"You don't have to feel safe to feel unafraid."

You'll have to excuse the fact that I seem to be using this blog as therapy at the moment. My brain really just isn't functioning correctly; I mean, I can't get the song Komm, Süsser Tod out of my head, and that's never a good thing. I mean, look at the damn title. I suppose I could attempt to cheer myself up with some ridiculous rubbish I found on youtube, but...here I am, with that song going around my brain. Gah.

This is relevant to my writing, I suppose, in that I haven't been able to write much of anything lately. I just can't settle to anything; when I am this depressed, I find all motivation for anything disappears pretty quick. I just want to stop. But the picture above...well, I saw those birds at a raptor recovery centre in Margaret River, and I was charmed not only by their name -- they're Tawny Frogmouths -- but how ancient they looked. And how adorable, given how close they sat together. I'm not a tactile person, you see; I dislike being touched, and therefore hugging isn't really my scene. But when I am miserable, because I can't ask for a hug, the closest I tend to get? Is having a mental picture of myself curled up in a hopeless ball on the floor, but with the more sympathetic of my characters kneeling with their arms around me thinking please don't leave us. I suppose that's pretty sad and pathetic, but I don't tend to feel I have any worth to anyone else. The only "people" who would miss me are the voices in my head, and frankly it's just because they'd go down with the ship, but...I was wondering who it would be right now. And of course Eliot came to mind.

I write Eliot a lot when I am depressed. It's just the sort of character he is. I wrote a short story several years back where Eliot asks an old friend to kill him, just for the sense of relief it would provide, and...it hurt so much to write. But it was also a release for me. Which is why I am thinking maybe poking at The Juniper Bones might help my brain a little. Although it likely means the next song that gets stuck in my head will be How To Be Dead, which...isn't much better than the aforementioned Come, Sweet Death. Although it does involve far fewer giant naked Reis, I suppose.

What amused me earlier today, mind you, is that one of the characters I was picturing in my crazy it's-all-in-your-head group hug thing? Was Arosek. And I had a phone call at work today from one of my old classmates, and I suddenly realised he was at least one influence on the creation of this character. No one character is any one person I know, but it just...made me think. He was one of the very popular people in my class, and being that I am unattractive, unintelligent, unsocial and generally pretty much not worth anything to anyone, I always assumed he had no idea who I was. But a couple days before graduation, I returned to Dunedin from Christchurch and around lunchtime was wandering between the Central Library and my flat and heard someone call my name. I turned, bemused, and found this classmate. We talked for a bit, and it became quickly apparent that he knew very well who I was. Even today, before he actually got to the point -- which was explaining the answer he'd found to a question I'd bothered another company rep with earlier in the week -- we just chatted, and...I'm nothing special to this guy. Don't ever think that. But he's just so nice. He remembers things about people, and it's because he likes to. And that's what Arosek is, too. He's one of those people who is intelligent, charismatic, charming, good-looking...you want to hate them, but you can't.

Of course, this has nothing to do with my depression and my subsequent inability to write anything new, but go figure. I suppose I might as well end the entry with another picture from the raptor sanctuary, seeing as we were all neither Raptured nor Raptored last week. Excuse the fact that I am ugly as sin, and just focus on the fact that it's awesome to have a bird of prey on your hand. I claimed it was research for the times I want to write about falconry, but honestly...I wanted to do it just because it's AWESOME. Ha.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

I should be writing, but instead I appear to be more interested in watching a Let's Play! walkthrough of Penumbra: Overture. And given this is a precursor to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you can imagine that watching in the dark while you're mostly home alone is...not the best of ideas. Naturally, I'm all over it like a flannel. And this is coming from the girl who is still too scared to walk outside the house in the dark in case there are raptors or zombies lurking in the forest on and surrounding the property. My overactive imagination, let me show you it!

But it does make me think that I ought to write more horror. This has probably come about because my mind, in the words of Lydia Deetz, is One Big Dark Room at the moment. It would seem a sensible idea to take advantage of that and actually tap into the crawling chaos. Or something. Although with that said, for someone who technically lives fairly close to the reputed location of R'lyeh, I do tend to be fairly blasé about the whole thing. Er.

I used to write a lot of horror-themed stories when I was smaller. I was a big fan of Christopher Pike and Stephen King from the age of about twelve onwards, and to be honest a lot of my earlier stories were wild attempts at horror. (I'm reminded, actually, of the time my first form extra-curricular writing class was taken to an ice-cream factory and we all came back and wrote stories about people being pushed into churning vats. Or there's the time my third form class was asked to rewrite the ending of a novel we all despised, and I believe every single one of us ended it with a bloodbath of one sort or another. So much for the gentle upbringing of a rural New Zealand setting...it must be all the sheep. Yeah. Those damn sheep...) I sort of fell out of the habit in the end. I think the last thing I wrote that skirted the horror genre was a bit of a crazy novel I only sporadically write; it's called Shadowsea and this particular part involved shipwrecks. And zombies. Because everybody loves ZOMBIES.

The interesting thing to my mind about all this, actually, is that last night I wandered over to my erstwhile livejournal and posted up a bunch of extracts along with the commission pictures I've had done lately; I don't believe anyone read any of it, but it was an interesting task for me in that I realised everything? Was about love. There were seven or eight snippets, and they showed love in several different guises and forms, and...it made me think of my favourite Stephen King novel. Bag of Bones. I'm trying to work out how old I was when I read it; it was published in 1998, so I would have been sixteen, almost seventeen at the time? I say that only because this story is a horror by genre, but in the end...I always see it as a love story. For all the terror and gore and terrible reality of various sequences of the novel, it's about love. And I knew that even at sixteen, when I had not experienced love; I mention that mostly because I'm twenty-nine now and have still never known love, and have accepted that I never will. But I can still see it all around me, in what I read, in what I write, and just...in life.

Still, reading back over these different manifestations of love that I dug out last night...I start to think that love is in fact the deepest form of horror. How many evil acts are primarily driven by love? It boggles the mind, really. And I suppose it's why people tend to say that the true counterpart of love is indifference. Hate is still an obsession. And love is just another facet of obsession.

...obviously, my brain is broken. Damn Penumbra. ...I might have to go have a shower, curl up in bed with the laptop, and watch a little more of it even though I really should write out some of the ideas floating around my head in relation to Greywater. It's just been a horrible week. But while I was hunting out these examples of love in my writing, I did run across something else. As I said, I don't write much in the way of horror -- although I suppose Tea For Two, my late-blooming December short story success, was a loving Lovecraftian tribute -- but I adore creating atmosphere. And I like to think I caught a little of it here. Joy!

*****

Eliot moves with ease in the gloom, having done this enough times to remember the layout of the place, but he’s once again surprised that Jonathan moves just as smoothly. He may be right behind Eliot, yes, but the trust he has in Eliot’s lead is astonishing. He’s almost ready to comment on it when Jonathan asks a question of his own in a low whisper.

“Where do you think she is likely to be?”

“I think in her library,” he returns in a lowered voice of his own, leading them both with care down the back staircase and out into one of the back hallways. “Although…hang on. Her bedroom is up there.”

“And?”

Eliot slips forward in the darkness, frowns at the distant door. “It’s never shut,” he muses, and then shrugs. “The door, I mean.”

In the dark hallway it is hard to read Jonathan’s expression, but he does sound somewhat bemused. “She strikes me as a private sort.”

“She’s only there at night. It’s only shut when she’s asleep. And I doubt she is now.” Without waiting for permission he steps forward; the sharp grip of Jonathan’s gloved hand on his upper arm assures him that the permission wouldn’t have been granted even if had actually bothered to ask. “Let me go.”

“No.”

“Don’t argue with me, cop-shop,” Eliot returns coolly, still looking forward. The fact that he wouldn’t be able to see Jonathan’s expression in the gloom even if he did look back doesn’t matter. “Seriously, if Morgan’s in there, she’s going to be in a shit of a mood. Let me deal with her.”

“But we’re here to save her.”

Eliot resists the urge to start laughing hysterically at that one; for someone who has to be have been a cop for at least eight years, Jonathan doesn’t seem to have any idea about the pitfalls of knighthood. “Have you ever been around any of your girlfriends when they’re PMSing and the DVD player’s broken and the corner dairy’s all out of Jellytip ice-cream?” he asks instead, turning back to smirk even in the dark between them. “No? Then you can’t handle Morgan in a tizzy.”

“Stop—”

But Eliot just pushes the door open, saunters in with all the care of a lemming on its favourite cliff edge – then closes it on Jonathan.

With that barrier now between them, all the humour goes out of the situation for Eliot. “Morgan?” he asks quietly of the shadows that crowd about him like the heavy damp leaves of a rainforest. The first twinge of genuine unease snaps his taut heartstrings he takes a tentative step forward and squints helplessly into the gloom. “…Morgan, are you in here?”

It is harder to get around in the dark in this room, given that Eliot has only been here once before and doesn’t quite recall its layout. The curtains are open, however, and the floodlights at the front of the house shine like blades across the floor. The bed in the corner – a simple king-size bed with no headboard and a thick duvet – is empty, and despite his growing conviction that she is not here Eliot can’t help but walk to the desk. It is as painfully tidy as the rest of her room, and just as tight-lipped about the whereabouts of its mistress.

When he leaves, Jonathan is waiting for him with one hand on the hilt of his gun. “She’s not in there,” he says, quite unnecessarily, but to his surprise Jonathan seems calm about their temporary split.

“We’ll go on downstairs, then,” he says in a reasonable tone that Eliot usually associates with accountancy department reports and not midnight raids on millionaire mansions. “But with care.”

“Duh,” he mutters, although he’s perfectly aware of the validity of Jonathan’s point. Still, that doesn’t stop him – barely twenty seconds later – from pushing Jonathan back and side-stepping over to a small corridor on his right. At Jonathan’s hiss, Eliot shrugs. “I thought I heard something,” he says in lazy defence, adding: “Hang on a sec, would ya?”

“You have to stop doing this,” the policeman returns through clenched teeth, although he makes no move to pull Eliot back from the brink of his own special brand of canned madness.

“Yeah, yeah, cheers, dad,” he says easily, and drops a wink that can’t be seen. “Back in a mo.”

The shadows here are longer than those in Morgan’s bedroom, but this corridor cuts through the centre of the house and around to the back where the floodlights out front don’t reach. Having spent quite a few lifetimes without the benefit of electricity Eliot’s pretty sure this should bother him less than it does, but then he has always been something of a spoiled brat.

There is a flash of guilt when he considers Jonathan left alone behind him, but that just convinces him to move forward faster; the sooner he locates Morgan, the sooner they can leave – and the sooner both parties will be out of whatever bullshit Baedeker has dragged into the good doctor’s home. The eerie silence of the house and Morgan’s complete absence have only convinced him further that this is the accountant’s fault, although Eliot does have to admit as he slides closer to the closed door at the end of the corridor that he needs reasons to be pissy at Baedeker the way fish need reasons to hate drought.

The door is locked, and that’s enough to make Eliot frown and reach for the skeleton key he keeps in the pocket of his jeans. Usually he eschews its use – it kind of feels like cheating, and Eliot cheats only at Scrabble, Yahtzee, and Where In The Sweet Merciful Fuck Is Goddamned Wally NOW?! – but tonight he feels no qualms about pushing it into the lock and twisting the cylinder. Moments later he does starts to wonder if he should have, because when he slips into the dark room it is only to feel the cold slide of the blade into his side.

*****

...and lest any of you think I cannot take love nor horror seriously...I will show you that this rumour? Is very true indeed.^_~

"...hail to those who have come from the sunlight that surrounds you..."

I'm prone to low moods. It's nothing unusual. But today...it's bad. Really bad. I wish I could write, but I can't do even that. Still, I can always read. I was going through the blogs I follow, and ran across an interesting post at All The World's Our Page about learning about your characters through love scenes. I thought it ironic enough, as I've been dallying with Arosek and Ryenn the last couple of weeks because their fraught relationship? Is the best path towards understanding them, and it's helped considerably with my understanding of the events of Greywater. Kristen did ask for people to post up little snippets at her blog, but I'm too shy and so out of sorts that I decided against it. Still, the story I thought of...it's the one I started writing in Australia, and I finished it some time last week. I haven't shown it to anyone, and I keep thinking this is one of my problems. I pour my heart into my writing, but then I am so unsure of the worth of my own self that I am becoming more and more reluctant about sharing it. Sometimes I can, but in times like this...I just want to delete everything I've ever written and accept my fate as just another space monkey.

But I did learn something about these two characters, I did, and I suppose it might do my broken mind some good to show anyone who happens to be out there just a little of their broken hearts. It's something, I guess.

And maybe, then, I can go back to Greywater, and to the story of the demi-goddess and her Major. Because that'll cheer me up. Ha ha ha. At least those two get something like a happy ending...if we ignore the fact that he is mortal while she is not. It brings to mind, actually, the note that Wills Penrose passed with something like terrible pity of purpose to Eliot Tennyson via his daughter, Tessera:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi

in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:

Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.

*****

“I must go back to Ilke,” Ryennkar said, but Arosek had known him for forty years and could hear tiny telltale cracks spreading like spiderthreads beneath the smooth façade.

“Will you stay with me?” He raised his face, bit his lip. “Just until I fall asleep?”

Those cool eyes, as silver and distant as the web of stars long since concealed by the cloak of day beyond the window, softened. A moment later they closed, as if he was afraid of what he saw reflected in Arosek’s own eyes, and pressed his forehead against his. “Is this what you want?” he asked, a mere whisper.

“I want it.” Again Arosek raised his hands to his collar, working on the torc. Ryennkar made no objection as it was removed, set gently aside. He only watched, wordless and weary. He had nothing to say even as Arosek pushed the heavy cassock from his shoulders, leaving him in the shirt and trousers beneath. With an ease born of long practise, Arosek made quick work of the laces of both and then pushed the silk from his broad shoulders. Only then did Ryennkar look to the window again, the cool light of morning bright over his pale skin.

“There’s time enough,” Arosek said, soft, drawing his attention back. He then moved his hands to his own waist, loosed the belt he found there. A shrug of his shoulders split the collar and he shed the robe like a second skin. Nude before Ryennkar, who was dressed now only in the opened trousers, he shivered, and the other man shook his head again.

“Arosek—”

“Isn’t this what you wanted, too?”

The question could be nothing but rhetorical. All he had to do was look down to see it was very clear that Ryennkar wanted him. And so, with a smile both tremulous and sensual, Arosek took his hand and turned towards the open door of his bedchamber. He did not let go until they reached the bed on its platform, the thick curtains already pulled back. With his heat beating hard he leaned back against the pillows. Relief flooded him to see that Ryennkar had not left him, and he opened his arms with a smile as involuntary as it was perfect.

“I don’t want to be alone.”

The quiet words seemed to hurt the other man, somehow; he closed his eyes, inclined his face to the heavens. If Arosek hadn’t known better, might have thought he was offering up a prayer to the earth-father. But for all his birth and early childhood in the cradle of Janerin’s home, there was little care for the immortals in one as vitally mortal as Ryennkar Vassidenel. 

 *****

For I myself saw the Sibyl indeed at Cumae with my own eyes

hanging in a jar, and when the boys used to say to her:

              “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied: “I want to die.”

"...they make me dream (scream) their dreams (screams)..."

So, I spent the night away from home last night -- I drove a couple of hours up the road, trawled Queenstown for various tasty treats, and then had a two and a half hour spa treatment at the Millbrook. I then had a very delicious dinner at the Millhouse and spent the evening curled in a huge blanket before a faux fire watching children's movies.

...and within about two seconds of getting home, I was completely depressed all ove again. Joy. What does this have to do with writing, I hear you cry? Well, it's more to do with living your life in a way that gives you purpose and pleasure, I suppose, because right now? I'm not doing that at all. I loathe my job, and it's not even so much the work environment itself. It's just that I got this damn degree because it was the "safe and secure" thing to do. I was guaranteed a job, and therefore I was guaranteed an income. So, in theory, everything should come up roses? Only...it doesn't work that way.

Of course I don't believe I can just walk away from my life as is and spend it writing, all the while functioning under the delusion that just because I want it so badly, that this will lead to me making enough money from writing to live on. Because it won't happen that way. But I was sitting on the back porch of my little resort cottage-thing, overlooking the golf course and the mountains beyond with the second part of The Neverboy in front of me, and...I don't know. I was happy. I'm rarely happy. I mean, it could have been the spa treatment, or just the act of sleeping in a hotel room -- I love sleeping in hotel rooms -- but...yeah. Nothing changed, which is why I was so unhappy when I got back home, so...I need to change some things. Obviously.

Still, I have to admit that in retrospect, if someone in a fancy restaurant asks you if you're a food critic? YOU...SAY...YES! Ha. Because I was on my own, I took into the Millhouse a big slab of paper that was Neverboy, and I spent happy minutes between courses reading over writing I haven't seen in quite a few months. It scared the crap out of the people serving me, though -- two of them approached me with quiet awe to whisper the dreaded words are you a critic? I mustn't be as evil as I thought, because I instantly replied: "No, I'm just working, you're safe!" I could have got a free drink out of this, dammit. I mean, if I'm going to be a starving artist, I should start thinking of these things, yeah? ...but with that said, being a starving artist could be a good thing, as I've given myself an eating disorder and one of its manifestations is uncontrollable eating. Yet I totally didn't want to overeat this weekend. The only time it kicked in was when I left to come home. Argh.

But yes, re-reading Neverboy is proving a surprising pleasure, and it is probably helped by the fact that both movies I watched last night were kid's flicks. One was Up, which I've never seen before, and the other was Night At The Museum 2, which I have seen before, except it was on a flight between Osaka and Singapore and I probably missed large chunks of dialogue. I also spent a good deal of the movie goggling at Amy Adams and those tight, tight aviator pants. Er. Although my favourite bit of the whole movie is actually the ending, where Ahkmenrah gets all excited about the tablet until the kids totally shoot him down. He then tells them with the best expression on his face: "Actually, it doesn't do anything, it's just for decoration." I adore sarcasm, yes. I was introduced to Edmund Blackadder on Christmas Eve at the age of nine, I can't help it.

Still, watching that movie reminded me of one plot device I have hated for a very long time -- I'm not sure what tvtropes.org would call it (I'm scared to go look, I don't have hours of life to lose tonight), but I'd call it The Surrogate. It's that thing where the original character you've spent the movie/book/television series with is replaced by a clone of some description, and everyone accepts it as given that they'll be just the same. This can work -- the Doctor is a roundabout example, but maybe that's more a case of The Other Darrin at play, and besides, it accounts for what bothers me. The Doctor retains his memories across regenerations. Often, these clones? Don't. It's like a reset button, and considering I think people are entirely the sum of their memories -- and this is why the thought of Alzheimer's scares me stupid -- to have a character "reset" in this way...bothers the fuck out of me.

I also had some issues with Up, even though I enjoyed it. I just...couldn't always suspend my disbelief willingly. Which is perhaps ironic anyway, considering the movie is about a house that flies to South America beneath a bunch of helium balloons, but whatever. It hit every button on an emotional level, which made up somewhat for what I felt was a story filled with little holes. It leaked, you see, and kind of deflated by the end. But then again, it made me bawl twenty minutes in, and that's some powerful stuff. Also: ED ASNER. So much LOVE for that man. Which reminds me, I had a little flip-out when watching the first episode of Doctor Who's latest series earlier today, simply because Old!Canton was William Morgan Sheppard, and then Young!Canton was totally MARK Sheppard, and...that's just awesome. And off-topic. But still awesome. Father and son and both rock the casbah! <3

But yes. I didn't write all that much, but I read. And was amazed while I read, because not only had I forgotten a lot of this, but...I was reading stuff back and thinking: "Wow, I wrote this? That's unpossible!" And I had this feeling because it felt so good. Can't be a bad thing, yeah? I mean, considering my inner editor sounds one hell of a lot like Malcolm Tucker, you can imagine I'm not prone to singing my own praises. But I am completely in love with Alara Feronza, who is what we children of the internet refer to as a BAMF, and...yeah. I don't know. I really should edit this properly and consider sending it for editing/publication/something.

In the meantime, life, it does go on. I really just have to reconsider the path mine is on.

...AND THEY FIGHT CRIME!

So, I was babbling the other day about commissions -- and yesterday I received this in my notes at deviantart courtesy of the ever-wonderful and extremely talented neme-chan. We have on the left one Tessera Penrose, and on the right we have Lavinia. You know, I still have no idea what Lavinia's surname is? I do know her first name is actually Lucia, but her father took to calling her Lavinia and it stuck. She never minded. <3 But yeah, the expressions on these girls' faces...they are totally BFFs. And what drives me crazy is that I totally want to make use of that, but really...they ought never to meet in-story.

Dammit.

But you know, this whole thing reminded me of fanfiction and whatnot, and that happened for a few reasons. Firstly, I used to write a lot of fanfiction. I fell out of the habit of it long ago, but when I was seventeen or thereabouts I started collaborating on an epic fanfic that became more of an original work than anything else, and after a while we filed off the serial numbers and reworked the setting and made it an original story. We then had a falling-out and neither version was ever finished, but despite my lingering nostalgia that's not quite the point. The fun of walking into a fanfic world, you see, was that artists liked to draw for us, and I still have a decent collection of pictures from those stories. I am such a whore for pictures, I can tell you, but the real irony of all this is that last week I got a message via livejournal asking about this epic fanfiction thing. The writer of the message wanted copies of some of the stories, as they've all been eaten by the interwebs; I figured it was just nostalgia on their part, too, but as it turns out? They want to do some fanart. <3 So, that was a bit of a welcome surprise right there.

Still, I got to thinking -- I have something of an odd attitude towards fanfiction these days. When I first started writing it I had no idea what it was, and to be honest it wasn't until the advent of the internet in my life that I took it seriously; before that I spent ninety-five percent of my writing time with my original characters. These days I don't write it much at all, mostly because I haven't the time and I'd rather write original fiction anyway, but sometimes I wonder what sort of attitude I'd take to fanfiction of my own work. I have no problem whatsoever with art, because I can't draw to save myself, but writing...I find to be an odder prospect. It's likely because I can write it myself, but with that said one of the best things about collaborating with another writer is the fact you get to read stuff about these characters without having to write it yourself...

Still. G.B. mentioned a couple of my older characters in a comment the other day and although I now tend to imagine Woody and Andy sitting around in the back of my head living out a sort of perpetual L&P commercial, it brought to mind a thought I had a long time ago about that story. Woody and Andy are best mates, and they tease the living daylights out of one another. That ad I linked just before is an absolutely pitch-perfect example of the kind of friendship they have. But as a slash fangirl of old, I can just imagine people taking a platonic relationship like theirs and sexualising it. And I would hate that. No, honest, I would. Hilariously I would totally be down with someone slashing Andy and Pisces, because there are various reasons why that could happen, but Andy and Woody? No. It would annoy the shit out of me, because it's just not how I see the characters. At all. So from that point of view, I suppose I can sympathise with authors who loathe fanfic, because it does seem almost like a loss of control over the characters and their development. I mean, I wouldn't personally forbid it, but there are definitely things that would bug me. And if someone ever wrote a story where Viola Morgan voluntarily ended Valentine's Day without the slightest bit of bloodshed, I would have to hunt that person down and lob a Companion Cube at their head. There would also be a distinct lack of cake.

Still. If there was someone who could write fanfiction for me, it would solve one little problem -- the girls above. They totally want to kick ass, take names and FIGHT CRIME. I frankly haven't the time to let them indulge in such crack. So who am I to argue, then, if they wander off elsewhere and find their satisfaction there...?

I've been out-imagined by my own imagination, and need to give the voices in my head curfews. Yeah, this writing marlarkey, it's a tad dodgy. Still, you don't see me giving it up, do you...? ^_~

Living As A Moon

So, the last few entries I've talked a bit about the workshops I've been to recently, and it brought to mind one Owen Marshall. I went to a couple of workshops with him back in...oh, it must have been 2009, as I remember I had planned only to do the one on the Saturday, but it was so fantastic I spent the night frantically sorting out my packing and travel arrangements and turned up on Sunday, too; then on Monday I got up at five in the morning and flew to Japan for two weeks. Good times! I think some of my original reticience had arisen because although Owen Marshall is a very well-known New Zealand author, I had never encountered him either at high school or university (in fact, I did almost no study of New Zealand works during my proper education; Heavenly Creatures and Broken English are as close as we got; both, incidentally, are films well worth the watching). The only time I'd read one of his stories was during a slightly infamous SIT pilot course in...2008, it must have been, because I think it was that course that inspired me to enrol as an extramural student at Massey in 2009. But yes, I didn't much enjoy this course, and that in turn slightly coloured my impressions of Owen Marshall's work.

Then I met him, and promptly fell in love.

...I should probably explain that by adding that I fall in love with people like this on a regular basis. I mean, when I was ten years old I went to see Jurassic Park with my form one class and I'm in love with Sam Neill to this day. (Yes, occasionally I lean on the breakwall around Lake Wakatipu and wonder why he can't just appear at that moment, like in a movie. Not that I'd even talk to him, I'd just stare and giggle and generally act like I'd just escaped from Charenton, or something.) But Owen Marshall was just...wonderful. He inspired me greatly, and was generally an all around awesome guy, so...I went out and bought one of his books. Living As A Moon. And I am deeply ashamed to admit that I only decided to actually read it the other day.

Reading this book proves to me again his general awesomeness, it must be said, but I'm finding that reading these short stories? Makes me think again about my own. I was planning to spend this weekend working on the first three chapters of Greywater so I could finally start sharing the story with people (most of the really complete draft stuff is from about chapter four onwards, unfortunately), but instead I've been messing about with short stories. One of them was my own damn fault; Becs asked me to act as a pinch-hitter for a group project of the Southern Scribes, as I haven't been going to the meetings regularly enough to have been a part of it in the first instance. It's a fascinating little experiment, which I'll tell you about another day when I've actually read the end result of the first draft (which is currently sitting in my inbox, along with half a dozen other things I really ought to read/reply to). But I had dragged my heels on it a bit, and at the dinner on Thursday I promised her profusely I'd email her my contribution either late Friday or early Saturday. Some drama later, it was sent by 2pm on Saturday afternoon. We're talking about a piece of flash fiction less than a thousand words long, here. My usual modus operandi rarely permits me to drop below ten thousand. Maybe that was the problem? Oh, well, at any rate Owen Marshall sustained me through my struggles. ...did I already tell you that this man is bloody awesome? ^_~

So, you'd figure that after this, I could go back to the novel. Apparently not. I'd been chatting via deviantart to one of the wonderful artists I've been commissioning, and she'd asked me about Ryenn and Arosek. I decided, rather than explaining some of their complicated history, I'd just show her by giving her a draft of The Simple Story. But then I realised this "short" story (it's far closer to a novella, at 22k) wasn't really in a fit state, so I spent yesterday putting it back together. And I ended up fascinated by those two all over again, and so today I returned to poking at the story I started in Australia last month. Just...what even is this thing. O_o It's not finished yet, but it's getting there. I'm going to work on it a little more in a bit, but...yeah. Gah. I'm also feeling the urge to return to the story I had intended last year to write for the long-since published anthology A Foreign Country, but I never finished the damn thing. It still fascinates me to this day, and...yeah. There's also the fact I should start writing properly for both the Dan Davin and Katherine Mansfield short story competitions, and...here I am, obsessing dreadfully over two characters who just make me horribly, horribly sad.

I've always had a habit of being cruel to my characters, I have to admit, but these two remind me of my overall reaction to the anime Death Note. I won't go into detail, because it's a long story best viewed on your own terms, but essentially the end result of the actions of the various protagonists is just...waste. Terrible, horrible, pointless waste. I once saw an AMV made of the show to Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek, and it summed it up perfectly for me. Just...so much pride, and so far to fall. I get that same feeling with Arosek and Ryenn, in that Ryenn just wasted Arosek's life. But with that said, Arosek chose that path just as much as Ryenn guided him towards it, and...I don't know. It just makes me cry.

It's interesting, though, because I've wandered back into reading histories of Alexander the Great again. Partially it's because I need to drum up interest in military history in order to make sense of Otho's position as a Major in the Sarinian army, but it was Alexander and then reading novels along the lines of The Other Boleyn Girl that first led me to develop these characters. It's that sense of never knowing what really happened, you know? We can imagine what Mary Boleyn did in the last days of her more famous sister, and we can draw conclusions about the relationship of Alexander and Hephastion from the ancient sources that remain, but we'll never know. And that's why I created Arosek and Ryenn. No-one knows why they did what they did.

...well, except for them. And now, as I dig deeper into their minds and hearts and pasts, I'm starting to see why too. And it's breaking my heart. Ah, stories, why can't I quit you? ;_;

What You Don't Know

Just a short entry tonight, to say that I went to a group dinner as part of the local arts festival; it was touted as a book lover's thing, and the author present was a New Zealand woman by the name of Jenny Pattrick. I must confess that I have heard of her and her first novel -- The Denniston Rose -- but I have never read anything she's written. Oops. But she was lovely to listen to, and the food was good; I mean, it was my favourite restaurant anyway, but still...!

There were good and bad things about the evening, mind you. The truly bad thing was that I ate far too much dessert and had to come home and spend forty minutes on the stationary bike to make up for it, but the good outweighs that sort of marlarkey. I had a good long chat with one of my tablemates, a woman about my age who teaches English at the high school I went to, and then something Jenny said struck me. A good few years back she'd been at a writing workshop or somesuch with Annie Proulx, and she had said something along the lines of "Most people will tell you to write what you know. I say -- write what you don't know."

The theory behind this, I believe, is about learning and research and enriching your own experience. I was charmed by this, if only because I've terrified myself in relation to Greywater over the last few days. This is because I realised that I need to know a lot more about military bits and pieces than I do, and the idea of it is daunting. But...it's all part of the process, isn't it? And I'm not a research-oriented person -- I like to make stuff up -- but even I realise that what I "make up" comes from my life experience, whether it's something I've read or something I've done. It's why I love to travel, after all.

Otherwise, the other thing I took away from the evening was a yearning to one day get the Katherine Mansfield grant. I want to live in the South of France for a year and write. Bit of a lofty goal there -- and pretty much downright impossible -- but oh, well, a girl can dream.

But in the meantime...the girl's gotta write. <3

The World Says Hello

I keep saying that I want to work on and finish the first drafts of Hibernaculum and The Juniper Bones before I do anything else, but I just keep poking at Greywater with the proverbial Great Big Stick. This is both good and bad, in that any writing is good writing, but it's feeding my bad habit of Never Finishing Aught. And I do need to work on finishing things. I suppose half the trouble here is that Greywater is simply more manageable, at least when it comes to the idea of eventual publication. The Juniper Bones is very long -- probably it's going to hover around the 300k mark, even when finished and edited -- and Hibernaculum is rather strange. None of them are easily classified, at least when it comes to their genres and whatnot, but those two certainly sit outside the norm. Argh.

With that said, I suppose it's not as if Greywater really slots easily into any category. You could call it a romance, in its way, given it deals very strongly in the strange relationship between a Major and a long-imprisoned water elemental (yeah, yeah, I have Belle and Sebastian in my head with Me and the Major, and it's irritating as hell). But I doubt I could pass it off as a true romance novel, given that a) it's written from the male protagonist's POV and b) the romance actually isn't the full point of the story. I thought it was in the beginning, actually, but I'm starting to discover that it really isn't.

Come to think of it, I'm intrigued by my POV tendencies. I'm a girl -- probably fairly obvious -- but I have a serious tendency to write from a male POV. I don't know what that says about me. Am I brainwashed by my culture, a culture that tends to say the voice of the male is the most correct and therefore ought to be the most dominant? I really haven't any idea, I just know that the stories I wanted to write were just best told from the perspective of characters who happened to be male. Maybe it's because I really came into my own writing-wise through fanfiction, and I was -- and still am -- a slash fangirl. But I suppose that's a quandary for another day. Another day when I actually have something finished and worth publishing, anyway. (Although let us note, for posterity, that Tea For Two, my first published story, is told from the wife's viewpoint. Not that this makes her particularly happy, let me assure you. But then we can count that as a nice bit of irony considering Lovecraft, the main inspiration for the piece, wasn't exactly a bra-burning feminist crusader. Ha ha ha.)

Still, the point of the entry wasn't to lament the fact that I can't even write within the boundaries of the romance genre to save my life -- it's far more traditional to be either the female or the female/male voice, and the latter still tends to be skewered to the distaff side -- it was more to talk about meeting new characters. Because although I have had the basic story of Greywater in my mind for probably a couple of years now, I've never really understood the nuances of what was going on. Basically, I knew that it was how Otho had met Círa, and explained why they were not really on speaking terms during The Neverboy. I also knew it had a lot to do with the beginning of the unravelling of Ryennkar Vassidenel, and how this would eventually ruin the heart and soul of Arosek Asfiye. What I didn't know, as it turns out, is that Greywater is actually about how a soldier deals with the way war moves in ways he cannot control, and how this affects the way he lives his life even as he struggles to keep himself alive in order to do so.

If that makes the slightest bit of sense.

This is all just relevant to me, mind, because I met Rylea yesterday. I'd known of her before now, but I'd never actually met her. She's Otho's first wife, and I knew from the beginning that she exerts undue influence on his life still -- I mean, the novel opens with him almost toppling himself out a window over an unexpected letter from her -- but I hadn't really expected the depth of it. The conversation between them that I just wrote? Hurt. And it's beginning to bleed through into his interactions with Círa, and is shaping their relationship in ways I didn't expect. It's wonderful, and frustrating, and confusing as hell. I'm also not really sure that her name is Rylea; it's sort of a placeholder right now, but there's still a reason behind the name. ...why yes, I was thinking of R'lyeh. And given how much trouble Rylea is causing me right now, it's fair enough to assume that it wasn't inaccurately given.

...I suppose I can but hope that now my mind is drifting towards the fascinations of non-Euclidian geometry, that my pet quantum mechanic Wills Penrose will speak up and get me back into The Juniper Bones before Rylea totally messes everything up. But knowing my luck, they'll just team up on me and make everything worse. I suppose that's just the hazard of the spec writer's profession...? ^_~

Roles and Research

The danger in my commissioning habit, really, is that it tends to inspire me to write things I shouldn't. I mean, I asked for these pictures of Tess, Lavinia and Wills in order to keep my mind on The Juniper Bones, but as I then ended up with the sketches of Círa and Otho I've got Greywater on the brain...but hilariously, when I came home from work for lunch yesterday, I found Natalia had sent me the lineart of Tess and Lavinia. And my brain is rebelling. Hard.

Now, the thing is, this is in theory an impossible picture; Tess and Lavinia can't meet. They're separated by about five hundred years. It's just that Eliot can't help but think of Lavinia whenever he looks at Tess, even though they're physically similar in only the most superficial sense. Their personalities aren't that close, either, though they have things in common -- it's more the sense of life inside them. Maybe a kind of joie de vivre? Whatever you what to name that quality, they share it. Therefore a lot of Eliot's instinctive need/desire to help/be around Tess comes from his memory of Lavinia. So, I wanted a picture of the two of them together. And the lineart...oh, god, I just want them to meet now, even though it's completely impossible. They will be BFFs, I just know it. And ironically, they'd even be able to communicate easily enough because while Lavinia speaks fifteenth-century Italian, Tess is a classically trained opera singer and therefore is a dab enough hand at differing forms of Italian. I just can't help but be reminded of an episode of a quiz show hosted by Jimmy Carr I once watched one New Year's; Russell Brand and Noel Fielding got bored of being known as the less-intelligent team and therefore decided to start planning their own tv show called The Goth Detectives. And somehow, I can just see Lavinia and Tess doing a similar thing. Not as goth detectives, mind you. But even as the opera singer and the Renaissance contessa, THEY FIGHT CRIME.

...like I said, my brain, it is a rebel. Argh.

But aside from that, I had been contemplating Greywater yesterday and trying to align the characters and their actual contributions to the story. And I finally remembered why I had kept Andorin and Cydrac in there; Cydrac is Otho's predecessor, and Andorin is what is known as his Second. Otho's led to believe that while Cydrac and Círa got along perfectly fine, the reason Cydrac left the position was not because he wasn't doing his job -- although he wasn't -- it was because Círa had taken a disliking to Andorin. It's not that simple, and I've just remembered why. I'd actually forgotten, as I'd never written it down. -__-;; Yes, I am just that stupid. But it gives me another way of explaining the theme of the story, so it's all good.

Still, aside from sorting out the characters and their thematic roles, I also came to the terrible realisation that I am going to have to do some research. This is because while I'd always known that Otho was a major, I figured because he was on a kind of compassionate leave I wouldn't have to go too deeply into military tactics or battles or whatever. I've since realised that the end of the novel is going to call for me to send him back to the front, and...well, as Dr. Horrible so aptly put it at the end of the first episode of his sing-along blog: balls.

I don't know a lot about the military, in any shape or form. In general, I'm just not interested. The only things I've read over the last year or so in that thread, at least voluntarily, has been various works about Alexander the Great. Er. The technology and culture Otho's time period is more closely twinned with the Western world in the late 1700s. Bugger, bugger, bugger. And yet last night, while I was punishing myself with an hour-long ride on my stationary bike, I found on one of the boxes a comic book collection. They're comics from the fifties, about the Second World War. I devoured three stories in that hour, and even though it's still not really the best time period for me to be referring to, it's still research of a kind? But yeah, I am quite cross about that. I tried to talk Círa and Otho out of ending their story in that way, but they both rolled their eyes and pointed at Ryenn.

And I don't have the guts to argue with him about anything.

O_o

So, I suppose I should go back to not being in control of the voices in my head and try to write a little something. It's Saturday, of course, but I've spent most of it driving between Invercargill and Cromwell. I actually have a terrible headache and probably ought to just sleep, but...the voices. Can't argue when the muse has got a whip to hand, huh? And I suppose it doesn't help that the commissioning gives them an even stronger mental image in my mind. Ah, the dangers of authorhood...

Musicians and Mathematicians

I decided the other day to have another couple of commissions done, because quite aside from the wonderful workshops of the other day, I respond particularly well to visual stimuli. And I've had Wills Penrose strutting around my head being difficult; it then struck me that Rachel's style would be suited to the image I was carrying of him. So, I poked Rachel for a picture of Wills, and while I was at it I decided that Natalia's lovely dreamy style would be brilliant for a picture of Tess and Lavinia. When I noted Natalia about this, she messaged me back and said that she'd forgotten the last time she'd done something for me that she owed me a sketch, so I took both and asked her to do a kind of matching set of Círa and Otho, like maybe you'd find in a locket? And what I got back...it's absolutely, ridiculously, stunningly wonderful. I will have to share it at some point, but it's inspired a lovely little bit of Greywater that I want to write first.

...but that inspiration is a bit annoying in that I had commissioned these pictures of Wills, Tess and Lavinia because I really want to finish The Juniper Bones sometime over the next month, rather than go back to picking through the pieces that are beginning to make up the plot proper of Greywater. Argh, this is my major issue -- focus. And I am having some serious thoughts on this front. In fact, I'm in the process of ditching my last university paper, and focusing on my writing is one reason in the "pro" column. It's not the only one, and frankly it's not even the most major one; in the end it comes down to the fact that my job and my home life have conspired so far this year to drive me almost to point of a nervous breakdown, and I haven't done any Japanese study since about a week before I ran away to Australia for the second time in two months. I am now so behind I doubt I can catch up -- actually, no, that's a lie. I know I could. I love the Japanese language and I have a rather remarkable capacity for retaining vast amounts of knowledge for short periods. I also understand a lot more than I realise (I was dancing last night to a Moby song and my iPod, being what it is, gave way to a Code Geass cast Q&A that I was actually half-listening to without realising what I was doing before I flipped it to another track that happened to be in English). But the fact is...for all I procrastinate, I haven't the time to focus on things properly. And it's the focus that's needed to make all this worthwhile.

So, dropping this paper? Would give me time to finish these drafts, to work more on Greywater (because frankly I am shipping Círa and Otho like a mad mofo), and to edit Neverboy. This can't help but be a good thing...? And I'd like to play more with Wills. I miss him. He's actually from People In Looking-Glass Houses, but being Tess's father he's wandered into The Juniper Bones and seems to have no intention of leaving. Which is...fine, I suppose, because I was always very fond of him. I just had to cackle when I got the note back from Rachel: I LOL at the coincidence of how I get a commission for an Edwardian time traveller when I had a dream about two Edwardian time travellers a week ago. I had to respond to that with "Oh, so rather than 'THE ZOMBIES ARE COMING!' it's 'THE EDWARDIAN TIME-TRAVELLERS ARE COMING!'" which rather amused Wills-in-my-head. He's not the type to eat brains, after all. He's much better suited to a cup of tea and a sit-down. Possibly with a tesseract and a bit of discussion on the Uncertainty Principle on the side. Oh, and some Rachmanikov. Can't forget the Rachmanikov.

So, yes, I can but hope to get some work on The Juniper Bones done this weekend; certainly Morgan and Eliot are chomping at the bit, wanting to have a bit of closure to their story. In that respect, it's possibly not for the best that I've re-released the pair of them on the experimental blog Down With The Author! I suppose that teaches me, for ever thinking I've got any control over these things. Ha. The only problem with this weekend, mind, is that I have a Mission of Mercy planned to Cromwell on Saturday, involving Dora the Explorer cupcakes. And small children. Oh, god. And as I said above, those sketches...well, Círa and Otho are now my desktop background, and I just keep wanting to write more to explore their relationship and their histories and their present and their future and...

...well. I suppose it's all good, because if I am this desperate to write it...hopefully that means that one day? Someone will be desperate to read it. <3 In the meantime, though, I really ought to cast my mind back to Cambridge in the nineteen-twenties. Incidentally, I have a Companion Cube sitting beside me and I can't help but think that even though it's not a tesseract, Wills would be quite amused by the Cube. Those voices in one's head, they do make for an interesting worldview. ^_~

Reading For Writing

I am no poet, and likely never will be. Still, yesterday I went along to the second of the workshops offered this year; this one was with Joanna Preston. I'd been a bit dubious about going right from the beginning because...well, I'm no poet. Teen Angst Drivel is still about my limit, and I haven't been able to use that excuse for nigh on ten years now. But on Friday night I went to the poetry reading and...I thought I'd made a good call. And after spending four or so hours in her company on Sunday along with a few hardy souls, I thought the whole experience well worth it.

Of course, I did come a bit unstuck when we actually got around to writing poetry. Another reason I went is because I thought it would mainly be close reading, which we did for the first half; I still rather treasure the moment I realised just what the first poem we read was about. That experience summed up rather neatly my problem with poetry, actually; I tend to read literary poems, find they sail over my head, and get frustrated and give up. For some reason T.S. Eliot got under my skin and wouldn't let me give up, but generally speaking...yeah. But this poem? Imperial, Don Paterson. Didn't want a bar of it the first read-through. Or the second. Or the third. In fact, I lost count of how many times I wrote that bastard off. Then...well, Joanna pointed us in a direction AND LO THERE WAS LIGHT AND IT WAS GOOD IN MY EYES. That's exactly what I wanted to happen when I went to the workshop -- to take pleasure in poetry. So, even though writing some later was like wringing blood from a stone, it was well worth the price of admission.

I also acquired Joanna's book The Summer King, although I'd decided I was going to buy it about ten seconds after she started reading her first poem on Friday night. I haven't started reading any more of them yet, partially because I am still reading those Jacqueline Carey novels, but it's also because Joanna pointed out to us that reading poetry fast and furious? Is like bolting a Michelin star meal. It's a waste, and you miss the craftsmanship that makes it so special. So, yeah, I'm saving it. I might actually take it with me on my little soujourn to the Millbrook later in the month. Reading poetry after a massage amongst the mountains...it's got to be relaxing, yeah?

Still, speaking of bolting food and Jacqueline Carey, I continue to stuff my face while reading and therefore have a bit of a sour taste in my mouth when it comes to Carey. It's not her fault, of course, but still. I should stop reading and start writing. I did find it amusing to discuss with Morag after the workshop, though, one thing I found very curious about Kushiel's Dart and my reading of it. I actually got into Carey through a short story in an anthology I'd bought specifically for a Diana Gabaldon short. I wasn't particularly enamoured of the latter and went sifting through the book for another story, and vaguely recalled having heard Carey's name somewhere down the fantasy line. The story in question -- You, and You Alone -- is bittersweet and lovely, told from the POV of Anafiel Delaunay. I fell in love with him then and there, let me tell you.

Anafiel is a poet. You'd think this would have been an impediment, but...I still loved him anyway. But the Anafiel in Kushiel's Dart doesn't write poetry -- that we know of. This is because his poetry was declared anaethema, but still...I ended up thinking "He's a poet with no poetry!" and I wanted to see it as it was such a fundamental part of his character. Which brings up the interesting question of how a novelist imbues a character with talents that they themselves do not have. Perhaps it's a mercy that Carey didn't attempt to give us much of Anafiel's poetry beyond a few couplets -- certainly I personally wish Anne Rice hadn't tried to go all Guns n' Roses in The Vampire Lestat as even my angsty teen ear smacked that shite down -- but...I don't know. I suppose I can but hope that I stick to my mathematicians and musicians, and pray that I never have to write a poet of my own.

...of course, saying that only encourages them. And Joanna didn't help; she was talking about how poetry is a powerful cultural force. It's the poems that we turn to in times of happiness or grief, and it's one of our oldest art forms. They still use poetic forms in Wales that began there three thousand years ago. Even I have the urge to read epic Norse poetry because something about it just sings to my mind. So, naturally, my personal insane "bard" archetype, one Aidan Jannock, is sneakily suggesting he tip his hand to poetry. He's usually more into talkative prose, if his entries in the Menhir journal throughout the latter third of The Juniper Bones are anything to go by, but Aidan's Aidan.

I'm in trouble.

It doesn't even help, when I try to tell him about something else Joanna said that stuck in my head -- apparently, when the revolutions come? The first artists they shoot are the poets.

In retrospect, I should probably just stick to being a novelist.

^_~