If I Could Turn Back Time

The first time I walked into the Raphael room at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington, I just about had a fit because it was huge, empty, and beautiful. I have a thing for grand stately rooms, particularly when I feel like I have it to myself (you may note in entry before this one, there is a picture of the larger temple at Abu Simbel with no people in front of it; I took that, and my good god it was amazing to be able to do so). The next time I saw the Raphael room I figured it wouldn't get any better than the first hit, so to speak. HOW WRONG I WAS. They'd installed what you see above: a giant couch. That's not even the half of it. You could walk into this room, kick off your shoes, and loll around in the presence of masterpieces.

There's a reason why I'm babbling on about this, believe it or not, but I'll get to it in a minute. The entry is really supposed to point out that I've "finished" NaNo, or at least I've achieved some of what I set out to do. I have first drafts of Hibernaculum and Greywater finished, I have a random beautiful and terrifying scene between Ryenn and Arosek written, I have a roughly 7k short story about SPARKLY EVIL BLOOD FAE, and as of today I have 50k on the manuscript of Kaverlen Falls, which I just started last week. I'm hoping to finish a draft of the 6k short story The Blacksmith's Daughter tomorrow, and...the official wordcount so far is 154,256.

I'm still having something of a crisis. I just don't know if I'm a good writer. It's a mental thing, as in I'm a complete mentalist, but now that I have spent almost six weeks in Australia writing my heart, eyes, and wrists out, I'm terrified there's nothing to show for it. Which is blatant lies judging by the prodigious output I've managed, but then I tend to bury my head in my hands and wail BUT IT'S ALL CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP an awful lot. [rolls eyes] I don't know.

Speaking of crap, my mother forced me to go see the latest Twilight movie with her the other day; I already felt ill before we got there, and the patented SPINNY CAMERA ANGLES OF DOOM meant halfway through the damn thing I had to dig into my purse and find two paracetamol and five mg of prochlorperazine. And I still felt so ill I had to keep my eyes closed for ten minutes. I didn't even eat my popcorn, and I have an eating disorder. (Maybe I should just spend my life locked in a room with Stephanie Meyer. I can almost guarantee I'd never want to eat again if all I had for stimulation was her books and those damn movies.) At one stage in the movie I even facepalmed. I literally facepalmed. Here, have a visual aid:

And I don't even like Star Trek, either. (DENNY CRANE!) I don't even remember what it was that made me do it. There were a lot of things that upset me about that movie. Principally, though, I was deeply disturbed by the power balance in Bella and Edward's relationship. I could only stomach it by entertaining the private theory that Bella is in fact an anguisette (thank you for the sanity switch, Jacqueline Carey). Because otherwise I'd just have to go with my initial gut feeling, which was that Bella is a good and dutiful housewife-to-be who marries at eighteen, justifies her husband's violence against her with "he can't help himself" and "it's proof of how much he loves me" and when her unborn baby threatens the mental health of her friends and family and also her own life, she justifies allowing herself to die by the thought her worth as a wife is only to act as a human incubator.

Also, there was a huge-ass fight between vampires and werewolves and NO BLOOD WAS SHED WHATSOEVER. I miss Alucard. I miss him a lot. ...I guess I just like my abominations Eldritch, not Edward.

The thing is, though, that I really ought to be careful what I complain about. I readily admit I can't and won't ever understand Twilight. But I will open myself to mockery by admitting the other day I noticed a movie about to play on FoxTel and promptly recorded it. And later watched it while kicking my feet in glee. I know most people pan the damn thing, but in my opinion it's so bad it's hilarious. ...sorry. ^_~

But I think I'm in a melancholy mood anyway because I finally finished reading the full text of the old story I had been writing all those years ago with an older friend, and...while I was wincing at the writing at the beginning, by the end I was utterly absorbed in the world we had created and the story we were weaving to the point I couldn't work out who wrote what. It's also been so long since I paid any lasting attention to the characters or the story that I'd forgotten so much of what we had written and what we had planned, and now that I am at the end of it...the sense of loss is immense. Not just for the story itself, but for the friendship that created it. I ache to read more of it, as much as I ache to write to my old friend and see where life has taken her now.

I thought of the V&A above for several reasons. I mean, museums are places of memory. You walk in the door and you are taken back to places that existed long ago -- so long ago, in some cases, that we can't even be quite sure they did exist. We can guess, but we're never going to know what those lives were like. There's a terrible sadness, in that. And I get a similar sadness from unfinished stories, especially one like this. So much potential, just rotting away on my harddrive. It feels like a betrayal, that even I forgot them. Part of me just wants to turn around and write to my old friend and beg her to tell me that she didn't forget, because if we both did...it seems so unfair.

But then, I also thought of the V&A because of that giant couch. It's not the first whimsical thing I've found in a London museum; I was most enchanted by the Super Fun Happy Slide! installation I discovered one dreary December at the Tate Modern, but then you expect that kind of malarkey at the Tate Modern. Not so at Victoria's digs. I love that museum for many reasons, and I walk in there feeling like it's one of the great and airy palaces of my imagination, stately and elegant and real. And then...I find a giant couch in my favourite room.

The emperor of the story I forgot, he came to his royal title at the age of eighteen after having been raised a commoner. It was always a running joke in the writing process that Dion would one day do something daft like fill the Emperor's Bathchambers with rainbow bubbles and a thousand rubber duckies, or that he'd draw a hopscotch grid on the approach to the Shining Throne and refuse to hold court unless all assembled gave him a round. He's the kind of person who'd insist on beanbags for state assemblies. TAnd this room, in this beautiful and elegant museum...had a giant couch specifically designed for lolling. Dion would have loved this room.

I wish I hadn't forgotten. In some ways, though, I almost wish I hadn't remembered.

Words Cannot Describe

If there is one thing I become ceaselessly, brilliantly good at during the month of November, it is procrastination. I do wonder if some of it isn't burn-out, because I do try to write almost every day and I tend to start at nine in the morning and not stop until I go to bed at one the following morning, but it's not constant writing. I stop and start and while some days I will produce words upon words, several days this month I just...haven't.

Still, the official wordcount of NaNo is well over 130k, and Kaverlen Falls is just slightly under 30k, so if I keep on keeping on I should hit the 50k for that alone before the 30th. I've produced a lot this month, even if it's not entirely what I wanted it to be. (The Juniper Bones just isn't going to be finished this year either. ...balls.) I finally finished the story I was arsing about with as a prequel to Kaverlen Falls, too; it hasn't got a proper name but I call it Blood Still For Blood and it's about 7k. It was intended just as a Lovecraftian mockery of sparkly vampires, but it's...a bit more interesting than that, now. And naturally I wrote the disturbing end of it to the tune of the Amnesia OST. I am pure class, of course.

I've written somewhere near 5k so far today and once I finish this entry I really am going to go and sort out the writing for today, because it's been patchy as all get out. Mostly this is just because the other day I was hunting something out in my terribly disordered Documents folder, and I was reminded again of a sprawling story an old friend and I were writing in various forms from the age of sixteen until we were both about twenty-two (which was about the point we stopped speaking to each other). As you can imagine, characters who have been in your head that long...just don't ever go away. The air you breathe is full of ghosts, as one of my favourite song-titles puts it, and when I started watching/reading George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire epic I was pushed right back into the waiting arms of these ghosts. My co-author was very, very influenced by Martin in her writing of our story; having never read any of his work, I didn't realise how deeply until I myself starting reading A Game of Thrones. And...while I am enjoying Martin's story on its own merits, it reminds me terribly of the story I had been writing all those years ago with my friend, and the last couple of days I've been procrastinating by rereading it.

It's a huge amount of text -- the story itself, which wasn't even a third done when we quit, is well over 300k. This does not include the files filled with character sketches and half-written snippets; those would be somewhere in the region of 200k, I would imagine. And again, this doesn't account for the story this was all based upon; I wouldn't be surprised to find that was about another 500k of text in the form of the main story (which was further along before we switched it with the new version) and a huge collection of supplementary material. I also have a good deal of pictures both by myself and by some talented friends who shared in our world, and...yeah. It's wonderful and nostalgic and sad, and I just can't help myself right at the moment. While my friend was a very plot-driven writer and revelled in the politics of our story, I am and always will be the character author.  I loved these characters. I still do. This is why I write; it's for the people who live the stories. And it's been so long since I really thought about this incredibly diverse cast of characters for any length of time. And believe me, there were a lot of them. I can't even hazard a guess at how many major characters there were, but fifty would be a ballpark figure. I just...yeah.

There are likely worse ways to procrastinate, as I am learning one thing -- I have vastly improved as a writer since I worked on this novel with my dear friend. In fact, working with her vastly improved me as a writer anyway, but even now I can see how I've moved on from some of my worst habits. I've also learned the difference between trope and beloved cliché, and it's all...well. I don't know. I have all sorts of FEELINGS about this that I'm not really up for articulating. Maybe once I get to the end of what she wrote I'll be better able to explain it, but for now...I think I've spent enough time reading today. I should be writing.

Still. As I was flipping through various files, I found a drabble collection. I felt like sharing one, jsut because these two characters...I always did wonder what would happen to them. I have the vague niggling feeling I might just write something about them in the weeks before Christmas, once I am done with the insanity of NaNoWriMo. But they always fascinated me. In the novel, Gaia is the eleven year old daughter of a recently widowed and deposed emperor, wheras Lais is the thirty-five year old son of the Regent in the North, a cold and pitiless Old Monster who has lived well beyond his alloted lifespan because he is waiting for his beloved to be reborn to him (she's being contrary about it, and rightly so; in the slightly misappropriated words of Tyrion Lannister about his own sire: "Everyone everywhere always has to do exactly what my father says...he's always been a cunt."). Lais is originally at the imperial palace as an envoy of his father, and is unusually gregarious considering his dread family; Gaia is a very reserved and retiring girl who lives in the shadow of her elder and more highly-born half-sister. There springs up a very unusual and rather sweet friendship between the two of them which was destined to be sorely tried by the opposing agendas of their respective families, and somehow we ended up thinking they were meant to be together despite the huge age difference. With that said Lais comes of a stock with deeply unusual longevity -- I don't know how old his father is, but let's say at least two hundred; I also think one of Lais's younger nephews is about twenty years his senior alone -- and it could have worked. Perhaps. But they were just so sweet together, when the world wasn't being a bastard at them, and when I found this drabble I wrote back in 2003 or 2004 or something...it brought it back.

I so very rarely write fluff. So, let's have some fluff before I go back to making life hell for some other poor characters, shall we? ^_~

Precious Things

“Mama?”

“Yes, darling?” she replied, raising dark eyes from her needlepoint; her surprise caused the needle to slip from the fabric and into her finger, but she removed it near-absently as she focused on her daughter alone. She barely noticed the blood as she pressed on the small wound, smiling easily at the small figure standing uncertainly in the doorway.

The dark-haired little girl promptly barrelled into the room; Gaia only just managed to remove the embroidery from her lap before Priya took up the entire space in a ball of limbs and big grey eyes. Accepting the glomp-greeting easily, she dropped a kiss across the girl’s browmark. “Did your nurse send you in to say goodnight?”

“Yes, mama,” she said; her heart was both glad to have this time with her mother and then sad. It would end all too soon, the way it always did. She ignored this fact for a brief snugglesome moment, then suddenly popped her head up and looked around with wide eyes. “But where’s papa?”

“Did I hear the sweet voice of reason calling out my most august name?”

Priya promptly burst into a gale of giggles to see Lais pop up his head from behind one of the couches; he was absolutely drenched in dust with his hair beginning to spring free in wild snarls from his tight braid. “Papa, you’re silly!”

“Saving each and every one of the pretty hairs on your head from the dust bunnies under the couch is not silly,” and the words were spoken with great dignity as he climbed to his feet and brushed off his equally-dusty trousers. “What if they multiply? We’ll be pulling them out of our ears and noses for weeks after the exterminator has been!”

Gaia spared her husband a long-suffering smile, and began to stroke her daughter’s dark-hair. “Ignore your father, darling. I think he hit his head again.”

“Well!” Lais returned, hands promptly moving to sit akimbo upon his hips as he beetled his brows. “Is this really what I get for playing at being a hero, your one and only knight in shining armour with a sword that would bring down all the stars in heaven if you’d but ask for a necklace of them to hang about your lovely neck?”

Priya blinked up at him; for a young child she was developing a precocious vocabulary and understanding of language, and everyone knew it was just because her father was pathologically incapable of being able to shut his nonsense up. “You have a sword, papa?”

“Well, I did have a sword once. But it happened to be made of sticky candy and had a hilt of the finest fudge, and it rather inexplicably disappeared one sunny, lazy afternoon. But surely we both haven’t the time for mourning my suspiciously-lost sword.” He came over to both wife and daughter, folding his long body onto the arm of the chair; while one arm draped itself easily about Gaia’s small shoulders the other joined her hand in stroking Priya’s soft, still-babyish hair. “You have a big day tomorrow and if you’re going to be big enough to fit into it without the seamstress making any of those tiresome last-second adjustments, it’s time you ran off to dream-land to play with the sleep-fairies.”

“May I ask a question before I go?”

“Only one, sweetling,” he granted generously, twirling a dark curl about one pale finger. “The fairies are waiting and they get grumpy. You know how it is. Their magic dust gets dull so quickly when the little girls are late to the land of dreams.”

She grinned up at her father, leaning up to plant a kiss on his cheek to show she understood. After doing so, Priya actually turned her attention to her mother and asked: “Mama? Was daddy your daddy, too?”

Gaia blinked, met Lais’s own blink for a brief moment, and then returned her surprise to Priya. “What do you mean, darling?”

“It was something Dasha said…I said I wanted a brother or sister, and she kind of laughed and said the only other children my papa had were you and Uncle Michael. I don’t get it. Was daddy your daddy too, then?”

“No,” Gaia said slowly, feeling Lais’s arm tighten about her as if in silent apology. “Your daddy was only my foster father, once.”

“Foster father?” Even with a father as vocal as Lais, it appeared the little girl had not heard the term before. “What does that mean?”

“It means he gave me all of his sweets and lied to me a lot.”

Lais’s jaw dropped promptly around his well-shoed ankles. “Dora!”

Still, Gaia was grinning as she absently tugged on her daughter’s nose and made her laugh. “I forgave him for it all a long time ago,” she confided in a low voice with a soft smile, pushing a strand of her own long hair back behind one ear.

“He gave you all his sweets?” Priya asked, craning her neck to look at him as she focused on what her mind saw as the most important thing her mother had just revealed. “Daddy never gives me all his sweets.”

“Oh, yes,” Gaia returned, and then dropped a wink at her dumbstruck husband. It was always so amusing to her, seeing Lais in his most unnatural state. “He always gave me all of his favourites, too.”

“…then I want daddy to be MY foster father, too!” Priya decided abruptly, a determined glint coming into eyes very much like those of her father’s family. She promptly turned on her mother’s lap and demanded of her stunned father: “I want you to treat me just like you treated mama!”

“Er…” he returned, Gaia already shaking with laughter at his continued and complete loss of his silver tongue.

“What?” the little girl asked, words resounding with the form of total innocence that was designed only for the very young to possess.

“We’ll tell you when you’re older, sweetheart,” Gaia chuckled, and carefully took a hold of Priya as she stood up. Before she got halfway up Lais had to claim the small girl; she was simply growing up too fast, was already too heavy for Gaia’s slight strength. “Now, isn’t time for bed?”

As she later shut the door to their private study, Priya returned to her nursemaid Dasha and her warm bed, Gaia shook her head and crossed the floor back to her armchair and needlework. “Lais, don’t look at me like that,” she murmured without even needing to look to her husband to read his expression. “I will let you tell her when she grows up.”

Lais trailed her in silence, but in a burst of elegant movement then overtook her slower form; by the time she reached her chair he was ready for her, reaching out with a quick hand to tumble her onto his lap. “But what if I simply can’t wait that long to share all my great wisdom and vast knowledge with my darling daughter?” he asked mournfully, barely acknowledging his wife’s token struggles.

“You waited until I was all grown up before sharing all your great wisdom and vast knowledge with me,” she pointed out as she gave up, setting about finding herself the most comfortable way to burrow into her husband’s lap.

“Yes, but my darling il’Gaia,” Lais pointed out as he dipped his head lower, brushing smiling lips against her ticklish ear, “I had extra special things to share with you.”

She shivered as his breath skipped across sensitive skin, heart jumping a beat in warm anticipation. “Your real favourite sweets, perhaps?”

“It’s no sacrifice,” Lais said, and kissed her long and sweetly. She was laughing even as he told her seriously: “They are, after all, precisely the kind that taste better when they are shared.”

*****

Incidentally, from the song title I can but assume I was listening to this song as I wrote it. There are so many memories to be found in music. I think it's time to go back to the old playlists.

Ideas, Inspiration and Insidious Little Voices

I’m really not sure I’ve ever been asked that most infamous of questions, actually – where do you get your ideas? Which is likely as not all for the best, because like ninety-nine percent of other authors in the world I honestly have no bloody clue. I mean, if you read my entry from the other day about the meaning behind my short story The Journey of the Magi I list influences and inspirations from Lovecraft to Ikuhara to Eliot to She Wants Revenge, but they still don’t write the story. I do. But then again, when I was about fifteen or so and furiously writing very bad fanfiction on a regular basis, I came across the word “amanuensis” and was rather charmed by the mental image it generated.

I’m a glorified secretary.

Every writer is different, I think. They “hear” the story and the characters within in different ways. Personally I really am a secretary; my characters chatter away in the back of my head while I run the office in the front, and often they come and pore over my pages, hang over my shoulder, or hold a Sword of Damocles over my head until I do what they want me to do. Which, funnily enough, is not something often in my control. Partially it’s because I’m not really a planner – I have characters stroll into my head, I write, and somewhere somehow sometimes a plot shows up to make the whole exercise at least somewhat legit – but really, I can start writing a story and have it go to hell in roughly four point six paragraphs. Different characters are more or less likely to cause this problem. Examples, much?

This is Sard. I didn’t create him myself, he’s part of a shared fanfiction universe I worked in while in the late years of high school. Unfortunately I’m no longer in contact with my co-author, which really is something I still regret, but that’s not a story for today. But I bring him up because for whatever reason this man really crawled into my head and then promptly insisted on hating my guts.

 

He was a particularly wilful character to write, mostly because despite being the second-in-command of a much nicer man he was very devoted to, Sard took no shit. From anyone. I particularly remember the day when he was dead that he decided death just wasn’t for him anymore and took over the body of the spiritually-sensitive protagonist. And my co-writer, who hadn't seen this coming any more than I had, promptly wrote back: WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED HERE?! …AND WHY THE HELL DO I LOVE IT SO MUCH?! Very ironic, when you take into consideration she had a very Conan Doyle-esque attitude towards Sard and actually kind of hated his guts. With that said, although I haven’t written him in years (and to the best of my knowledge she hasn’t either, though she has every right to), towards the beginning of the year an artist on DA messaged me through livejournal to say she’d been through a nostalgic art phase and this was one of the results:

Apparently, much like the Hector my tour group and I found the shadow of in Troy earlier this month, THE LEGEND LIVES ON.

So, Sard, he’s a difficult character. And many of my characters are opinionated, too; actually, Sard’s reminded me of another character from that same universe, this time one of my own creation (with that said, because of the way we wrote, all the characters became shared characters, regardless of who actually created them; it’s probably the main reason that even when the urge strikes, as it very occasionally does, I can’t bring myself to even write a drabble with any of them). Her name is Coral. Coral’s…a very brash and sarcastic woman, and was never intended to be a major player. Basically I had a character up and die on me and I needed a pathologist, and Coral sees dead people. Both in her morgue, and in her head. She’s hardly as cute as a tiny Haley Joel Osmont, mind you.

She's CUTER.

But Coral actually shares a lot of things in common with one of my other very opinionated characters, one Dr. Viola Morgan. I’m sure the two would get on like a house on fire, though I couldn’t be sure. They’re superficially similar, as I said, but I think under their bored and brash exteriors they’re quite different women. Hmm. With that said, Coral has this problem with ghosts, and this is her standard day in a nutshell:

And really, that’s how I feel some days when I am trying to write.

So, one of my major problems in writing is not even when I do have a clear idea for a story, it rarely happens that way. I’m working on a novel called Greywater just right now, and not only are the two lead characters based upon two very stereotypical cardboard cutouts used as supporting struts in my thirteen-year-old self’s epic opus The Pool of Reflection, the story’s focus and theme has changed that many times I can’t even remember where it started. Again, it’s because I start with characters and let them do stuff, which considering the characters…not always for the best. Otho, the male lead, is the “noble soldier” with a “crisis of conscience;” Círa is the “yandere female” with the “mysterious past, present and future” and…well, other characters came wandering in when they perceived gaps in the story that they could wrestle to their own shape, and good lord where does it all end?

 

Fortunately for me, even though I am less than generous with the happy endings when it comes to these characters, both Otho and Círa are quite co-operative with me. But not each other. We can only have so much maturity, here. Actually, in Greywater there’s only one character who isn’t easily corralled to my will: Ryennkar Vassidenel. And that’s not so unusual, as he has a basic worldview very similar to Sard’s – which is basically: “You suck. All of you. …well, not you,” and that one you is all they devote their not inconsiderable capacity to love to. Which is why they are so scary. Love is a powerful force, and giving that energy and force to one person, focusing it upon their health and happiness alone…oh, it’s scary. Love ought to be shared, spread around. If you can only love one person, both you and that person are pretty damned screwed, in my opinion.

Still. There's some cute to go with that obsession...right?

But yes, I have a messed up relationship with the little voices in my head. But it’s the only way I get interesting stories to write out; they sit in the back of my head and argue and bitch and laugh and love and live, and most days I am so very happy to be allowed to act as secretary for those stories.

Other days, not so much.

I keep thinking that one of these days I need to commission a drawing of myself with a couple of my characters. I had a sketch through yesterday for a picture of Círa and Otho by the star-river in the cove near Greywater, and she’s actually holding onto him like an anchor and it’s so damned lovely…and even though I was thinking of getting to the end of Greywater and having a picture done with them, I now rather think I ought to leave them to each other. Hee. I’m actually leaning towards Arosek and Ryenn, rather. Arosek loves me. …this isn’t saying much, Arosek loves everyone. But Ryenn…oh, it would be like the most awkward of family portraits. Arosek all chirpy, me half-terrified, and Ryenn rolling his eyes to the sky and saying: “If it’s you, then I suppose I can stand still for sixty seconds and not attempt to throttle that woman.”

…oh, dear, I think he dislikes me more than I realised. O_o And he’s a voice inside my head! So much for the great escape? Not that I’m going anywhere, mind you. I’m just having far too much fun indeed. <3

 

Note: For all the art in this post that isn’t mine – and thankfully, some of it isn’t…we have to keep standards up somehow! – more of their work can be seen through these links: Lianne, Frosted Blossom and JustineDarkChylde.