Something A Little Like Magic

I have the strange urge to try and work out how I write a story, mainly by blogging it. I'm not sure that I'll ever get around to it, mostly because once I really get writing it's hard for me to understand even where I am, let alone what I'm doing. But it came to mind yesterday while I was working on a story that...sort of came out of nowhere, though not really. It's essentially the very first part of the sequel to The Juniper Bones, though it acts as a stand-alone in some respects because it's a bridging piece between spring and autumn.

Something about the writing of the piece seems...odd, to me. Partly it's because I am having a commission frenzy, being that I am very over-excited by having money again. One of the pieces I commissioned was of Eliot and Morgan, the two characters in this story, and it's a very...odd piece, in such that it's got some fantastic lighting to it. I've seen the progress of the artist so far, and while I knew it would be excellent from her previous work, my god she knows how to deal with lowlight conditions. And this picture has the two characters in a windowseat with a full moon beyond, no other lights on, and...it's a very liminal sort of atmosphere. Things change in light of that kind, mostly because people and objects are very indistinct in such light in the first place. And the story I am writing deals with that moment, and it feels like I'm trying to catch moonbeams in my fingers. And they're slipping away...but not in a bad way. It's just...writing is a peculiar experience at the best of times, I think. But there's something very peculiar about this story. I feel like a magician, or a wizard, or perhaps even an enchantress. I can feel the power, even though the story is just fragments at this point. Something thrums beneath them, something far bigger than what I think it is. I often feel like I have very little to do with the creation of a story except as a glorified secretary, and I'm getting that sensation so very strongly here.

So yeah, there's an odd little ramble for the day. I should go eat something before I go even more nuts. Let's just blame Christmas for this one, shall we? ^_~

Under the Sea

I have once again reached the most terrifying part of a novel -- the slippery slide to the finish. Except I'm like one of those chickenshit little kids who sit at the top of the highest slide wailing that they're too scared to let go and just slide. So, even though I began yesterday by sketching out the entirety of the first of the Scary Slide Chapters, I ended up going for a drive into Perth. There was some logic there; my mother needed a ride to the airport. Having gone all that distance, my father and I ended up going to the Aquarium of Western Australia, hence the rather trippy photograph above.

It was an interested experience, being that the main reason I wanted to go is because I have been writing three novels involving the machinations of four gods, each having most sway over one cardinal element. The West is Water, and he has been haunting me a lot recently. It's partially because he is the most human of the four, and by consequence the least human. He's a very curious wee creature, my Inamoran. As I walked around the aquarium I felt him with me. He's barely my height -- about five foot four -- and light of foot, and has this lovely lilting light little voice. ...ha ha, that makes me sound insane. I swear I'm not. I've had an overactive imagination since I was very small, and my greatest regret is that I am paradoxically too logical to have ever had a proper imaginary friend even when so very tiny, because I knew it was impossible. Hence my love for reading and writing fantastical stories, I suppose.

But I walked these waters, the places that he loves, and I took some photographs. I decided to share a few of them, just because it might aid me in getting back to the Slippery Slide of Doom. I'm a lousy photographer at the best of times, and my camera can't cope with lowlight conditions very well, so I apologise for the quality. But still. It's the song of the sea.

So, I need to go for a walk into town to visit a bank machine, as I am going horse-riding tomorrow afternoon. So much for the writing? Ha. My excuse is that I haven't really got a lot of opportunity to do it at home, and I need to go down to Margaret River anyway. I rode both a camel and a donkey in Egypt last month, and as a consequence ended up wanting to ride a horse. I can claim it as research, anyway; in the older stories the characters ride horses. Mostly. Ha. I also need to do a tiny bit of shopping and work out what I am making for dinner, how domestic of me. But I might read a chapter or two of the book I acquired yesterday, the second part of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. It's only taken ten years and one Singapore Airlines flight from Heathrow to Changi for me to finally get around to doing it. But really, my thoughts on that series so far is an entirely different entry.

In the meantime, there have been various soundtracks to my writing as of late, but I feel the urge to share this Jean-Patrick Capdevielle piece. He is the composer who first brought us Emma Shapplin, whose voice I have loved since 1999. This video is a song from his pseduo-opera Atylantos, and considering the fate of Inamoran...well. Atlantis has fascinated me since I was very small. When I was twelve or thirteen I created my own Atlantis, which eventually morphed into the enclave of the Ossu'heim, Inamoran's sole remaining children imprisoned between worlds and oceans by the curse of another god. Stories within stories. But I adore this song, even ten years after I first heard it.

Funnily enough, it's not my favourite -- that would be Bellezza Divina. But it's so much story in so little space and is absolutely beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful things, in case you wonder what my little imaginary friend who accompanied me to the aquarium looks like, I have had a commission of him done by the wonderfully talented Calicot over at DA.

He is on the right; the woman on the left is she who will be Chaesha, goddess of East and Air. They're actually both in their proper human forms in this picture. Which reminds me, last night after getting back from Perth I watched television (which I never do) and then I did write for a bit. But I started writing a short story about Janerin's human wife, Janerin being the god of North and Earth. Now that's procrastination, folks. I'll write, but not what I am supposed to!

...we're all doomed.

Magic Doors

Self-confidence doesn't come easily to me. I could list a lot of reasons as to why I suspect that might be, but it's not actually going to help me understand it in the slightest. It's only relevant to this post in that I am consistently amazed at how much I am enjoying working on The Juniper Bones. I mean, I don't want to imply that I generally don't like writing -- obviously I would hardly be doing it if I hated it -- but because I often end up in despair over what I am writing, it's a little bit strange when I find myself actually saying to myself as I write: hey, this is actually pretty damn good!

It's probably something to do with the change of scenery. The Juniper Bones, unlike the other two novels I've been fiddling with, is set directly in our world in fairly recent times. It makes it slightly easier to deal with in some respects (I don't have to make stuff up) and harder in others (I'm not allowed to make stuff up). But that's not it entirely. It's written in the present tense. I don't habitually write in the present tense, you see; for a very long time I had the garden variety knee-jerk reaction I was taught to have to the present tense, which appears to be NO IT'S BAD DON'T DO IT. But in 2000, when I first started at university, I bought a book my first night there from K-Mart. It was a random selection. I can't even remember now what it was called; I do still own it, but it's stashed in the barn somewhere and has been since I moved to Sheffield in 2006. I'll find it eventually. But it was written in the present tense and I loved the immediacy of it. It was also a very well-written story.

Still, it didn't really grab me as something I ought to be doing. That didn't happen until 2002, when I read a Smallville fanfic also written in the present tense that to this day still blows my socks off whenever I chose to reread it. And I do reread it a couple of times a year. It's highly atmospheric and by turns wry, silly, sorrowful, passionate and very, very funny, and I am still very charmed by it. But the way the author wrote these words struck a deep chord with me, and I chose to write what exists of People In Looking-Glass Houses because the ironic style was well-suited to the nature of the story. I've never finished a draft of that damn novel, but when I first started working with Eliot in a short story named Stockholm Syndrome in 2005, I decided to go with the present tense for him too. It's been stuck to him with crazy-glue ever since.

It can take me a while to get back into writing that way, I must admit. And by "a while" I mean "about two seconds." There's something very natural to Eliot's ironies, to me, and I suppose that's why I like reading back his stories more than most of my work. I still can't decide whether or not this means that it is actually good, or if I've just repeatedly flicked a switch in my own head.

But I am hopeful of actually finishing this draft. I wasn't at first, partially because I was so sure I would RAGEQUIT before I finished Hibernaculum anyway, but The Juniper Bones has a particularly messy denouement I still don't entirely understand. (And considering the copious amounts of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...stuff, I possibly never will.) Yet...I so badly want to tell this story, because I am so in love with the characters right now. And not just Morgan and Eliot, my so-called Usual Suspects. I'm still surprised by something I discovered during NaNo last year, which is Erik's increased role in the story. He was supposed to be a shadow-character for Tess, someone for her to interact with if I needed someone to fill that role. Instead he quietly stepped forward and filled that role for Eliot, even though that was what Pania was for. It's changed the tone of a lot of things, and that...well. I suppose this is why I write, and why I read. It's for the surprise. It's for the joy of picking up a book or sitting in front of a keyboard and opening a magic door with no real idea what lies beyond it, or where that door is going to take you. When I clicked absently on the link to that Smallville fic in 2002 I had no idea that it would still be influencing my writing in 2011. And yet here we are.

Long live the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey magic doors, I say.

The Final Countdown

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She wouldn’t.”

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

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

“Look, you’d better just turn up.”

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

*****

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

The Favoured Child

I’m not much of an artist. I can draw, but I don’t do it very much these days. Mostly it’s a time thing, but it’s also because it’s far more satisfying to write and have it come out the way I want, than to draw and have it come out only somewhat like I was thinking of. Which is why I’ve developed an addiction to commissioning people on deviantart, ha ha ha.

Now, I have a few different commissions on at the moment, but I felt inclined to talk about one today as I just got received the finished product in my inbox late last night. (You know, the other day I mentioned I’d finally caught up with the times and acquired a smartphone; in some ways I wish I hadn’t, as I spend too much time online as it is. Because when I received this file, it was well after midnight, I was supposed to be sleeping, and instead I was watching videos on youtube and reading my email, wtf.) This was a slightly unusual commission in that I was quite lucky to get it – the artist’s hard to reserve a slot with – and La'Vata O'Neal's style is quite realistic. Observe:

I was blown away. Completely. And somewhat terrified with it, too. ^_~ This is Doctor Viola Morgan, a little voice I’ve discussed on this journal before. She’s been in my head since I last lived in Christchurch; I’m not sure of her exact birthdate, but it was the middle of 2005. (If I bothered looking up the release date of Batman Begins in New Zealand I’d have a better idea, as I remember going to see it with my younger brother at the flicks and thinking of Morgan most of the way through, but go figure.) She’s been a very vocal presence there ever since, and while I’ve drawn her myself as well as having some other art commissioned, seeing her like this…

…wow.

I think I’ve said before that one of my shallower reasons for wanting to be a popular published author is that I’d love to have a movie or a mini-series made of my work…just so I could look a character in the eye, or wander through Círa’s gallery or Radeen Dam’s oratory or the great library at Deseran. I’m a traveller, and as such I don’t just want to read things, I want to feel them. And the realistic tone of this portrait gives me a bit of that. This is what she’d look like if she was a person.

And like I said, it’s pretty damned scary. Here, have a tiny extract of Morgan from The Juniper Bones. Even though I’d love to meet Morgan for real, I think this explains why it’s also a very good thing that I never ever will. ^_~

*****

“What are you doing here?”

He turns, startled; the only good thing about having Viola Morgan sneak up on him is the fact her hands are empty. “Your bloody husband won’t leave me alone,” he says, keeping a wary eye on the tall woman. Morgan may be without visible weapons, but he knows better than anyone else that Mr. Happy Scalpel is quite capable of concealing himself in very odd places about her person.

He isn’t detecting any discernible threat from her now, at least; she circles around him with an easy step that indicates her mood, if not good, is at least not bloody. “You’re such a sucker for coming back here,” she remarks finally, coming to a stop some ten feet to his left.

“So why are you here?” he asks, noting she now stands beneath one of the larger paintings of the western corridor. It’s a reproduction of a Dalí work he’s sure he’s seen before in Paris, or perhaps Madrid.

“Ah, but being a bitch doesn’t preclude me from being as much a sucker as you are,” she offers with a waggled finger, and turns her back on him. She is tracing that same lazy finger over the gilded frame of the painting when she adds: “You’re too damn interesting to just kick out of the house.”

“Is she here?”

Morgan looks back to him over one shoulder, the hard lines of her face carved from marble. He cannot decide if she resembles more the pale reclining woman in the painting at her back, or the two tigers arcing towards vulnerable flesh with claws unsheathed. “Yeah. Not that she lives here, or anything. Creepy little bitch that she is.”

“Morgan!”

“Don’t start with me, Eliot.” The words are as clipped as the individual shots from an automatic weapon, and he flinches when she comes forward to jab that calloused finger hard into the centre of his chest. “And I thought you’d be a few damn weeks later than this at the very least – thank god there’s no one to take bets with around here!”

“What about Dragovich?”

“Doesn’t do bets,” she explains moodily; she has fortunately retracted her clever surgeon’s fingers from his person, but he doesn’t feel any better for it. “God knows what I pay him for.”

“I think he asks himself the same thing every day.”

“Don’t start with me,” she repeats, and Eliot’s opening his mouth to suggest something potentially suicidal when she cuts him off with a slash of one strong wrist. “So you want to talk to Rowan, then?”

“Just get me Baedeker.”

She snorts, rolls her eyes like a mad horse. “What am I, your girl Friday?” Without waiting for an answer, she stalks out of the room; it is some fifteen minutes before Baedeker walks in with an air of vague bemusement that clears the moment he sees Eliot.

“Oh. I thought you were dead.”

“What?”

The smile he gives Eliot is wry, with a touch of affection which Eliot doesn’t really want to contemplate. “Viola said she’d left me a cadaver in the foyer,” he explains, removing his reading glasses to squint critically at Eliot. “…she didn’t kill you, did she?”

*****

…you have to cut Baedeker some slack, you know. Because with Morgan, you just never can tell. ^_~

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.)

The Casting Couch

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

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

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

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

...oh, crap.

SAVE AND EXIT

I haven't been doing a lot of writing recently. My brain has really decided to go and throw a temper tantrum, and even though writing can be extremely therapeutic for me, I haven't been able to concentrate on it. It's getting to be late afternoon here and I haven't done any writing whatsoever, but I have managed to tidy my room and that...felt like a massive clear-out. I've had a lot of things on my mind, and doing this seems to have helped. We'll see, I guess?

One of my main procrastination tools the last couple of weeks has been watching walkthroughs of Amnesia: The Dark Descent; even though I swore I never would, I also ended up downloading it yesterday on Steam. I've officially played forty-five minutes and am so terrified I can't go on. Ha. Why is this relevant to my writing? I keep thinking, as I've said before, that I should write something Lovecraftian. But wandering around Brennenburg actually led to my brain inventing a history for the house that Anja and Ryennkar are raising their children in, and I think it is going to play a large role in the forevergirl. Actually, I am becoming more and more surprised by how big a part both Arosek and Ryenn are going to play in the entire novel. Huh.

Aside from that, I've been working on the editing of The Neverboy while working out on my stationary bike; I'm almost through the last two thirds of the book. Then I have to go back to the first ten chapters and fix that. I'm planning on printing it out and taking it with me on the plane rides to and from Wellington Monday next, if the volcanic ash doesn't ruin it first. I have to go up there to have biometrics done, which is going to take all of TEN MINUTES WTF. Ordinary I would have this done in Christchurch, but...Christchurch's CBD isn't really there anymore. Speaking of which, I live in a country of the most adorkable and charmingly insane people EVER. But yeah, I am thinking that the plane ride will give a good opportunity to just edit, and despite the fact I've had to go back to a very restricted diet because I am an idiot, I think I will have a nice lunch somewhere in the Wellington CBD and work on it then, too. We'll see. Quite what I am going to do with it when I am finished, we may never know. Perhaps I'll try to flog it to an agent when I get to London, I don't know.

I also got very close to the Finishing Frenzy of The Juniper Bones a week or so back. I ended up falling out of the Zone before I really hit my stride, but I still got abour twenty or thirty thousand words and a partially-constructed End Game out of it. I'm hoping that once I finish this edit and a couple short stories and this trade that things will flow again. Speaking of which -- the trade. This is going to be interesting! I've never done anything like it before, and I am hoping that once I've had dinner tonight and finished this little bit of mostly-constructed fluff I can begin to sketch it out. More on that later, I suppose. Right now, I am freezing cold so I want to close all my curtains, leave the lights off, and scare myself stupid. Dammit, Daniel...