Something A Little Like Magic

I have the strange urge to try and work out how I write a story, mainly by blogging it. I'm not sure that I'll ever get around to it, mostly because once I really get writing it's hard for me to understand even where I am, let alone what I'm doing. But it came to mind yesterday while I was working on a story that...sort of came out of nowhere, though not really. It's essentially the very first part of the sequel to The Juniper Bones, though it acts as a stand-alone in some respects because it's a bridging piece between spring and autumn.

Something about the writing of the piece seems...odd, to me. Partly it's because I am having a commission frenzy, being that I am very over-excited by having money again. One of the pieces I commissioned was of Eliot and Morgan, the two characters in this story, and it's a very...odd piece, in such that it's got some fantastic lighting to it. I've seen the progress of the artist so far, and while I knew it would be excellent from her previous work, my god she knows how to deal with lowlight conditions. And this picture has the two characters in a windowseat with a full moon beyond, no other lights on, and...it's a very liminal sort of atmosphere. Things change in light of that kind, mostly because people and objects are very indistinct in such light in the first place. And the story I am writing deals with that moment, and it feels like I'm trying to catch moonbeams in my fingers. And they're slipping away...but not in a bad way. It's just...writing is a peculiar experience at the best of times, I think. But there's something very peculiar about this story. I feel like a magician, or a wizard, or perhaps even an enchantress. I can feel the power, even though the story is just fragments at this point. Something thrums beneath them, something far bigger than what I think it is. I often feel like I have very little to do with the creation of a story except as a glorified secretary, and I'm getting that sensation so very strongly here.

So yeah, there's an odd little ramble for the day. I should go eat something before I go even more nuts. Let's just blame Christmas for this one, shall we? ^_~

Inspiration Stations

Due to a combination of factors, I haven't been writing since I came back to New Zealand. Mostly it's that I am just so disorganised; living real life again is far too complicated for a person with a brain as small as mine. So, I've been stuck on trying to get myself sorted for both work and Christmas, leaving very little time for writing. But I want to write, so...

The other day I got a couple of my more recent commissions printed properly, and then I stuck a few up on my wall with some of the older ones to remind me of what I am up to. It's still missing a few of my favourites, but my own printer is out of ink and I pulled the plug on my credit card for the others...but I've been paid since, so I will have to do some more at some point. But yes, having pictures up on my wall is a major inspiration to me, along with the extensive playlists I make for different novels. I can write without these things, sure, but I much prefer to have them. They remind me of what I need to do. Besides, there's nothing quite as terrifying as Viola Morgan staring at you from behind your computer with her baleful button eyes.

...terrifying woman. Damn her. At least she doesn't have a scalpel, though one must note she is dangerously close to a canopic jar. It's currently filled with earbuds, but things always can and do change. But yeah, I am trying to work out what I should be working on in the run up to Christmas. A friend wants to start reading Greywater so I probably ought to proofread/sense check chapters as I pass them along, but I should actively write something too. Kaverlen Falls is calling, but I've had a couple of very curious revelations regarding several characters and their fates, and some scenes from the end of the unnamed third book are very strong in my mind. So I probably ought to write those down, so at least they exist. I can alter them to suit whatever the story ends up being later, of course.

I'm just not sure about anything, I suppose. I find it very easy to get discouraged and just throw my hands in the air and shriek STOP WRITING YOU CAN'T WRITE JUST STOP IT. But I can't. Like I said, I just keep realising things about characters, and it feels like failure if I don't give them this chance to live. But then I wonder what sort of chance it is, if I can't write anything worth reading. So...yeah. It's very much SSDD around here right now.

So, with that said, I'm going to go and try to write something without thinking about it. Because when I think about it I end up in floods of tears wondering why I am even alive. Yeah, it's that time of month all right. My issue, mind you, is that it's always my time of the month these days. Gaaaaaaah. At least I have a felt plushie. That wants to kill me. Oh, dear...

"And good evening, Colin."

I haven't managed to do much of note the last week or so. I arrived back from Australia and between trying to get over jetlag, catching up with some fellow local writers, and going back to work a day and a half after getting back into the country...I'm exhausted. Not to mention I've got the most ridiculously fruit-stuffed Christmas cake in the oven this afternoon. I've never made a fruit cake before. I don't even like fruit cake. But as I'm well-known as the sort of madwoman who'll bake anything on a dare (yes, Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies, I'm looking at you) my mother told me to make one for her. So...we'll see how that turns out. Although with that said it's not like I have to eat it.

Otherwise, I spent Saturday most emphatically not writing, which was at least partially because I took a break from Dany and Tyrion and my other favourites to read the book that arrived in Saturday's post. The Scottish Prisoner. I've been dying for this book for months, and...finally. I did learn a lesson about checking release dates, mind you; I knew the UK date was later than the US one (or at least I thought it was) and when in Australia I ordered it from Amazon.com. And when I was at Whitcoulls last week hunting out A Storm of Swords for a laugh I checked the new release section and almost had an apopolexy when I saw that The Scottish Prisoner was there. Cheers, New Zealand. You suck, New Zealand. God, I love you, New Zealand.

Now, I'm a bit of a rabid Lord John Grey fangirl so of course instinct demanded I buy it, but my bank account is unhappy with me after so many weeks of not working, so I actually kept my cool and didn't buy another copy when I knew I had one coming in the post. I also got the next A Song of Ice and Fire to distract myself with anyway, but you know. [slaps hand] I'm a bad fangirl. (Actually, I still haven't read Lord John and the Plague of Zombies yet either, so I am a doubly bad fangirl.) But to make up for it I'm going to have a ramble here now anyway. I hesitate to call it a "review" because it's not like I have a clue what I'm talking about at the best of times, but I want to have a little SQUEE HANDFLAIL WHEEEEEEEE moment, so here we are. It's going to be filled with SPOILERS, so ye have been warned.

Like I said above, I've been waiting for this book for ages. Mostly it's because I love Lord John like the foaming-at-the-mouth idiot woman that I am, but it's also because it promised to give some real insight into John and Jamie's "friendship." Said friendship was utterly in tatters after Brotherhood of the Blade, and although we know from Voyager and beyond that the two of them managed to come to an understanding before John married Isobel, it was obviously not something that could be overcome with mere words. It needed action -- acta non verba, if I may be pretentious enough to pretend I know anything about Latin, ha ha ha (tip o' the hat to Herself there for teaching me the Latin in the first place) -- and fortunately for us, we got an entire book of action. In words. Oh god the irony, it burns. And you know I fucking love it.

I have to say first off that I have a copy of iTunes that is possessed by some sort of music demon. Or possibly a leprechaun. I already knew from having read various generous extracts that Jamie and John would be taking a trip to Ireland, and the moment I opened the book to the first page iTunes -- which was on random -- promptly brought up The Rocky Road To Dublin. Cue hysteria on my part. Incidentally I apologise for the leading photograph of this entry; that's not Ireland, it's the Highlands of Scotland. I've never been to Ireland myself; partly it's because I am a moron, but I also have this funny little thing about Ireland. By descent I'm English and Scottish -- although a Scotsman once told me I was Danish -- but my father has a family tree on his mother's side going back to the sixteenth century that he once told me proved we were Irish. I read it, then flipped out and emailed him back wailing DAAAAAAAAAAD WE MOVED TO ULSTER FROM ENGLAND and...yeah. I'm neither a Paddy nor a Mick, I'm a bloody Pom. Oops. (Although my great-grandmother was actually Scottish; apparently my English grandmother was terrified of her. Er.) So, yes, going to Ireland in books is about as far as I get right now. (And in my head, every Irishman sounds like Dara and Ed. Ha.)

So, to get back to the book. Overall I enjoyed it -- it's not my favourite of the supplementary material, I don't think, but Brotherhood is somehow hard to top for me. (And not just because through said book Lord John saved my life in Mexico. Long story.) But there is definitely a lot to recommend it. My only complaint is that I felt it could be longer, which is hilarious in hindsight because I've felt a few of the Lord John books have been a bit overlong in the tail. It wasn't even so much the story that I felt could be longer, I think I just wanted more detail. It's the richness of Gabaldon's writing that I always keep coming back for, and I didn't get as much of that here as I usually do -- though I might change my mind on a reread, because I was chewing through this thing like the word-glutton I am. I know I took my time over various extracts when they came to light and got far more satisfaction that way, so you know. Take that one with a grain of salt.

The characters, again, are what stood out for me. Naturally I adore Lord John, and even though I am not actually a huge fan of Jamie's, I do like his narrative voice. And yes, you heard that right; I am a full-blooded presumably straight female who wouldn't jump Jamie Fraser's bones at first opportunity. I'm not sure why that is; I find him to be a fascinating character, but he doesn't appeal to me the way I know he does to most other readers. I suspect it's just because my tastes are odd, but there you go. I do, however, love his narrative voice; Voyager is one of my favourite books in the series because we get to hear from Jamie. And considering the way this book deals with Jamie and John's friendship, I thought it was a very good idea for Gabaldon to have it told from both viewpoints rather than just John's. There's a running theme through the book about the two of them meeting as equals, and by sharing the narraitve rather than it being strictly from John's only really gave that a strong resonance. I enjoyed that. It also gave plenty of opportunity for warm fuzzies between Willie and Jamie, which considering the state of their relationship by the end of An Echo In The Bone...ooh, yeah, fluff is handy right now.

So, John and Jamie. Brilliant. But their supporting cast is wonderful -- Tom Byrd, I just want to squishle. And it says something for Diana's writing -- and perhaps my own gross stupidity -- that I fully thought Tom was going to die in Ireland. (I say "gross stupidity" because I've already read an extract of Plague of Zombies that says Tom is alive, and I know that happens after Prisoner.) I was very, very sad. And then very, very happy. I also have a thing for John's brother Hal, who is a stubborn son of bitch with an honourable streak a mile long; Jamie makes a comment towards the end of the book that he envies the brothers their company, and I can see why. Hal and Johnny are just...Hal and Johnny. As someone with two brothers and one sister, I can safely say that there is nothing in this world quite like a sibling who has your back. And though Jamie still has Jenny, it's...different. I love my brothers, but my sister is the one who knows me best. I imagine it to be much the same with men and their brothers and sisters.

Hal's wife, Minnie, is also a revelation in this book -- although I was fond of Minnie anyway. Harry Quarry is a force unto himself -- a very poetic force, albeit one best suited to the saucier imprints of Mills and Boon -- and I had a little snicker when John Hunter turned up again. Oh, that man is a prick and a half; when I was in London earlier this year I went to the Royal College of Surgeons and saw his collection. Tsk, tsk. I've seen "interesting" anatomical collections before, being that I spent so much time wandering in and out of the Lindo-Ferguson Building at Otago, but even I was taken aback by what the man had. (I was particularly revolted by the half-child's head, which says a lot as my previous "worst ever" was the conjoined twins who did not look to me like they'd died at birth; they seemed far too old in my admittedly limited experience.) But it was a nice touch to bring him back for the concluding duel of the story.

As to the story itself...it was actually a good deal easier to follow than some of John's other stories. That may be just because I'm an idiot, but there you go. It flowed like a river, picking up pace and flotsam along the way, and then hit a dam before spilling over into a very nice conclusion. I did have one complaint, but the more I consider it...well. A month or so back I made a smart-ass remark on the compuserve forum that my wilful brain has a happy-ever-after scenario that involves John running away to Germany to live with Stephan von Namtzen where they can raise sausages ever after. Said sausages referring to dackels (dachshunds), naturally, but only on the surface of the matter. Ha ha ha. I have a particular fondness for dachshunds, you see; ever since I was eleven or twelve I've been of a mind to acquire one and name it Colin. Which is entirely the fault of Prince George. ...ironically enough set in the same time period as this novel. Ha. So you can imagine I was overjoyed when Stephan reappeared.

Weirdly enough, I wasn't a hundred percent satisfied with it, but it may be because I am, in the words of Jamie Fraser, something of a "wee pervert" myself. I wasn't quite satisfied with the change in Stephan and John's relationship, and at first I thought I was just being a jerk because of a lack of detail. (I've been rereading the other stories in Red Velvet and Absinthe the last few days, you see; explicitness is the name of the game there!) I then realised that for all John was clearly over Percy, I was not getting the same sense of intimacy between John and Stephan that we were treated to with Percy and John in Brotherhood. And I don't mean in the sense of sex -- the emotional intimacy wasn't the same. And for a bit I couldn't decide if it was because John was pulling back, or if it said something else. From the lovely scene in Brotherhood it's very clear that John and Stephan are emotionally close, and the end of the book sorted it for me. Stephan sent John a dackel, and invited him hunting. And I grinned. Not just because I mentally named the poor creature "Colin," but also because I realised what it was. I love Stephan, and I love him with John, but they strike me as friends more than anything else now. And not in a bad way. Much as I wanted them to be something more, I think they are best as friends. Not that I'd object to being proved wrong, but it's all good. They're friends, but not exactly confidants in the way John was with Percy, or even with Jamie.

The relationship between Jamie and John was particularly lovely to watch develop anew. I was particularly struck by the ending, where Jamie, John and Willie are watching the horses and John opens with the Torremolinos Gambit. It was a wonderful callback to the first time their friendship went balls-to-the-wall in Voyager, and it also put John, Jamie and William together. I've always been fascinated by that triad, particularly as it is one of the things that I believe ties John and Claire together much much later. While John is no-one's "woman," neither is Claire -- they're both partners to Jamie in terms of his two children, and this lovely little scene almost has them as a peculiar little family. Yet they're all unaware of it, which gives it a nice echo we'll see later. I love that sort of thing; I think that's what makes both reading writing prequels and supplementary material so much fun.

Of course, I have the brain of an idiot and I was watching The Venture Bros. earlier yesterday, and for some reason as Jamie and John began to work together I started mentally picturing them as Brock Samson and Rusty Venture. Which is perhaps a bit of a disservice to John, because he's nothing like Rusty. It was just the juxtaposition of the huge guy ostensibly working for the much smaller man and yet the two of them having a laugh together as the relationship's more equal than that...although yes, I do have days when I mentally picture Jamie as a red-headed Brock. ...nice ass, Samson. But that's the heart of it; I absolutely adored how John and Jamie went from John's hilarious "I wouldn't piss on him were he burning in the fires of hell" comment to playing chess again by the end of it. And it was believeable. Though we already knew it was a given, they had to work for it. And they did. That's what I liked so much about this story; as I said above they came together as equals, and that was what allowed them to work through their issues with one another and part as something very much like friends. For being the one to set that up and make it possible, I wish Hal would take me on the hearth rug. Ha.

The particular stand-out moments to me were Jamie rescuing John from the castle, which was a lovely bit of irony considering there was some vague talk of Jack Randall through the whole thing. I've always wondered how much John knew, you see; I couldn't imagine Jamie ever telling him, but John does know something happened in Jamie's past and I can't help but wonder if he'll ever put it together. After all, John's not stupid -- and I liked how he came to realise why Jamie stayed at Helwater. I actually thought it was a bit cruel of Jamie to lead John to think it was for Betty, because while I harbour no belief that Jamie would ever want John the way John wants Jamie, I thought lying about something of that nature was a bit unfair. But John was a lot more magnanimous than I was, and it was a nice way to lead him to realise that Willie was Jamie's son. I also liked how Isobel, Jamie and John became connected through Wilberforce, as it says a lot to me about how John came to wed Isobel and why Jamie was a bit apprehensive about it considering the circumstances. Also, Lord Dunsany arranging for John to become Willie's guardian even before John weds Isobel was nicely done. These people are connected, in so many ways. One of my favourite Stephen King novels, Bag of Bones, talks about how the TR-90 (a "town" of a sort) is filled with people connected by "underground cables" you can't see but you feel, and that's what I got here. Heartstrings, strung out between them all. And even though you already know these people will be connected to one another long into the future, you can see why even now. I read the first book as Cross-Stitch rather than the US title of Outlander, and though I like the latter better for the series as a whole it feels like a callback to the former title to me. It's a tapestry, and the threads move in and out of the weaves of the others. I love that. That's why I read these books.

There are a lot of other things I could say, but my brain is dying this afternoon. And like I said, I need to reread the book anyway. But there's just...a richness to the story that I enjoyed. I must unashamedly admit that John is my favourite character, but I think it was because John finally got to do something with Jamie that was meaningful. Because they were equals. I liked John from the moment I first started reading from his POV in Voyager (I don't recall thinking much of him in Dragonfly In Amber), and I can assure you that I remember very well reading that book in Christchurch. I all but shrieked at him when he made his Torremolinos gambit after the chess game and reached out for Jamie. I knew it was not the time. It put them on an unequal footing that went beyond the standard governer/prisoner thing, and although we knew they worked through it we never knew how. And to finally see it, all these years later...I feel quite privileged, somehow. It's such a vital and strong part of John's character, this constant love for Jamie, and seeing how the two of them can deal with it to the point that they can be friends...

The duel struck me deeply. I loved how it was told through Jamie's eyes but with John's words in his mind; they were principle and second, and almost in a way they were one body in that moment. Considering they can never be one in the way John might wish -- and my heart broke for him when he heard Jamie calling for Claire and ached to be someone who could give him solace -- this did my poor bruised heart right in. There's a lot of things in this book, in terms of the different relationships between people and the reasons for it -- love, honour, duty, filial association, that sort of thing. John gets brotherhood from Hal and a more physical kind of love from Stephan, but from Jamie...it's an understanding. It's not romantic, but it's not platonic either. It's something else entirely. It acts, actually, as a very strong reasoning behind the oddity of John and Claire's consummated marriage, but that's entirely another discussion.

But yes, this is all getting very disjointed. I just loved the little details of this book, too; John's repeated motif of the master couplet said so much for the theme of equality, and I also had a good little snigger at the poem Jamie was reading early on about the woman scorned. I tended to read it as his quiet unease about John; as far back as my reading of Voyager I could see Jamie held a concern about John's intentions towards him for a long long time. And I mean that in the sense Jamie didn't realise for quite a while the nature of John's honour. Fair enough, considering his experience at the hand of Jack Randall; it was no wonder Jamie would believe John's fake impossible "love" (you can't hear my sarcasm in the written word, believe you me) could turn just as easily to resentment and hate. Which is why I loved how Jamie refused to let Quinn kill John. And I also understood the last bit with the names. I loved how John suddenly got annoyed and demanded that Jamie stop calling him "my lord." And the fact that Jamie wanted to but knew it was better not to...it was lovely and sad and made me think of their meeting all those years later in Jamaica. That was where the equality truly began. But it was there earlier, just...it was never quite the time.

So, I am looking forward to In My Own Heart's Blood in a couple of years. I love Jamie and John, and I love them together. Even though my slash fangirl self will always wish John could have what he wanted, I do love them as friends. It's such a rich and fascinating relationship, one once again in tatters, and seeing how it was between them the last time they patched it up...it gives me hope for this time. It also makes me slightly philosophical; much as I wanted Stephan and John together, I think they're better as friends. It's the same with John and Jamie. They have their own paths, but they're just...there are heartstrings, as I said. They stretch out between us and all the people that we love. And I particularly like how a Scot and a Pom had to go to Paddy-Land to become friends. Something about that just amuses me deeply.

In other news, I should probably go and do something like writing myself. I have LOTS OF FEELINGS about writing, mostly something between despair and hope, but that's for another day. In the meantime...just write. As they say.

"I think it's going to be a very Merry Christmas!"

I can't remember if I first ran across it in-novel via one of his many author-avatar characters or if it was in On Writing, but at some point in my reading life Stephen King described "The Zone" and I totally clicked onto this concept. I'm a haphazard writer by nature, but also a very prolific one. My "official" NaNo total came to around 155k, but that doesn't account for the two 3k stories, the 7k other not-finished short story, the 3k not-finished short story, another 3k of assorted dribbles that haven't got official story status yet, and the monster 30k "short" story I wrote over the last three days in between writing all this other stuff.

Er.

I haven't done all that much today, to be honest, it being the first of December. But I have to go back to New Zealand on Sunday and I have a list of stories I want to finish before I do. One of them is done. I'm going to make myself a shopping list just to make a point to myself, actually.

What I Must Become - creepy short story about horrible creepy things.
No Good Deed - projected 10k worth of angst and sweetcakes.
Expressions of Etiquette - entirely screwed up short story about coming "home" for the holidays.
The Blacksmith's Daughter - unnecessarily horrific story about smallfolk and the whims of the gods.
Dream About Flying - bizarre misaimed Aesop about jerkass genies and falling in love with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with.

They're all in...varying states. The first is finished and stands at just over 6k. The second has about 7.5k to its name and I figure I could finish it tonight. The third is complicated as I haven't written much of it -- maybe 800 words -- and I need to have it finished by next Friday. The fourth is all plotted out at just under 3k and just needs to be filled in; I should finish it tonight over the second, actually, because it needs to be less than 6k anyway and I need to do something with it before the 15th. The last is...maybe 2.5k written and is for a friend for Christmas and therefore can wait until everything else is done, so...maybe if I can get Daughter finished tonight and Deed mostly done, I can spend tomorrow finishing Deed and then working on Expressions. And then I won't feel like a failure for maybe two minutes.

I'm having an odd time of it, you see. I was told yesterday via email that I didn't make the cut of the master's programme, so I'm at a loose end as to what to do next year. There are benefits, of course; I can now go to Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam for my birthday in February without crippling worry about funding a move to Wellington, and without the university schedule holding me to the country I can go meet up with friends in Seattle for a weekend in August and then pop over for SARAP! in Edmonton with friends met in Turkey. I just...I'd wanted this programme, you see, to help me learn something about my writing and also make contacts. I guess I just need to spend January editing and querying Greywater and hope something comes of it. I just...don't really know.

But I have been reminded that I love writing. Whenever I get rejected I tend to think "FINE I SUCK I'LL JUST QUIT." But I know that I won't. Because I can't. The infamous 30k in three days thing is proof of that. It just...poured out of my heart and through my fingertips and onto the computer screen and it made me laugh and cry and laugh some more and I just...I don't know. Maybe my writing will never mean anything to anyone but me. Maybe I'm just stuck in the Zone all on my own.

But I'm going home in the weekend and I know the DVD pictured above will be waiting, as I tossed it back from London before I left the UK. It's my Christmas movie. And it's December now. Time for joy, they say...and that was one reason why I wrote that 30k story. It's...kind of a Christmas present, though I'm not sure I'll have the nerve to send it to the person it was written for. But I probably will. Christmas is an awkward time in my family; there are terrible memories for us associated with the season, but then there are so many brilliant ones too. And that was what the 30k was about. The beginning after the end.

And I already knew that carpets can fly, anyway.

If I Could Turn Back Time

The first time I walked into the Raphael room at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington, I just about had a fit because it was huge, empty, and beautiful. I have a thing for grand stately rooms, particularly when I feel like I have it to myself (you may note in entry before this one, there is a picture of the larger temple at Abu Simbel with no people in front of it; I took that, and my good god it was amazing to be able to do so). The next time I saw the Raphael room I figured it wouldn't get any better than the first hit, so to speak. HOW WRONG I WAS. They'd installed what you see above: a giant couch. That's not even the half of it. You could walk into this room, kick off your shoes, and loll around in the presence of masterpieces.

There's a reason why I'm babbling on about this, believe it or not, but I'll get to it in a minute. The entry is really supposed to point out that I've "finished" NaNo, or at least I've achieved some of what I set out to do. I have first drafts of Hibernaculum and Greywater finished, I have a random beautiful and terrifying scene between Ryenn and Arosek written, I have a roughly 7k short story about SPARKLY EVIL BLOOD FAE, and as of today I have 50k on the manuscript of Kaverlen Falls, which I just started last week. I'm hoping to finish a draft of the 6k short story The Blacksmith's Daughter tomorrow, and...the official wordcount so far is 154,256.

I'm still having something of a crisis. I just don't know if I'm a good writer. It's a mental thing, as in I'm a complete mentalist, but now that I have spent almost six weeks in Australia writing my heart, eyes, and wrists out, I'm terrified there's nothing to show for it. Which is blatant lies judging by the prodigious output I've managed, but then I tend to bury my head in my hands and wail BUT IT'S ALL CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP an awful lot. [rolls eyes] I don't know.

Speaking of crap, my mother forced me to go see the latest Twilight movie with her the other day; I already felt ill before we got there, and the patented SPINNY CAMERA ANGLES OF DOOM meant halfway through the damn thing I had to dig into my purse and find two paracetamol and five mg of prochlorperazine. And I still felt so ill I had to keep my eyes closed for ten minutes. I didn't even eat my popcorn, and I have an eating disorder. (Maybe I should just spend my life locked in a room with Stephanie Meyer. I can almost guarantee I'd never want to eat again if all I had for stimulation was her books and those damn movies.) At one stage in the movie I even facepalmed. I literally facepalmed. Here, have a visual aid:

And I don't even like Star Trek, either. (DENNY CRANE!) I don't even remember what it was that made me do it. There were a lot of things that upset me about that movie. Principally, though, I was deeply disturbed by the power balance in Bella and Edward's relationship. I could only stomach it by entertaining the private theory that Bella is in fact an anguisette (thank you for the sanity switch, Jacqueline Carey). Because otherwise I'd just have to go with my initial gut feeling, which was that Bella is a good and dutiful housewife-to-be who marries at eighteen, justifies her husband's violence against her with "he can't help himself" and "it's proof of how much he loves me" and when her unborn baby threatens the mental health of her friends and family and also her own life, she justifies allowing herself to die by the thought her worth as a wife is only to act as a human incubator.

Also, there was a huge-ass fight between vampires and werewolves and NO BLOOD WAS SHED WHATSOEVER. I miss Alucard. I miss him a lot. ...I guess I just like my abominations Eldritch, not Edward.

The thing is, though, that I really ought to be careful what I complain about. I readily admit I can't and won't ever understand Twilight. But I will open myself to mockery by admitting the other day I noticed a movie about to play on FoxTel and promptly recorded it. And later watched it while kicking my feet in glee. I know most people pan the damn thing, but in my opinion it's so bad it's hilarious. ...sorry. ^_~

But I think I'm in a melancholy mood anyway because I finally finished reading the full text of the old story I had been writing all those years ago with an older friend, and...while I was wincing at the writing at the beginning, by the end I was utterly absorbed in the world we had created and the story we were weaving to the point I couldn't work out who wrote what. It's also been so long since I paid any lasting attention to the characters or the story that I'd forgotten so much of what we had written and what we had planned, and now that I am at the end of it...the sense of loss is immense. Not just for the story itself, but for the friendship that created it. I ache to read more of it, as much as I ache to write to my old friend and see where life has taken her now.

I thought of the V&A above for several reasons. I mean, museums are places of memory. You walk in the door and you are taken back to places that existed long ago -- so long ago, in some cases, that we can't even be quite sure they did exist. We can guess, but we're never going to know what those lives were like. There's a terrible sadness, in that. And I get a similar sadness from unfinished stories, especially one like this. So much potential, just rotting away on my harddrive. It feels like a betrayal, that even I forgot them. Part of me just wants to turn around and write to my old friend and beg her to tell me that she didn't forget, because if we both did...it seems so unfair.

But then, I also thought of the V&A because of that giant couch. It's not the first whimsical thing I've found in a London museum; I was most enchanted by the Super Fun Happy Slide! installation I discovered one dreary December at the Tate Modern, but then you expect that kind of malarkey at the Tate Modern. Not so at Victoria's digs. I love that museum for many reasons, and I walk in there feeling like it's one of the great and airy palaces of my imagination, stately and elegant and real. And then...I find a giant couch in my favourite room.

The emperor of the story I forgot, he came to his royal title at the age of eighteen after having been raised a commoner. It was always a running joke in the writing process that Dion would one day do something daft like fill the Emperor's Bathchambers with rainbow bubbles and a thousand rubber duckies, or that he'd draw a hopscotch grid on the approach to the Shining Throne and refuse to hold court unless all assembled gave him a round. He's the kind of person who'd insist on beanbags for state assemblies. TAnd this room, in this beautiful and elegant museum...had a giant couch specifically designed for lolling. Dion would have loved this room.

I wish I hadn't forgotten. In some ways, though, I almost wish I hadn't remembered.

Words Cannot Describe

If there is one thing I become ceaselessly, brilliantly good at during the month of November, it is procrastination. I do wonder if some of it isn't burn-out, because I do try to write almost every day and I tend to start at nine in the morning and not stop until I go to bed at one the following morning, but it's not constant writing. I stop and start and while some days I will produce words upon words, several days this month I just...haven't.

Still, the official wordcount of NaNo is well over 130k, and Kaverlen Falls is just slightly under 30k, so if I keep on keeping on I should hit the 50k for that alone before the 30th. I've produced a lot this month, even if it's not entirely what I wanted it to be. (The Juniper Bones just isn't going to be finished this year either. ...balls.) I finally finished the story I was arsing about with as a prequel to Kaverlen Falls, too; it hasn't got a proper name but I call it Blood Still For Blood and it's about 7k. It was intended just as a Lovecraftian mockery of sparkly vampires, but it's...a bit more interesting than that, now. And naturally I wrote the disturbing end of it to the tune of the Amnesia OST. I am pure class, of course.

I've written somewhere near 5k so far today and once I finish this entry I really am going to go and sort out the writing for today, because it's been patchy as all get out. Mostly this is just because the other day I was hunting something out in my terribly disordered Documents folder, and I was reminded again of a sprawling story an old friend and I were writing in various forms from the age of sixteen until we were both about twenty-two (which was about the point we stopped speaking to each other). As you can imagine, characters who have been in your head that long...just don't ever go away. The air you breathe is full of ghosts, as one of my favourite song-titles puts it, and when I started watching/reading George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire epic I was pushed right back into the waiting arms of these ghosts. My co-author was very, very influenced by Martin in her writing of our story; having never read any of his work, I didn't realise how deeply until I myself starting reading A Game of Thrones. And...while I am enjoying Martin's story on its own merits, it reminds me terribly of the story I had been writing all those years ago with my friend, and the last couple of days I've been procrastinating by rereading it.

It's a huge amount of text -- the story itself, which wasn't even a third done when we quit, is well over 300k. This does not include the files filled with character sketches and half-written snippets; those would be somewhere in the region of 200k, I would imagine. And again, this doesn't account for the story this was all based upon; I wouldn't be surprised to find that was about another 500k of text in the form of the main story (which was further along before we switched it with the new version) and a huge collection of supplementary material. I also have a good deal of pictures both by myself and by some talented friends who shared in our world, and...yeah. It's wonderful and nostalgic and sad, and I just can't help myself right at the moment. While my friend was a very plot-driven writer and revelled in the politics of our story, I am and always will be the character author.  I loved these characters. I still do. This is why I write; it's for the people who live the stories. And it's been so long since I really thought about this incredibly diverse cast of characters for any length of time. And believe me, there were a lot of them. I can't even hazard a guess at how many major characters there were, but fifty would be a ballpark figure. I just...yeah.

There are likely worse ways to procrastinate, as I am learning one thing -- I have vastly improved as a writer since I worked on this novel with my dear friend. In fact, working with her vastly improved me as a writer anyway, but even now I can see how I've moved on from some of my worst habits. I've also learned the difference between trope and beloved cliché, and it's all...well. I don't know. I have all sorts of FEELINGS about this that I'm not really up for articulating. Maybe once I get to the end of what she wrote I'll be better able to explain it, but for now...I think I've spent enough time reading today. I should be writing.

Still. As I was flipping through various files, I found a drabble collection. I felt like sharing one, jsut because these two characters...I always did wonder what would happen to them. I have the vague niggling feeling I might just write something about them in the weeks before Christmas, once I am done with the insanity of NaNoWriMo. But they always fascinated me. In the novel, Gaia is the eleven year old daughter of a recently widowed and deposed emperor, wheras Lais is the thirty-five year old son of the Regent in the North, a cold and pitiless Old Monster who has lived well beyond his alloted lifespan because he is waiting for his beloved to be reborn to him (she's being contrary about it, and rightly so; in the slightly misappropriated words of Tyrion Lannister about his own sire: "Everyone everywhere always has to do exactly what my father says...he's always been a cunt."). Lais is originally at the imperial palace as an envoy of his father, and is unusually gregarious considering his dread family; Gaia is a very reserved and retiring girl who lives in the shadow of her elder and more highly-born half-sister. There springs up a very unusual and rather sweet friendship between the two of them which was destined to be sorely tried by the opposing agendas of their respective families, and somehow we ended up thinking they were meant to be together despite the huge age difference. With that said Lais comes of a stock with deeply unusual longevity -- I don't know how old his father is, but let's say at least two hundred; I also think one of Lais's younger nephews is about twenty years his senior alone -- and it could have worked. Perhaps. But they were just so sweet together, when the world wasn't being a bastard at them, and when I found this drabble I wrote back in 2003 or 2004 or something...it brought it back.

I so very rarely write fluff. So, let's have some fluff before I go back to making life hell for some other poor characters, shall we? ^_~

Precious Things

“Mama?”

“Yes, darling?” she replied, raising dark eyes from her needlepoint; her surprise caused the needle to slip from the fabric and into her finger, but she removed it near-absently as she focused on her daughter alone. She barely noticed the blood as she pressed on the small wound, smiling easily at the small figure standing uncertainly in the doorway.

The dark-haired little girl promptly barrelled into the room; Gaia only just managed to remove the embroidery from her lap before Priya took up the entire space in a ball of limbs and big grey eyes. Accepting the glomp-greeting easily, she dropped a kiss across the girl’s browmark. “Did your nurse send you in to say goodnight?”

“Yes, mama,” she said; her heart was both glad to have this time with her mother and then sad. It would end all too soon, the way it always did. She ignored this fact for a brief snugglesome moment, then suddenly popped her head up and looked around with wide eyes. “But where’s papa?”

“Did I hear the sweet voice of reason calling out my most august name?”

Priya promptly burst into a gale of giggles to see Lais pop up his head from behind one of the couches; he was absolutely drenched in dust with his hair beginning to spring free in wild snarls from his tight braid. “Papa, you’re silly!”

“Saving each and every one of the pretty hairs on your head from the dust bunnies under the couch is not silly,” and the words were spoken with great dignity as he climbed to his feet and brushed off his equally-dusty trousers. “What if they multiply? We’ll be pulling them out of our ears and noses for weeks after the exterminator has been!”

Gaia spared her husband a long-suffering smile, and began to stroke her daughter’s dark-hair. “Ignore your father, darling. I think he hit his head again.”

“Well!” Lais returned, hands promptly moving to sit akimbo upon his hips as he beetled his brows. “Is this really what I get for playing at being a hero, your one and only knight in shining armour with a sword that would bring down all the stars in heaven if you’d but ask for a necklace of them to hang about your lovely neck?”

Priya blinked up at him; for a young child she was developing a precocious vocabulary and understanding of language, and everyone knew it was just because her father was pathologically incapable of being able to shut his nonsense up. “You have a sword, papa?”

“Well, I did have a sword once. But it happened to be made of sticky candy and had a hilt of the finest fudge, and it rather inexplicably disappeared one sunny, lazy afternoon. But surely we both haven’t the time for mourning my suspiciously-lost sword.” He came over to both wife and daughter, folding his long body onto the arm of the chair; while one arm draped itself easily about Gaia’s small shoulders the other joined her hand in stroking Priya’s soft, still-babyish hair. “You have a big day tomorrow and if you’re going to be big enough to fit into it without the seamstress making any of those tiresome last-second adjustments, it’s time you ran off to dream-land to play with the sleep-fairies.”

“May I ask a question before I go?”

“Only one, sweetling,” he granted generously, twirling a dark curl about one pale finger. “The fairies are waiting and they get grumpy. You know how it is. Their magic dust gets dull so quickly when the little girls are late to the land of dreams.”

She grinned up at her father, leaning up to plant a kiss on his cheek to show she understood. After doing so, Priya actually turned her attention to her mother and asked: “Mama? Was daddy your daddy, too?”

Gaia blinked, met Lais’s own blink for a brief moment, and then returned her surprise to Priya. “What do you mean, darling?”

“It was something Dasha said…I said I wanted a brother or sister, and she kind of laughed and said the only other children my papa had were you and Uncle Michael. I don’t get it. Was daddy your daddy too, then?”

“No,” Gaia said slowly, feeling Lais’s arm tighten about her as if in silent apology. “Your daddy was only my foster father, once.”

“Foster father?” Even with a father as vocal as Lais, it appeared the little girl had not heard the term before. “What does that mean?”

“It means he gave me all of his sweets and lied to me a lot.”

Lais’s jaw dropped promptly around his well-shoed ankles. “Dora!”

Still, Gaia was grinning as she absently tugged on her daughter’s nose and made her laugh. “I forgave him for it all a long time ago,” she confided in a low voice with a soft smile, pushing a strand of her own long hair back behind one ear.

“He gave you all his sweets?” Priya asked, craning her neck to look at him as she focused on what her mind saw as the most important thing her mother had just revealed. “Daddy never gives me all his sweets.”

“Oh, yes,” Gaia returned, and then dropped a wink at her dumbstruck husband. It was always so amusing to her, seeing Lais in his most unnatural state. “He always gave me all of his favourites, too.”

“…then I want daddy to be MY foster father, too!” Priya decided abruptly, a determined glint coming into eyes very much like those of her father’s family. She promptly turned on her mother’s lap and demanded of her stunned father: “I want you to treat me just like you treated mama!”

“Er…” he returned, Gaia already shaking with laughter at his continued and complete loss of his silver tongue.

“What?” the little girl asked, words resounding with the form of total innocence that was designed only for the very young to possess.

“We’ll tell you when you’re older, sweetheart,” Gaia chuckled, and carefully took a hold of Priya as she stood up. Before she got halfway up Lais had to claim the small girl; she was simply growing up too fast, was already too heavy for Gaia’s slight strength. “Now, isn’t time for bed?”

As she later shut the door to their private study, Priya returned to her nursemaid Dasha and her warm bed, Gaia shook her head and crossed the floor back to her armchair and needlework. “Lais, don’t look at me like that,” she murmured without even needing to look to her husband to read his expression. “I will let you tell her when she grows up.”

Lais trailed her in silence, but in a burst of elegant movement then overtook her slower form; by the time she reached her chair he was ready for her, reaching out with a quick hand to tumble her onto his lap. “But what if I simply can’t wait that long to share all my great wisdom and vast knowledge with my darling daughter?” he asked mournfully, barely acknowledging his wife’s token struggles.

“You waited until I was all grown up before sharing all your great wisdom and vast knowledge with me,” she pointed out as she gave up, setting about finding herself the most comfortable way to burrow into her husband’s lap.

“Yes, but my darling il’Gaia,” Lais pointed out as he dipped his head lower, brushing smiling lips against her ticklish ear, “I had extra special things to share with you.”

She shivered as his breath skipped across sensitive skin, heart jumping a beat in warm anticipation. “Your real favourite sweets, perhaps?”

“It’s no sacrifice,” Lais said, and kissed her long and sweetly. She was laughing even as he told her seriously: “They are, after all, precisely the kind that taste better when they are shared.”

*****

Incidentally, from the song title I can but assume I was listening to this song as I wrote it. There are so many memories to be found in music. I think it's time to go back to the old playlists.

Winning On A Mere Technicality

Admittedly I am always a bit of a spaz when it comes to writing, and NaNoWriMo can only make that tendency worse. But I am falling off the deep end all over again. I've already bemoaned the fact that I've all but given up on finishing the third of the three novels I set myself to completing and have instead gone haring off on a sequel to the first one I finished, and...well, the wordcount on that little beauty is currently about 22k. I've decided that there's still seven days of NaNo to go so we might as well make a mini NaNo for that and have at least 50k on it before November's gone.

...I am so brilliant.

GAH.

I do have to admit, mind you, that I have been playing about still with a short story that makes up the prologue of this novel, and I haven't counted a word of it towards NaNo yet. And it's about 4.5k right now, from memory. If I would just stop procrastinating I would be able to finish its draft this evening. But I'm procrastinating. For some reason I am utterly and irretrievably in love with the Ambassador of Xoan and his unholy lust for croquembouche (...you DON'T want to know) and when I've managed to drag myself away from that archive I've been rereading a huge epic fic I wrote with a friend when we were in our later years of high school/first years of university. Oh, the good times keep on rolling.

Still, I am managing to write; I clocked up 5k for Kaverlen Falls today, even though I've been shrieking at the characters while doing so. One character in particular took offense at something I noticed the other day. I've mentioned before a growing fascination for the HBO series A Game of Thrones and I've got through the first two novels of A Song of Ice and Fire so far this month. This neat little graphic struck me as interesting as one of my writing groups and I had been exchanging emails about character alignment:

While looking at this, I realised that I had a couple of squares I couldn't fill with characters appearing in the Greywater/Kaverlen Falls/Neverboy/Forevergirl/Simple Story saga, and I got cross. Unfortunately some of the little voices in my head were "listening" to my ranting, and one of them's gone and EXPLODED all over everything in the form of chaotic evil. I just...yeah. I don't know. I suppose I got what I deserved, but...um.

Otherwise, that should be enough whining for the evening. The first picture in this entry is from Ephesus, and I was looking at my pictures from this ruined city last night as I worked on the short story featuring the cursed and broken coty of Dan'Mara. I really ought to go and finish the damn thing. So...here's to history and the hell it can raise in the present?

Cheers!

Slow and Steady...?

Ah, racing turtles -- although calling my NaNo progress "turtling" rather depends on how you look at it, considering the wordcount. But I have become an absolute rebel and am still not writing The Juniper Bones like I'm supposed to be; rather I'm about 13k into the sequel of Greywater, which seems to have titled itself Kaverlen Falls even though a) I wasn't aware there WAS a waterfall at Kaverlen and b) I haven't got a clue why the characters would end up there anyway. So go figure.

I'm having a right ol' interesting time with this, mind you. Mostly it's because I haven't a clue where the story is going...well, I do, that's a slight lie. I wrote a YA adult recently called The Neverboy, and Kaverlen Falls involves that storyline to some extent as Cira, the main character of KF, is a companion of the main character of Nb. Meaning I now get to tell certain parts of Nb from an entirely different point of view. This is going to b fun. It also mixes up the story a bit, because Cira isn't present for the first twelve chapters of Nb anyway, and they also part ways towards the end for a bit. So, it's not like KF tells the same story only from Cira's viewpoint. It's her own story entirely, and I am not entirely sure where it begins and ends.

...well, okay, another lie: I know where it starts. Or I do now, anyway. I started writing a short story the other day for my own amusement about blood fae for no good reason, and as it turns out...it's the prologue to KF. And in the first chapter of KF a legendary character who was offhandedly mentioned maybe twice is now apparently a major influence on Cira's early life at Greywater. So now I am all O_o WTF OTZ because...I did not expect that. At all. Not to mention Cydrac Agrane strolled into the first chapter waving his hands about something I didn't know about, and now Nan Jerikak has announced she wants to play My Little Cavy with Alara, and I...what. What.

I love NaNo. Although sometimes I get the feeling it kind of hates my guts. Here, have a .gif that explains my relationship with NaNoWriMo a thousand times better than I ever could with words:

Speaking of writing things from other POVs, I also had a strange experience while writing the scene between Nan and Cira. I'll actually put a snippet of it here so you can see what I mean upfront.

*****

At first she was silent, and Círa glanced back to see she had furrowed her brow. It might have been a mistake to ask Nantya; she was young and no real ranking magian – but she had already been given in service to the Attorney-General of Lonan at least once. Another moment of thought later and Nantya shook her head, the dark curls of her hair dancing beneath the scarf she had tied over half her head.

“I don’t know what it is, if that’s what you wanna know.” She peered at Círa, pale eyes very curious. “Is your Lady Maiden worried about him? ‘cause I don’t think she should be, really. I doubt Mister Wolf is gonna bother her again, after the flak he copped from the First Consul over it all.”

“What flak?”

Nantya blinked at her sharp tone. “Oh, it was flak, all right. I mean, it’s not like I saw anything, but I heard some of it. He summoned Lord Rendran to him at the beginning of the winter, after the mourning-month for his little girl. I got a call up there myself, ‘cause I was with him in Aran Nomese when it all went to pot. It was all very civilised, mind, or at least it was supposed to be – just a discussion about how things would be, what with Mister Wolf’s privileges at the palace being revoked. But…”

Círa frowned. Not one word of this had ever reached her ears before now. “But what?”

Nantya shrugged, but it seemed more bewildered than nonchalant. “I don’t rightly know, not for sure. But I was down in the glasshouse, these huge big offices under the First Consul’s chambers where all his pages and assistants and things work. There were raised voices, then thumping, and this huge crash…and then they really started yelling at each other.”

“The First Consul was shouting?”

“He was really angry. Not that any of us could really hear what he was saying.” She seemed just as disbelieving as Círa herself. “The Attorney-General came out first. You could see he was furious, too, but he wasn’t shouting anymore. He just came down those stairs and stood there, looking at all of us like not a one of us was really there.” Shaking her head, she had to take an audible breath before continuing. “Then Lord Consul Asfiye came down. You could tell he was upset, but he was…not like he usually is. He was just…pale as a ghost, but he could have been made of marble. I’ve never seen him like it. No smiles, eyes dull as dishwater.”

Círa didn’t bother to hide her shudder. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Me neither -- if I hadn’t seen it.” Again she shook her head, like she was trying to clear it of a mountain of llama wool, and Círa began to understand why no word of this strange discussion had ever reached her ears. “He asked Lord Rendran, polite as you please, to come back with him. And they went up. No-one heard anything else strange upstairs, and when they came back the First Consul was all smiles and the Attorney-General charmed his way through the whole office, but…I’ll never forget it, the way they looked then.” Her small fingers, hidden in her black kid gloves, clenched into sudden fists. “They said the great window was what smashed. Someone had put a paperweight through it.”

“The Attorney-General, surely,” Círa said, faint, and Nantya only shook her head.

“I dunno. I just...I dunno.”

The clear reluctance to commit to anything sent a shiver down Círa’s spine, but she covered it with a blithe smile. “So you haven’t talked about this to anyone, have you?”

Nantya’s eyes, coloured that strange pale green more common to those born of the fire-lady, held more solemnity than a grave. “No. I haven’t.”

Círa swallowed hard. More secrets had risen to wind their coils about the life of the First Consul, and she did not like it at all. Arosek, what are you doing? she thought, but all she had before her was the troubled small face of the magian.   

*****

Now, it probably seems quite pedestrian, I know, but the point is -- I had to know exactly what the argument between Ryennkar and Arosek was. Do other people do this a lot? I do it upon occasion; for instance in The Neverboy Cira and Otho quite obviously have a history they are not going to discuss in front of Kit, who is a thirteen year old boy. So I went and wrote out the scene where they thrash out some out demons (and yes, it involved sex, but even that wasn't why it couldn't ever be in the main body of the story). As it so happens this scene will now end up in Kaverlen Falls, but...yeah. Roughly 2.5k later I had an "extra" scene I called Close Every Door for a lark (damn you, Andrew Lloyd Webber!). It can't ever fit in Kaverlen Falls given the POV, but...I had to write it, because I really needed to know exactly what passed between them. But then again I did the same again in Greywater because I knew that Arosek and Ryenn had also had an "altercation" of a sort between the time when Otho first returned from Alkirn and then when Otho returned to Greywater. Again, neither Cira nor Otho could possibly have been privy to these conversations, but they have a major impact on their lives, and...yeah. Dammit. I hate having all these lovely words AND NO-WHERE TO PUT THEM.

...and I would snippet part of the scene here, but it's dodgy as hell. So I won't. I'll just go back to sulking and writing some more. In closing, here's another .gif; once again it explains the relationship between me and NaNo in very succinct terms. But I'll let you guess which of us is which. ^_~



The Beat Goes On

November is still here, and my brain is...mostly still present as well, so I thought I probably ought to update on the NaNo-progress. I am being very contrary mary in my writing right now, although I am still going on with it. Just...not the way I planned. Ha. But then NaNo seems to be very much about grabbing the seat of your pants and holding tight as you run along with it, so here we go.

Technically I am still supposed to be working on The Juniper Bones; it's probably not that far from a complete first draft (say, maybe twenty thousand words) but my brain is just not co-operating with me. It's a complex ending, of course, but I just can't seem to concentrate on it. Whenever I do I just procrastinate worse than ever before, and after a less than productive week I finally surrendered on Thursday night.

The first novel I had been working on after getting here was Greywater, and while writing both Hibernaculum and The Juniper Bones I ended up missing the characters in that dreadfully. On Thursday night I was particularly troubled by the loss of Arosek and Ryennkar, and was reminded that while in airports from New Zealand to the US to Canada to London to Turkey and then on a wee boat upon the Med, I had been writing a couple of stories detailing a very important chance in their relationship when they were teenagers. I'd started typing it out sometime in London and never got around to finishing it, even though I had typed out other stuff I'd written in a couple of different coffeeshops in York. So, I decided if I was just going to sit and stare at The Juniper Bones and not type anything I might as well get my shit together and type out stuff I'd already written for a .doc I'd called Night of the Long Grass.

The story was never finished in longhand, despite the long hours in airports and those beautiful days in Turkey (although in the case of Turkey this may be because I was often distracted by delicious food and the lure of swimming in beautiful blue waters filled with ANCHORFISH!). After I finished typing out what did exist, I ended up finishing it. And of course it didn't kill my fascination with the characters, it only made it worse. So while yesterday very little writing was done -- I had to drive to Perth, which was an experience; I've never driven a freeway in my life and spent most of it wanting to scream out the window I DRIVE BETTER THAN YOU AND I'VE NEVER EVEN DONE THIS BEFORE! -- today I ended up opening a file that contained a few scribbles of the direct sequel to Greywater. Roughly seven thousand words later...

So, yes, it's been an odd few days. I've also been sketching out the bones of two other short stories to the tune of three or four thousand words I haven't counted towards NaNo yet, and one of those stories is actually most likely the prologue of Kaverlen Falls. So, I am keeping on keeping on, despite a rather unproductive week. I did manage to reward myself for the first couple of weeks, at least; I went horse-riding on Tuesday and got wrapped in seaweed on Wednesday. The horse-riding was an absolutely wonderful experience; I did it partly because I'd been on a camel and a donkey in Egypt and had forgotten what a horse felt like, and also because a lot of my fantasy-tilted writing involves riding horses which I remember so little about. But despite the terrible weather of the last few weeks in Bunbury, it was a beautiful sunny day for us to ride through the fields and see kangaroos, emus...AND COWS. I like cows. Go the research, I say. ^_~

At any rate, I should go spend a few more hours with the kids. <3 But just for amusement, here's one of my favourite places in York. I wrote about Arosek and Ryenn in this most beautiful of beautiful cities, and this place in particular inspired me to commission of drawing of the pair of them. It's all good.

Under the Sea

I have once again reached the most terrifying part of a novel -- the slippery slide to the finish. Except I'm like one of those chickenshit little kids who sit at the top of the highest slide wailing that they're too scared to let go and just slide. So, even though I began yesterday by sketching out the entirety of the first of the Scary Slide Chapters, I ended up going for a drive into Perth. There was some logic there; my mother needed a ride to the airport. Having gone all that distance, my father and I ended up going to the Aquarium of Western Australia, hence the rather trippy photograph above.

It was an interested experience, being that the main reason I wanted to go is because I have been writing three novels involving the machinations of four gods, each having most sway over one cardinal element. The West is Water, and he has been haunting me a lot recently. It's partially because he is the most human of the four, and by consequence the least human. He's a very curious wee creature, my Inamoran. As I walked around the aquarium I felt him with me. He's barely my height -- about five foot four -- and light of foot, and has this lovely lilting light little voice. ...ha ha, that makes me sound insane. I swear I'm not. I've had an overactive imagination since I was very small, and my greatest regret is that I am paradoxically too logical to have ever had a proper imaginary friend even when so very tiny, because I knew it was impossible. Hence my love for reading and writing fantastical stories, I suppose.

But I walked these waters, the places that he loves, and I took some photographs. I decided to share a few of them, just because it might aid me in getting back to the Slippery Slide of Doom. I'm a lousy photographer at the best of times, and my camera can't cope with lowlight conditions very well, so I apologise for the quality. But still. It's the song of the sea.

So, I need to go for a walk into town to visit a bank machine, as I am going horse-riding tomorrow afternoon. So much for the writing? Ha. My excuse is that I haven't really got a lot of opportunity to do it at home, and I need to go down to Margaret River anyway. I rode both a camel and a donkey in Egypt last month, and as a consequence ended up wanting to ride a horse. I can claim it as research, anyway; in the older stories the characters ride horses. Mostly. Ha. I also need to do a tiny bit of shopping and work out what I am making for dinner, how domestic of me. But I might read a chapter or two of the book I acquired yesterday, the second part of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. It's only taken ten years and one Singapore Airlines flight from Heathrow to Changi for me to finally get around to doing it. But really, my thoughts on that series so far is an entirely different entry.

In the meantime, there have been various soundtracks to my writing as of late, but I feel the urge to share this Jean-Patrick Capdevielle piece. He is the composer who first brought us Emma Shapplin, whose voice I have loved since 1999. This video is a song from his pseduo-opera Atylantos, and considering the fate of Inamoran...well. Atlantis has fascinated me since I was very small. When I was twelve or thirteen I created my own Atlantis, which eventually morphed into the enclave of the Ossu'heim, Inamoran's sole remaining children imprisoned between worlds and oceans by the curse of another god. Stories within stories. But I adore this song, even ten years after I first heard it.

Funnily enough, it's not my favourite -- that would be Bellezza Divina. But it's so much story in so little space and is absolutely beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful things, in case you wonder what my little imaginary friend who accompanied me to the aquarium looks like, I have had a commission of him done by the wonderfully talented Calicot over at DA.

He is on the right; the woman on the left is she who will be Chaesha, goddess of East and Air. They're actually both in their proper human forms in this picture. Which reminds me, last night after getting back from Perth I watched television (which I never do) and then I did write for a bit. But I started writing a short story about Janerin's human wife, Janerin being the god of North and Earth. Now that's procrastination, folks. I'll write, but not what I am supposed to!

...we're all doomed.

Magic Doors

Self-confidence doesn't come easily to me. I could list a lot of reasons as to why I suspect that might be, but it's not actually going to help me understand it in the slightest. It's only relevant to this post in that I am consistently amazed at how much I am enjoying working on The Juniper Bones. I mean, I don't want to imply that I generally don't like writing -- obviously I would hardly be doing it if I hated it -- but because I often end up in despair over what I am writing, it's a little bit strange when I find myself actually saying to myself as I write: hey, this is actually pretty damn good!

It's probably something to do with the change of scenery. The Juniper Bones, unlike the other two novels I've been fiddling with, is set directly in our world in fairly recent times. It makes it slightly easier to deal with in some respects (I don't have to make stuff up) and harder in others (I'm not allowed to make stuff up). But that's not it entirely. It's written in the present tense. I don't habitually write in the present tense, you see; for a very long time I had the garden variety knee-jerk reaction I was taught to have to the present tense, which appears to be NO IT'S BAD DON'T DO IT. But in 2000, when I first started at university, I bought a book my first night there from K-Mart. It was a random selection. I can't even remember now what it was called; I do still own it, but it's stashed in the barn somewhere and has been since I moved to Sheffield in 2006. I'll find it eventually. But it was written in the present tense and I loved the immediacy of it. It was also a very well-written story.

Still, it didn't really grab me as something I ought to be doing. That didn't happen until 2002, when I read a Smallville fanfic also written in the present tense that to this day still blows my socks off whenever I chose to reread it. And I do reread it a couple of times a year. It's highly atmospheric and by turns wry, silly, sorrowful, passionate and very, very funny, and I am still very charmed by it. But the way the author wrote these words struck a deep chord with me, and I chose to write what exists of People In Looking-Glass Houses because the ironic style was well-suited to the nature of the story. I've never finished a draft of that damn novel, but when I first started working with Eliot in a short story named Stockholm Syndrome in 2005, I decided to go with the present tense for him too. It's been stuck to him with crazy-glue ever since.

It can take me a while to get back into writing that way, I must admit. And by "a while" I mean "about two seconds." There's something very natural to Eliot's ironies, to me, and I suppose that's why I like reading back his stories more than most of my work. I still can't decide whether or not this means that it is actually good, or if I've just repeatedly flicked a switch in my own head.

But I am hopeful of actually finishing this draft. I wasn't at first, partially because I was so sure I would RAGEQUIT before I finished Hibernaculum anyway, but The Juniper Bones has a particularly messy denouement I still don't entirely understand. (And considering the copious amounts of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff, I possibly never will.) Yet...I so badly want to tell this story, because I am so in love with the characters right now. And not just Morgan and Eliot, my so-called Usual Suspects. I'm still surprised by something I discovered during NaNo last year, which is Erik's increased role in the story. He was supposed to be a shadow-character for Tess, someone for her to interact with if I needed someone to fill that role. Instead he quietly stepped forward and filled that role for Eliot, even though that was what Pania was for. It's changed the tone of a lot of things, and that...well. I suppose this is why I write, and why I read. It's for the surprise. It's for the joy of picking up a book or sitting in front of a keyboard and opening a magic door with no real idea what lies beyond it, or where that door is going to take you. When I clicked absently on the link to that Smallville fic in 2002 I had no idea that it would still be influencing my writing in 2011. And yet here we are.

Long live the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey magic doors, I say.