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.

Winning On A Mere Technicality

Admittedly I am always a bit of a spaz when it comes to writing, and NaNoWriMo can only make that tendency worse. But I am falling off the deep end all over again. I've already bemoaned the fact that I've all but given up on finishing the third of the three novels I set myself to completing and have instead gone haring off on a sequel to the first one I finished, and...well, the wordcount on that little beauty is currently about 22k. I've decided that there's still seven days of NaNo to go so we might as well make a mini NaNo for that and have at least 50k on it before November's gone.

...I am so brilliant.

GAH.

I do have to admit, mind you, that I have been playing about still with a short story that makes up the prologue of this novel, and I haven't counted a word of it towards NaNo yet. And it's about 4.5k right now, from memory. If I would just stop procrastinating I would be able to finish its draft this evening. But I'm procrastinating. For some reason I am utterly and irretrievably in love with the Ambassador of Xoan and his unholy lust for croquembouche (...you DON'T want to know) and when I've managed to drag myself away from that archive I've been rereading a huge epic fic I wrote with a friend when we were in our later years of high school/first years of university. Oh, the good times keep on rolling.

Still, I am managing to write; I clocked up 5k for Kaverlen Falls today, even though I've been shrieking at the characters while doing so. One character in particular took offense at something I noticed the other day. I've mentioned before a growing fascination for the HBO series A Game of Thrones and I've got through the first two novels of A Song of Ice and Fire so far this month. This neat little graphic struck me as interesting as one of my writing groups and I had been exchanging emails about character alignment:

While looking at this, I realised that I had a couple of squares I couldn't fill with characters appearing in the Greywater/Kaverlen Falls/Neverboy/Forevergirl/Simple Story saga, and I got cross. Unfortunately some of the little voices in my head were "listening" to my ranting, and one of them's gone and EXPLODED all over everything in the form of chaotic evil. I just...yeah. I don't know. I suppose I got what I deserved, but...um.

Otherwise, that should be enough whining for the evening. The first picture in this entry is from Ephesus, and I was looking at my pictures from this ruined city last night as I worked on the short story featuring the cursed and broken coty of Dan'Mara. I really ought to go and finish the damn thing. So...here's to history and the hell it can raise in the present?

Cheers!

Slow and Steady...?

Ah, racing turtles -- although calling my NaNo progress "turtling" rather depends on how you look at it, considering the wordcount. But I have become an absolute rebel and am still not writing The Juniper Bones like I'm supposed to be; rather I'm about 13k into the sequel of Greywater, which seems to have titled itself Kaverlen Falls even though a) I wasn't aware there WAS a waterfall at Kaverlen and b) I haven't got a clue why the characters would end up there anyway. So go figure.

I'm having a right ol' interesting time with this, mind you. Mostly it's because I haven't a clue where the story is going...well, I do, that's a slight lie. I wrote a YA adult recently called The Neverboy, and Kaverlen Falls involves that storyline to some extent as Cira, the main character of KF, is a companion of the main character of Nb. Meaning I now get to tell certain parts of Nb from an entirely different point of view. This is going to b fun. It also mixes up the story a bit, because Cira isn't present for the first twelve chapters of Nb anyway, and they also part ways towards the end for a bit. So, it's not like KF tells the same story only from Cira's viewpoint. It's her own story entirely, and I am not entirely sure where it begins and ends.

...well, okay, another lie: I know where it starts. Or I do now, anyway. I started writing a short story the other day for my own amusement about blood fae for no good reason, and as it turns out...it's the prologue to KF. And in the first chapter of KF a legendary character who was offhandedly mentioned maybe twice is now apparently a major influence on Cira's early life at Greywater. So now I am all O_o WTF OTZ because...I did not expect that. At all. Not to mention Cydrac Agrane strolled into the first chapter waving his hands about something I didn't know about, and now Nan Jerikak has announced she wants to play My Little Cavy with Alara, and I...what. What.

I love NaNo. Although sometimes I get the feeling it kind of hates my guts. Here, have a .gif that explains my relationship with NaNoWriMo a thousand times better than I ever could with words:

Speaking of writing things from other POVs, I also had a strange experience while writing the scene between Nan and Cira. I'll actually put a snippet of it here so you can see what I mean upfront.

*****

At first she was silent, and Círa glanced back to see she had furrowed her brow. It might have been a mistake to ask Nantya; she was young and no real ranking magian – but she had already been given in service to the Attorney-General of Lonan at least once. Another moment of thought later and Nantya shook her head, the dark curls of her hair dancing beneath the scarf she had tied over half her head.

“I don’t know what it is, if that’s what you wanna know.” She peered at Círa, pale eyes very curious. “Is your Lady Maiden worried about him? ‘cause I don’t think she should be, really. I doubt Mister Wolf is gonna bother her again, after the flak he copped from the First Consul over it all.”

“What flak?”

Nantya blinked at her sharp tone. “Oh, it was flak, all right. I mean, it’s not like I saw anything, but I heard some of it. He summoned Lord Rendran to him at the beginning of the winter, after the mourning-month for his little girl. I got a call up there myself, ‘cause I was with him in Aran Nomese when it all went to pot. It was all very civilised, mind, or at least it was supposed to be – just a discussion about how things would be, what with Mister Wolf’s privileges at the palace being revoked. But…”

Círa frowned. Not one word of this had ever reached her ears before now. “But what?”

Nantya shrugged, but it seemed more bewildered than nonchalant. “I don’t rightly know, not for sure. But I was down in the glasshouse, these huge big offices under the First Consul’s chambers where all his pages and assistants and things work. There were raised voices, then thumping, and this huge crash…and then they really started yelling at each other.”

“The First Consul was shouting?”

“He was really angry. Not that any of us could really hear what he was saying.” She seemed just as disbelieving as Círa herself. “The Attorney-General came out first. You could see he was furious, too, but he wasn’t shouting anymore. He just came down those stairs and stood there, looking at all of us like not a one of us was really there.” Shaking her head, she had to take an audible breath before continuing. “Then Lord Consul Asfiye came down. You could tell he was upset, but he was…not like he usually is. He was just…pale as a ghost, but he could have been made of marble. I’ve never seen him like it. No smiles, eyes dull as dishwater.”

Círa didn’t bother to hide her shudder. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Me neither -- if I hadn’t seen it.” Again she shook her head, like she was trying to clear it of a mountain of llama wool, and Círa began to understand why no word of this strange discussion had ever reached her ears. “He asked Lord Rendran, polite as you please, to come back with him. And they went up. No-one heard anything else strange upstairs, and when they came back the First Consul was all smiles and the Attorney-General charmed his way through the whole office, but…I’ll never forget it, the way they looked then.” Her small fingers, hidden in her black kid gloves, clenched into sudden fists. “They said the great window was what smashed. Someone had put a paperweight through it.”

“The Attorney-General, surely,” Círa said, faint, and Nantya only shook her head.

“I dunno. I just...I dunno.”

The clear reluctance to commit to anything sent a shiver down Círa’s spine, but she covered it with a blithe smile. “So you haven’t talked about this to anyone, have you?”

Nantya’s eyes, coloured that strange pale green more common to those born of the fire-lady, held more solemnity than a grave. “No. I haven’t.”

Círa swallowed hard. More secrets had risen to wind their coils about the life of the First Consul, and she did not like it at all. Arosek, what are you doing? she thought, but all she had before her was the troubled small face of the magian.   

*****

Now, it probably seems quite pedestrian, I know, but the point is -- I had to know exactly what the argument between Ryennkar and Arosek was. Do other people do this a lot? I do it upon occasion; for instance in The Neverboy Cira and Otho quite obviously have a history they are not going to discuss in front of Kit, who is a thirteen year old boy. So I went and wrote out the scene where they thrash out some out demons (and yes, it involved sex, but even that wasn't why it couldn't ever be in the main body of the story). As it so happens this scene will now end up in Kaverlen Falls, but...yeah. Roughly 2.5k later I had an "extra" scene I called Close Every Door for a lark (damn you, Andrew Lloyd Webber!). It can't ever fit in Kaverlen Falls given the POV, but...I had to write it, because I really needed to know exactly what passed between them. But then again I did the same again in Greywater because I knew that Arosek and Ryenn had also had an "altercation" of a sort between the time when Otho first returned from Alkirn and then when Otho returned to Greywater. Again, neither Cira nor Otho could possibly have been privy to these conversations, but they have a major impact on their lives, and...yeah. Dammit. I hate having all these lovely words AND NO-WHERE TO PUT THEM.

...and I would snippet part of the scene here, but it's dodgy as hell. So I won't. I'll just go back to sulking and writing some more. In closing, here's another .gif; once again it explains the relationship between me and NaNo in very succinct terms. But I'll let you guess which of us is which. ^_~



The Beat Goes On

November is still here, and my brain is...mostly still present as well, so I thought I probably ought to update on the NaNo-progress. I am being very contrary mary in my writing right now, although I am still going on with it. Just...not the way I planned. Ha. But then NaNo seems to be very much about grabbing the seat of your pants and holding tight as you run along with it, so here we go.

Technically I am still supposed to be working on The Juniper Bones; it's probably not that far from a complete first draft (say, maybe twenty thousand words) but my brain is just not co-operating with me. It's a complex ending, of course, but I just can't seem to concentrate on it. Whenever I do I just procrastinate worse than ever before, and after a less than productive week I finally surrendered on Thursday night.

The first novel I had been working on after getting here was Greywater, and while writing both Hibernaculum and The Juniper Bones I ended up missing the characters in that dreadfully. On Thursday night I was particularly troubled by the loss of Arosek and Ryennkar, and was reminded that while in airports from New Zealand to the US to Canada to London to Turkey and then on a wee boat upon the Med, I had been writing a couple of stories detailing a very important chance in their relationship when they were teenagers. I'd started typing it out sometime in London and never got around to finishing it, even though I had typed out other stuff I'd written in a couple of different coffeeshops in York. So, I decided if I was just going to sit and stare at The Juniper Bones and not type anything I might as well get my shit together and type out stuff I'd already written for a .doc I'd called Night of the Long Grass.

The story was never finished in longhand, despite the long hours in airports and those beautiful days in Turkey (although in the case of Turkey this may be because I was often distracted by delicious food and the lure of swimming in beautiful blue waters filled with ANCHORFISH!). After I finished typing out what did exist, I ended up finishing it. And of course it didn't kill my fascination with the characters, it only made it worse. So while yesterday very little writing was done -- I had to drive to Perth, which was an experience; I've never driven a freeway in my life and spent most of it wanting to scream out the window I DRIVE BETTER THAN YOU AND I'VE NEVER EVEN DONE THIS BEFORE! -- today I ended up opening a file that contained a few scribbles of the direct sequel to Greywater. Roughly seven thousand words later...

So, yes, it's been an odd few days. I've also been sketching out the bones of two other short stories to the tune of three or four thousand words I haven't counted towards NaNo yet, and one of those stories is actually most likely the prologue of Kaverlen Falls. So, I am keeping on keeping on, despite a rather unproductive week. I did manage to reward myself for the first couple of weeks, at least; I went horse-riding on Tuesday and got wrapped in seaweed on Wednesday. The horse-riding was an absolutely wonderful experience; I did it partly because I'd been on a camel and a donkey in Egypt and had forgotten what a horse felt like, and also because a lot of my fantasy-tilted writing involves riding horses which I remember so little about. But despite the terrible weather of the last few weeks in Bunbury, it was a beautiful sunny day for us to ride through the fields and see kangaroos, emus...AND COWS. I like cows. Go the research, I say. ^_~

At any rate, I should go spend a few more hours with the kids. <3 But just for amusement, here's one of my favourite places in York. I wrote about Arosek and Ryenn in this most beautiful of beautiful cities, and this place in particular inspired me to commission of drawing of the pair of them. It's all good.

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.