperamental sort of guy. My retelling also incorporates elements of different stories, such as the other interpretations of Eros and Psyche (Beauty and the Beast, East of the Sun and West of the Moon), Andromeda and Perseus (weirdly similar situation, that), and the tale of Arachne and Athena.
LENORE (U&C)
This one's a retelling of Beauty and the Beast (one of my favorite stories of all time) where the moral of the story has nothing to do with beauty being skin deep. I'm really tired of that take on it. It takes place in a fantasy world, where the kingdoms are equipped with a full set of nasty politics, creeptastic witches, dagger skills, and shiny black pistols. The kingdom belonging to our protagonist, Prince Lucan, is called Lenore. Here's where it gets its name:
"'Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?'"
-- Edgar Allan Poe, "Lenore"
Sigh. Poe is such a dreamboat.
POLITICS (U&C)
This is the vampire story I swore I would never write. However, the story has less to do with OMG VAMPIRES than family dynamics and the way changes effect them. Replace "vampire" with "transgendered" or something similar and you'll see what I mean. Also, there are lots of motorcycles involved. Basically, the story goes something like this:
Girl meets Boy at a bus stop. Boy grabs her and Girl thinks Boy is a rapist. Boy turns out to be an off-duty cop trying to protect Girl from strange Bad Guys. Boy gives Girl a ride home on his motorcycle. And that's how Trent and Vera meet. Trent is a half-Indian (as in East Indian) vampire patrol cop riding a white and black 2005 Harley-Davidson Dyna Super Glide. He's my favorite, so he gets the all-American Harley.
Because I'm a freak, I spent a long time looking at bikes that fit my characters' personalities. In actuality, none of the characters would have these bikes because they're expensive and no government agency, vampire or human, is going to splurge for Harleys when it can hand out Yamahas or Hondas. I'm just pretending that these bikes are actually cheap and therefore plausible rides for my boys.
Allister Davis: Trent's partner, a rough and tumble blondie that moves like a bear and smokes cigarettes with a James Dean brand of cool. He rides a blue 2007 Victory Hammer. Note the huge back tire and the bearlike badassery that exudes from the body.
Allan: A guy riding a white and blue 2005 Triumph Speedmaster that Vera (protagonist) consistently mistakes for Trent. Is it longing? A feminine, blase dismissal of motorcycles and their unique models? Or is it something more?
Allan's Dad: A guy with a thick accent and an old red Kawasaki-Bajaj 4S Champion from back in the day. He instilled a love of bikes in his son.
The Cousin: A character that may or may not appear in the first book, he's Trent's vampiric cousin (on his mother's side) from Russia, making his rebellious way across Southern Europe and into the States. A guy like this needs a hot ride, so he picked up a black KTM RC8 in Austria, which is a street racing bike that makes me drool. This is probably how he'd enjoy riding it. Honestly, this bike makes me think of that Polygon pokemon set loose on the streets of Hungary, Top Gear style.
The Cousin's Dad: Also a vampire, and also from Russia, Cuz's dad rides an old school purple Minsk MMVZ-113.
SILVER (U&C)
So far the only part of Silver that I've written is the ending scene, but I can't tell you about that. I got the idea for the story because I realized that I really really adore star names (I name all of my video game characters after stars) like Polaris, Spika, Sirius and etc. Rigel happens to be my favorite, so I wrote a description of Rigel. His word is apathy. As a star, he could believe himself entitled to demean the entire human race, but he really doesn't care enough to act uppity. He lives his human life with his eyes half-closed, but when he opens them you can see they're as black as space. When Ry gets excited his starlight leaks out of his pupils and stains the iris white. An identifying characteristic of fallen stars is the silver lights embedded in the skin on their arms. Ry normally wears jackets to cover this up. He also dresses in black, not by any particular preference but because black is what his roommate wears, and he steals all his clothes from his roommate. He's a tall, brooding sort. Silver is sort of an experiment focusing on whether love can be avoided by apathy. Does love overpower apathy? Does it come to all people? Can someone who feels nothing still feel love?
Oh, and Rigel is beta Orionis (the beta star in Orion), even though it's brighter than alpha Orionis, the red supergiant Betelgeuse. In fact, Rigel is one of the brightest stars in the sky, a supergiant about 40,000 times the sun's luminosity, according to wikipedia. Obviously, I had to make Rigel in the image of young Marlon Brando.
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