Goals, Tries and Having Something To Score

 

At the start of the year I’m sure I made some sort of goal post in this blog, but I really have the memory of a goldfish. I’m not sure that it matters, anyway, but I was thinking that I should sit down and work out what I need to achieve over the next few months. I turn thirty in February, and aside from having a fit about where I want to spend my birthday – I’m leaning towards Peru, although I was having thoughts of camping in South Africa – I want to be seriously dedicated to my writing to a point I can see it as a viable part of my career. I don’t think I have the necessary talent or ability or pure dumb luck to make a living off writing, but I’d like to be able to go back to being a pharmacist but kick back my hours a bit. Four days a week instead of five, or something. But I’ll get to that part in a minute.

I am the queen of unfinished novels. But I do have two that are finished. I’m not really up for submitting either to an agent, however. The first, an urban fantasy romance, has a very solid and interesting first half and completely turns to lumpy scorched custard by the second chapter of the second half. Bollocks. I can rewrite it, and I know that at some point I will. I just don’t think it’s where I want to start my publishing career. The other novel was intended as a children’s book, then a young adult novella, and now…it’s still about thirteen year old kids, but it’s a kid’s book the way Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is a kid’s series. Kids could read it, sure. I know I’d have read it. But then I was reading bodice rippers and Stephen King at the age of ten, so I don’t think I’m the best judge of reading material suited to age, here. So, I’ve set that aside for the meantime even though I am on and off working on its direct sequel.

This leaves me with four options for my first punt on an agent, none of which are fully complete. The first is Greywater, and this really is the best option save for the fact it’s straight-up fantasy. I think I’m going to have to go waaaaay outside the New Zealand channels here, though I am aware thanks to SpecFicNZ that I’m by no means alone here. It just depends on how hard I want to hit. I’m fairly certain I can get somewhere with this, but we’ll see. The current manuscript is at 112k and is maybe twenty or thirty thousand words off a first draft, after which I can tidy.

The other three options are more complicated. People In Looking-Glass Houses is easily the most marketable idea I’ve got – it’s also an urban fantasy romance – but while I wrote a good deal of it back in 2002/2003, the characters have changed a lot to suit the canon of the world it edges up against, and I’ve decided most of what was written ought to be scrapped or reappropriated. Writing it would take a lot of time over the next few months. I may have that time, but I’m not sure. I will write this story at some point, I’m just not sure how soon is now, or something to that effect. Ha.

Hibernaculum is a tricky one. I love these characters, and I love their story – two of the centrals are my first true OTP, and the novel is nearly finished. Maybe twenty thousand words out, too; I drag my heels with it because it’s a complex ending and I’m a moron. But not only is it also fantasy, it involves one of the other central characters getting into a very complicated relationship with another man and therefore might be hard to market. I’m not sure on that front; it would depend on the publisher. And I suppose I oughtn’t to care considering a) I won a competition last month with a short story with clear elements of homoeroticism and b) my first print publication was with a light erotica story, het or no, and…er. Yeah.

My other novel-in-progress is never going to be a publisher’s choice, mind you. But how much I want to finish it! ^_~ The Juniper Bones is my baby. And of everything I write and share, it’s the one that’s generated the most interest. But not only is it ungodly long in its current form, it just involves so many difficult things that I suspect a publisher would rather just shove me off into Charybdis with that barge pole rather than use it as a debut novel. Ha. Yet every time I open one of the associated files or look at some of the commissions I’ve had done, I end in hysterics. I love those characters, and I love that story. So hard. And I want to share it in its fullness with people, and not just because Morgan will one day give me that partial lobotomy she’s been promising if I don’t.

On the short story front, I want to keep poking away at various markets. Wily Writers has a call for submission for a young adult post-apocalyptic short story that I have a solid idea for; its due date is the end of October, so I can swing it. Yesterday I also ran across this blog fest that sounds fascinating, and I’m fairly certain I will be signing up later today because the fact the first submission sits so well with the dates of my trip to Egypt next week…it seems a sign, to me. So we’ll run with it. Besides, I’ve really got to get back to networking and sharing with other writers. One thing I regret about leaving New Zealand is the loss of my writing groups, and I’ve been really slack about spending time on the wonderful and wondrous CompuServe Readers and Writers forum. So, writing and reading stories for a joint Blog Fest universe sounds like a hell of a way to meet new writers…

Speaking of blogs, I have a few links that I got from CompuServe the other day, relevant to our interests. They’re about writing a query and then a synopsis, and even though I am not at that stage yet they’re actually very useful links for someone like me. Because I have problems with focus and structure. But I was so happy to see that Greywater fit very well into the basic synopsis template, and after writing a test query for the novel I feel that writing a synopsis in that format actually might help me a lot with finishing the novel. So, we’ll see? I would do it today, but I want to go to the Museum of London, and I have no idea how much longer I’ll be in town…

Which brings me to my next thought – I have an opportunity. It occurred to me last Friday as I was sitting in St. James Park that I could go back to Western Australia and just…write. I’m not Australian – GOD, I’m not Australian! – but my father is on a project near Perth and my parents live in a lovely seaview apartment with three bedrooms, one of which doubles as an office. I’ve been to see them twice there over the last year, and it’s a lovely place (which I’m not saying just because Margaret River has the best goddamned nougat IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, nuh-uh). I remember thinking the second time in particular how nice it would be, to marry an engineer and live a life where I could get up at six in the morning, have breakfast, do Zumba, go for a walk for an hour around the mangroves then return home for a day of writing. It struck me at the park that I could actually do this, if only for three or four weeks. I floated the idea to my mother, asking if I could stay in order to write if I contributed to the bills, and she green-lighted it. So…I’m not sure. I came to the UK with the intent of living and working here for a bit, but it’s not really as I’d thought it would be. I do love London; I had no real feelings towards the city the first time I saw it in 2006, but it’s grown on me. I’m just not sure I want to live here – or in the UK – after all. It feels like a step back, to the life that I both loved and hated four years ago. And I want to move forward as a writer, not go back to the world pharmacy. I can do my job, and do it well, but I need something more than that to keep me going. I have to be honest with myself about that, otherwise it's just not fair to any of us.

So, that’s my decision. It’s a bloody difficult one. I keep reminding myself that not every writer gets this sort of opportunity, and considering I have no real ties to anywhere, I should take it. And once I’ve had that sabbatical, I can return to New Zealand (maybe via Cambodia, ha) and move back to Wellington. There, I can get a full-time pharmacist position with my finished novel(s) tucked safely under my arm. Maybe then I can go back to the nine-to-five knowing I have a way of altering my own destiny, so to speak.

I’m scared as hell. I suppose that’s the way the cookie crumbles. But when I was looking something up about The Juniper Bones the other day I found a little file I’d made last year during NaNoWriMo in which I’d kept some of the feedback I’d received from the fantastic individuals at the CompuServe forum, and things like this just brought and still bring tears to my eyes:

When I read your writing, it makes me want more. I don't want to stop. And then I get to the end, and my brain is like a little puppy, all kind of like, where's the rest? What comes next? Huh? Huh? You have an absolutely stunning talent, you know. Your characters are beautifully put together, your story is compelling and mysterious- there's no question at all I'll be buying this off the shelf at a bookstore within a couple of years, and I'll just have to twitch impatiently and hang out for snippets until then.

I need to remind myself that I can write, and that I must write, if only for my own sanity. My sister keeps watching Dragon’s Den, and last night they were talking about how pitches need passion, because no company is going to succeed unless the person wants it enough to spend so much time with it. I could say the same of my writing. I love doing it. I want to do it. I just need to believe. And I was giddy yesterday to finally have run across a review of Red Velvet and Absinthe that mentioned me by name; while I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback about the collection as a whole, I’ve been craving something personal whether good or bad. And this…yes.

Tea For Two is a heart wrenching story that had this reader on the verge of tears. The poignancy of this love story and the loss that the two main characters suffer is so tenderly written, making the whole scenario come alive before your very eyes. Congratulations Ms. Buckingham for a truly tremendous and well thought out short story.

I can do this. I can, I can! So…here we go. Although as I said, it’s half-nine in the morning here in ol’ London Town and I might go out. I need to make the most of the city while I’m here, because I suspect I may have to leave her soon. We’ll see.

Plot? What Plot?

I tend to have reasonable amounts of trouble navigating around places unknown. London, being full of strange streets and stranger people, can therefore prove something of a challenge. I’m fairly infamous (in my own mind, at least) for being completely capable of losing the British Museum. No, honestly; I get off at Tottenham Court Road and I just can’t find it. Bearing in mind it’s a very large building, even when armed with a map I tend to be pretty stuffed. I just acquired a GPS-enabled smartphone the other day, which you think would help, but for someone who spends as much time as I do messing around on the internet I can’t operate Android to save my own life (or find a museum, for the less melodramatic).

Still, the other day when I decided to go to the museum as I had no place else to go (seriously, when it closed at eight-thirty that night I sat on the steps and cried), I thought maybe I’d try my luck from Holborn as I was on the Piccadilly line anyhow and really couldn’t be arsed moving my ass to Central. Lo and behold, I found it. No issues. And after eventually discovering the Enlightenment galleries just as it was closing for the evening, I stumbled back the next morning to investigate some more. When I left that time, I didn’t return to Holborn station, I decided to go towards Tottenham. I actually found Leicester Square instead, but that’s just how much of a retard I really am. What’s more relevant to this entry is that I found along the way a store called Forbidden Planet.

I have trouble with geek-oriented stores. For instance, there were three late-teen boys in there I wanted to punch in the mouth for being total pretentious pseudo-emo posers. Seriously, the nonsense they spouted as they criticised various drawing guides…god. I hate these stores, mostly because while I enjoy anime and manga I have very little patience with comic books and graphic novels, or tabletop games, or trading cards of any kind. I’m not even a true-blue speculative fiction fan in some respects, although I made a beeline for the title with “Eldritch Abomination” in it, I can tell you. Of course that’s hilariously ironic as I write spec fic, but I think it’s just I like stuff beyond the pale. I just want to read something that takes me out of the ordinary world; the subculture itself is not really strong enough to do the same job.

Still, I went into this store principally because I wanted to see their manga. I had myself a good wee read of Hellsing, and then was amused to discover some of the Code Geass manga. Which is where this entry really begins; yesterday I was all about setting, today it’s the characters.

 

I have a very odd relationship with Code Geass. It’s a fairly recent Japanese anime series; I first started watching it in 2009 and finished it…earlier this year? I can’t actually remember. I got into it after watching another series called Death Note, which is a series I’d generally recommend to most people. Not so much with Code Geass, though, and that’s the curious thing.

 

Like I said, Death Note is an interesting series for all I absolutely despised the lead character by the end of it. Light Yagami’s not meant to be sympathetic, not exactly, but it’s still pretty remarkable to get to the end of the show and hate a character so much. …although it wasn’t that I hated Light, I suppose. I think I just hated what he’d become and why. Characters can and should change over the course of a story, but Light just took a path I could not follow. I had empathy for him in the beginning. By the end, I just…didn’t. But the characters kept me watching the show the whole way through, particularly as Light and L, the initial antagonist/protagonist duo, have a fascinating relationship. I was told to watch Code Geass as the two male leads there, Lelouch Lamperouge and Suzaku Kururugi, also had a similar dynamic; two young men who could and should have been the best of friends, but were driven apart by the vagrancies of fate and belief. (For a Western equivalent, we’re probably looking at the equivalents of Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr.)

Interestingly enough, while it was quite a ways into the series before I really took a dislike to Light, it was within the first two episodes that I took an immediate and deep dislike to Lelouch. Who is the main character. I just…really. What ended up keeping me watching was Suzaku, and then Suzaku and Euphemia had the most ridiculously cute relationship that made me flail my hands with glee every time they spoke. Totally my OTP of the series, yes.

But as the series went on…Lelouch started to grow on me. He’s an extremely complicated character, and I have a real weakness for that. It helped that while Lelouch was painted as being the darker half of the friendship, as time went on you began to see that Suzaku was not as light-hearted as he appeared, and in the end I was just broken. By all of it. But I have to emphasise that it was the characters that did it to me. To this day I really cannot explain what the fuck happened in that damn show. I just didn’t follow the plot at all. And while I suspect some of that was your basic garden variety idiocy on my part, I also believe that the series really didn’t focus much on the story. Which didn’t matter, as I was just in love with the characters anyway.

And I’ve noticed that as a weakness in my own writing. It’s probably not that surprising, in that I build stories based on characters. Generally the plot can just go hang. Which is probably why I so rarely finish anything, at least with the longer things; short stories are a bit easier for me to shape into a finished product as I can clearly define the ending and the beginning when I create the document file, and having a word count usually keeps me in line. Novels, however…well. Put it this way. I wrote a short story back in 2005 called Stockholm Syndrome, and now in 2011 the characters have attempted to give me a novel. It’s currently in three pieces; the first two thirds have completed first drafts at wordcounts of 81,090 and 122,424 respectively, and the at least half-completed third part is already at about 82k. And that’s happened simply because the plot…well. What plot?

 

I have a deep dislike of the novel Twilight, mostly because I couldn’t read it. I really couldn’t. Largely I believe it's due to the way it is written; the language and the phrasing reads to me as clumsy and ill-chosen, and as someone who’s fairly lyrical in her own writing I just couldn’t deal with it. But I also read a description of the novel that said most of that first book was just Bella and Edward staring at one another until the plot suddenly drove into the front room forty pages from the end, stumbling from the car drunk with a paper bag and a bottle of cheap whiskey shrieking “SORRY I’M LATE NOW THE PARTY CAN START WHOOP WHOOP!” and I thought “Oh my God, that’s it exactly!” Nothing happened until very, very late in that book. Which just made it so painful to me, because the characters meant nothing to me and so even when the plot finally did deign to put in an appearance it was too late for me to give a damn. Which is why I don’t like cricket…er, Twilight, I mean. Ha.

But I did have to turn around and take a look at my own writing. While I sincerely hope I have a better style and manner of expression, plot just isn’t my strong point. I’m a character author; most of my little voices turn up in my head fully formed and just…do what they like. Because of the way they play off each other I do eventually get a story out of them, but I waste a lot of words and effort getting to that point. I mean, my first real completed novel suffers from this; while the first half is actually rather readable, the second half was written without much of an idea of the actual plot, and suffers dreadfully for it. I still haven’t got around to rewriting the damn thing, it depresses me that much. (Sorry, Andy and Julia; Andy, your half is fine. Julia, I hate you. I hate you and your melodrama so hard.) And this is because the first half was written for NaNoWriMo in 2003 and I knew just what I wanted to do. I had to plan it in order to succeed in that timeframe. The second half was written over a year and lacked direction and drive and it just…yeah. Fell very, very flat.

The Juniper Bones, the incomplete novel I mentioned first, is going to weigh in at over three hundred thousand words by the time I finish the first draft. Not that I have any idea when I’m going to manage to finish it; the damn plot I ended up with is so convoluted that I just can’t keep it straight half the time. With that said I will have to strip so much out of it once I do have it sorted, because really? In the early days I was just playing with the characters. And my god, they’re a delight to do that with…but so much of their interactions are irrelevant to the plot I ended up with that I just need to cut it out. And it makes me sad, because like I said…I write for the characters I meet. But I don’t want my own novels to be like Twilight or Code Geass…Twilight is just hollow all over to me, and the only reason I go back to Code Geass is because the creators of the franchise seem to have realised that the plot is irrelevant. There are that many different variations on the theme that really, it’s just the characters people come back for.

But I want a story in there, too. It’s just finding it that’s the problem, most days.

Incidentally, I realise some of you probably realise that my blog’s title is shortened to PWP, though obviously I wasn’t talking about that. Which isn’t to say I haven’t tried to write some of that myself, but again I can’t do it. The damn characters just take off on me and start talking and…yeah. Although with that said, when Irene kept me out of New York City late last month I ended up in Vancouver, and I have to wonder if they’d have been so happy to give me my cheerful little entry visa stamp if they’d realised I was going to de-stress over the situation by spending that five hours in their lovely airport writing smut. Ha. (I’m not very good at writing smut, like I said; I get distracted by more important things. THIS TIME I DID NOT. Maybe I should try writing longhand in public every time I need a sex scene in a book. Huh. Talk about exhibitionism…)

But on an ending note, The Juniper Bones needs editing, yes…but I am always going to be writing idiotic short stories for these characters because I do adore them. With that said, we’ll close with the beginning of a Halloween tale I wrote for my spec fic group back in Invercargill. It seems appropriate, considering it was done because I was having one of my little fits over Twilight. Again. ^_~

“Do you know any vampires?”

He freezes in the act of picking up the little blue car. “What?”

“Vampires,” she repeats, and he knows he’s screwed because the impatience in her tone is growing exponentially. “I want to know if you know any vampires.”

Setting the little plastic piece back in the box, he doesn’t bother to hide his grimace. “I thought you wanted to play The Game of Life.”

“Fuck Milton Bradley.”

“I think they’re dead. I’m not into that.”

Of course that idea doesn’t particularly bother Morgan; she instead stares thoughtfully off into space as if contemplating the mechanics of it all. It’s rather to his relief when she says curiously: “Are they real?”

“What, Milton and Bradley?” Eliot stares at the game box for a minute, and then shrugs. “Well, if they’re not, some fucker’s making a mint off Cluedo and it’s not me.”

“Don’t be a dickshit,” she says, sharp enough to make him glad she hadn’t tried to shove the gameboard somewhere painful as an incentive. “I meant vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. Elves, fairies, Eskimos, gargoyles, dragons, whatever. Are any of them real?”

For a short moment he considers taking a running leap out the nearest window. The fact that they’re two storeys up isn’t what stops him. It’s more that he knows from past experience that Morgan will likely as not winch herself out the window two seconds later to gleefully assess the damage. And then make it worse. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because you’re real.”

“The last I checked, yeah.” He eyes her empty hands. He doesn’t trust empty. Also past experience. “And if I say “please don’t stab me with a fork to see if that’s true,” will you please not stab me with a fork to see if that’s true?”

She holds up her supposedly empty hands in a gesture of mock-surrender. “I can’t always control the fork.”

(Incidentally, the thing that will always amaze me the most about Code Geass is that it actually made me like a Coldplay song. I'm horrified, yes. If you're curious, the video is here, although it's one very, very massive spoiler for the whole show. And it's gorgeous. DAMMIT.)

...AND THEY FIGHT CRIME!

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

Dammit.

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

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

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

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

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

Writing Different Worlds

So,  today I took advantage of the wonderful local arts festival and its wonderful Readers and Writers Alive! programme, and went to a workshop based around speculative fiction. I'm pretty sure I've said before that I don't really know what genre my writing properly falls into, but considering my tendencies towards the weird and the wacky, spec fic is definitely a place where my mind is at home. So, I was quite excited about this one (although to be honest, I've been excited about all the workshops I've ever been to through Dan Davin; the ones with Owen Marshall and Gavin Bishop particularly stand out as wonderful in my memory, and I still kick myself for not going to Helen Lowe's).

Anyway, today's workshop was with Tim Jones, who was a Southland local for a while there but now lives in Wellington; I can hardly hold it against him, mind you, considering the fact that I myself am a bit of a Wellingtonian at heart. (Although how anyone could hold anything against a place that produces things like this, I don't know. I myself have a vague dream of living one day in Paekakariki, at least partly because saying it is hilarious...whether it's proper or Paekok. Ha!) We spent the workshop chatting about speculative fiction, did a couple of little exercises, and then ended with a discussion about publishing. That's definitely something I need to start focusing on, although then again I need to start finishing things first! Although with that said, Tim said that Young Adult is the genre most likely to be published by New Zealand houses, so I suppose I should really look again at the draft of The Neverboy. It's been sitting around long enough now that I can look at it semi-sensibly, so...

In the meantime, there's always Hibernaculum and The Juniper Bones to finish, and then consider trying for an agent either in Australia, the States or the UK. And I suppose there's always For What We Drown, too, but that manuscript has a gaping hole in it at the moment. The first half of the book, I think, is fine; it just needs a futher round of edits to make it tighter. The second half is a mess. I basically chopped the first three chapters to pieces and started putting it back together, and then gave up. It also requires major editing throughout because I confused myself so much in terms of the world-building of Julia's home, and...yeah. It lost momentum and cohesion fairly early on. I still think it's an interesting story and in theory it ought to be salvagable, but...yeah. It depends on my mood, somewhat. I suppose, too, it's more likely to be picked up in New Zealand than anywhere else being that its first half is set primarily in Te Anau, but we'll see.

I really enjoyed the workshop, though. It had probably the best turnout I've seen for any workshop here in good ol' Invervegas, and the people were fun. I really hope a couple of them will come to the Chapter I meeting tomorrow night. I need to make some cupcakes for that, actually. Ah, cupcakes, my old foe...

But back to the workshop -- the two writing exercises were interesting, both in the writing and then in hearing what other people did. The first was just a warm-up from a prompt, and I rather liked what I came up with in the fifteen minutes or so. Strangely, for me, it was basically a finished piece. I have no idea how many words it was, but anything less than five thousand words is a miracle on my part. I think I will have to type it out and play with it, keep it for some future submission or endeavour or whatever. The second was a bit less successful; we were just writing to show how the world was different in the story. I ended up writing something from the point of view of one of the handmaidens of the Queen of Nylurea, but I actually started, info-dumped, and then started again. That do-over, though, was quite useful for me in that it did help me examine what I was doing and how it didn't work that first time around. I would like to finish it at some point, mostly because it gives me an insight into the Nylurean culture. I'm far more familiar with Sarinian culture, as it's primarily Sarinese characters that I write, but of course there are Nylureans present in most of the stories. And I'm still fascinated by Jeramie and his love for the once-queen Kiriana, so understanding more about how she grew up...is always useful.

I never did finish those short stories for submission this month, though. I was inspired during one of my walks today, however; I think I'll try for next month's Wily Writers submission, which is to do with post-apocalyptic worlds. I've got the song Pretend The World Has Ended stuck in my head, and there's definitely a story there. I'm just not sure which world it's set in. I think it's an entirely new one, to be honest; that's a little terrifying. Maybe it's the crimson moon? Certainly thanks to Henryk Górecki and Lamb the once-opal moon has a terrible and tragic history. It seems maybe the crimson does, too.

In the meantime, I think I shall try and stop eating this evening -- I'm in the midst of a food binge, unfortunately -- and write instead. I think The Juniper Bones might be calling my name; Morgan seems to be having a temper tantrum about something. Or maybe I am just thinking ahead to the poetry workshop tomorrow. The section of TJB that I am working on now is named the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew, and opens with a nice little extract from Ash Wednesday. It's the bit with the juniper tree and its bones, even! But even then, maybe that's not it; I was thinking at the workshop today that I need to go back to the CompuServe forum and spend more time there, and I was reminded of how I had shared some little bits of this novel with them and received such support. There's little bits of poetry scattered throughout my prose, given the way I write, and especially when Eliot is thinking of Lavinia...oh, yes. So I suppose we'll end with a little of that, shall we?

The warmth of her had become as familiar as the sound of the sea, as the rhythm of the waves against the stone waterways of the city from whence he had come. Though he had never been a creature of the water, in that place it had become the touchstone of this life. Yet, in the city of marble and light, he found his rest and his sanctuary instead in the nearness of her flesh, the openness of her heart, the touch of her spirit against his. It did not matter, that he had not been born here, that this was her city. By his very nature, he should never have a home – and then the sacrifice of the widow had rendered her as homeless as he, save for the asylum of one another.

It was enough.

With the careful hand of a musician, he traced a line from the curve of her jaw down to the hollow at the base of her throat, coming to rest upon the delicate collarbone above the beat of her heart. No, this place had never been his home, and now it would never be hers again. Yet she never showed him that she mourned the loss of her human life, and for all she sometimes worried aloud about when this life was done how they should meet again in the next, he knew that she did not regret it any more than he ever could. Of course she missed the widow, worried for her peace and her soul – but Vincenzio had leaned over the other woman’s body and seen at last the peace on her face as she died for the final time. In a strange way, for a moment he had almost envied her. Then he had turned to find Lavinia standing there, his bride and his wife, and he had felt no more regrets.

Still, he thought of the place he had rested for so long, in that world now denied him. Despite being aligned with the watchtowers of the south, with the element of fire, he had been most easily summoned in an unremarkable grove of trees deep in the northern mountains. Even in his new life, he could not explain why.  There had been other ways, other places where his spirit could be invoked. But he had liked those trees. He mourned still the loss of the star-lake, the heavy scent of the silver leaves, and the silent watchfulness of the Menhir to the distant centre of the world.

“What are you thinking of?”

Startled, he looked upward to meet the sleepy gaze of her blue eyes. He had not noticed her awakening. “The place from whence I came,” he murmured, and leaned forward to press a kiss to the skin where his fingers had lingered. Already her eyes flared, dark with desire, though she had barely escaped from her dreams.

“Do you miss it?” she asked, gentle as the memory of the sea. He sighed.

“In a way.”

“Will you ever see it again, do you think?”

“Perhaps.” He did not think so, for he remembered well the dark day of the Ending, when he and all of his kin had either been sent from the world, or enslaved to those it had been given to. Though those gods had by rumour lost that influence long since, he still did not think his own kind would ever have what had been theirs once more. He could not bring himself to say her name, to bring her into their marriage bed, but he suspected that had been the reason why the widow had no longer wished to live. Their purpose had been taken from them, and filled with so little in return. But he had found a new purpose, and he leaned close to again press his lips against the rhythmic centre of her eternal life.

“It was a strange world,” he said finally, and then looked up at her with gentle trust. “But that world is gone. And here I am.”

“And I am glad for it.” Her voice was suffused with rich pleasure as she tilted her head upward, brushed her lips over the brief stubble upon his chin. “But…could we go there?”

“I do not know.” His brow creased; he had not expected her to ever want such a thing. “Do you wish it?”

“Only if you do.”

The memory of trees was like a brand upon his mind. It was true – he did want it. Though the world had changed, had gone on without him, he could not help but wonder if those trees still reached for the sky in the shadow of the great Kaverlen mountains that had sulked upon the horizon since time immemorial. It would have been years since their Ending, but the trees had been touched by his own immortality. And even should they have at last curled in upon themselves, helpless before the grinding mill of time itself, their children would have sprung from their gravewood and reached for the same stars that had once been the jewels in their parents’ silver crowns.

“Shall I take you?” he asked, and touched a chaste kiss upon her forehead. But when he rose above her again, her grin had become wicked, a promise of a world in which no sin existed, save for the denial of love and the beauty it wrought deep in the fabric of their very beings.

“Take me, husband,” she whispered, and reached for him.

He started – but a smile swiftly followed on its heels. As he leaned forward into her touch, he thought ruefully upon her capacity to surprise him still. But then, it was only ever in all the best ways.