The Mysterious Ticking Noise

I've been really lax about updating, but perhaps that makes some sense as I have also been lax about writing. I think I'm just overwhelmed by everything; it still doesn't really seem real to me, that I am wandering off again at the end of the week. But then, this sort of thing often doesn't seem real to me until I actually hit the ground in some foreign country. The weird thing about all this, though, is that London won't be some foreign country. Although it will never be as New Zealand to me, I still feel very much at home in the United Kingdom. I've also been in and out of LAX enough times for it to feel like a familiar face -- the same goes for Auckland and Christchurch airports, more so Christers as I lived in the city for two years. It's just Sydney and New York that will be unfamiliar territory -- at least until my sister and I hit Istanbul, anyway.

So, yes, I haven't written a heck of a lot in the last week or so. The Greywater .doc is at 96,734 words, which is annoying because if I could just apply myself to it, I could easily kick it over 100k in an evening. But between having family to stay and having to organise stuff for my last week at work, not much has been happening. Today I even wasted time by reading Harry Potter fanfic, which should say something because I'm not even a fan of the franchise as such. But to settle my niece and nephew the other day I in some desperation played them this vid, and it eventually led to watchings of the first two movies. I'd rather forgotten how much I enjoyed those first two books, actually; when I first read them all the way back in the summer of 2000/2001, they reminded me of Roald Dahl books I'd adored as a child, and so I do think of them fondly enough. It was the latter books that drove me bonkers. Also, I still have that crush on Lucius Malfoy. Er. It may go a ways towards explaining my own character Ryennkar Vassidenel, come to think of it. But then I've had a thing for white-haired pretty boys of dubious morality for quite a long time anyway. Ha.

Still. Even though I haven't been writing physically, I have been writing in my head. I've actually been thinking a lot about the origins of the cardinal gods of my fictional world, partly because of Greywater. The lead female has been bound to the city of Aran Nomese by the earth-god, and the lead male is in the army of the earth-god against the forces of the fire-lady of the South. And it's just been...interesting, because Otho's aide-de-camp Sabin had a little rant about religion, which I did not expect. Sabin, you see, is a straight man who brings to mind one Owen Burnett; I totally didn't see it coming. Ha. Otho later went to an earth-church and had a fascinating discussion with one of the priests there, and...I never really realised how much I explore my own lack of faith in my writing. Basically I'm not at all religious, but I have a deep fascination with faith and things beyond the pale. Usually I indulge in this with stories about ghosts and magic and whatnot, but the four gods and how their world reacts to them in their Dreaming...

I never really knew a lot about them as people, though. Speaking with Neme-chan about her pantheon however got me thinking about what they were before they were elevated to godhood, and in the end I commissioned a drawing of Amanita and Janerin in their original human forms from a very talented French artist. As below:

Cali did a fabulous job; Amanita was a highly-priced commodity as a courtesan, and Janerin was a sheep farmer. YES REALLY. (God, he's so obviously a secret New Zealander, I swear. Probably even has an army of bees somewhere. YES, BEES!) I'm now thinking I need to commission a companion piece of Inamoran and Chaesha, the water and air gods; Inamoran was a bastard son of a wealthy merchant and Chaesha was a wandering seer out in the wilderness. All these things explain a lot about the gods they became. And I've had bits and pieces of their origin stories going around in my head ever since, and I suspect I will have to write up some of it on the long haul flights to the US and the UK.

Aside from the above fabulousness, I also got another commission in the last week (I'm having a bit of a commission meltdown lately, mostly because I finished work on Friday and am now a Lady of Leisure with no regular source of income...). This was the awesome result:

This was another commish from the awesomely talented RaraHoWa, who has done three other commissions for me. And I stared at it for ages afterward with the biggest girlcrush on Alara. Like, massive girlcrush. Which is hilarious as I already adored the woman stupid. But I gave Rara the reference of Vivien Leigh and she came up with this and OMFG. I also adore Nan, the one on the right, but Alara...wow. Unbelievably perfect. She's a knight and a lady and a stone. Cold. FOX. So much love in this room right now. It's just slightly disappointing that Greywater only involves Nan, but I suspect I may have to drabble something with Alara and Nan and perhaps their first meeting. They're superbly mismatched as knight and magi, and that's really why they work so magnificently together. The only novel-in-progress that involves the two of them together thus far is forevergirl, but as I said, I am supposed to be focussing on Greywater, so...

I also need to use my long flights to start sketching out a short story. Mitzi has another call for submission out, and I definitely want to give this one a go. I have an idea already, and I blame Alara for it entirely. Because of my girlcrush. Ha. I also had an email from Mitzi the other day checking snailmail addresses, as the comp copies of the other anthology are ready to be shipped. Hopefully it may be in London by the time I get there. Speaking of London, I am slightly mortified to realise that on September the first, New Zealand time, I will be somewhere between New York and London. Why am I mortified? Well, that's a long story I'll explain in another entry. In the meantime, I have some terribly evil Oreo cookies to bake. I may have to post a picture to prove their evil. If you're curious about the first picture in this entry, by the by, it's a sketch I did a few months back of Tara and Eleni Larmenret. It shows you why I commission, but still. I do love visual representations of my characters so very much. And I can definitely say that staring at Sir Alara and her big...sword...makes me want to write something rather erotic indeed.

...er, that's probably more than you needed to know. But that's the danger of writing, I suppose: falling in love with the voices in your head. Excellent. I also need to do something with Amanita and Janerin, before things went to hell between them. <3 I love love stories gone bad, does it show much? ^_~

The Casting Couch

A few years back, when I still lived in Oxfordshire, a friend of mine and I took a train out to Stratford-upon-Avon and played mini-golf. As you do. At one stage we were sitting in a little English pub, and we were...well, I won't say "chatting," exactly, because I was going through a major depressive episode and I am extremely hard to deal with in that state. My poor friend, bless her heart, did her best to break me out of my funk, and to this day I am very, very lucky to continue to have her as a friend. (It just breaks my heart to know that when I get back to the UK she'll be in Chicago rather than Cambridge, but with that said...hey, an excuse to visit Chicago!) But while we were drinking in this pub, I remember her saying something to me along the lines of: "Claire, you do realise that not everyone has casts of characters in their head like you do?"

I don't remember the exact context of this comment, but it was a compliment of sorts -- or at least, that is how I took it. I suffer regularly from a crippling sense of pointlessness, and feel that I have no talents and therefore no worth to the world. My dear friend, who met me through my writing, was trying to convince me otherwise. And I was thinking of that yesterday during a phone call. Now, even though my characters' voices are very loud in my head, they don't generally argue with me outside the context of their stories. However, every now and then they will make a commentary on my day-to-day life. Yesterday I was on the phone to a doctor regarding a rather nasty prescription, and and it turned out the doctor himself was a rather nasty piece of work too. (Think of that joke that goes "what's the difference between god and a doctor?" and you'll get the idea.) I am used to this sort of thing, yes, but he really took the cake (probably a good thing, or I'd have eaten it). But I got some amusement out of the whole debacle when Viola Morgan suddenly leaned down in my ear and whispered with terrible, terrible irony and amusement: "Now honey, that is a doctor!"

Viola Morgan is a surgeon. A terrible, terrible surgeon, and I mean that in the sense she's terrible because she's too bloody good at her job. Although she's not a serial killer...exactly. Ha. Oh, Morgan. She's a curious character all around, that one. She was meant to be something like Niles Frasier's wife Maris -- commented upon, discussed even, but never ever seen. She was just going to be Baedeker's terrifying trophy wife of convenience and nothing more. Of course, this was when what would become The Juniper Bones was a solitary short story involving two men who could both beat the snot out of one another and enjoy it (the first rule of Fight Club is...), so...er. Yeah.

She actually likes wearing pink. I think that fact alone terrifies Eliot more than anything else about her. Ha. Oh, yes, Morgan is my very favourite Ensemble Darkhorse, even though her presence in the story has made everything rather exceedingly complicated. But then, this harks back to the Cast In My Head thing -- they really do whatever they damn well please, and Morgan more than anyone else. But then, I am a pharmacist and she is a doctor, so perhaps that is just the way of these things.

...oh, crap.

"They built a statue of us -- and later said it's all our fault."

As I type this, the snow they've been threatening all weekend has finally started to settle outside my window. It's not doing much, mind you, and on Friday when the weather people went nuts and told us to stock up on fuel supplies and essential food items (generally most parts of New Zealand see significant snow only rarely, and it tends to screw us up) I went to the Four Square and returned with a litre of low fat milk, a bottle of vanilla, a dozen eggs and a package of dates. Because obviously, as far as I am concerned, if I am snowed in all I care about is omelettes, date scones and Oreo-infused chocolate chip cookies.

...probably it's better, if you don't ask about that last one.

But yes, I have had to spend the weekend being somewhat productive considering the fact that in less than two weeks I will be out of the country for an indeterminate period. Today I've spent the afternoon cleaning the bathroom out and throwing clothes and laundry from my room into Tyler's. I'm not sure that I've achieved all that much by doing so, but...it was a start? I also cleaned the kitchen, mostly because I'd left it in a state after the Brownie Experiment of Thursday night and I wanted to make soda bread for lunch. I also need to make soup for dinner. Oh, joy. (The Oreo cookies are, somewhat thankfully, on hold for the meantime.) Despite all this, though, I have actually managed to do some writing over the week. Probably not as much as I ought to have, but considering everything...

Right as of this minute, the Greywater .doc is sitting at 92,177 words. The writing I've done over the last week, too, has been a little...odd. Well, not odd, strictly; it's just that on Monday I started to get a much clearer idea about where the story is supposed to be going, and instead of writing things in full I've been sketching out scenes in dialogue and stage direction, and going through the novel in order to get things straight before I smooth out the line art and colour it all in. This is how I write short stories; it doesn't usually work so well with longer pieces, but considering the fact I started writing this story with no idea as to where it was going...well. It's all good, in any way I get it? I don't know.

Still, for a bit of a giggle, have an example of my sketchy-writing:

The head rose, turned to him, and the eyes opened.

Otho wanted to rear back, but he was frozen in place by the eyes. The statue was made of ice, but the colour in the eyes was there. Blue, green, grey, white – the sea in full storm. But no anger. Just the force of a great personality, a greater art.

“I…”

Slight shake of his head. And then, he reached forward. The bear. Woken, it raised its head, yawned, and then looked to him. Black eyes, rich with intelligence, lazy with easily-given affection.

As if in a dream, Otho accepted the bear from the boy-god. He nodded, smiled. Had not exactly been beautiful in life, not in the fashion of the brawn farmer Janerin or the notorious courtesan Amanita, but that did not matter. Otho could not look anywhere else.

The bear nuzzled, butted his chin. For a strange moment he wondered what he would do, if it decided to sink its little ice-teeth into the great vein in his throat. But he felt no danger, no fear, and then it settled as it had in the boy-god’s cradling embrace, and Inamoran smiled wider. Sadness, in those storm-ridden eyes, but still he smiled.

“What am I supposed to do?” “You want me to help her, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“How?”

Turned his head. Janerin, in the darkness before them.

“He won’t help me.”

And Inamoran shook his head. Otho knew he’d misunderstood, and wished he would speak. But the cold of the bear was spreading through his limbs. Not uncomfortable. Reminded him of how strange he’d always thought it, when people said that drowning was a peaceful way to die. Lungs filling with liquid, struggling, fighting against a force overwhelming every inch of your body. Had never seen what could possibly be peaceful about that.

Thought he understood now. The cold in every part of him, and yet it felt like a dream pulling him deeper into sleep, into a place where dreams were no long necessary. No desire to fight, but then he looked into those eyes again.

“Please!” “Please, tell me how to save her!”

Smiled.

When he opened his eyes, he was in his bed. A dream? But the pillow was wet. Put a trembling finger to it, then to his lips. The taste of salt, the taste of tears. But he remembered the weight of the ice-cub in his arms, and he wondered.

As I said, I tend to just go by the dialogue to get the point of the scene, and then I just throw in half-formed sentences and key snippets of description so that when I eventually get around to filling in the gaps, I remember the road of the Zone I was careening down at a thousand miles an hour the first time I did a drive-by of it. Good times, as I said. The polar bear cub story, incidentally, still depresses me but this little snippet here has gone a long way towards cheering me up. Daw.

And you know, when I was walking around the reserve this morning looking for the snow that never turned up, I had all these ideas about what I was going to write about today in this blog. Mostly it was a tvtropes-driven explanation of the genesis of the two lead characters of Greywater, but I find after having spent the afternoon tidying and cleaning and whatnot I'd much rather just go and write. But just for laughs, if you look in that picture up there of my desk you should be able to see a drawing on the left, somewhere above the plate of my Pink Lady apple (yes, I have to cut my apple up like a baby; I had braces for years as a kid and also knocked half of one of my front teeth off when I was seven at Conon Street swimming pool; I honestly can't bite into an apple to save my own life). That drawing is some line-art from a commission in progress by RaraHoWa, and I'm ridiculously excited about it. Even though the character on the right is Nan. Fucking Nan. ...this is relevant to this entry's interests, you see, in that Nan was supposed to be with Alara (the stone cold fox on the left) in forevergirl. Yet somehow she is careening around Greywater making my life hell.

This is somehow awesome.

...so, let's get back to the awesome?

"And that's why I don't like cricket."

The accountability experiment seems to have been a bit more successful this weekend, even though I spent all of yesterday watching obscene amounts of Harry Potter and eating even more obscene amounts of Guinness-spiked chocolate cake and butter-cream-cheese icing. (It didn't help that my elder brother came wandering in my room late this afternoon to announce he is going to visit my younger brother and his family tomorrow for several days, necessitating my spending an hour this evening making cupcakes for my niece and nephew. There are dinosaur sprinkles everywhere.) But yes, I am still picking away at the Greywater .doc, but I have rather successfully ended up with 79,335 words in it. I think I'll try and kick it over the eighty thousand mark before I go to sleep, but we'll see.

I also went for a long walk today, and while doing so composed an interesting little story in my head that I think I might attempt to write longhand on one of my long flights to the US and then to the UK. I'm not much for writing longhand these days, but it does tend to be more entertaining than bad movies and scary seatmates. But even if I don't write stories, I've been thinking I ought to start taking more detailed notes on worldbuilding. I've been chatting to Neme-chan about the gods of her world and of mine, and it makes me realise how little I note down about this sort of thing. It comes up in the stories, obviously, but I never lay it out straight for myself. I should do that, so at least then I have proper references. I also need to update a lot of my maps and things, because I am always making up new towns and cities and then forgetting where and when they are. Er. Foolish child....

Still, the gods are an interesting thing for me to consider. The world I write in has a rather...complex...theological background, but although I do understand its basic structure talking to Neme about it makes me realise how many details are still missing. It's been a real joy to delve into it; I was also amused by one of my recent trawls through the dangerous waters of tvtropes.org, as I discovered the Four Temperament Ensemble and came to the conclusion that the four cardinal elementals actually fit it very well. Chaesha is sanguine, Inamoran is phlegmatic, Amanita is chloeric, and Janerin is melancholic, and each of the personality traits associated with each match not only their original personalities before their deifications completely Flanderized them, but their associated elements. SCORE.

Still, Janerin's been amusing me in both good and bad ways the last couple of days. Even though earth elementals seem to be more associated with maternalistic figures, Janerin's a male god. He's a very male god, in fact; for an association, let's go with Gaston, shall we? Because no-one's got more in common with god than Gaston! (...oh, god, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But then again I'm evil, because I'm going to link y'all to this just because I don't want you to sleep tonight.) But he was made the earth god because he comes from a long line of miners and farmers, and he's very much a hunter and a warrior. It seemed obvious, at the time. (Then again, my Elder Gods can't exactly be called good judges of character.) Thing is, when I picture him, I tend to think of Russian tsars. But when I was walking today and calling to the sheep as I wandered past their fields, I was suddenly struck with the bizarre mental image of Janerin in classic New Zealand man-of-the-land attire -- and by that I mean a black singlet, stubbies and a fedora, with a sheep under one arm and a Speights in the other. Oh, god. In retrospect, it's a good thing I can't really draw, though I do have the urge to doodle this one. Uh...

Funnily enough, Otho's started sounding more and more like a New Zealander to my ear, though he's more of the Nothing Much generation. My terrible mental image of Janerin as above comes more from the seventies STUBBIES! generation. Although one can but hope he will never be struck by the urge to roll around on a classic car in said stubbies...

BRAIN BLEACH NAO PLS.

So, yes, that was my day -- I feel somewhat guilty, mind you, because I got to writing Círa's explanation to Otho of how she came to be imprisoned at Greywater, and...well. I used to live in Abingdon with my sister, and due to both BT and Virgin being right royal c*nts about connecting our internet, we wound up getting it through Sky...which of course meant we wound up with Sky television, too. And my sister had this dreadful habit of watching any show on NatGeo that involved polar bears. I say "dreadful" because no documentary about polar bears ever ends well. I mean, even when you watch fictional polar bears something terrible has to happen to them (you know I'm looking at you, I'm-gonna-knock-your-jaw-off-Bad-Ass-Armoured-Polar-Bear-Warrior-King-panserbjørne folk...). But yeah, my sister was always watching these shows and winding up in tears. So tonight I continued the tradition, because Círa's story involves a polar bear cub. And it dies rather nastily. ...so, yes, much writing has been done, but I am still a Bad Person.

Oh, well. I'm a writer, yeah? Suppose it comes with the territory. I mean, we invite voices into our head for the sole purpose of making their lives hell in the name of entertainment. What's a story without conflict, after all? :D

The Thief of Time

...so much for the accountability experiment? Ha. As it turns out, I haven't had much opportunity to write the last few days anyway. I have a full time job anyway, but on Tuesday I had an unexpected text at work from a friend who lives in Nelson who was overnighting in town, and because I'm unlikely to see her for some time once I go overseas even though she also had an overnighter last night too, we met up for a drink and a chat. So, that was Thursday gone, too, as we had dinner. Wednesday was just a bust because I was depressed and tried to eat my way out of it, which naturally makes me more depressed. Stupid thing was, mind you, that writing would have made me feel a hell of a lot better...

Still, tonight's not proving much better. After adventures all day with a truck and a WOF and mildly retarded vehicle inspectors -- though the one who finally got me the warrant was hot as hell -- and a day at work that was just a pain in the ass, I am spending the evening catching up on stuff. I need to exercise -- fifteen k biked so far, still need a twenty minute Zumba session -- and I also had to bake a cake for the Harry Potter marathon I am apparently attending most of tomorrow, I had to call my father about the aforementioned Truck Adventure, and then he wanted me to scan all these pages from my grandfather's log book, and my sister's chatting to me about jobs in London and a possible trip to Barcelona and I owe Neme-chan a massive email about gods and world-building and...well. When do I get time to write?

Still, I have done a bit of writing the last couple of days, don't get me wrong. The Greywater .doc is at 73,462, and a lot of that was scribbled last night in between getting home from work and getting ready to go out for dinner. Priorities, yeah? But it was Nan, and I can hardly deny Nan when she wants my attention. She scares the living daylights out of me, Nan does, which is always a fabulous thing for a little voice in your head to be doing. -__-;; But I'm also thinking a lot about Otho's military career and how this affects the story, at least partly because I've been flipping through my grandfather's logbook for my father. My grandfather flew Lancaster bombers in WWII, although I think he also flew Stirlings and Wellingtons; I seem to have operations manuals for them sitting on my desk in amongst the wonderful little sketches Neme sent me the other day. It is just very, very strange to read back through his flights and see the names of German towns and realise that that means he went out there and bombed those places. It's not an entirely new sensation; I got a similar creeping feeling in Munich and in Dachau, but...I don't know. As a technical pacifist, the realities of war really seem to miss me a lot of the time. I need to tap into that in order to really get inside Otho's mind.

I could go on a lot about other things tonight, but I really need to do that Zumba and write that email still, and then I've had the oddest scene rolling around in my head that I could probably drabble in a thousand words. I blame Mitzi, who is the editor responsible for my first publication. I in fact just got the payment through earlier in the week for my story in Red Velvet and Absinthe, which is out in September. But it was the first time I have ever been paid for my writing, so...wow. I'm all excited. I can't wait for the comp copies, though I think I'll be in London then. I should tell Mitzi. Hee. But yes, take a look if you like. I love the cover, it's gorgeous. And I am looking very forward to reading the other stories inside, too...

"What about the Twinkie?"

I think I've decided to try and do a bit of a "Wall of Shame" thing this month in order to keep myself on track writing-wise, though with that said it might be a bit interesting anyway because towards the end of the month I will be packing up and wandering off god alone knows where. ...actually, that's a lie, as I know I will be in NYC for a few days, then London for a couple of days before the eleven-day trip to Turkey, and after that my sister and I are going to tool on over to Suffolk to see my great-aunt. I also have the urge to go to Peterborough to pay my respects to Catherine of Aragon and I also want to go climb up Glastonbury Tor, but we'll see.

...but yeah, I can still do some writing. Actually, I'd like to go sit in the reading room in the Schwarzman branch of the New York Public Library and write a little bit of something. That would be heaven. ...hell, with the odd direction conversations between Cira and Otho have been taking the last couple of days, I could even get away with an anecdote about an unexplained mass sponge migration. Even if they do only move a foot and a half. Ha.

But yes, I ought to do something to account for what I do and don't write, so...here we go? Because I decided to do another couple of commissions, I spent the weekend writing about either Arosek and Ryenn, or Cira and Otho, and it's really got me back into the rhythm of Greywater. In between arranging my ESTA, scanning bills and obsessing over Nigella Lawson (don't ask), I managed to get a very little bit done. I'd already written maybe a couple hundred words this morning before I decided to take count, but at that point the .doc was 70,551. It's now 71,473. I'm guessing the novel's slightly more than halfway done at this point, though I can't be sure. Certainly it keeps changing shape on me -- not least of all thanks to that damn Rylea, and I'm terrified of Nan making an unexpected cameo -- but I think its key theme is always and ever going to be about rescuing others, and ourselves. And which one is possible, and which isn't. Hmm.

Right now, though, I think I've earned an early night. <3