# My opera-theme short story in progress, comments?



## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

I'm posting my short science/fantasy story "Finale", in progress, but I'd like some feedback on the portion here -- it's under revision and incomplete but I still wanted to share it:

"Finale", Copyright © 2013

Donna Elvira entered stage right and strode center, where she solidly planted herself to begin the defiant yet comic _Ah! Chi mi dice mai_.

Concealed behind a pressboard treetrunk far right upstage, Giovanni and I observed Elvira's entrance, but neither of us had recognized her thus far. So while she sang, the Don had me assist him change into a handsome greatcoat and feathered hat so he could make a pass at her, add her to his catalogue.

At least that's the way it was supposed to play.

But as Karyn Petrovich began her aria, her once-lovely voice thickened, she stammered and choked, spasms of coughing soon to follow. Karyn retrieved a ratty old bath towel to muffle the hacking, and just stood there, bent over, face buried in the cloth as her shoulders shook.

When the coughs subsided, Karyn nodded for Frank to restart the accompaniment. Each time, however, she never managed to get further than a few lines before the choking invaded to cut her off once more.

I shook my head sadly at Mark Bernstein, who was standing beside me, waiting patiently in his Don Giovanni coat to woo Donna Elvira. I broke out of character, hobbled to center stage, clapped my hands, "Everybody, Take ten!"

Karyn read this as a sign of defeat and scurried over to the lip of the stage. At first I thought she was going to dive headfirst into the vacant orchestra pit, but instead she sank dejectedly to a sitting position and plopped there, legs dangling into empty space. She was alternately choking and sobbing into the towel. As I approached I could see bright flecks of blood she'd coughed up. She noticed me and demurely folded the towel, concealing the blood into a deeper part of the cloth. As if I didn't know.

My hips ached as I eased down from my crutches and sat beside her. I briefly wondered how much longer I'd be able to get around, but pushed the thought from my mind, folding it deep, just like Karyn's bloodstains.

I guess I was lucky in a way, the phase one infection having settled into my legs and hips first, a painful and debilitating arthritic condition, but at least my voice was unaffected. Some, like Karyn, got the virus in the respiratory tract first. For others it was the brain. Still others, the liver, pancreas, wherever. Regardless of where it began, the end result was the same. The virus dribbled and poked and nagged at you for a few months, maybe a year, entered a brief dormant phase, then finally erupted all through your body. A week, ten days, and you were gone.

Karyn's violent coughs finally subsided to a raspy wheeze, but she still kept her face buried in the towel, a measure of resignation, letting her shoulders sag, head droop. I put my arm around her. When I did, she leaned into me and began to sob steadily. "I'm so sorry," from within the muffled folds of cloth.

"Take your time. We'll skip to my catalogue aria and then go back and work through your entrance later." I gave her a little friendly squeeze but that set off another round of sobbing, so I took my arm away and simply sat there beside her, a friend. I looked around, noticed the rest of the cast waiting for some sign from me, so I nodded reassuringly and gave them a little wave to show that everything would be okay.

I could hear occasional gunshots in the streets outside the theater. On the news they always called it the "persistent rattle of sporadic weapons fire" as though that formulaic label made it any easier to accept. There did however seem to be a recent pocket of reasonable calm in our immediate neighborhood.

Jack Davis, our sole remaining tenor, was also in the Park Place militia, and he kept us updated on the latest fighting, or truce, or what served for a temporary peace this week. It had been bad in the spring, with Jack on active duty. This disrupted our performance schedule but with all the fighting, not many opera fans ventured out anyway. Now that things had quieted down, Jack managed to spend most of his spare time in our productions.

Jack was an Immune, a genetic rarity. Biologists surmised that people like him had survived other pandemics like bubonic plague, smallpox, and even the common cold. A certain percentage of the populace was simply and completely immune from the KillBug, Jack among them. They didn't get so much as the sniffles.

I wondered whether to envy or pity people like Jack. If someone didn't shoot them first, if they didn't fall prey to the organ and blood gangs, they'd be here when the rest of us were rotting. But they'd have to bury us, bulldoze the corpses, clean up the riot damage and rampage burning, start over. It would take enormous stamina.

As soon as the KillBug hit, people drew an immediate connection between this infection and Stephen King's apocalyptic novel, _The Stand_. The book went into several reprints, and each of the film versions were played endlessly on TV everywhere. A mob of fanatics even stormed and burned King's old home, converted into a museum following his death of natural causes a few years earlier. I don't know whether King would have been chagrined or delighted in the parallels. Probably horrified, as he'd been a decent guy who'd been blessed with a wicked imagination and the talent to write about it.

Nevertheless the similarities were there. The infection seemingly came from nowhere and spread rapidly across the world. Like AIDS, it was viral and rapidly attacked the immune system. But unlike AIDS, it was airborne. The scientists soon discovered it was a mutant form of virus that encapsulated itself, therefore to survive outside its host until it was picked up by the next victim. Vaccines were rushed into trials but were mostly ineffective.

Whether it was engineered by some weapons lab or evolved naturally, nobody knew. Or was saying. But the outcome was the same: Death and more death. And only for primates. When it first hit, all the zoo ape and monkey populations were euthanized, only enough remaining to allow for vaccine research. Primate populations were now nonexistent in the wild, a few scattered survivors, mostly immunes like Jack Davis.

Karyn dried her eyes and was now quiet, staring out over the empty seats and thinking about God knows what.

"Ready?" I asked her.

She nodded, stood up, helped me back onto my crutches. Arm in arm we supported one another until we reached our stage marks.

I reached over to a nearby chair, grabbed my score, glanced it over. "Okay, gang. Let's pick up, top of page 42, Catalogue aria." I saw that Frank had his hands poised over the keyboard, ready to start the rehearsal. Karyn had her game face on, Donna Elvira again, she and Leporello meeting in a town plaza in Seville, three hundred years ago.

I gave Frank the go-ahead, opened the score to a random page to pretend it was my chronicle of Don Giovanni's conquests, and started to sing, _Madamina! Il catalogo è questo_...

Later, in the dressing room, I wondered why we even bothered. Few of the principal singers were in voice, most of the chorus was gone, and the orchestra had shrunk to the point that we only had what amounted to a string quartet. We even had to set up a stereo to play the overture from a CD.

Not that it made much of a difference. Most performances there were nearly as many people on stage as in the audience.

So why? Why keep up appearances? Why pretend?

Because if we didn't, we go straight into abject insanity, was why. Human beings are defined by their culture. It's what separates us from other species. And if we forgot our culture, forgot music and art, forgot Mozart, we were damned. Damned even more than if we'd blown ourselves to fragments during our atomic madness, damned more than if this virus killed each and every last human on the planet.

So we persevered.

(in progress)


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## sospiro (Apr 3, 2010)

:tiphat:

More, more, more please!!


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

I like it, too. I wonder if somebody discovers a cure in the end... to be fair, it might all end when the opera ends.


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## Volve (Apr 14, 2013)

This is very thrilling! You do have a talent for writing, I want to read more of this!


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Thanks. It's in what is essentially rough draft form right now, I'm revising it now, working toward a conclusion, the fabric of which could go either way.

I'm a mystery novelist (2 sold & published, 3rd in progress) but I also write short stories, essays, articles, the occasional screenplay -- none optioned, sigh, and mystery/thriller book, TV, and movie reviews for an online mystery e-zine site. Most of my time goes toward the novel right now but I do take a bit of sidebar toward my short stories. "Finale" has been rummaging around in my fevered brain for about a year now.

Thanks for the kind words, but I'd also appreciate some nudging toward improvement, as to whether the exposition (a sort of recit, ha ha) is too long versus the "solos and duets" (dialogue). The goal is to make the story accessible to the non-opera fan by explaining as much as needed about the story and opera (Giovanni) without making it an instruction manual, or to skim over the operatic themes so lightly as to render them useless and therefore dull to the opera fan.

This sort of balance is always something I work toward in my mystery novels. For example, I'm a moderate-level firearms enthusiast, and I therefore strive to be accurate (no safeties on revolvers, for example, the most common of all gun errors in prose). On the other hand, I don't want to bore the reader such that the story gets bogged down with minute gun trivia that doesn't drive the story line.

This is very much like our normal discussions about opera, as to how much the music, how much the story and stagecraft should contribute, as we all want a good balance.


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## Volve (Apr 14, 2013)

Well, maybe one way you could try to achieve that balance between appealing to both opera and non-opera readers could be with the rehearsal, particularly with the staging of the whole thing. It could give an insight into the opera for those who don't know it, and as an opera fan, I always enjoy reading about or watching the whole backstage production, it's always exciting.


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## sospiro (Apr 3, 2010)

I hope they find a cure, I do like happy endings. Which is strange considering I love opera so much.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Volve said:


> particularly with the staging of the whole thing. It could give an insight into the opera for those who don't know it, and as an opera fan, I always enjoy reading about or watching the whole backstage production, it's always exciting


yes! with all this regie-not regie thing going on you could have the director fight for a stranger production (maybe mirroring the fighting out in the streets) whilst the singers would rather go for a traditional one and explain the plot this way. Anything that showcases your great knowledge of backstage antics - I know I loved that thread and would always read more along those lines.


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

deggial said:


> yes! with all this regie-not regie thing going on you could have the director fight for a stranger production (maybe mirroring the fighting out in the streets) whilst the singers would rather go for a traditional one and explain the plot this way. Anything that showcases your great knowledge of backstage antics - I know I loved that thread and would always read more along those lines.


That's a very interesting side-plot technique and would likely be appropriate for a longer story. As you know, in a short story (as this is), you can't burden the plotlines with too many asides because there isn't time. Short stories are such structured not just because of their length (10000 words or fewer, usually) but the fact that they have a single plot arc that carries the narrative thread.

To split the production adherents into traditional vs modernized factions would lessen the impact, which is, for me, the intense, perhaps futile, but noble effort to produce a traditional production in the face of chaos. That will be the arc and plotline that carries the narrative.

I'm not demeaning your point, understand, just saying that it's more suitable for a longer treatment and perhaps in a story with a less apocalyptic tone. Consider for example the very nicely plotted film "Black Swan" which allows personal conflicts to exist within the ballet company as well as internal fantasies and emotional burdens, as the film is long enough a vehicle to carry those diffident threads.

Myself, being a bit longwinded (as you can easily tell from my postings, ha ha), I'm better suited to the novel format than short story. And fact that my favorite writer is James Joyce should point to that sort of format rather than the shorter genre. Realize that (as I was taught in my lit classes) the hardest thing to do in a short story is to economize and to leave out the excess, to trim, to summarize, to say in a few words that which might normally take more. And proof to point why short stories aren't my strong suit, ha ha. Per my most recent novel, about 80k words, and my novel in progress, which will likely be 90k+ words.


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Volve said:


> This is very thrilling! You do have a talent for writing, I want to read more of this!


When the story is finished, I'll post it again. All please remember that it's copyright. Thanks again for the kind comments.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

I see your point. Since too much plotting is out, I thought what you had was great. Did you try to challenge yourself by writing a short story then?


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Not exactly a challenge, per se. I've got a zillion ideas buzzing around in my head and I keep copious notes on my laptop about things that occur to me.

I've written quite a few short stories before, most of them horror genre or sometimes SF, and an occasional "mainstream" story about modern life.

It's just that some ideas lend themselves more toward a short story, being a single concept, rather than in my mystery novels, which examine several themes throughout.

But the short stories all have a single idea driving them. In "Finale" I imagined a group of artists trying to hold together the threads of art for art's sake despite the despair surrounding them.

One of my horror stories, for example, "The Stump" is about a low-level thief who becomes obsessed with stealing personal objects rather than good stuff to fence. So he steals a hairbrush, a sock. And he also feels compelled to touch the body part of the sleeping person, like gently caress a woman's hair. This obsession grows until he sees a neighbor man who has an artificial leg. So the thief must steal the leg and touch the stump. What happens is, well, not something he bargained for at all.

Horror stories aren't about jumping out and saying "boo!" but instead about one person's obsession or fixation, how it leads to ruin, and for a horror tale, often involves supernatural and very nasty outcomes.

My mystery fiction on the other hand is precisely accurate. My protagonist is a modern day private detective but he's got computers, all the latest electronic gadgets (no private detective could exist today without that), and the stories are intentionally realistic -- no "gumshoe" thuggish Mike Hammer type, but a college educated investigator in the "real" world, drives an SUV, has his office in the front of his house, etc.

In "Finale" I want to make the story as realistic as possible, authentic based on my personal experiences in a small opera company, with the single and unique change to reality that there's a plague outside the theater door.

And yeah I do meander my responses here but they help me formulate my concepts better, airing them.


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## Bellinilover (Jul 24, 2013)

That's good, Katdad, especially the last paragraph! I love mystery stories myself and have tried my hand at writing fanfiction (no opera fanfiction yet, though I'm considering some).

By the way, I had a question for you and sent you a PM.


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## katdad (Jan 1, 2009)

Bellini, fanfic is a good way to start, as you've got a base to work from and your writing is a bit easier than jumping into the deep end. But you'll also find you're a bit restricted with fanfic because you have to work within someone else's parameters.

I'll also say that it's a common mistake for new fiction writers to assume that because it's short, a short story is easier than a longer piece, like a novella. That ain't so (haha). Short stories have their own creative arc and are damned hard to control, as you must focus on a specific rhythm in the narrative and stick with a single aspect or theme. When I write my mystery novels I can wander a bit, perhaps have a humorous or sardonic chapter or sequence intermixed with the straight-ahead mystery narrative.

Should you decide to write a short piece, please feel free to PM me and let me take a look. I've written movie, TV, and book reviews often and still do, so I'm quite familiar with the review process and promise not to be too harsh (heh heh, he said, twirling his mustache).


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