The Final Countdown

So, it's Halloween. Not that Halloween is a big thing where I'm from -- this does tend to be the only time of year I really wish I was Stateside, if only because they really do love Halloween. And it's about the only really tacky holiday I can take pleasure in just for its sheer tackiness. Easter's not my thing -- too much surprise!church as a child while living with my grandparents -- and Christmas is a bit tricky in my family (the other set of grandparents inadvertently gave us bad associations), but Halloween? I can get behind Halloween. Although given the spring heat here I've only managed to scare myself with Amnesia and creepypasta stories on livejournal, ha ha ha.

Quite aside from all that, the last day of October obviously heralds the oncoming storm of NaNoWriMo. I'm set up to go, of course, because all I've been doing is writing anyway, but I am hoping like hell this is going to work. I've always found the basic requirement of NaNo easy, when I've bothered to see it through; last year I amped it up by saying I had to do 100k rather than 50k, and this year I am focusing on another problem altogether: finishing things. So, I've got to have a starting point. The novels and their current wordcounts are:

Greywater: ~150k
Hibernaculum: 187,374
The Juniper Bones (part three): 83,188

Greywater has an uncertain count because I'll almost certainly be working on it tonight before the official wordcount period begins. I'm almost a hundred percent certain it will be finished by the end of the week; Hibernaculum might be a couple of weeks, and then The Juniper Bones is far more iffy. It's the real struggling-point, that one; the other two are almost certainties, but the last one isn't. It's got a very complicated ending and I really am not sure how it's going to play out. But if I'm really in the zone...hopefully the finishing frenzy from the other two will coast me through the third, too.

I'll have to update this journal everyday to keep myself strong for this. In the meantime, I ought to go do some writing. As it's Halloween, though, I might as well update with a tiny snippet from a Halloween story from last year. I didn't have the opportunity to do anything this year, even though I rather liked the idea of writing something about a similar holiday in Sarin. This is something I wrote for my writer's group, involving a couple of characters of The Juniper Bones. I do love them so.

*****

“A Halloween party?” he asks, holding the invitation like it might explode. Given its origins, he wouldn’t be surprised if it did. The bearer of these bad tidings, pressed and perfect in his three piece suit, grins as if he has just read Eliot’s mind.

“Oh, yes. Had you forgotten it was coming?”

Eliot hadn’t, but even had he been inclined to turn up at one of Morgan’s soirees, he’s always figured himself to be beyond invitations. His modus operandi is just to show up when and if he feels like it. Examining the engraved card, personally handed to him by the good doctor’s own husband, he realises that he really doesn’t like the sound of this.

“She has them every year,” Baedeker adds, helpful to a fault. “You know what she’s like…throws parties, invites half the hospital around, and no-one can quite work out if she’s making fun of them or actually wants them to come over, and…yeah. At least with Halloween parties they can be fairly certain it’s going to be insane, whereas at most other times they really can’t tell.”

“So glad to hear it’s not just me,” he mutters, and holds the card out. “Not that I’m planning to come.”

“You don’t have to plan to come. You’re coming.” He raises his hands when Eliot makes a stabbing motion with the card, resolutely refusing to take it back. “Trust me, she’ll drag you over herself if you don’t show up.”

“Like she’s that desperate to see me.”

“Do you want to tempt her?” He’s grinning despite the warning note that’s entered his voice. “I know she was reading about Alexander the Great the other day, I saw her with Arrian. Between the thing with Hector in The Iliad and what Alexander did to that bloke at Gaza, and the fact I know she was thinking of buying a racehorse last week…unless you want to see what it’s like to be dragged behind a chariot you really ought to turn up.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t she?” He arches an eyebrow. “It’s Halloween. Everyone knows the blood is fake on Halloween.”

“That sounds like the tagline of the most terrible B-movie never made.” Something of a guilty look flashes behind Baedeker’s glasses, and Eliot groans. “Oh, please tell me you don’t moonlight as a wannabe screenwriter!”

“Look, you’d better just turn up.”

Eliot’s stuck with the invitation as Baedeker turns to leave, and he looks down at the shimmering lines of his name with a sigh. There are probably worse things than a Halloween party with Viola Morgan, but he’s pretty hard-pressed to imagine what they might be.

*****

And just in case you wonder why Eliot is so afraid of Morgan, here's a recent commission of the two I had done recently by the wonderful Danielle Ellison, otherwise known as thecosmicdancer over on DA. It's gorgeous. And terrifying. And we all know that's the way Eliot loves it, no matter what he says. ^_~

"Tell me we both matter, don't we?"

I've been quite lax with this journal the last few weeks, partially because my brain's all over the show whenever it comes to doing much between feeding my face, going for long walks around Koombana Bay, reading trashy novels or writing my own. I think it's because I did feel guilty about not being about to keep up with Rule of Three, especially as I had an email today that made me all excited about it again. Oh, well, I should go and catch up on some stories and get involved in voting with those that were shortlisted. I also think the avoidance is helped by the fact that this journal is tired to a gmail account I don't use for anything else but this sort of malarkey, but while I was in the UK my smartphone picked up on the account and was always chirping to tell me when I had new comments. Usually I wouldn't notice until I came specifically to check, and since I've been in Australia I've been off the 3G network I was on and I haven't been often by, so...yes. Head in the sand, that's me. I'm rather good at it, too.

Still, I've been writing. It's almost NaNoWriMo time again, too -- and I am taking part, although I'm not doing it properly. I want to finish the first drafts of at least Greywater and Hibernaculum, and if things are going really well I might just have to give The Juniper Bones an all-mighty kick to go with it. I've been working on Greywater since Monday night or so, and currently it's slightly less than 140k and I just got to the end of chapter sixteen. Which isn't to say it's 140k to 16; there's probably fifty or sixty pages of text beyond what I've been writing up to, simply because I habitually write out of sequence. But when I get into this kind of mood I go right back to the beginning and write chronologically so that I can pull the threads into a proper weave. This was particularly important with this novel, as the first chapter existed while the next two didn't, and I really needed a better sense of the beginning to make the middle come together. And it is coming together, often in ways I didn't quite imagine. The characters are very alive to me right now, which I suppose can only be for the best. They're off doing things and behaving in ways I didn't expect -- I'm looking at you, Leylea and Sabin, and you know it -- and I can't complain because it just makes me feel as if the story is about real people...because real people often do things we don't expect, even when we later realise their behaviour is perfectly in line with their personality.

Still, Deniz left a comment on my last entry asking for snips, and as I am still quite pleased with this little (little?!) story, I thought I'd share some of what I've been up to. These two characters aren't a large part of Greywater -- in fact only Nan makes an appearance in that novel -- but they're a part of the larger story and they're becoming dearer to my heart by the day. Even though Nan told me the other day she wants guinea pigs because her parents farm them and then she climbed in a box with the First Lord Consul and the Ice Maiden of Aran Nomese and started a sing-along to the tune of I'm On A Boat. But I have to love her. Even if she seems to be turning into a female Bret McKenzie more and more with every passing day...

So, we have two little bits here -- the very beginning of the story, which doesn't actually have a proper title. I refer to it as Keep Calm (And Carry On) while the file is tea,dammit.docx, but it probably doesn't matter. I think the UK put tea on my brain and it's just not going away.

*****
 

It was silly, she thought sourly, that they would think a mere cup of tea would settle anyone after what had happened, least of all a Mydaraën. Not that she’d been shy about pointing that out – yet her suggestion of a rousing band and enough alcohol to sink seven ships had been summarily shot down and she had been installed in the little bedchamber far from the rest of the delegation.

With a pot of tea.

She did wonder if Alara would have been more amenable to her suggestions – for all Alara Feronza would generally appear to be the least amenable of the priggish lot of them, Nan knew that the woman would at least pretend to listen to her. But then she recalled how she had last seen her – covered in blood, her face that same perfect porcelain mask even as she meticulously cleansed her sword of all gore – and shuddered. She did not know the true Alara. She was beginning to doubt that even Alara herself knew.

*****

The next part comes much further in the story; though the story is from Nan's POV, it's really Alara's tale -- but it's about them both, because this is where knight and magian, forced to close proximity by the one they refer to as the grey wolf of Kerdenet, begin to realise they're quite comfortable where they are.

*****

“He told you that?” She cursed, loud and long, in the harsh-vowelled dialect of the far north-east. Only when she realised Alara had no idea of the exact meaning of what she said did she finally spit out: “Son of a whoremaster! Tell me his name, Al. I mean it. I’ll kill him myself.”

As you killed those men for me. Those words hung unspoken between them. But Alara simply shook her head, though Nan knew now she could not be as unmoved by her passion as she appeared to be. “Not now, Nan. Or at least, not yet. But yes, he came to me that night, said I could do the right thing and tell Rolande about us. My husband-to-be might then have been kind enough to simply break the contract and leave the dowry with my father. It would be harder, the Red Dog said, if I left it until the inevitable discovery in the bridal chamber.”

“I hope you told him where to shove it.”

“I punched him in the face, actually.”

“You…Alara.” Nan had no idea whether to laugh or cry. She settled on something between both. “Oh, gods, Al.”

Both of Alara’s hands wrapped around her now and she actually smiled, though it was tainted with sadness. “He told everyone it had been an accident. But several people knew he’d been speaking with me, and most people were aware that I was my twin’s equal in all ways. In the end I suppose I played into his hands, for if it had gone the way he wanted, Rolande could have pointed towards it as evidence of our previous association.”

“I still want to kill the bastard,” she seethed, linking her fingers tightly through the other woman’s. Her head still ached, but it seemed more important than maintaining the wards. “Tell me his name, honestly, I’ll tear him a new arsehole tomorrow. And again the next day, too.”

“Let me finish the story, Nan, please,” Alara chided, but though her smile had long gone Nan could hear faint amusement that faded only as she went on. “So, Rolande and I were married the next day with all the pomp and circumstance required.”

Nan’s eyes dropped downwards. She’d always noticed that Alara still wore her wedding rings. She’d never really looked at them, but Alara allowed her to turn the leftmost hand over, let her raise it to the light. The ruby in the ring closest to her heart was deep and bloody, the birthstone of her husband. The one on the outside held an amethyst in a delicate leaf setting. That was Alara’s own birthstone, deep violet with rainbows of every colour concealed within.

“That night, he came to me in the bridal chamber.” As she sighed Nan lowered her hand, pressed it close between the palms of both of her own. “He was very gentle. But I laid there like a rock, unmoving, and afterwards he said to me: was it so very bad, then?” She bowed her head. “And I cried.”

The admission, so utterly at odds with everything Nan had been taught of this peculiar woman, hung on the air like a condemned criminal kicking the gallows air. When she spoke again, Nan found her own voice strange, higher-pitched than normal. “He’d been with a woman before?” She swallowed hard, half-choked on her own fear. “Did he…know?”

“He knew. He never went into details – he was too much a gentleman to be as crass as all that. But he’d known women in his travels, and could be sure I was no virgin. But he also knew that my lack of response came not from a longing for a man I would no longer know, but from a fear that he would know me again.”

*****

Now, I probably ought to go back to working on Greywater, as tomorrow I should properly get out of the house and go for a drive to Margaret River or somthing. Even though I'm here to write, I suppose I need a proper break sometime...? 

"And Lorraine would have a smile on her face that made her look a little crazy."

Argh, I've completely dropped the ball somewhere down the line here. I didn't manage to pull myself together last week long enough to actually do the third part of the Renaissance story, and here I am a week later and I'm still flitting around like a fool. Which I am good at, admittedly, but there it is.

I'm not sure what it is, my inability to finish my Blog Fest story. I was finding it interesting to write, after all, but for some reason I just wasn't able to commit myself to either getting it written on time or giving feedback for what I was reading, and for that I apologise to anyone who's stumbled across the blog as a result of that competition. I think personally it's just because I've been very much all over the place the last few weeks -- and to be honest, my life's been a bit of a state since the very first day of it. I still haven't quite pulled myself together, and I suspect I won't manage that until Christmas at the very earliest.

Still, I have been doing a few things since I wound up here in Western Australia, and one of those was applying for the Master of Arts in Creative Writing at Victoria. I have absolutely no idea whether or not I'm going to be considered anywhere near good enough to be accepted into it, but I've finally laid my heart on the line and sent in the application. Considering how long it's taken me -- applications have been open since the first of October -- it's amazing I finally got there. I have a terrible fear of rejection, which is just one of the reasons why I struggle to finish anything I start (hello, blog fest! -__-). It doesn't help that I see the opportunity to do the MA as a way to get out of the lifestyle I shoehorned myself into back when I accepted my placement into pharmacy school in 2000. I should always have been a BA student, but I told myself to do the "sensible" thing. And here I am, doing very non-sensible things as I try and find my place in the world again.

Of course, I am writing. The other day, not long after I arrived, I wrote a ten thousand word short story to explain to myself the backstory of two characters, only one of whom plays a role in Greywater, and then I finally got around to working on the novel itself. I've got over a hundred pages through the manuscript and added ten thousand words; it existed in a piecemeal fashion, you see, and so what I am doing is not only filling in the gaps, but reading back on the discrete scenes that existed already and working them into a rolling narrative. It seems to be working, because in the deeper hours of the night when I'm holed up in the little office with the lighthouse blinking in the distance beyond the window, I love my characters. I love their story. I become so deeply involved I can't see why anybody else wouldn't want to read my story, because it's so damned fascinating to me. Then, in the daytime...well, it's almost five in the afternoon and although I have been writing today, I just can't sit down for more than half an hour at a time because I feel it's all a load of rubbish. Such is life, I suppose.

But yeah, despite the radio silence of the last week I am alive, and I am writing. I suppose I'll have to wait and see how it goes from here.

Rule of Three Blog Fest: Part Two

 
I have to apologise upfront because I have so far been absolutely terrible at participating in the Rule of Three Blog Fest. ;_; Thank you so much to everyone who commented on the last entry I made; this week I really need to get myself together and do some more wandering and commenting on other people entries, because honestly there's some fantastic stuff coming out of all of this!

My next entry also manages to be a bit of a rush job; last week I had just come back from Egypt, and this week I have just come back from a couple of days Oop North in York. Hilariously it's going to be evne stupider next week as I am going to Western Australia via Singapore on Wednesday; I've really managed to pick all the worst days for this, because travelling is cheaper during the week. Never mind, I am going to play better the next few days (although I'm spending the weekend in Suffolk, probably...).

In the end I did manage an entry for this week, although I am pushing the timing thing (it's seven in the evening on Thursday in London here, though I suspect my journal is still on New Zealand time anyway). I've got a few details to go with it after the continuation of the story. So...let's head back to Renaissance, shall we...?

SALVAGE

Part One: Flotsam
Part Two: Jetsam

She hits the ground hard, and for a moment she sees stars – but it is bright daylight, and the sun blinds her when she looks upward. There is no night sky here, save for that which has just fallen over her heart.

“Don’t even try to get up.” His voice is all that remains of him, the rest wreathed in shadow. “This is where you belong.”

“No, I—”

“It’s done. It’s over. I am through with you.”

“No, please—”

The slam of the carriage door steals the last of him away. The horses rear, and the wheels turn – then, they are gone.

The pain follows fast. Curling around her abdomen, she wants to weep for her loss. But she can feel the heat of the sun and knows it will be pointless; in the hours to come, she will scarcely have moisture enough to sustain herself, let alone the burden he has gifted her with.

She should hate it, she knows. But it is not its fault. It asked for life no more than she asked for this death, and she supposes they are in this together and must muddle along the best they can. That is what allows her to push aside her fear and sit up.

She knows where they are, for all it is a place she knows only from vague stories. The fallen mining town had never had enough glamour even for ghost stories, and she herself had never thought to come here. It had been so far outside the sphere of her existence as to be in another universe. It had been nothing more than a place from his past.

It is most likely the reason why he put her there, too.

“Us,” she corrects, voice sudden in the silence. “Us.”

One palm lies flat on the ground, the other over her stomach as she pushes up. She grimaces; the fall had not been far, but it has jarred her. When she looks to the distance, she finds the carriage long gone. The dust settles, golden and dancing in the late afternoon light; it is much closer to the earth than stardust, for all its glittering colour.

She is not given to despair. But as she looks about, she realises suddenly that despite its name, she is the only new thing in Renaissance. The age of the town weighs it into insignificance, and it is a place of forgotten things.

“My name is Leidi,” she says, as if she is afraid she will soon not remember. And her fingers move into her palm.

“…but what shall I call you?”

There is no answer, at least not from the tiny spark of life deep in her belly. But even if there had been, she likely never would have heard it any more than she did the actual answer that did come.

“Hello.”

Leidi’s head has fallen forward, her thoughts adrift as a comet with no trajectory. But then the voice comes closer, and a cool hand anchors her again to the earth.

“Hello,” the voice says again, and Leidi looks up, like she’s heard the wind whispering her name. “I think I’ve been waiting for you.”

Prompt: Someone is killed, or almost killed/a relationship becomes complicated.
Word Count: 532
Main character: Leidi (supported by the as-yet unnamed man and woman from the first part).

Rule of Three Blog Fest: Part One

This is a bit of a rush job, I must admit, if only because I've just arrived back from Egypt this afternoon...and although I'd already written the first part of the story for this very post, once I got in my sister texted me and I ended up toddling back out into the wildlands of London to have dinner at one of my sister's beloved Michelin restaurants. Ha. Combined with the fact I haven't slept more than four hours a night save for one in the last nine, well...I apologise in advance for any dodginess in the story. And hopefully next week we'll get a more coherent entry out of me, too! ^_~

Salvage:

Part One

Flotsam

True love is not supposed to end like this, she thinks, and lays a hand upon the bore-riddled wood. It holds no answer for her. Nothing in this place does.

Yet I am here.

Rough gravel loosens her steps as she crosses what had been the main street, the midday sun as harsh upon her skin here as it would be far out into the Schiavona desert. When she tries to look up the light cuts through her hand yet stops at her eyes, blinding her; she is forced away with her head down.

When dawn had first broken, waking her from sleep, she had thought this perhaps a quiet kind of hell. It seemed only right, that the town where her passion had first flared would die, too, with the passing of her beloved. His presence had animated so much of the fading town, bringing hope to linger long in places where it had been thought to be lost forever.

There had been hope for her, too. Her father had come from beyond Assart to seek his fortune in a town nearly bled dry, but Renaissance had not been kind to him. She remembered well the day she had buried him. The sun had shone then. It always shone in Renaissance, even now, even when there was no-one left to see it.

I’m here. Then her eyes catch another fluttering broadsheet, the date half-erased by dust and sand, and she shakes her head.

I’m no-where.

Making another circle of the main street does not take long. Renaissance had never flourished, not even at the height of its mining glory. That glory had seemed a long time ago, even when she had first arrived; it is even longer now, if the grainy dates hold true. Which they do. She can pretend all she likes that they are too faded to read, but her daddy had always ensured his little girl learned her numbers and letters.

For all the good it did me. But she cannot resent him. He hadn’t meant to die, leaving her alone. He hadn’t meant for the magistrate’s son to fall in love with her. Above all, he hadn’t wanted the mine to fail and for Ferdinand to leave her here.

“Alone.” She forms the word, the first she has spoken aloud, with care. It carries no weight nor sound. If only she could have said the same for her own body when she had cast herself into the hollow womb of the closed-down mine.

It is unfair. She had thought it would end there. But she is here, again. The town has collapsed. There should be a sense of relief, revenge. It had ended her life, but in the end its own life had gone out too.

But it is still here. And so is she.

And something has changed.

She begins another circuit of the main street, adrift and alone. In this state she can do nothing but watch. And wait.

She does not think she need wait long.

*****

This entry is part of the Rule of Three Blog Fest; please see this page for details and to read the entries of the other talented authors taking part!