Dragging Heels

I hate this kind of evening, really -- I've spent the whole day wanting to come home and write, but now that I'm here I just haven't got the energy to do anything useful at all. And I'm giving myself a headache trying to force it. Gah.

I think I'm just feeling guilty because I told myself a month ago that by the end of March I'd have Greywater in a fit state for submission to agents, but I've fallen into one of my Old Bad Habits and haven't really been writing at all the way I've supposed to have been. It's an ego thing, to some degree; I have very little self-esteem and the thought of being rejected is still really hard for me. It doesn't help that I talked myself into applying to Clarion West just before the deadline and that inevitable rejection is going to send me spiralling into a complete pit of despair, so. I don't know.

I suppose the good news is that my experiments with Twitter Fic were somewhat successful; I managed to get myself second place in the vote with my Cthulhu-esque tale of love and sushi, which I suppose means I have yet another thing to thank Lovecraft for. We're batting three for three here, in terms of things that win competitions for me or actually get published. God, that man is probably sitting down there in hell just warming a pitchfork up for me.

In other news, thanks to my little glee-fest over the movie Thor and the fact I mainlined The Almighty Johnsons this weekend, I'm having Lots of Feels about epic Norse poetry. As in, I may have to start reading it. This can't be a good thing. I did, however, acquire a book of Maori myths from the library yesterday, mostly because I commissioned a picture of Pania, Erik, and Rowan weeks back and it's just coming through, and...now I want to write a ridiculous spin-off wherein the token Maori flatmate, the half-selkie and the not-actually-a-witch adopt a taniwha and THEY FIGHT CRIME. My subconscious is bleeding, I tell you.

Obviously, I'm going insane. I hope everyone else is doing better than me...I kind of feel like I should be doing something about that. But really, my brain's in two minds about that.

Pieces In A Parlour Game

At some stage today I really going to have to get out of bed and get dressed. If only because my mother sent me a quilt the other day, and after two successful days of teaching the cat she's not allowed to sleep on it, she's now sleeping on it. Curled up like a snail. Why must cats fight so many of their battles with the power of CUTE? It's not FAIR.

But I seem unable to do anything of note, really. Although due to a sudden desire to actually watch Thor properly, I am now utterly in love with Loki Laufeyson and have recently also been reminded of how much I love trollin!Tony Stark. Because he be trollin'. Always with the trollin'. ...dammit. I'm not actually in any fit state to be forcing myself to write, but I adore smartasses, and Tony and Loki definitely qualify as smartasses. And after seeing the trailer for The Avengers I want to see this movie just to revel in the smartassery of their inevitable ham-to-ham combat.

But yeah. The little black dog of depression is doggedly dragging along at my heels, and making it very hard to write anything, which is a bit of a bugger because I'm in such a bleak place mentally that some fantastical escapism is really what I need right now. I just can't summon the energy to work the spells for myself, as it were. I did, however, notice that the voting for the Twitter-style love fic competition is up at last.

SpecFicNZ February Twitter Love Contest: the entries are there, and one of them is mine. If you have the time -- and they ARE only 140 characters long at most -- go have a read, and a vote. It's an interesting little concept, and I did enjoy seeing what others came up with too.

In the meantime, I suppose it's back to trying to work out how to get out of this bed. And no more quilty for kitty, dammit.

Brevity Is The Soul Of Discretion

I really haven't made any effort thus far to make any goals for this year, writing-wise, which really says a lot for the fact I am absolutely useless at that sort of thing. I've lost all self-confidence for starters, but I just need to...work through it, I suppose. To that end I sucked it up and entered the Twitter-length fiction contest I mentioned the other day, against my own better judgement. Ha. I also had an interesting little experiment, because an email had come through from the kindly folk who run NaNoWriMo about Pitchpalooza.

In essence, this is just about pitching your NaNoWriMo novel to these people and hopefully winning a prize. The trick is that you have to do it in two hundred words. As you've heard from me already, brevity is not my forte. At all. So I took one look at the email, laughed, and said YEAH RIGHT.

Half an hour later I was furiously editing an attempt at a query letter for Greywater I had been working on in December or something. I'd given up at around three hundred and fifty words. So, I got to distilling, and I found...it's such an interesting exercise, and I really ought to try doing it for a lot of other things I've written. I love to write, obviously, but I'm freeform and highly indulgent. I don't really edit very well. But the Twitter fic and this two hundred word pitch taught me to be more selective about my words, cutting away the chaff and going for the evocative rather than the merely elaborate. It also gave me hope, that I'll be able to edit this first draft of Greywater down from 167k to at least 150k, if not lower. Because that is my goal, this year. Getting that to a submissible state and then submitting the hell out of it.

For posterity, here is the synopsis. In the meantime, I am tired from a long walk and I need some sleep. As usual. I'll probably just go back to talking to Arjit about his obsession with wielding the sword of a pacifist in a war said pacifist never wanted. Or so we were led to believe. Hmm.

When Major Otho Calenta, on leave from active service, is summoned to the prison-city of Aran Nomese to convince a reclusive inmate to lead her once-lauded army into battle, he doesn’t know how he’s expected to achieve his goal. Not only is a she a centuries-old water elemental sorcerously imprisoned by the earth-god of his country, he knows already the bitter taste of crusades long since lost.

Raised from childhood to believe his duty is to take up his sword and protect the innocent, upon arrival at the broken-down palace of Greywater Otho feels obligated to attempt his mission. But between the peculiar machinations of the lupine Attorney-General of Lonan and his own troubled conscience, he sees little reason to incite a pacifist creature to murder. His reticence only grows when a prickly friendship mixes curiosity and craving between them.

Greywater is a novel set in a fantastical world where love and lust shadow a tale of loss and longing, where a soldier and a creature of ice and water meet on an unequal field to engage in the oldest battle: the one where you must learn to save yourself before you even dream of trying to save anyone else.

Twit Fic

I've always had an issue with self-confidence. I'm not going to go into a sobstory about how it started because to be frank I have no bloody clue, but it's relevant here for one reason -- I'm thinking of entering another competition. And it's a competition that scares me silly.

I belong to a local (i.e. a New Zealand-based) speculative writer's group called SpecFicNZ, and I tend to feel like a fraud when I have anything to do with it. After all, it has plenty of members who, like, actually publish things. Whereas I just fluff around with my characters, never get anything done, and generally make my carbon footprint on the world the size of a yeti's while making no relevant contribution to anything. So, I have an issue right there; I'm generally scared to death of speaking to anyone who has anything to do with the group because I suffer from what they poetically name "Imposter Syndrome." I'm just waiting for the polite email that says "You're not a writer. Go away and play with your broken little toys elsewhere."

The next issue comes from the fact that the competition in question was announced yesterday and...it's a Twitter contest. Or at least, it's themed that way, in that said stories are romantic speculative ditties written with 140 characters or less. I'm the kind of moron who struggles to meet word limits when it comes to short stories of six thousand words. So...uh. Yeah. This ain't gonna work.

And yet I am trying. At first I took one look at it and said OH GOD THIS IS DREAMING YOU CAN'T DO THIS. And yet, the last couple of days I've been reading various tumblrs that take from Texts From Last Night. In particular there are three that amused me greatly; they take from the movie Alexander, the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena and the television series Doctor Who and by combining a screencap with a text quote from the original website we get gems like these (click the link for the full tumblr experience):

From http://utena-tfln.tumblr.com

From textsfromthetardis.tumblr.com

From textsfrommacedonia.tumblr.com

It also helps that thanks to some talented people at In The Rose Garden I also became aware of a site called A Softer World some time ago; they were remixing text from the strips with screencaps from Utena, resulting in things like this particular beauty:

I feel terrible because I can't remember who remixed it. But all of these taught me something -- you can tell a story in very, very few words. It's not a skill I've ever mastered; the most success I've had recently was with The Journey of the Magi (almost four thousand words exactly) and Tea For Two (just under six thousand); both are pushing the limit of their associated publication/competition rules, but they got did what they were supposed to. So go figure; this means I've actually logged onto my Twitter account for the first time in years and am using it to compose little one-forty character stories and seeing how it goes. We can only enter the competition once, so I have to come up with something before Valentine's Day. Hilariously, writing a one-forty character drabble will likely take me ten times as long as it would to write fourteen hundred actual words of a novel or a short story.

I am fascinated by the act of it, though. And while I know those above illustrations work partly because of their illustrations, the fact that you can take the text away and put it somewhere else says a lot for the strength of the story inherent in the words themselves. I'm supposed to be a wordsmith, hack though I inevitably truly am. So, I shall hack away on the Twitter and see where it takes me.

Standing In The Ashes At The End of the World

Sometimes I think life likes to mess around with me, just a little. I say this mainly because I spent most of the earlier part of this year going through a series of nervous breakdowns, mostly due to work and a sense of not knowing who I really was. I don’t actually know why I chose the past tense there because I still have no bloody clue, but there it is.

So, with that in mind, I ended up finally biting the bullet, quitting my job, and traipsing halfway around the world with only my trusty backpack for company. It’s been a bit touch and go so far, what with Hurricane Irene and then an interesting journey home from Turkey, not to mention my next plan appears to be a trip down the Nile, but here I am. I do need to either get a job or make more serious travel plans as not to be a burden on my poor sister, on whose couch I am currently crashing, but I still just don’t know what I really want to do.

As I weigh up my options, I am beginning to realise my power as a writer. That’s a very hard thing for me to say, I have to point out, in that I am a born and bred New Zealander and if you happen to read a book called The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Kiwis you will come across the entry that points out that we are not very good with singing our own praises. It’s considered crass (sometimes I think this can be why Southlanders and other Kiwis south of the Bombay Hills can be so dismissive of Aucklanders; they’re much quicker to say how much they rule the roost). So, my actually exploring how my writing is improving…makes me uncomfortable, to say the least. But I’ve always written stories, a habit I picked up not long after beginning to read them, and I think now…it’s like being a magician, I suppose. It’s an apt analogy as I am prone to fantasy in my own work. But think of it this way: I am an adept, someone who has always held the power somewhere within her. Throughout my life it’s been largely unfocused and uncontrolled, and while occasionally things have worked out, I’ve always been very rough and ready (and probably very self-serving) in everything I’ve written. This year, I’ve started to look for that control. And it appears to be working.

While I was in Turkey earlier this month, two things happened: my first short story publication came out (something I will update on later, when I actually receive my comp copies and get to see the book as a whole; from the reviews I’ve read I’m dead excited about seeing the other contributors’ works!), and right before I left New Zealand I discovered that not only had I placed in the Dan Davin competition, I had actually won first place. I obviously don’t have access to the local paper from here, as such, but it came out the day I was in Turkey and I only got a look at it last night thanks to my proud daddy and his kindly provision of his library card number. So, I trawled through some online archives and took a look. And laughed. I had a two-page spread in The Southland Times publishing my story on the third of September, just days before my first book publication, and it was that same-self paper that first published my writing at the age of ten. I was in Mr. Ovens’ class and it was a ghost story called Mr. Nobody. And I suppose I haven’t really changed my tune, as Tea For Two is primarily a ghost story, and The Journey of the Magi is certainly headed that way.

It’s The Journey of the Magi I principally want to talk about in this entry, of course. (If you want to read it before this entry, just send me a comment or an email or something and I can send you a copy.) When the paper came out, I was highly amused by what few facebook comments I caught via my sister’s smartphone in Istanbul and beyond regarding the story and how people reacted to it. My mother, who was clearly quite excited to finally see me doing something with my writing, announced on facebook: “Even though I may not have quite understood the story I do appreciate how beautifully written it was - very jeaslous [sic] of your writing ability!!” Which is why I decided to explore a little my reasons for writing the story and what I meant by it – bear in mind, though, that analysing your own work is a touch and go process. I love literary analysis, and I am not afraid to say I’m very talented at it. When it comes to my own work, though…well. It’s a director’s commentary at best, I suppose? ^_~

The principal reason I wrote this story at this time was to enter a competition. I have to say that first up, because it is the truth. I needed a story, and this one came to mind. But as you can possibly guess from my wording there, I chose a story that had been in embryonic form in my mind for a long time anyway. This is what I usually do when I need to write “to order;” I dig up one of my previous “what ifs?” and run with it.

Though this story ended up with multiple influences, the one that set it off was a song. The band She Wants Revenge has a song called Pretend the World Has Ended, and I first heard it probably a year or so back on the recommendation of a fellow fan of Ashes to Ashes and Life On Mars. The lyrics immediately struck me, in particular this bit here:

We can run away tonight,
Pretend the world has ended.
No matter what they say we'll work out fine,
‘Cause you and I know this is heaven

That was the original seed: I liked the idea of exploring the idea of two people shutting out the world around them to indulge in one another. But then, I thought, what happened if it wasn’t a pretence any longer? What if the world really had ended?

I chose the characters I did for any number of reasons, but they are two men principally because it was the easiest way for me to present in a short space a “taboo” relationship. Not that I find it particularly taboo myself, I’ve dealt in the slash genre for a very long time. But that’s the way of the world around us, and so I used the ingrained knee-jerk reaction of our society for an easy fix. Which I suppose is a trick all writers use, in varying shapes and forms. I had a bit of fun in name-changing, though; I always choose my characters’ names for their meaning, and I went through any number of choices before I settled on these. And it was to do with another emerging influence on the story: T.S. Eliot.

Anyone familiar with this poet’s work would immediately have picked up on his shadow over my words by the title alone. It’s not my favourite poem of his by any stretch – I am a Prufrock girl, first and foremost – but the idea of the magi came to me as I was creating the story behind the POV character’s current situation. He is a docent because he is a “wise man” of a sort, but he both teaches and learns himself. The magi themselves, of course, are the three wise men who came to seek Jesus. In a way this is what Thomas Kandahar is doing: in a world on the edge of apocalypse, he stumbles in the dark, looking for the shining star that will lead them all to their salvation.

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."

But people are bastards, according to tvtropes.org (by the way, if you follow that link and get stuck there all day, it is totally not my fault). Which is why the fate of creatures of Matsya Kalkirn’s type is to be taken as a tool and then discarded when their use is over. This is something relevant to the world today anyway, as we all tend to wonder what makes us human – but it’s been there always, this idea of those who are “better” or more deserving of the world than others. This comes back around to the name selection; Matsya was purposely given a less Western name, but then Thomas’s surname is also non-Western in origin, implying the mixture of society at this undefined point in time upon this world that parallels ours.

Thomas was given that Christian (!) name simply for the association with the Doubting Thomas well-known to any of us raised in a Christian society. Thomas doubts -- both himself, and the world around him. That is his principal function. His place is to be wise, but he knows nothing. Which brings to mind another Eliot poem, actually; here’s a bit of The Waste Land:

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

This is what Thomas is – he is full of misgivings, and therefore in a liminal state. This story deals in parallel worlds, which I’ll get to in a minute, but Thomas has created his own world, unwittingly upon the ashes of another, because he does not have the strength to rise above his doubts. Saint Thomas had a wound he could place his hand into – my docent, however, has only Matsya. And how much help he is…well.

The origin of Thomas’s surname confounds me a bit – I am having trouble recalling why I chose it, but I believe it was because of its linguistic relation to Gandhara, a former ancient kingdom now in Afghanistan. I think I liked the idea of a name within two worlds – one closer to Matsya’s, and then one beyond it, in a different culture. Gandhara is also a very rich name, with a lot of world history behind it from before Alexander the Great to today, so…I think I liked that aspect. Thomas is our world from our viewpoint, as we want to “save” this world and all that comes with it, but there’s a price to be paid and at the time of the story, Thomas doubts he can personally afford it.

Matsya’s name was built on several things. Partially I liked his first name because I was reminded of two characters from a long-standing favourite Japanese anime of mine, Shoujo Kakumei Utena. I won’t go into details, as they are spoilers and it’s a wonderful story, but the pathos of that arc came through here for me in this story. But Matsya is the first of the avatars of Vishnu; to quote Wikipedia, Vishnu is “…the All-Pervading essence of all beings, the master of—and beyond—the past, present and future, one who supports, sustains and governs the Universe and originates and develops all elements within. Vishnu governs the aspect of preservation and sustenance of the universe, so he is called 'Preserver of the universe'.” We’re getting an echo here, yes? Matsya is the first, as I said, the avatar who saved humanity. Kalki is the tenth and last, the so-called “destroyer of time” who is expected to appear at the end of our current time. With that said, it’s fairly easy to see why I chose his names, I guess? ^_~ Matsya is a beginning and an ending, salvation and destruction in the same package – but because of his nature as a Defiant he’s something otherworldly, too. Hence my borrowing from the Hindu canon, there.

As for the story itself, it came about from several influences – I mentioned the tragic story of Souji Mikage from Shoujo Kakumei Utena, but I was also thinking of a wonderful fanfic I read years ago for the series Gargoyles that dealt in characters stuck in a parallel timeline to the proper one, and I also recall being fascinated by a similar concept in Doctor Who a few years back. And naturally I must give a tip o’ the hat to the Master himself, one H.P. Lovecraft, because the Others in this story are certainly close personal friends of Cthulhu Himself. So, that’s where my sense of the apocalypse came from – and then I wondered, if your world has ended, what do you do? If your whole universe collapses, where do you go?

This is Matsya’s question, and he goes to answer it. And that’s where the story got scary for me, I think. Thomas is a doubter, but for all he was named after a canonised saint, Thomas is still human. Matsya…is something else. Was Thomas right to indulge him? One would think not, given the result. But then did Thomas have the right to chose whether to indulge him or not? Ah, there’s the rub, there. But as someone who has personally been haunted her whole life by the meaning of déjà vu, I enjoyed writing this story. My problem with déjà vu, you see, is that it makes me wonder if a future self has brought me back to this point to make a decision over. And I always fear I am doing it wrong. But in this story, Matsya sees the opportunity to make his choices over and over again, as much as he likes. And the tragedy of it all is that it was having those choices taken from him by his own world that led him to destroy it to get what he wanted.

I know I said Eliot’s dear friend Prufrock didn’t directly inspire this story, but as I come to the end of this little digression…he likely did. So, I’ll end it with one of my favourite quotes from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, because I can hear echoes of Thomas in these words. And really, all the words we speak today are just echoes of those already spoken, and those as yet unspoken in tongues poised on the moment of speech.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—        40

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare        45

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I also have to note that Morag, a dear friend of mine who is part of my beloved writing group back in Invercargill, mentioned to me that apparently I was the first Southlander to win the open Dan Davin Award; Davin was himself a Southlander, of course, but I believe he spent a lot of time in Oxford. I suppose I could go over to Oxford today and look for inspiration, but I lived in Abingdon for six months and I'm kind of done with Oxfordshire. ^_~ Tim Jones, the judge of the competition, also said much the same thing about my being the first Southlander to do this, so there you go. But before I stop warbling about this competition, I need to make one last link: the winner of the high school competition was a girl named Pooja Pillay, and it sounds like we've lost a wonderful writer in her. I recommend you go and read her story and enjoy it as much as I did. The imagery is haunting, almost horrifying, and at all times I am helpless in its wake. And again, I am reminded of Prufrock, and on his words we can end this.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown	130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Unbearable Strangeness of Being

So, I've just returned from a vacation -- and I use the term "return" in a slightly ironic sense, as I am not currently in New Zealand. After a very strange series of flights I originally wound up in London  (I was supposed to go via New York, but was rerouted through Vancouver thanks to one Hurricane Irene), and then my sister and I went to Turkey for eleven days. I returned to London just this afternoon, but even then my travails of travel hadn't really ended because an evacuation scare on the rail platform at Heathrow's Terminal Five rendered access to both the Express and the Underground impossible, and given the fact our flight had already been delayed and we'd had an inordinately long wait in immigration due to staff shortages...well. Time for a (rather expensive) cab ride halfway across London...

The weirdest thing about all this, of course, is that I decided to leave New Zealand just when things started to get interesting. The anthology that included Tea For Two came out on the ninth, and on the third I discovered I had won the open section of the Dan Davin competition. With that in mind, in the next couple of days I am going to talk about both things here. In the meantime, though...I need some sleep. ^_~ But I do feel very positive about my writing at the moment, so hopefully there will be more chatter about my latest projects, too.

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? ^_~

"It's like being in charge of a special school on a day out!"

When I went to the Millbrook a couple months ago, I had dinner at the Millhouse -- and as I had gone away for some peace and quiet, I had taken a good chunk of the manuscript of The Neverboy in order to do some editing. At dinner, I entertained myself between courses with said manuscript. For the last three weeks, I've relived that dinner by having Saturday's lunch at a restaurant while reading and scribbling with my big red pen. I also did this in Wellington three weeks ago. It's actually really lovely, despite my ongoing problems with food and weight and whatnot. One place, too, is actually somewhere I regularly walk past on my weekend wanderings, so incorporating a stopover there into my walk -- and lengthening it afterwards -- was really very, very lovely, especially as I usually spend my walks mulling over characters and storylines.

So, this Saturday I toted the prologue of the forevergirl along to a pseudo-English pub and worked through that. It was an interesting exercise in that I knew the prologue really didn't make a lot of sense in the new context of the novel. When I wrote it last December, I had assumed I wouldn't be writing the actual novel for a long long time and was doing it mainly because it took place during Winter's Heart, which is sort of the closest Sarinian equivalent to Christmas (although it's more just a mid-winter festival of food and gifts; it's not strictly religious, but then for a lot of people these days Christmas is fairly damn secular anyway). Things have changed since then, of course -- not only did Arosek and Ryenn shoehorn themselves and their damnably complicated friendship into the novel, but the Dragon and its drug-fuelled dream-devouring dramas turned up out of bloomin' nowhere, and Alara recently informed me that Nan is going to be in this novel too. Nan. I'm terrified of Nan. I'll have to introduce you to her someday. When I'm not terrified of her. Which might be never, come to think of it. (...oh, God, iTunes is, like, reading my mind and playing me Gay Bar as I write about Nan. Shit. She's totally going to start that nuclear war, isn't she...?) But...yes. I had to rework the introduction before I could consider writing the first chapter, which I really need to do if I'm to stop Arosek and Ryenn running off with the whole damn book.

Er.

So, yes, that was lovely -- but then I came home and realised that I had two short stories that I really had to finish this weekend. One's something for a local short story competition, the other is part of a trade, which is something really quite interesting I'll talk about in a minute. But I have to mention the competition first. I always have incredible trouble writing for competitions -- partly it's because I have great trouble writing to order, but it's really the wordcount that tends to trip me the hell up. I'm still surprised Tea For Two didn't get banhammered for its incredible length, but then I think it got through on the strength of its atmosphere anyway. But yeah, this competition was for four thousand words; the current first draft is closer to 4.1k, but I can knock that down. I think. Ha. It's really very funny, though, how long it took me to write this story. It's not actually something I dreamed up for the competition, it's more that the competition finally gave me an excuse to write it. Even though I am riding very close to the deadline. (Which is Friday...) It was directly inspired by a song, actually, and when the competition is all over I think I'll go over the genesis and the development of the story. It'll be fun! (...I swear.) But the fact that I actually have something to enter is achievement enough, as I originally thought entries were due at the end of June and I was far too wrapped up in my zombie headstate to do a damn thing about it then.

...which reminds me, in a roundabout way, that I am still far too intrigued by one Kaworu Nagisa, which has led to the discovery of a tumblr that gives me ridiculous pleasure. I just couldn't resist something that included the description of "My hobbies are cooking and being sad." Oh, Shinji. I am a Bad Person, honest. But I just love this thing to pieces. For all it is obviously parody and satire, they really do nail Shinji's character.

But to get back on topic (topic? what topic?) I'll speak a bit about the other story I wrote this weekend -- I just finished the first draft, actually, and with any luck I'll be able to give it a decent edit tomorrow night and send it off to Neme-chan. It's my half of the trade I mentioned above, and it's been...an experience! Neme-chan is an artist over at deviantart I met via a friend from IRG (which is basically My Happy Place); I commissioned her a few times, and I've posted the results of those here a few times. She's really very, very talented and I adore her style. Because she was doing original characters for me, I ended up sending her snippets of stories involving said characters, and she enjoyed my writing style enough to offer up a trade idea -- she would draw something for me, and in return I would write something for her. We decided to do this quite a few weeks ago, but between her exams and holiday and my own wallowing in Cooking And Being Sad, we hadn't really got started on it until a couple of weeks back.

So, I got about fifteen hundred words done last weekend and figured I would plot out the rest properly this weekend, but then Neme-chan sent me my completed half and I freaked out completely. I was determined to stop dragging my heels and just write, no matter my mood, and...here we are. I can be really slow, you see, for all I am by nature a prolific writer. I mean, I wrote over a hundred thousand words last November. I could have written more. I just...have a bitch of an inner editor and therefore find it very hard to write at all some times. Or most times. But I was writing for someone, and I knew it was time to stop listening to the Inner Editor and just go for it.

It was a really interesting experience, as I've said. The characters I wrote for are original creations, and I am also unfamiliar with the world they were created for. Essentially I worried that I was totally God Moding the whole thing, but after a positive response to the opening I've totally let loose on the rest of it. I can but hope she likes it as much as I do the picture she sent me in return. ...to give you a visual, this is basically what I did when I opened the attachment in my email:

Daaaaaaw. No, honestly, I was gobsmacked. The two characters in question have been in my mind since I was twelve or thirteen or something, and though I never quite seem to finish their story, I am trying. Hibernaculum, the latest incarnation, is OH SO CLOSE. ...of course it needs to be edited the hell out of, but never mind. Having a draft is the first damn step, and it's further than I usually get, so...yes. But I figure I might as well close this entry with a little snippet of my bbz, and then you can see for yourself how talented Neme-chan really is. ...and while you do that, I will go hold myself to my end of the bargain. And pray that my dribble will make me as happy as did her scribble. <3

When she chanced a glance sideways she found him smiling, tremulous and quiet. He then reached forward, the touch of his fingertips light upon her cheek. “He said you weren’t beautiful, didn’t he?” Zurin mused, and though Luchandra thought she should have blushed, to hear him acknowledge so the fact he had seen the dance of the gods, she pushed it aside. She’d always known. He’d given her the lullaby. And then his smile deepened, sad and yet tinged with the faintest hope; it stirred her own even as he leaned back, shook his head. “But you are. You are so beautiful.”

“And you have more power than you know,” she whispered in return. “You saved me, then.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. You did.”

“If only we’d met under other circumstances.” Zurin tightened his hands on his knees, gave a short laugh. “Then I suppose under other circumstances, we never would have met.”

“Maybe not.” Luchandra looked again to the butterflies, wondered what warding power they had; surely they were from the East, the land of the air-goddess. She was not their patron. But then, their earth-god cared much for their protection any longer. “I wonder if it even matters, though.”

“It matters.” She turned, surprised by the sudden ferocity of his words – but the kiss shook her deeper. Though it felt very different to the pressure of the earth-god’s kiss when the fire-lady had blazed within her, lacked the taste of metal and snow, she still shuddered beneath it. Zurin drew back as if stung, eyes wide.

“I’m sorry.” And she could see he was, could see he was just as surprised by his actions as she. “I didn’t…I didn’t mean…!”

“I don’t mind,” she said softly. “I was just…surprised.”

“I still shouldn’t have.”

“Why not?” Bitterly she spoke, even as the memory of his swan-song sent a shiver down her spine. “They took their comfort. Why shouldn’t we have ours?”

Zurin stared at her, so long that she felt as though the world had stopped. “Do you really mean that?”

“Maybe we would have met no matter what.” She bit her lip, and then laughed, wild and careless. “Maybe this is what they talk about, in the stories, when they speak of destiny. It’s the world bending to the path of love and desire.”

He shook his head, but there was clear wonder in his gaze. “You can’t love me. We’ve only just met.”

She smiled. “And perhaps we’ll never meet again. Isn’t that why we should do this?”

For a moment, she thought he would draw back. Then he laughed, too, and for the first time she heard genuine joy in his voice.

“You’re mad, you know that?”

“I just like a good story,” she said, and reached for him. “You know…the kind with a happy ending?”

“This isn’t the ending.”

“We can still be happy,” she said against his lips. “If only for a little while.”

Words by me, picture by Neme-chan. <3

Focus

So, I am back in New Zealand and writing-wise? I didn't accomplish as much as I would have liked while I was on holiday, but with that said I was on holiday more or less because I am in the midst of a nervous breakdown and the fact that I have managed to go back to work for the last two days and not run screaming all over again, well. It's a victory? Ha.

But while I was away, I did do some writing and a lot of thinking, and it mostly all came down to that little elusive bugger of focus. I am easily distracted. I write many things simultaneously, both novel-length fiction and short stories, and as a consequence I rarely finish and submit anything. Because I've been in a bad place mentally these last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about two very ill-starred characters, but Arosek and Ryenn have ended up inspiring a lot of short fiction as well as their own novel-length epistolary thing. But while I was wandering the mangrove reserve in Bunbury every day it occured to me that both characters are now a firm part of the forevergirl, and because of this I've been thinking again about Greywater, and...yeah.

What did I manage to write in the end? A thousand words or so of Greywater, roughly five thousand words of a short story between Arosek and Ryenn called (as a placeholder) In Our Bedroom, After The War, and then I wrote out bits and pieces of four or five other short stories that came to mind. You see what I mean about focus? Some of it was inspired by news of a couple of competitions closing at the end of the month, so...yes. I don't know.

Still, in two days time? It is Easter. I should have had four days in the clear but I offered to come act as second pharmacist on Saturday morning, but it's only three and a half hours out of the long weekend. But what I have decided to do? Is use it to just write. I want twenty thousand more words in Greywater, and I want to finish both A Statue of Us (for the Wily Writer's superheroes competition) and Dream On (for the CONText competition). I'd also like to finish In Our Bedroom, too, mostly because it's a fairly telling moment in the relationship between Arosek and Ryenn. The reason why I like to write them when I'm depressed, I think, is because it just does not end well. But then, it's a bit debatable whether it ever went well one way or another anyway. And yet...they genuinely care about one another, and they need one another. They don't actually spend all that much time around each other once they leave school, and I think that contributes to my fascination with their interactions in later life. Every moment is charged with things unsaid, and it just fascinates me.

I've also been commissioning again, and when I got back from Australia I was delighted to find in my deviantart note box a message that Círa and Otho were done. And it's gorgeous; Neme-chan is unbelievably talent. <3 I have a version printed out and stuck on my wall already, though I will have to get a proper poster version done through snapfish at some point. And today, I got home from work to find that Ryenn and Arosek are done, too. So, to celebrate, I think I'll find a little snippet of the pair of them.


This little bit is from the novella that originally bore the title The Simple Story. It's actually told from the viewpoint of Aleksandr Zaloyo, a former Kearnian noble; he's telling his companion, a former Leiceynan hierophant, what he knows of Ryenn and Arosek, who lived about a hundred years before they did. Aleksandr's understanding of the convoluted history is interspersed with the real story, as the point of the novella? Was to show how the truth and the legends match and diverge. It's a mess, even though the first draft stands finished at twenty-two thousand words (!), but here's a little bit of it anyway. As I said, Arosek and Ryenn? Intrigue me because they are very different people. Arosek loves too much, whereas Ryenn doesn't love at all. But then the tragic thing is that each to each, they are the only ones who can draw the other from one another, if that makes any sense. Arosek can teach Ryenn how to love, but the flip side of that coin is the simple fact that only Ryenn can teach Arosek how to hate.

Though Ryennkar had been the one to be away for three weeks, he offered no explanation. When Arosek looked up to find him standing before him, a ghost come back to haunt the place of its birth, the silence had to be broken first by his strangled demand.

“Where were you?”

Ryennkar did not blink, taking his habitual place across from his friend; it was three hours beyond the time of the meeting Arosek had called upon his return to Erindel, yet he seemed relaxed, incurious in regards to Arosek’s growing agitation. “I apologise for my lateness, as well as for my unexpected absence. I was attending a funeral.”

“A…funeral.” The tense lines of his face deepened, but his dark eyes had widened with curiosity. He knew as well as anyone that the man had almost no family to speak of. “Whose funeral was it?”

“My wife’s.”

“She’s dead?!” Arosek found himself on his feet, directionless and bewildered. “You…why didn’t you say so earlier? I wouldn’t have called you back if I’d known!”

“There is work to be done,” he said smoothly, waving his hand at the abandoned seat, the stacks of paper at every place. “It’s not your concern.”

Arosek did not sit. For long moments of dim silence, lit only by guttering candles and punctuated by the sound of their breaths, he stared from the window of the meeting-room. The others he had called were long since gone, their business conducted without the benefit of Ryennkar Vassidenel, and Arosek Asfiye had never felt so alone.

“Why won’t you talk to me about her?” he whispered to the window.

“You didn’t need to know.” The chair creaked as he leaned backward, the dark robes rustling with a sound too agonisingly familiar. Arosek did not look back at him, not even when he added thoughtfully: “Not that it matters, not now. It is done.”

The coolness of those words made him turn, the words flying from his lips before he had even thought them. “Did you love her?”

Ryennkar’s smooth brow furrowed. “I don’t follow.”

“It’s a simple question.”He stalked across the room, his compact form all muscle and motion. He didn’t even know what she had looked like, not exactly – he’d never even met the unfortunate woman! – but he held a picture of her face in his head all the same. Knights and princes were not just the stuff of legend, though Arosek had never needed a white horse, only his hands and his voice. He slammed those same strong hands down on the table on Ryennkar’s right and demanded: “Did you love her?”

He blinked, looked down at the spectacle, but the bang had not made him so much as flinch. “Why are we discussing this?”

“Because I’m your friend. Your best friend.” He found himself shaking, his weight barely supported by his hands, but his voice was as strong and clear as it had ever been. “And I’ve never met your wife even though you’ve been married to her for four years, and now she’s dead and I never will! Does none of that strike you as strange?”

“No.” He arched an eyebrow at Arosek’s answering frown. “To both questions.”

Like a marionette whose strings had been rudely cut mid-performance, Arosek slid to the floor at Ryennkar’s side. His head was aching again. He’d thought three weeks of the rolling hills and great lake at Wendar would have been enough to erase the memory of the three dead men, but then he hadn’t reckoned with the sudden addition of Ryennkar Vassidenel’s poor dead wife.

He spoke only when a hand dropped to his shoulder, though he kept his eyes upon the faded pattern of the rug beneath his knees. “Why did you marry her?”

“It doesn’t matter.” The hand tightened, his touch of the other man’s skin cool even through their clothing. “You didn’t need to meet her.”

“How do you know that?”

“I didn’t want you to meet her.” In one easy movement Ryennkar left his chair, dropping to one knee at his side. The long fingers moved upward, tilting Arosek’s face so that the grey eyes sought his, held them steady. “She’s gone now, Arosek. There’s no need to speak of her again.”And then he stood, a flurry of black and silver, and bowed his head. “I see that the meeting is already concluded. I apologise for my late appearance, but perhaps tomorrow would be a better time for us to discuss the matter in question. I will come to you upon the ninth hour.”

Arosek didn’t stand, pretending to admire the elaborate woodwork of the table leg. He didn’t want to watch the other man go, but a moment later he couldn’t bear not to.

“Ryenn?”

He turned from the door. “Yes?”

Looking at the other man, Arosek found himself wondering again how he could picture the face of a dead woman he’d never even known. “Did she love you?”

Ryennkar blinked. “I don’t know.” The slim shoulders rose and fell. “I never asked.” He closed the door then, and was gone.

The above picture is the commission of the two of them, done by the wonderful RaraHoWa; Arosek is the golden-blonde, Ryenn is the platinum blonde. As I said, it's about the fact that one loves, and the other does not...except when it comes to one another. Poor bastards. I really do love this picture; it actually reminds me a lot of this terrible letter exchange in the same story, where Arosek writes Ryenn a happy, casual, cheerful letter and gets the shortest, curtest, most formal note back in return. Honestly, the things I put my characters through...! And on that note I suppose I ought to get back to writing more of their story -- although to be honest, tonight I think I'll work on Greywater for a bit. The current wordcount is 44,294; I'm sure I can kick it well over forty-five thousand. ...well, once I've done some Zumba for the evening, anyway. I've also promised myself there will be NO BUYING OF PORTAL 2.

...yeah, we'll see how long THAT lasts...

Two Months In

I was hoping to really get serious about writing this year, but so far? It's been a little bit of a bust. Not completely, of course, but work has been terrible since the first of January and it's making things really hard writing-wise. However, I have had my holiday in Australia and now the house is empty of all guests, so even though university starts back tomorrow and work is still a living hell...it's time to be serious.

I have two projects I want to work on over the next month, and I'm going to start this afternoon. I am about to go for a long walk to clear my mind, as that's when things tend to start to gel for me, and after that...I will come back and start doing two things.

The first writing project for the month is a short story for this competition. One of the other writers in our local speculative fiction writing group is also entering, so hopefully we can give each other a bit of encouragement and feedback and whatnot. I had intended to start it while I was in Western Australia, but because of the stress of work and other things, I spent most of the holiday pretty much just vegetating. Which of course isn't necessarily a bad thing, but as I had also wanted to work on the second project...never mind. While I was away I did come up with a basic story idea that I am going to flesh out this afternoon. I'll create the .doc and start sketching in some shapes, basically; I just need to get a feel for the thematic push of the story, and then I need to hear a bit of the voices of the two lead characters. It's basically about two young girls, and the way family and tradition and culture can both create and destroy lives. I keep having to remind myself that I only have five thousand works in which to do this, gah.

The second project is my NaNo -- I really, really want to make the final push on the first draft of The Juniper Bones. I was thinking about the ending sequence on my walk yesterday afternoon, and I am pretty sure now I know what I want to do. Although I printed out what I have of the third part of the novel with the intention of editing and brainstorming while on plane rides and then didn't do much, while I was on holiday I did become a bit clearer on what Wills Penrose was doing and why. And that, combined with my revelations about Chaesha yesterday...yeah. I know what I want to do, now. It's just a matter of doing it.

I've also commissioned an artist friend of a forum friend to do me a picture of Morgan and Baedeker on their wedding day; it was a bit of a lark, but as it turns out I am really loving her style from what I have seen so far. I am now considering other things I'd like her to draw; I'd love a picture of Tess, Eliot and Lavinia, and of Erik and Rowan, and then one of Chaesha, Janerin, Inamoran and Amanita. Hell, I'd probably love Jeramie and Kiriana in her style, too. We'll see. Right now...I just need to get back into the writing side of things. Here goes!