37.2 Degrees in the Morning

The prodigal blogger

2011-04-02T01:19:00.000-07:00

Oh, I've been very bad, haven't I? This is the first time I've been back here since my happy news. I might as well fess up: I hate blogging with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. ;)

I've been trying to spend my few blogging brain cells on the official author blog: www.janekindred.com, but to bring you up to date, I spent most of December revising the manuscript of The House of Arkhangel'sk, which went out on submission in early January. We've had a few passes so far, but there are several editors we're still waiting to hear from, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that at least one of them will fall madly in love with Anazakia and the boys. The print publishing world moves at a snail's pace, and fantasy tends to move even more slowly than other genres due to the limited number of editors dedicated to it at each house, but I've waited this long to reach my goal; what's a few more months?

In the meantime, my other happy news that I may have overlooked on this blog is that my novella The Devil's Garden was accepted by Carina Press (Harlequin's fledgling e-only imprint) in October. TDG had a false start earlier last year when it was initially accepted by a different publisher who later dropped it because I wouldn't change the character's age, so I was very happy that it finally found a home.

So after THOA went out on submission, I spent the next several weeks on edits and revisions on TDG. The final copy went to production at the end of February, and a few weeks ago the cover was finalized. Is that not the most awesome cover ever?? Okay, maybe I'm a little biased. ;) The release date for TDG is June 27, 2011.

If you want to read more about it, check out my post A Book By Its Cover on the Jane Kindred blog, and the blurb on the TDG page. (I also have a Facebook page for it, if you want to see the same information in several places. LOL.) And if you really can't get enough of me ~snort~ I also blog as Jane Kindred at Here Be Magic.

But I promise to be better about keeping up with—oh, hell, who am I kidding? I'm the world's worst blogger. I may have to start posting random "man candy" like my friends Allison Pang and Marie Sexton to get you all to come back. ;D (Or girl candy; I can go either way.)

Get me, I'm givin' out wings!

2010-11-30T22:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's what all those bells are you're hearing: me giving out wings. Or kisses under the mistletoe, if you prefer, 'cause there's not a Nargle in sight. (Um, you are all hearing those bells, aren't you? Hello?)

If you read my last post, you know I was expecting a phone call. Now, I've read other writers' posts about "The Call" with much trepidation. What the heck were they all talking about for an hour or more?? I am not a phone person. I hate the phone. The phone might as well be a Nargle.

But somehow, I spent over an hour on the phone with the aforementioned agent, and I didn't even notice how much time had gone by. I can't tell you how awesome it is to talk to someone who loves your book. (Really; even when my betas love my books, though they can't get me a publishing deal, it's just awesome. I ♥ my betas.)

Writers are a largely narcissistic lot (yeah, I know, you're shocked), but we are, for the most part, weirdly introverted narcissists. If we weren't, I guess we'd just put lampshades on our heads and dance a jig on your table. (And perhaps some of us have; I'm not going to be the one to break the secret oath of the writers' vory v zakone. Oh, crap. Did I just write that out loud?) But instead we scribble in silence, hunched over the notebooks tucked into our Bibles in church (um, maybe that was just me), and then hope someone will ask what we're doing. (But not our parents. At least not in church. At least not what I was writing.) And then when that poor someone takes the bait, we haunt them forever: "But I've rewritten the first chapter again. It's so much better now. C'mon! Read it!"

(Wow; look at all the semicolons and parenthetical clauses and sentences starting with conjunctions in this thing! And exclamation points! Aw, who cares! I have an agent!)

Yes, you read that right. I have an agent: Sara Megibow at Nelson Literary Agency has signed me. And she squeed, you guys. Let me quote from her email: "SQQQUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!" I kid you not. I have an awesome agent, who squees! :D

I Suspect Nargles

2010-11-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

At 9:30am Saturday morning, after I'd stayed up until 4am working on The Palace of Wisdom, my phone began buzzing across my nightstand. I growled and snarled at it and slapped my palm around on the flat surfaces in the near vicinity in search of my glasses. I didn't recognize the number and I growled some more. I'm always getting long distance wrong numbers. I pulled the covers over my head, attempted to regain lost ground from the cats who ooze into any abandoned bed space like a liquid seeking its own level, and tried to go back to sleep.

A few minutes later, the phone chirped at me. A message had been left. Curious thing for a wrong number to do, I thought.

Now, due to a clever mishap on my part, I no longer get my voicemail on my phone. Instead, I get garbled text messages from Google Voice, the most recent of which managed to tell me "Hey babe, scared" instead of "Hey babe, it's Jack." This one said "Unable to transcribe message." Still grumbling, I dragged my laptop over and googled the area code...it was a certain city where I only know two people. One of them is a literary agent who was reading my manuscript. My heart started hammering. I told it to shut up so I could think. Clearly, this was just a wrong number that was coincidentally in that same city, and furthermore it must have been a bot call, resulting in a message Google Voice couldn't transcribe.

I opened up Google Voice. There was a minute-and-a-half message waiting. I clicked play, and heard complete silence for several seconds. Calling myself many names for imagining things, I reached over to click stop. And then heard the only four words that got recorded: "from the literary agency...."

FROM THE LITERARY AGENCY????

After I regained consciousness, my e-mail announced a new message in that special folder set up for such unlikely scenarios as someone actually responding to a query. And there it was: from the literary agency.

An actual call is now scheduled for tomorrow morning. It better not be Nargles.

And the truth shall set you free

2010-06-08T13:30:00.000-07:00

Just got the rejection on the last outstanding full, from the agent I really, really wanted. I was expecting to be devastated until I read this:

"But when it switched up to the fallen angels and their love story, it just didn't work at all for me and it didn't seem to lend anything to the book as a whole."

And my brain exploded. I suddenly realized that it isn't me, it's them. I've been taking every bit of criticism to heart, thinking I had failed as a writer, failed these characters, but the love story between Belphagor and Vasily is the one thing I absolutely know is right about this book. So for this smart, terrific agent to simply not feel it, and to like the parts I was so uncertain about, the parts I was sure I had failed at...well, damn...it really IS all subjective!

As sad as I am about this rejection, I feel like I have a new lease on life as a writer. I can just keep querying until I find the agent that loves all of it. I don't have to crawl in a corner and berate myself for my failure and try to rewrite the entire story every time someone criticizes it.

Hell, I may just start querying on the other two books I had given up on. Someone, somewhere, may just finally get them.

Gathering rosebuds

2010-03-12T01:09:00.000-08:00

My spring hypomania seems to be here early, and I'm taking full advantage of it. These moments are so rare, when my head is full of words and I'm not too exhausted to put them down on virtual paper. I've returned to my 1,000-word daily goal to try to finish the first draft of The Prince of Tricks by the end of May. I'd love to have it done in time for the cruise, but I don't know if I'm quite that hypomanic.

I'm listening again to Kate Bush's Aerial as I write and work through plot points while walking to and from work or riding on Muni. I've never listened to any other album this much. I keep waiting to get tired of it, but every time I play it, Kate takes me spinning up into the St. Petersburg White Nights on the wings of my demons (and I'm sure she would never have thought to invoke anything of the sort with this music). One night during my trip in 2006, I sat in the late-evening light and listened to both disks while watching the sun pretend to set outside the balcony of my little room in the Lesnoy Prospekt flat, and it transports me there when I close my eyes.

Because I listened to it while writing the last three books, it also sometimes transports me to places I've never been with images of things I have never seen: like the Aurora Borealis over the Arkhangel'sk skies across fields of rime frost, or the monastery on Solevetsky in the White Sea. Sometimes it's a ride on the Trans-Siberian rail. But everywhere it takes me, it's full of rosebuds, and I'm gathering them while I may.

Paralysis

2010-02-28T15:06:00.000-08:00

This word seems to define many aspects of my life right now. Though I've decided to go ahead with Prince of Tricks, I'm afraid to write anything on it. I write a paragraph, then delete it. There's so much back story now that I don't know where to begin, and my MC doesn't know most of the back story herself, so I have to be careful not to put things in that she isn't aware of in her first-person narrative.

Then there's the subplot about the Prince of Tricks himself. Is there really room for that in this story? Maybe it deserves its own book. Can I pull this off? Will I be able to do either of these stories justice if I include them both? And should I really be putting time into this project when I still don't know whether the first book will even get representation, let alone a publisher?

One agent has the full, one has passed on the partial, and I have one query outstanding with no response yet. I can't decide whether to continue querying. What if the story is fatally flawed, and I'm sending out queries to agents I can never query again? Should I wait until I get the rejection on the full and hope it isn't a form rejection so I can get some insight into what isn't working? Or am I just allowing my fear to keep me from taking any action? Maybe I should work on more rewrites before submitting again—but maybe that's just another form of not doing anything.

Meanwhile, I've been wanting to get physically active again, after spending a year embedded in these books and sitting on my ass. It seems like a simple thing: just go outside and start walking. But I think about it, I mean to do it, and then I just...can't. The mild agoraphobia plays a role, I suppose, and the weather (though the rain has not been constant, so that's just an excuse). If I don't start moving, however, the writers' cruise in May is going to be here before I know it, and I'll be heading to the Bahamas unable to fit into my bathing suit. Then I'll have to go bathing suit shopping again. I'd rather cut off my pinky toes with pruning shears.

I can't even decide whether this post is worth posting. My hand is hovering over the delete button. Who wants to read this self-indulgent whinging? And why am I still sitting here at my computer messing with my blog while dreaming of cinnamon buns? I should go out and get some. But do I really need cinnamon buns? Why does every action I think of taking feel so supremely self-indulgent and wasteful that I just slip back into paralysis...which is ultimately more self-indulgent and wasteful than anything I can't quite decide to do?

Papa Don't Preach

2010-02-22T17:13:00.000-08:00

All righty then. As I intimated in my last post, I've had this discussion in "real life" (i.e., the one I don't write), and I've come to the same conclusion today about my WIP (work in progress) as I did those 19 years ago: maybe it's rash of me, but I'm keeping my baby.

Last night as I was falling asleep, I had one of those pokes on the shoulder by a character where they start telling you what they want. For reasons only she knows, this one wants to look like Rumer Willis. (In case anyone wants my opinion, I think Rumer is gorgeous. No one in the world looks like her. Yes, she has a very unusual face, but thank Heaven, because I think Hollywood has enough bland, cookie-cutter Barbies. *Stepping off soapbox*)

I'm not one to "cast" my books with actors as I write. They look how they look in my head, and it never occurs to me to find pictures of models or actors that look like them, or to think about who I'd want to play them in a movie. But when a character steps up and says, "Hey, in case you were wondering, the daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis? I look a lot like her"...I listen.

So my "baby" now has a face. And it's a fabulous one. I'm attached. It's too late for sensible decisions.

The Big "R" and Where to Go Next

2010-02-20T19:06:00.000-08:00

The first agent passed on The House of Arkhangel'sk. The angels and demons, she said, were too human. Well, at least I succeeded in making them what I wanted them to be.

I know I shouldn't let it affect me, but every rejection does, and of course it's worse when it's on a manuscript and not just a query. There's no pretending I missed the "magic words" that get you in the door. It was my writing that failed to engage.

I also know that unpublished writers should never write trilogies or series, but that was what was in my head, so that is what I wrote, and I've recently started working on a second trilogy in the same world. While I realize this is only one rejection, I'm afraid I may be heading for misery by staying on this path. If this book doesn't make it, I am wasting more years of my life on an unattainable goal.

This is what wrecked me the last time. I was working on a sequel to Anamnesis and had another in mind, and wrote a novella in the same world, and when it finally hit me that Anamnesis was not to be, I had nothing.

I can't seem to walk away from great characters once I've created them. (And they are. I know that. If the book does not succeed, it is not the fault of these characters, it is my failure to do them justice.) But I cannot spend another twelve years of my life chasing a mirage. I have to walk away and work on something new. I simply don't know how.

What's worse is that if I do walk away, I will always regret it. I wish I had finished the Anamnesis sequel, but everyone told me I should let it go. Shiva still gives me dark looks from deep in my soul where I've shoved her down. And I've been so excited about this new book as I start to plot. If I stop and let it go now, it will never come to be. It's like being told to get an abortion just as I've really gotten excited about being pregnant.

So what do I do? Do I do the sensible thing and get rid of it now before I get too attached, or do I go with what my heart wants? (The irony of my art imitating my life is not lost on me. I have been faced with this decision before.) Can I write something else? If I knew where these stories came from, I would be down there right now digging in the alluvial mud for another.

I think I hate my muse.

Fuel

2010-01-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

I'll be honest. I didn't read many books last year, partly because I was busy writing three of my own, and partly because I feel guilty when I read. I don't know why, but I always feel like I'm wasting time, even more egregiously than when I watch television. (Yes, I know. Sacrilege! And I should throw away my t.v. Yeah, whatever. Buffy.) I think it must go back to when I was a kid and I would sneak reading at every opportunity. There was always something else I was supposed to be doing. (And still is. I won't even tell you how long it's been since I cleaned this house.)

But words are fuel for writers, and I've been starving my poor writer-tum, so I'm making an effort to read more this year.

To that end, I'm going to keep a running tally of what I read—not for you, but for me, kind of like a dieting journal. Go ahead and be appalled at my reading choices if you must. I read what interests me.

So far this year:

Still working on: Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie. I started reading this a year ago as research for The House of Arkhangel'sk, and it has been very difficult to get through, not because it isn't fascinating and masterfully written, but because it is. I pick it up, and in two minutes, tears are streaming down my face. I last put it down just after the Imperial family was put under house arrest and Tsarevich Alexei's formerly loving servant began treating him like an animal. I don't know why I feel so close to this tragedy, but it makes my heart ache with every word.

Finished: Mark of the Demon, Diana Rowland. First in an urban fantasy/police procedural series. Loved it. Can't wait for book two. I mean, female cop who happens to be a demonic summoner accidentally conjuring an inhumanly beautiful Demonic Lord who decides to seduce her instead of tearing her into tiny, bloody pieces as honor demands...what's not to like?

Currently reading: Fool Moon, book two of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I don't have a copy of book one, which irks me, so I'm starting here. Initial impressions: enjoying it, but annoyed by the physical descriptions and stereotypical behaviors of some of the women, and really annoyed by Murphy's over-the-top assumptions of Harry's betrayal. I don't like it when characters are treated so unfairly by their supposed friends. I wouldn't tolerate it in real life, and it makes me mad on the character's behalf, and not it in a "you've really sucked me into this story" kind of way, but a "you'd better stop this or I'm throwing the book at the wall" kind of way.

Hoping to get around to reading: Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and hoping not to take as long as I took in reading Demons last year. It would have been a lot easier to keep up with the patronymics and remember who had done what to whom if I hadn't waited a week between every ten pages. (I have to stop considering my commute as my only reading time since I now only work at the office one day a week.) Even so, it was lovely, wickedly funny, and horribly depressing. I adored it.

Really psyched about reading: The White Road, book five in the Nightrunner series by Lynn Flewelling. Jumping-up-and-down psyched: I will be cruising the Bahamas with Lynn for its debut! (Not as her personal friend or anything, just joining her Writing on the Waves writing seminar at sea, which is, like, the most awesome idea ever...and has clearly regressed me to '80s teenspeak. And I think the video below in Making Me Mental really applies here as well.)

Writing right, or the penance of the pen

2010-01-24T01:09:00.000-08:00

I'm always interested in how other writers write. The conventional wisdom is "never edit as you go, just get through the draft," and "when you're done, put it in a drawer for six weeks and come back with perspective." Most writers I know try to follow that advice. Not me.

I plow on through during a single writing session, but the next time I sit down to write, I go back and read everything I wrote in the last session (whether it was a few hours ago or the day before) and edit until I'm reasonably satisfied with it before continuing. Sometimes my edits don't satisfy me and I put things I absolutely hate in brackets to revisit later. But it makes it easier for me to go on when I see where I've been and feel fairly certain that I'm going in the right direction.

When I'm done with a first draft, I go straight back to page one and read through for grammar, typos, and continuity, fix anything in brackets (if I can), and then immediately go back to page one to read again and rework sections I'm not happy with. That draft is what goes to beta readers and critique partners. (Though I have to make a confession: I don't really have critique partners. I have a single friend I share critiques with when I can, and another friend who's a very critical reader; Orson Scott Card refers to this as the Wise Reader: someone who knows how to let you know when you're on track and when you're skidding onto the shoulder—or way out into the dirt and weeds on an unimproved county road.) When I get their input, I start over. If I make significant changes, I go through all three stages again, and then try to find a reader I haven't annoyed.

The reason I write this way is in part related to my depression. Writing is necessary to stave it off (and usually results in some nice hypomania and occasional euphoria when it's all working), but when I reach "The End," I'm in danger of an epic crash.

The first two novels I wrote differently. I fed them a chapter at a time to my closest friend or partner (or both) while I was writing the first draft. I think it was necessary at that stage to have the external validation that someone was interested in the story and wanted to know what happened next. Without that, I would not have kept going.

But when I reached the end of both of those novels, it felt like the end of the world. I put them in a drawer for six weeks...six weeks that sank me deeper into despair, knowing that every word was crap, that I couldn't fix anything, that I would never write again. I tried to write other things, but kept obsessing about the "love I had lost." I didn't want someone new; I wanted them. By the end of six weeks, I had lost all faith in my writing and I was mired in hopelessness, which led to epic periods of writer's block. Maybe that still happens now, just a little bit later; I don't know. I certainly still have periods of despair, as evidenced by some of my recent posts. But I do know that re-reading and reworking while it was still fresh made me feel like I hadn't lost anything, and reassured me that I wasn't completely mad; the story needed work, but it was sound.

I guess what I'm getting at is that you don't have to follow writing advice that doesn't work for you, and you don't have to feel like a bad writer because you don't do what you're told. (I think that last bit was for me. Maybe this whole thing is for me. I seem to have a lot of "writer's guilt.") Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't follow the rules, or who wonders if I'm being "bad" and somehow the writing gods will find out and punish me. (Fundie childhood PTSD, anyone?)

So, tell me; how do you write? Do you think I'm writing wrong?

This anticipation...it's making me mental

2010-01-07T23:05:00.000-08:00

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's whine-fest to report that the agent I queried before Christmas responded today...and has requested a partial of my manuscript. [Brief, undignified dance ensues.]

Maybe I am in the ballgame after all.

If there's one thing I've learned from the overflowing cup of writing and publishing advice available on the Web, it's that any given drop may be both absolutely right and absolutely wrong. Simultaneously. Like a character in a Dickian dystopia, you never know which truths apply to you. Because it's all true. Until it's not.

And here's what my little undignified dance looked like, in case you were curious:

When there's deafening silence, you have to listen more closely

2010-01-06T18:36:00.000-08:00

Two great blog posts today from Rachelle Gardner and Janet Reid lay it on the line about what it means when you're getting no feedback from agents. (Here it is in short, if you're too lazy to click: it means epic FAIL.) This is not the first time I've heard this in recent weeks; several other agents have said as much on Twitter, albeit with a little less tact.

This revelation has put me into a serious funk. I've been hearing for years that when an agent sends you a form rejection, it doesn't mean that your writing isn't good, it just means it wasn't right for them. Coulda been anything, they say. "Go on, keep sending out those queries; did you hear how many times Harry Potter was rejected?" (Well, way less times than my book, actually. About a third as many times. But who's counting?) And so I did. Again, and again, and again. (To be fair, I did get two requests for partials eventually—and two polite letters saying it was well written but didn't excite them.)

If someone had been honest with me about what those silent rejections meant ten years ago, I would not have doggedly pursued representation for a manuscript that clearly was not even close. I would not have spent $4,000 on the Maui Writers' Conference (yeah, I'm that stupid) to pitch it to agents who had already rejected it during the pre-conference Manuscript Marketplace (pre-conference, but post-payment; no, I didn't feel at all like a chump getting on that plane for Hawaii). I would not have held onto that story for so many years, feeling brokenhearted every time I got a rejection letter but climbing back on the horse, because after all, it probably just wasn't right for them and someone would love it. It finally took a crippling depression for me to let it go and start something new.

That something new has so far received two form rejection letters. I consoled myself with thinking it simply wasn't right for those agents, rewrote my query letter, and got ready to send it out again. Reading those blog posts today gave me pause. Am I just going to keep repeating the same actions and expecting different results? How many silent rejections should I accrue before I get the message this time? Five? Ten? Twenty? If it weren't for the encouraging feedback I got at the Editors' Intensive, I would say that number was two.

So while I am going to send my little darling out there again, another dreadful possibility keeps me awake at night. Maybe, just maybe, I simply cannot write a query letter to save my life. I may have written a really great book...and a dozen iterations of an astoundingly bad query.

I've taken the WOW query writing class. I read Chuck Sambuchino's blog religiously. I follow Nathan Bransford. I have read dozens of other great blogs on querying. I have books on it. And yet I still managed to write a query that friends told me succeeded in making a really exciting story sound dull. (I have since rewritten it several more times, but how would I know a good query from a duck? I thought the first one was good after all.)

Maybe I'll finally figure out the answer to that one in another ten years.

What will this day be like? I wonder. What will my future be? I wonder.

2010-01-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

Here's another year in front of me in which anything could happen. Like Maria von Trapp, I'm afraid of the unknown, even as I long for it. And of course, everything is unknown. The actions I take this year may have nothing to do with the events that will fill it.

I was reminded of this on Christmas Eve on the way to a dinner party, when a truck came out of the unknown and slammed into the car I was in while we were stopped behind a doubleparked car. The driver of the truck did not slow, and as near as we can figure, he was trying to pass someone on the left before switching into the left lane to go around us.

There was that sickening thud and lurch I have experienced before (that sort of "Pevensies at the train station" feeling, only without being transported into Narnia), and then the back end of our car was torn off, and Jack's cane, which he keeps on the dash while driving, struck me and became tangled in my hair. I had no bruises afterward, so I can't quite figure out where or how the cane struck me, although my head hurt as if someone had rattled my brain inside my skull, but there it was: the brass handle of the cane wrapped in several inches of my curls.

Ahead of us, a white pickup truck lay on its side in the left lane. Our car had served as a ramp and the driver had soared over us and flipped his truck. People were running to it, screaming, while Jack and I stood stunned in the debris of our rear bumper (now in front of the car). Someone shouted that the door was stuck, and they couldn't get the driver out until the police arrived. When they eventually pulled him out, he seemed miraculously unscathed, though they put a brace on his neck and took him away in an ambulance. We were uninjured, but Jack's car was totalled. Being unable to work for the past few years and dealing with chronic pain and health issues, this was the last thing Jack needed. But it could have been worse. Much worse.

Through all of this, I kept thinking that no matter how safely I drive, no matter what I do, there is no way to control what others around me might do. Had the other driver turned a second earlier, he might have missed us completely; a second later, and he might have seriously injured us, or worse. We are forever at the mercy of the unknown. All we can do is react when it comes flying at us.

While pondering these things, I came across a blog post written earlier today by writer and literary agent Lucienne Diver, wherein she contemplates an idea that has "spiraled into something truly ambitious, something I’m afraid I won’t be able to pull off." Well, there it is, the unknown we can affect, but which still looms like a dragon in the dark: our own words. As every writer knows, when the muse throws down the gauntlet, you have to take it up. Will I be able to pull it off? Will I do my darlings justice? I don't know, but I have to try.

So I wonder what this day will be like, what my future will be, and I remember that I must dream of the things I am seeking. (I am seeking the courage I lack.) Thank you, Maria von Trapp and Lucienne Diver, you are so right. Pants kicked.

Livin' on the air in Cincinnati, or an Unbearable Lightness of Being

2009-12-23T15:06:00.000-08:00

I flew to Cincinnati against my agoraphobia's better judgment, expecting freezing rain and windchill factors of zero in both weather and critique. Two things happened that I was not expecting: the weather was relatively mild, and Writer's Digest editor Jane Friedman did not beat the hell out of my little darling. Instead, she compiled a list of agents I should send it to. (Yes, yes: "to whom I should send it.") I kept thinking, wait, does she think I'm someone else? Is this somebody's idea of a mean joke? Am I still rehearsing this session in my dream the night before? (I decided it could not be the latter, as my dreams run more toward, "This is the worst piece of tripe I have ever seen! What makes you think you have any business writing? Give me your keyboard: I'm cutting it in half!")

But Nelson Muntz did not pop out and say "HA, ha!" and I still had the piece of paper with all of the agent names on it when I went back to my hotel room. (And the little smiley in the margin of my manuscript where Jane liked my silly ZuZu's petals joke between the demons after the angel gets her wings.)

I was walking on air for several days afterward. Finally, some validation that maybe what I'm writing would be of interest to more than just a handful of my friends. Maybe, finally, I had something. And then the other pole of my bipolar head swung back around with a nauseating lurch, and the Shakespeare quotation that I have above my computer came back to me: "Expectation is the root of all heartache."

I recognize that this is chemical, that I have been staying inside my very dark, scaffolding-shrouded house for too long writing, and the Seasonal Affective Disorder is raging out of control. Still, I cannot convince myself that the upswing in my mood was not a total, helium-filled delusion, a Hindenburg awaiting a spark. The agent I queried on referral hasn't replied. Normally, I wouldn't expect a quick response, but I don't really know how it works when it's a referral, and I'm now trying to figure out if I've done something wrong. Yes, it's the holiday season, and I should take a step back and not worry about it right now; people are busy. Yes, I have other agents to query and a few more referrals. I think about that list of referrals and I'm a bit giddy for an instant. Still, I am gripped by self-doubt and self-hatred, as if the price for feeling good, for hope, is an equal amount of despair.

It's the Solstice, the time for lights in the darkness, the time to look into the leafless trees for the dancing snegurochka syla—but here I sit with an unbearable feeling of detachment and insubstantiality, a fear that like my mother, I am close to the end at the age of 43. I read of others for whom it comes so easy, who attain their goals so young, and I have been trying for so long, but it's always out of reach.

I pondered whether I should write this post. All that talk of building a platform, and the best I can do is blurt out my anxiety and paranoia for all the world to see like a stain of emotional incontinence. This is one of the reasons I've resisted the "public presence." I am all too familiar with my mood swings. Yet if I keep it to myself, it feels worse, and if I don't write when I feel like this, I don't write. I guess I'll take comfort in the fact that no one is yet following this blog, and apologize to my future followers should they ever happen across it.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to get myself to go outside and get a Solstice tree. After all, it will be up in plenty of time for the Russian Orthodox Christmas and New Year. Maybe the lights will work their terrestrial magic. As my leather demon Belphagor once said, it's why we fall.

Naked

2009-12-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

Oh, dear. Who knew that following another's blog would mean this silly blog would become visible? I admit, I'm woefully behind the times (and woefully behind on my blog). I have never "followed" anyone before, because I wasn't quite sure what it meant. No time like the present. (And no present like time.)

So I suppose I ought to briefly update my blog, as the last post was over a year ago. And now that I'm exposed, I suppose I'll have to keep updating my blog. This whole public persona thing gives me the wiggins, I have to say. (Stop staring at me! Oh, wait...that was only the painters standing on the scaffolding directly outside my bedroom window while I sit here in my bathrobe at 4:00 in the afternoon. Another story for another dreadful blog post.)

To sum up over a year of blog silence, I finished up The Blood Maiden's Vision (formerly Under Galga) rewrite last Thanksgiving and sent it off to an LGBT small press looking for romantic fantasy. In February, they responded to say that it wasn't LGBT enough. (Because the B in LGBT apparently stands for "by the way, we mean same-sex only.") But they did give me some very useful critique.

Meanwhile, I had vowed to complete my Queen of Heaven book once and for all (after all, I'd gone all the way to Russia and started learning a foreign language just to write it), and I had begun in December, giving myself a deadline of April 1. It wasn't long before I realized that, dammit, I was writing not a single novel, but a trilogy. I then gave myself three deadlines: April 1, June 1, and September 1, to write the whole thing. I've pretty much been sitting here in my bathrobe ever since.

I finished The House of Arkhangel'sk in early February, and a second draft by the beginning of March. Not wanting to lose momentum, I launched straight into The Fallen Queen, and finished up its second draft by the end of May. Each day became progressively more difficult to force myself to sit and write (I'm not one of those people who can crank out thousands of words in a day), but the story wanted out, and I wanted it out. Writing the final book, The Midnight Court, was a painful, upward climb (barefoot, through snow), but just two weeks past my deadline, The Queen of Heaven trilogy was finally done.

I had hoped I could remain a bit detached from this story, because the last one took so much out of me, and each rejection was like having the same raw wound torn open again and again. (To those who like to scoff at us sorry losers who feel pain over a rejection, you know, some of us just feel it, all right? It hurts like hell and I keep going. I'm bipolar: a rejection is a suicidal low, but the writing is an ecstatic, religious high.) But I fell in love again. I couldn't help it. The damn things just get under your skin.

This weekend I'll be in the sleet of Cincinnati paying a Writer's Digest editor $300 (not to mention airfare and lodging) to beat the hell out of my little darling. As much as I've always loathed this saying, I hope what doesn't kill my little darling will make it stronger. As for me? Hell, I'm a masochist. I don't know when to quit.

Poison Poisson

2008-09-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

First there was the mythologically bad "Greek Flounder" episode wherein I baked a gorgeous, pink fillet the size of a human infant into a complete, ungodly mush, then the dover sole I broiled with a little olive oil, lemon slices, and Ali'i Kula Lavender Seasoning Blend that was absolutely delish—and then there was last night's fish.

Again, I bought the dover sole fillets from Ralph's (packaged from the "fish and meat shoppe" display after it had closed for the day), and again I used my easy, tasty broiling recipe that was so yummy last week. Maybe these fillets were thicker and I didn't broil them long enough...they seemed overdone on the edges, but not quite "flaking easily with a fork" in the center. I didn't want them to get any dryer, so I took them out and decided they were done. It didn't taste bad per se, but it sure didn't taste fabulous. I ate half and then decided it just wasn't good, and I tossed the rest.

My stomach started churning shortly thereafter, and within a few hours, well...I won't go into the gory details, but suffice it to say, the digestive system just isn't supposed to work that way. Garrrrrrrrrrrr.

Hey, that reminds me: it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day and I completely forgot. Oh, well, thar she blows. (Yeah, you think that pun made you groan? I'll give you groaning. Come here and eat this fish I just made you.)

After eating soft, innocuous foods and drinking a lot of fluids today, I decided I could properly digest something, and I had these Zesty Lemon chicken breasts that I bought along with the fish. (Don't worry, it wasn't Ralph's "fish and meat shoppe," chicken, it was a prepackaged Zacky Farms thing; nothing untoward will follow.) It said "best if grilled," and I thought, Hey, I haven't used my mini-Weber all summer and the damn season's almost gone, and so what if it's already 5:00? There was this fabulous golden undertone to the blue-gray overcast San Francisco sky, and a sweet smelling breeze, and one gorgeous pink bloom on my aphid-ravaged Betty Boop rosebush, and I happened to have an unopened bag of charcoal briquets, so I fired up the Weber and threw on the breasts, and with very little fuss, I had made some really tasty chicken. How damn hard was that? Why don't I cook more often? Why don't I grill more often? Why don't I go outside more often?

Anyway, I managed to squeeze some pleasure out of an otherwise unpleasant day of stomach upset, JavaScript menu-tweaking frustration of Sisyphusian proportions, and an acute episode of "crazy brain and impending doom," and now I'm watching Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts bounce on Ghost Whisperer, and ultimately, I think I have earned a nice bath with lavender salts, candles, and incense. Of course, that means I'll have to spend 20 minutes scrubbing the tub, which will trigger my OCD because the old porcelain never feels clean, and there are stains that never come out. I'll let you know how it goes.

Synchronicity revisited

2008-09-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

Other Betty Blue in the UK (whom I discussed previously) has mysteriously changed her name to just "Betty," making my Synchronicity post look a little silly (though not entirely, as everything else is still true--except that my birthday is apparently earlier than hers and now I'm older; hmph). So I have to wonder, did she find my blog and not want to be associated with me? (Yes, I'm paranoid; next question?)

I have to say, Other Betty (formerly Other Betty Blue), it irks me that you don't allow comments or have an e-mail link on your blog. I'm feeling slighted. It's not every day that one finds a doppelganger lurking about the Web, and I thought it was pretty cool. And now...snubbed by my own doppelganger. I feel truly unloved.

I found her

2008-07-09T00:37:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about "the girl that got away" for many years. I wrote a love story about her called "Heat" that was published in Best Lesbian Love Stories. (I thought I was just writing another erotica story, but it turned out to be something more.) I have no idea if she ever shared my feelings. There was one night in my memory where it seems that something else could have happened, if I hadn't been so dense (and so drunk); that's what inspired the story. I don't know if my memory is even accurate or a fantasy I've created over the years. It didn't even dawn on me that I'd been in love with her until several months after I'd moved away, when I realized how intensely I missed her. (I was involved with a man at the time, we both were, and being bisexual wasn't something it occurred to me that I could act on. Seems silly now, but I was 21, and had only recently escaped my Fundie youth.)

We didn't part on the best of terms, and I think it was partly because I needed to invent a reason to break that bond with her, because I knew I was leaving town for good. She went back to the reservation she grew up on, and I moved 2,000 miles away to the big city.

But I've been unable to stop thinking of her for 20 years. Every six months or so I Google her, trying to find her. I came close a few times, but was always a few months behind her, finding the place she'd been, but no longer was.

Tonight something on t.v. reminded me of her, and I looked again...and there she was, on a reunion site. And there were other links, articles mentioning her name in local papers: an obituary for her father who recently died, her time in a recent marathon, a paper she'd written for the school on the reservation. It's like the universe finally stopped hiding her from me.

And now...well, I don't know what to do. If I contact her, 20 years of dreaming of her might crumble into an unpleasant reality that I imagined our connection so many years ago, that she thinks badly of me because of the way we parted, that she's as straight as an arrow, a homophobe, or dear goddess, a Republican. Whatever her response, I know we'd still be separated by more than the 2,500 miles that are between us. We talked about it once, how I had the "city" in my bones, and she had the quiet life, the reservation, in her blood.

I know. I'm being a coward.

Fluff

2008-07-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm housesitting in the East Bay for a couple of weeks (a "writing" vacation away from shrieking cockatiels and other distractions) and the place has a darling garden full of flowers and trees (and birds and bees). I've been sitting in the studio behind the garden where the computers are, trying to work on my final tweaks to the fuel source in Under Galga, smelling this gorgeous jasmine that drapes the entire fence along the right side, just outside the studio door.

As I stare at the page and jump over to Google and skip back over to read more Capital Hill, I realize I really can't think. My head is full of fluff and I can't concentrate. Not that this is an entirely unprecedented state for me, but I've been having more trouble than usual getting myself to actually write two words in the novel. It finally dawns on me as I wait for some laundry to fluff to get the wrinkles out before I fold it that my head is thick with jasmine scent. To which I am having an allergic reaction.

This makes me sad. I love the smell of jasmine. Why is it that something I adore has to be on the list of things that hurt me? Moments ago, I cleaned the fluff out of the dryer lint trap, and I thought, yeah...that's the stuff in my head. If only I had a lint trap.

Ah, well. At least I can soak in the hot tub later.

Synchronicity

2008-06-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is just weird. Today I decided that it didn't make sense for my blog title to be different from my URL (it was bettyisblue.blogspot.com, because bettyblue.blogspot.com was taken by some Jennifer in Amsterdam who posted all of one line to her blog in November of 2000), so I decided to change it. First I thought about the 37.2, and figured I wouldn't be allowed to use a period (full stop, for you Brits), so I came up with 37point2degreesinthemorning. And that just looked silly long. So I thought, okay: 37point2degrees. That's nice and neat. There's no way anyone could possibly have that URL. I like it. It's in.

And then Blogger told me I couldn't have it because it already existed. WTF? Who in the world would have come up with that exact shortened version of an obscure anglicized title of a cult French film and replaced the period with the word "point"?

Well, it turns out, I would.

Check it out: 37point2degrees.blogspot.com—a 41-year-old bipolar woman calling herself Betty Blue, using the same blog title and the same freakin' template! What are the odds of this? I wanted to e-mail her and tell her she had a doppleganger over on the other side of the pond, but she has no e-mail listed, and doesn't take comments on her blog. Drat. Well, other bipolar Betty Blue, maybe you'll stumble upon me one of these days and we can chat. (Hopefully, we won't cause our two worlds to explode if we ever meet face to face.)

Oh, and what does Other Betty Blue list as one of her interests? Synchronicity.

Ah the delicious irony: censoring a post I once titled Big Bloggerbrother

2008-06-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

What a difference a year-and-a-half makes. Rather than boring you with a long, drawn-out pontification about What I Did on My Depression Vacation, I'll just summarize:

Jack moved in with me and promptly became very ill (was it me?) and then disabled with a chronic, genetic immune disorder known as CVID
Finished that semester of Practical Spoken Russian, but hardly wrote another word on my novel
Went to Singapore again for work for a pre-launch strategy session for our new website
Went to Hollywood with Chris for an Adobe CS3 conference, where I failed to properly fulfill the role of wingwoman (sorry; next time I'll shout: you do NOT want to tap that!)
Went on a driving tour of the Cascades with Sam (which was a blast, except for the bugs...Sam and I hate bugs and we are petitioning for their removal from the planet), coming back down via the Oregon coast and ending with two plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It)
Started seriously working out, went on NutriSystem and lost 20 pounds and got back into a bikini
Went to the Maui Writers Conference on (duh) Maui; worth it for the week I spent there before the conference at a cheap condo, cuz, hey, it's Maui; not really worth the nearly $3,000 spent on the conference (which I really should have known; fantasy writers are not "real" writers); but I had dinner (and lunch) with Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, so that was cool (P.S., did not get a publisher)
Sank into a deadly depression and gained back 20 pounds
Got my stories "When She Was Good" and "Handy Man" published in Best Lesbian Erotica 2008 and More Five-Minute Erotica
Went to Pantheacon with Jack and Sunny, where Sunny and I discovered we're both on a new path embracing Dark Magic
Took an acrylic painting class with Steph and painted one of my photos of succulents from the Ali'i Kula Lavender Farm on Maui, which was then put into the instructor's gallery display for the class (which I felt pretty good about, even though it was a silly thing)
Did a final, full edit and rewrite on Under Galga (in between hard drive and power cord dying on my MacBook) and wrote a 12-page synopsis in preparation for submitting it to an e-book publisher (because, let's face it, I will never be a "real" writer)
Went to Lisbon, Portugal for a conference for work, and then spent three days in Barcelona with Chris (who has been living there and "telecommuting" for five months)
Became completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party after the vile treatment of Hillary Clinton and the Big Bold Return of Pre-70s Sexism Complete With Code Words, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, nowotimean?

So that was my year (and change). What's next on the Betty agenda? Taking a housesitting "vacation" in the East Bay to do some writing on Arkhangel'sk in a quiet, gardeny house with no psychotic, screaming cockatiels for a couple of weeks.

Too old to learn new tricks, too dumb to stop trying

2007-01-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

Another year goes by and I still have a vague idea of "going back to school" and no idea what I want to do. At what point does it stop being "cute"? (As if it were ever.)

Because I could think of nothing else, I am taking more Russian. I've written very little on Arkhangelsk, but perhaps this will inspire me once again.

To be fair, I was a little busy last year (while writing papers and presentations for Russian Culture) with creating the user interface for our new website, creating a user guide, style guide, training manual, and testing scripts, flying to Singapore to conduct user acceptance testing and content manager training with the Asia Pacific group, and then (oh, did I forget to mention this?) spending a month in St. Petersburg (yeah, that St. Petersburg) studying Russian.

Then there was Jack being laid off when I got back from Russia in July, my boss up and quiting in October, eleventh-hour activism to help return sanity to Congress, and the utter languishment of our website launch due to a third, and then fourth CEO replacement. (Meet the new boss: same as the old boss. Or maybe not. The new boss lives in Minneapolis and seems to have forgotten Chris and I exist.) And that Christmas thing. Okay, so I'm making excuses.

But today I re-reapplied at City College, spoke with my Russian Culture teacher (who sponsored the Summer in St. Petersburg), and will be taking her second-semester Practical Spoken Russian class on Wednesday nights.

Perhaps I will even get back to doing yoga. Perhaps monkeys will fly out of my butt. (Hopefully not during yoga.)

In the random category: Dumbass shit that sticks with me all year? Not realizing "Camus" was the spelling of the French philospher and thinking it was pronounced "came-us," and referring to Sasha Baron Cohen as Ali G, even though I knew that was a character and not his name. Why does this sort of thing haunt me? I don't know. But it makes me feel abysmally stupid.

Initial Apgar: A forgotten entry

2006-02-07T12:37:00.000-08:00

After many months, I have finally popped in to write a new entry in my blog, only to find one languishing in the drafts. So here's that:

Sometime in the last two weeks, I started writing. I forgot to make note of when I began; I just got so excited about the coalescing story in my head that I couldn't wait any longer, and even though (once again) I have not fully plotted this book, I jotted down an opening scene from the point of view of the "skeptic" character. I just wanted to introduce the two main characters, but once I had done so, I felt compelled to flesh out what had come before: the Disturbance, wherein the protagonist's family is slaughtered.

So then I started to "jot down" that scene, and discovered it was impossible to make this a mere catalyst for the protagonist's action. Furthermore, Agnetha/Agnieszka needed to tell her own story in first person.

[Continued Tuesday, January 16, 2007]

What I ended up with is, as usual, flouting the rules of writing: a novel that switches between first-person and third-person limited omniscient. Will it work? Who knows? Maybe my novels will never be publishable, but maybe I need to give up on that dream and be true to my muse. Bern's blindness should have remained a secret, 'gite speech should have remained a dialect, Shiva's story should have remained in Anamnesis as a single book, and the sex should not have been compromised. Screw publishers. I'll stay at a dreary desk job for the rest of my life no matter what I do anyway.

So there's that.

Gotta be startin' somethin'

2006-01-19T23:03:00.000-08:00

My friend Chris is an instigator. If you mention an interest you've considered in passing, he challenges you to pursue it. "Why not? What have you got to lose?" He is pursuing his own dreams and interests and doesn't take no for answer when obstacles are placed in his way.

He recently came back to Mercer after a four-year absence, working directly with me, while going back to school for a degree in classical languages, and talking of school got me thinking of my own half-assed attempt to go back to school as a post-baccalaureate pre-med student when I was 30. The thing is, I'm almost ten years older now, and it's ten years more impossible, yet this weird little urge never quite goes away. Watching Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy lately, both shows that focus on interns, I feel like I'm missing something vital by not having that experience. But is that all I want out of it? Do I really want to be a doctor, or do I, for some inexplicable reason, only want to go to medical school? Because that's the part I imagine doing, not the doctoring. That's the part I imagine loving: the learning, and the proving myself.

Yet on Wednesday morning, Chris almost had me signing up to take a full-time classload of General Chemistry at City College starting immediately. The idea is absurd; it truly is. Going back to school at 40 to become a doctor at 50? Who am I kidding? And what, pray tell, would become of my true passion: my writing? Is it discouragement over not getting published that makes me yearn for something else, something I know I could do, rather than this capricious field that doesn't care whether you're good or bad or how much blood and sweat you pour into it? Is it because going back to school makes me imagine that I'm still young and life is still ahead of me, not half behind me? The funny thing is, the last time I was in school I got so inspired to write that I finally finished my first novel, blowing off my chem class after spring break and deliberately getting a D so I could take it again sometime if I ever decided to and work for an A. I think there's something wrong with my brain.

But before leaping back into chemistry, I thought I'd pursue another interest that I've never gotten around to, one that is tangentially related to Arkhangelsk: learning Russian. After renting Russian Ark last week and watching one of the extras about people living in St. Petersburg and working at the Hermitage, I wanted to learn the language even more. And it just so happened that City College was offering a beginning Russian class starting this week, one night a week, at the jr. high just down the street from me. I mentioned it to Chris, and he said, "Take it! Sign up right now!" When I mentioned it to my friend Jon at tea, he exclaimed that he'd always wanted to learn Russian too, and might be persuaded to take the class with me. So I wrote to the instructor to find out if we could still add it, even though classes started this week, but sadly, the class was already full.

When I told Chris that the Russian plans had fallen through, he said, "So take something else!" He uses that same "won't take no for an answer" attitude when I try to make excuses for why I want to put it off. He tells me to go look and see if there's anything else I'm interested in at the campus near me. I look, and discover Russian Culture and Civilization. There's no good reason I should take this other than Chris is prodding me, and I've just been admitted to City for the spring semester, so I feel obligated to take something. Well, there is one other reason, which is that it might be good research for Arkhangelsk. So what the hell. I've written to the instructor to see if I can add it next week. And in the summer semester, Jon says he definitely wants to take Russian. (An interesting side note: the instructor of Russian Culture and Civilization takes a group of students to St. Petersburg every summer to live with Russian families for a month and experience the arts and culture while being immersed in the language. Wouldn't that be cool? But that costs money, and money is increasingly something I haven't got.)

One final offhand comment to Chris, and I've ended up committing to take Hatha yoga twice a week with him starting Monday. I can definitely say one thing: working with Chris again won't be boring.

Love, angel, music, baby

2006-01-14T16:12:00.000-08:00

"Inspiration comes from everywhere and anywhere. I've been inspired by landscapes, by vivid dreams, by other books, by movies, by art history lectures, by passing comments, by a fleeting emotion, by misremembering an entry in a dictionary. Beyond that, I couldn't say. How it all coalesces into fiction is a mystery, even to me." ~ Jacqueline Carey

I read this earlier today, when I wandered by Jacqueline Carey's website to jog my memory about the name of Terre D'Ange (TNB* is tentatively set in Arkhangelsk, and I had forgotten that the Kushiel setting was a "land of angels"—I didn't want them to sound similar), and I got to thinking about how I would answer this question ("Where do you get your ideas?"). Everything that she said fits for me as well (especially the part about dictionary entries), but I would also add ineffable feelings evoked by a twinkle of light, a color, a note from a violin.

Music, in particular, as I've noted here before, almost compels me to write. There are notes that fill my head and heart so completely, make me feel so intensely, that I think I might burst, or weep, or die. These notes feel as though they're swimming inside my brain: physically touching the pathways of my mind, as though they themselves are the firing of synapses and neurons connecting; it is better than a drug, though it only lasts for a fleeting instant. It's the instant after, the loss of that ecstatic feeling, that drives me to write. In my writing, when it works, when it's good, and my characters themselves are feeling those moments of ecstasy and agony, that's where the high lasts forever.

There are also moments in books and film, moments of romance, eroticism, and tragedy that make me long to find that feeling again, to capture it in the ecstatic notes of a written word. Tonight I saw Brokeback Mountain, and another piece of TNB's puzzle fell into place; my demon character, my fallen angel, will not be the love interest of the female protagonist; he will have a secret, his "fall": the love of another man.

Instead, the love interest will likely be another character, one whom I had already decided will be enchanted by a demon queen, a nod to Rillian and The Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair. This was bothering me a bit; I thought the idea was "illegitimate" because it was inspired by a story of someone else's; then, while looking up names for my demon Lady, I moved from a search of celtic names to a search of fairy names, and stumbled upon the story of Tam Lin. To my surprise, I realized that Lewis himself had been inspired by this tale, for there was the enchanted knight in the underworld of a fairy queen, and even the mention of a green kirtle. And probably, the writer of Tam Lin heard a story in his or her youth, a folk tale passed on by verbal tradition, of a man tricked and taken by the queen of the fairies, and perhaps that verbal tradition began from a dream someone had, or an afternoon in a meadow listening to a lute whose notes struck moments of transporting ecstasy, like the fingers of the fairy queen herself plucking at one's neural pathways.

The notes of unattainable fairy music, as I drove home tonight from Brokeback Mountain, striking those flashes of painful beauty in my head that make me yearn for an outlet in words, came this time from Depeche Mode, in a song ironically about the desire for no words at all:

Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
Painful to me
Pierce right through me

And that is how the notes make me feel: they pierce right through me.

So there it is for tonight: the inexplicable mishmash of moments, music, and movies that will become—that must become—a story.

*The Next Book™

Early polypeptides

2006-01-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

Further thoughts on The Next Book™:

Setting: Arkhangelsk, an island city shrouded in mist; a city of angels.

Protagonist: [Agnetha], daughter of the royal family of Arkhangelsk. Agnetha is third in line for the throne, her older brothers above her by birth order, not by sex. She has one younger sister.

Antagonist: [Anael], a high-ranking angel intent on usurping the throne; Anael has enchanted [Kaleb], Agnetha's cousin, using him to overthrow the royal family.

Other characters: [Byron/Bryson], as previously described.

Balance: The royal family has an idyllic life; all the children are close. Agnetha feels something lacking in the state of sterile perfection and peace. She is fascinated by the demons, her father's subjects, and disguises herself to move among them, playing at games of chance.

Disturbance: While Agnetha has slipped out for one of her adventures, the royal family is overtaken by Kaleb, who has also killed his own father, the king's brother. (His mother died when he was young, and he has spent much time with the royal family, treated like a brother.) A servant of the palace who has escaped finds Agnetha in town, still disguised, and gives her the news.

Problem: Agnetha, the true heir to the throne, must go into hiding, and must find a way to defeat Kaleb (who is working powerful magic [something to do with music?]) to take her rightful place before she is caught and executed.

Complication: Agnetha discovers the ugliness beneath the perfect veneer of the Dominions [higher order of angels]; good and evil, angel and demon become less black and white, and along the way, her relationship with Byron becomes an entanglement. He is a thief, and unapologetic about it, but he has become her friend. Agnetha can't quite reconcile the contradictions.

I gotcher "writerly" right here

2005-12-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

So the blog hasn't had any writerly ramblings since August. What are you gonna do about it? I said there would be random rants, didn't I? Do you want the damn fork? DO YOU??

All right then. So I seem to have this pattern...I can write from May through August. If I'm "in the zone" (Jesus Christ on a crumpet, I hate that phrase), I can write like a demon, day and night...and then the light changes, and I got nuthin'. How lame is that? (Am I the only one who sees that? That the light changes, somewhere around the last two weeks of August, drastically, dramatically, from bright, summer white to the weak, tired bisque of autumn? Is it just here, in the Bay Area? I can't remember anymore. Tucson is twelve-hundred miles and a million years from town.) (And while we're on parentheses, I overuse them, apparently. Like adverbs.)

My point is, here it is, the last day of the year, and I'm getting older by the second. I'm unhappy and filled with anxiety all the time, with a new psychosomatic illness every week. And I know that in large part it is my inability to write that is making me feel this way. So I'm going to force myself to write, and to write something that is not set in the world of Anamnesis, because thinking about Anamnesis thrusts me down into the Slough of Despond. (And I'm going to start all of my sentences with "and" and "so" and use tons of parentheses, just to bug you.)

And so (ha!) here are my nebulous ideas for the The Next Book™:

Setting: I dunno. Probably not the Real World, but a magical realism setting is an option.

Protagonist: Some guy named Byron, or something like Byron, an antihero. He is a demon, of sorts, who performs cheap/fake magic tricks, perhaps a traveling "fool," and a thief. (He is not a Scarlet Pimpernel, a Nightrunner, or a Malcolm Reynolds, but a geniune, amoral thief; there is, however, an episode of Firefly that inspired this proto-character: "The Message.")

When you can't run anymore, you crawl, and when you can't do that...well, if you're a Flan, you know the rest.

And that's it for now. At least it's something.

Dead can't wait

2005-11-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

On November 2nds past, I've participated in the bewitching Dia de Los Muertos candlelight procession through the San Francisco Mission District. It is a recognition of the impermanence of life, and of death that is its natural companion. It is also a time to honor those who have come before us, those who are no longer with us. The procession ends at a park filled with beautiful altars celebrating the lives of those we have lost.

This November 2, however, I honored the dead by taking to the streets with thousands of my neighbors in one of hundreds of World Can't Wait protests held across the nation. Over 2,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens have died in an illegal war based on lies, and more continue to die every day. With every illegitimate breath they take, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their greedy cabal spit on the graves of those slain. How much more damage will these criminals do to the Earth in the remaining three years of their falsely-gotten reign? How many more must die to line their pockets and the pockets of their corporate cronies? Drive out the Bush regime; the world can't wait.

Below are the pictures I took at the protest on my cell phone camera.

Hear no truth

2005-10-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

Oh, this is just too good not to pass on. This is what happens when conversative talk radio meets liberal talk radio. The liberal speaks the truth and the conservative becomes willfully deaf. Usually, they don't demonstrate it quite so literally for us, but this video is a must-see.

And when you're done, make sure you check out the Randi Rhodes show on Air America Radio weekdays from noon to 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

Lost in Katrina

2005-09-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I've been obsessively reading the latest updates on the tragic situation in New Orleans and wishing there was something I could do to help. Thanks to my usual Internet haunt, Democratic Underground, I found something. I've been volunteering my time and data entry skills:

Join the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.

It's easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to copy data into a form.

After Katrina, many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of Internet websites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about missing persons or persons who want to let others know they’re okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it's almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites - making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We’re requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

To get started please click here.

The results of your work will be searchable at the Katrina Data Project page.

Questions? Email katrina-people (at) activist-tech.org

If you've spoken to me lately, you probably know my views on this disaster and where culpability lies for the unconscionable lack of response from the federal government and Bush administration in the horror that has followed it. If you have any doubts about my "tinfoil hat" ideas, please view this compendium of posts at Democratic Underground and find out for yourself.

It is finished

2005-08-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

(Hey, I figure as long as I'm waxing biblical, I might as well steal quotes.)

After three weeks, it is finished, at 24,241 words and 95 pages. I finished The Devil's Garden on Thursday night, but wasn't satisfied with it. I had completed all of the plot elements I'd intended, and the characters had changed in a satisfying way, yet there was something missing. The ending was rather flat and I wasn't sure what to do with it.

I fiddled with the last page a bit on Friday morning, some more during work, then finally came up with just what I wanted on the train ride home. What was lacking was a wrap-up of the theme, plus a little bit of meat to dangle on the hook to entice the reader to want more, since this entire exercise has been done in hopes of garnering the interest of agents and publishers in Anamnesis. (Funny how along the way, I fell in love with the characters anyway. But that's the only way it works for me, really. And that's what makes rejection even more painful.)

So now that I'm done, I have a bit of post-partum depression. My baby is no longer part of me, no longer belongs to me. I have pushed it into the world to make its own way. What can I do to assuage this feeling? Why, write another, of course! Luckily, in the world of artistic creation, being addicted to that feeling of newness, of having something all my own, is an advantage instead of a pathological defect.

But before that, of course, there's editing and rewriting. Who says I have to cut the apron strings just yet? She hasn't even been weaned, for heaven's sake! So...who out there would like to volunteer to be a reader and help change diapers?

Godsmack

2005-08-04T00:28:00.000-07:00

I just killed a man. (I won't say whom, as some gentle readers have expressed a desire not to be given any more spoilers.)

I always feel rotten when I have to kill a character (unless they're deserving of it, as discussed in Invoking Kali), as if I've personally set them up for a fall and betrayed them. Well, because I have.

I also feel a certain weird sense of exhilaration, or at least satisfaction. Is it simply the act of playing god? It's an interesting question, since one of the themes of Devil's is the nature of deity. My gods possess magic, they create by speaking, but I've always intended for readers to infer that this is not what sets them above ordinary people. It is their capacity for sacrifice.

No matter how much I try to avoid the brainwashing of my fundie upbringing, the Christ archetype finds its way into my writing. But then I remember that he is only another story, built from even earlier stories, and that this theme of sacrifice goes back to the first human awareness that other things feel. (Though we are not necessarily the only creatures with that awareness, as evidenced by the odd story one reads in the news about animals sheltering children. The animist in me likes to believe the sacred lives in all things.)

Ultimately, it is the divinity of human beings—the inherent divinity so elusive to us—that I am trying to invoke through the stories of Anamnesis. We are the gods and the devils. This is hell, and it is also heaven. And someday, maybe, we'll remember that.

Invoking Kali

2005-08-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

A common theme in my writing is vengeance for women.

The stories from real life that invade my consciousness on a daily basis, that feed my anxiety and depression, are left, for the most part, without justice. The file just grows bigger every day, and the message is repeated in an endless loop: if you are female (or dare to look like it, or act like it), you are something to be used. Even your pain and sorrow are commodities, as is every piece of your body. We like to go about our days behaving as if this isn't so. And then we catch a glimpse of the news, and we are reminded.

It's a wonder more women (and most men) aren't consumed by morbidly debilitating depression. How do we go on knowing how futile the struggle is? Some days, I don't.

On the other days, I stab and beat and kick and draw and quarter the perpetrators of injustice with tiny marks on a piece of paper (or a computer screen) like a goddess of vengeance. It isn't enough, but without it, I don't know where I'd be.

It isn't often that I have the opportunity to do something in the ugly, raw, real world from which I prefer to escape that will actually make a difference for even one woman caught in the violent machine of misogyny. But this morning, in my e-mail, an opportunity arrived.

The woman in the photos above (yes; both photos are the same woman) is Linda Loaiza.

FreeChoiceSavesLives.org offered me the opportunity to send a letter to top Venezuelan officials to demand a fair and timely trial for her torturer, the son of an influential Venezuelan who has so far been deemed beyond the law for what he did to Linda over the four months of her captivity in his apartment. A few months back, I sent a letter to the World Health Organization through FCSL and helped to end a Bush administration-engineered delay in adding drugs such as RU 486 to the WHO's List of Essential Medicines so that women around the world could have access to them. I believe my small part helped, and I hope it will help Linda, too.

There are details that I could not read, but the summary on the letter campaign page was enough to haunt me for the rest of my life.

A minor glimmer on the market elliptical

2005-08-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

(I like saying elliptical. It's my new favorite word.)

In a follow-up to Well, isn't that special, I looked at the markets I had saved in my WritersMarket.com short fiction folder, and discovered one among them that actually takes novella submissions of up to 25,000 words: Fantasy & Science Fiction.

A long-shot is better than no shot at all. (Which reminds me; I bought a lottery ticket and I haven't looked up the winning numbers yet. I am probably a millionaire 48 times over right now, so why am I talking to you people?)

There is also the even longer shot of Asimov's, a mostly hard SF magazine that considers some fantasy novellas, but has a 15,000 word maximum. Since, however, I wrote the 19,250th word moments ago, and the climax and dénouement have yet to occur, I'm thinking that one is a tad unrealistic.

But, hey, there's always cutting all of those adverbs!

Adverbs, apparently, are the Devil's Tongue. (In which case, why should I not use yet more? I should pepper my paper with them until people turn purple just reading it!) Every time I see writing advice from an author, the most they seem to be able to offer is "don't use adverbs." Thanks. That must be why you're making the big bucks. (Oh, look; what's that I see on page one of your bloated, unedited piece of tripe? Adverbs!) I swear, if one more person tells me that's the key to great writing, or that only the lowest of the low ever use adverbs, I am going to tie them up and read an adverb-riddled Danielle Steele novel to them until they choke on their own vomit. (Of course, I'd probably vomit myself into oblivion long before they exhausted their own supply.)

So, back to it. Page 78 and the beginning of the carnage await.

This my shit

2005-07-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

This post has only peripherally to do with The Devil's Garden or writing. Okay, really, it has nothing to do with it.

But it does.

Music has always been inextricably linked with reading and writing for me. If a particular song or album is playing while I read a particularly dramatic scene in a book, those notes always evoke that passage for me. Other times, certain notes in songs give me an overwhelming urge to write, and color the emotion of the piece I'm working on.

When I was a kid, I used to read The Chronicles of Narnia every year around Christmas. The first time I read The Silver Chair, I was listening to a ghastly Christian contemporary album by a group called Share. There was a song about Paul dreaming that he must go to Macedonia, with some slightly eerie-sounding, off-key notes, and dream people crying "come to Macedonia and help us!" The song was called "The Way of the Wicked," with the refrain from Psalms 146:9, "the way of the wicked he turneth upside down." This song began to play as Rillian was tied to the silver chair, during the one time of day that he was himself, begging Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum to release him. The lyrics "in a dream, I saw your face; heard your muffled midnight cry," played as the Lady of the Green Kirtle strummed her lute, trying to enchant the children and marshwiggle, asking them what the world above was, and telling them it didn't exist, that the Underland, where she ruled and Prince Rillian was her captive and enchanted consort was the one, true world.

As silly as that song now seems to me, it made me weep as I listened to the Macedonians crying out for help while on the page in front of me, Rillian struggled against his bonds. (Perhaps this has something to do with my current predilection for bondage. Hey, thanks, C.S. Lewis!) At any rate, each year when I read that passage, I had to listen to that song, to take me to that same place of hope and despair, and to this day, that is the moment in all of the Chronicles that I love most (although I no longer own that album, and probably wouldn't listen to it unless actually tied in a silver chair and forced).

A few years later, in college, I was working on one of those novellas-by-default that I had begun in high school, and I had the Thompson Twins' Into the Gap in the tape deck, on the song "The Gap," and it suddenly turned my story in a different direction than I had meant to take it, where the heroine finds herself seduced by a sultan of sorts, despite the promises of love she has made to the hero. One might argue that Azena (the very Azena whose story would later become Under Galga) lost her innocence and added a dimension to her moral character because of the Thompson Twins.

So what, in the remotest way, does any of this have to do with The Devil's Garden? Well, it's convoluted, but on Saturday, I went to the music store to get a copy of Gwen Stefani's Love, Angel, Music, Baby because, I am a tad embarrassed to admit, "Hollaback Girl" has me thoroughly hooked. While at the Wherehouse, what should I discover but a copy of the CD Into the Gap? In one of my many moments of true physical nostalgia, I purchased it.

Now, whether my interest in Gwen Stefani has been piqued lately because of thinking about Gwen Araujo, who chose her name because of her admiration for Stefani, or whether my mental image of Cillian/Ume has become Gwen Araujo's face because of my thinking lately about Gwen Stefani, as that song sticks in my head, I have no idea. Maybe neither has anything to do with the other. Who can say?

And "The Gap"? Well, that moment in the early prototype of Under Galga that changed into the seduction of a maiden by a sultan in a desert oasis because of "The Gap" later became the basis of an entirely different book: Anamnesis. And Ume's seduction by MeerAlya is merely another version of that seduction by the mystery and magic of the "East," formed in my head as a child in part by C.S. Lewis's Calormen in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle. And the song on Into the Gap that comes before "The Gap" happens to be "No Peace for the Wicked." And it's playing right now. Reminding me of "The Way of the Wicked," which is inextricably entwined with Rillian's escape from Underland, a name not coincidentally used as a pun for the underground-dwelling community in Under Galga.

Uh huh, this my shit.

Well, isn't that special

2005-07-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

I've done a great deal of research into writing markets over the course of my Anamnesis obsession. I wrote the novel first, of course, before having the sense to become informed about the crucial business side of things.

So, after coming across the brilliant idea of writing a novella to sell a larger work, did I heed the difficulties I've had in reworking Anamnesis to fit the market and apply the market research step to my deliberately plotted novella?

Of course not. Today, on reaching 16,000 words, I thought I'd look up the article I'd read that put this idea in my head in the first place. Typing "novella markets" into Google yielded a wealth of information that I should have read before now.

It seems that there has never been much of a market for the sort of thing I'm doing, and what little there was has declined in recent years. And of those markets who do publish novellas, few publish anything longer than 15,000 words.

Well, aren't I clever?

For every Gwen

2005-07-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

It has been noted that I seem to gravitate toward characters with ambiguous gender. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but I know that it's a very conscious choice. I envision future readers discovering these characters and thinking, "Wow—there are trannies and bisexuals and polyamorous relationships here, and it's like it's normal."

I was picturing Cillian/Ume, the main character, as looking something like Gwen Araujo, the young trans woman from Hayward who was brutally murdered three years ago for simply being who she was. In researching pictures of her on the Web, I discovered that her murderers' retrial is going on right now; the first ended in a mistrial, I believe, with a hung jury, following the obscene defense that her sexuality, her desirability, damaged her killers' masculinity when they learned that she had been born biologically male. This is an actual defense in the 21st century, that it's okay to beat someone to death in front of a crowd of tacitly approving people, to beat someone in the face with soupcans and frying pans, knocking them so hard across the room that their head leaves a large hole in the wall; it's perfectly understandable to do this and for society to condone it if you're afraid you might be turned into a fag by desiring that person, and then to throw that person away like trash.

So I guess what drives me is the hope that other Gwens some day might read one of my books and see strong, beautiful characters who are simply being themselves, and finding love and their way in the world with respect.

Gwen was "taught a lesson," a lesson for every trans person and genderqueer in America, that who they are is less than human, and to dare to express the beauty within them, the sacred and divine within them, to dare to live, is to invite the violent destruction of their very being.

I hope my books can teach another lesson, or at least send a message, that every Gwen deserves to live and to celebrate who they are, and that they are not alone.

Pink monkey lighter

2005-07-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

That's just one of the many things I stare at while trying to formulate thoughts in the writing process. If you saw my pink monkey lighter, you'd want to steal it. It's that fucking cool.

As an added bonus, it scares the holy living crap out of my devil-cat Neo whenever you flick its little monkey arm to light it. (Trust me; if you knew Neo, you'd think it was funny, too, rather than a sign that I'm a budding serial killer who likes to terrorize small animals.)

At any rate, I just spent much of my evening setting up this blog to chronicle the internal process of crafting a novella. I've never written a novella, at least not on purpose. When I was a kid, everything I wrote would probably have qualified; my stories were usually between 30 and 100 pages long, but they were written long-hand on college-ruled notebook paper, so there's no telling exactly how many words they may ultimately have been.

Since college (winter, 1988), I've written two lengthy fantasy novels: one (Under Galga) that grew out of one of those early adolescent novellas and took me eight years to complete; the other (Anamnesis) that sort of burst out through parthenogenesis over a period of three months when I first started taking Wellbutrin. That second book has been a thorn in my side ever since because it means so much to me; I feel an obsessive obligation to get it published, and I'm terrified that it never will be. Since August of 1998, after finishing that first, manic draft, I've revised and rewritten Anamnesis about six times, finally sending out query letters to agents this spring. After receiving nineteen rejections (two thoughtful passes after requests for sample chapters, plus seventeen xeroxed form letters informing me that they were too busy and important to bother insulting me more personally) and one deafening silence of total disinterest, I've decided to write a novella.

After reading an article in Writer's Digest (which I've now misplaced) about an author who had received dozens of rejections on his novel until he wrote a novella in the same world and submitted it to a magazine for serialization, I decided to do the same. Hence the preceding entries in 37.2 Degrees detailing my haphazard thoughts in trying to pre-plot the thing for a change from my usual pattern of letting the characters use me like a Ouija board.

My goal for The Devil's Garden (the working title) is a novella of 25,000 words, or approximately 100 pages. Since I began writing last Monday on my week off, I've written 60. This is about the pace in which I wrote Anamnesis, its sister novel. I haven't been able to produce like this since I gave up working on the Anamnesis sequel in September of '98 for fear I'd be making all the same mistakes and never get either of them published. Knowing that this is an experiment has taken away that anxiety.

There is nothing like the high of being so full of words that I can't write them down fast enough.

45 minutes of less-than-profound rumination painstakingly recovered after an hour and a half of crying and shrieking

2005-07-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

What the hell do I do with Zedei?

When do the three drunken frat types from the tavern come after Ume? (Do they come after Ume or Cillian?) What, if anything, does this have to do with Zedei?

Zedei must be in on the plot with Nesre, therefore he is still alive. His “death” must continue to be used to control Ume.

Is Zedei a serial killer or just a serial abuser of prostitutes? Why would he have agreed to the pretense with Nesre? It was announced earlier that a templar had been murdered, but no one mentioned his name, only a reference to his being abusive to some of the women.

What might an abusive fuck like Zedei have to do with Nesre’s plot to overthrow the Meer? Does he know? Did he just playact for the fun of it? If Zedei is not his real name, he could almost go on about his usual business with no hiding after the faked death, since Ume wouldn’t normally run into him. (Except that I had his predeliction for smacking prostitutes around given as a means of identifying the dead templar in that earlier conversation among the Expurgists.)

Fingering the keys

2005-07-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

Nesre contacts Ume and tells her the trail is cold and she’s free to go back to work, and then tells her he has an engagement for her, which turns out to be for the Meer. Later, Ume is “decompressing” at a Garden pub, and Cree enters (with another man?) and recognizes Cillian as Ume. Yet later, the realization that Cillian is a courtesan gives Cree the idea of using him to get close to the Meer. Nesre’s plot to assassinate MeerAlya develops later.

Nesre’s plot, as revealed initially to Ume, is to spy on the Meer.
The Expurgists also want Cillian to spy on the Meer.

In the end, the Expurgists have been stirred into foment against the Meer, and this becomes the Expurgism. Ume is with MeerAlya on the fateful morning, having been sent by Cree/Nesre on a mission of less violent intent. Cree has to rescue Ume from being bludgeoned along with Alya. They realize they have both been set up by Nesre, and they, in turn, kill him. (If the ripper plot still exists, he comes after Ume.)

Additional thoughts on the Meer's proclivities:

On her first assignation with him, MeerAlya asks to “feel” Ume; he runs his hands over every inch of her body. What he really wants is to sculpt her, which he begins once he has memorized every inch of her with his hands.
Ume eventually falls in love with Alya, persuading him at last to break the Meeric law and have sex with her on the evening of the the annual vetma. She also sees what it takes for him to perform the ultimate vetma. It is the following morning that he is dragged from his bed, and the first blow to his skull knocks a chunk of it into Ume’s face, so that she is flecked with bits of his brain when Cree drags her away from the Meer’s body. As Cillian, he is in love with Cree, but Ume’s bond with Alya was unique to her.

Somebody's getting the fork if I don't start writing soon

2005-07-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

Zedei and Nesre are both planning to kill Ume, but Nesre changes his mind after they’ve drugged her and kills Zedei instead so that he can use Ume to seduce and assassinate the Meer? That doesn’t make sense. If Nesre is the “ripper” and Nesre kills Zedei and frames Ume, then Nesre uses this to blackmail Ume into assassinating the Meer along with the LOE?

Okay, first we have a templar, Nesre, who wants to assassinate and usurp the Meer, and also enjoys torturing and killing courtesans. Second, we have a group of anarchists who want to overthrow the Meer. Third, we have a trans courtesan. Nesre learns of the Expurgists and conspires with them to get a courtesan into the Meer’s confidence. No. They’d have to mistrust a templar. If he was that close to the Meer, why couldn’t he kill him? Okay, let’s say the Meer has a Second, like Merit. No one gets past him…except perhaps a courtesan. So Nesre needs a courtesan. How does he get a courtesan to go along with this? Makes sure he has something on her first so that she won’t dare tell anyone what he says even if she wants to. Now, if he was working with Expurgists, why wouldn’t they let Ume know that? What would be the benefit of keeping Ume in the dark? Hm. What if Nesre sets Ume up, but doesn’t let on that he “knows” she’s killed Zedei? But if he set her up (on the engagement), then she’d be his first suspect anyway. Question: What do we need Expurgists for? What purpose does Cree serve besides romantic interest?

A god in every golden cloister

2005-07-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

“You’ll find a god in every golden cloister. And if you’re lucky, then the god’s a she.” (Murray Head, One Night in Bangkok: Chess)

“A doctor told us that birth defects are more common in males and that more stillbirths are males because the male fetus is more fragile, and has to undergo a metamorphosis to even BE male.” (a post on DU)

Cillian’s courtesan dress is very lavish: gold threads, a headdress of some kind?

Need Deltan word for “bank” (as in river), translation for “Ume” and “Alya.”

Note: caste of sacred whores

Henna tattoos give Cillian away when Cree sees him in male drag

Sticking the wickets

2005-07-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

Complications: The League of Expurgists wants to use Cillian for their own ends. (Why Cillian?) Cillian can get into the palace as a courtesan, but so can other courtesans, especially those not being hunted for murder. The Meer would have to be the one fond of tranny courtesans for this to make sense, and still, wouldn’t being wanted for murder tend to hinder and not help? Is it because he can pass as a woman, or because he is genetically male that he’s valuable? It would make more sense if being a suspect forces him to live as a male, since none of his patrons have seen him as Cillian. So now we have Cillian able to move about freely, but with no access to templars, and Ume wanted for murder, so her contacts don’t matter because she must stay hidden. So how is Cillian useful? The Expurgists need someone with access to the Meer. The templars are not yet on their side.

If Cillian is living as a male, how can he help the Expurgists? If Ume is wanted for murder, how can Ume help the Expurgists? Can this work if Ume is not wanted for murder? What would be the disturbance and problem then? (Note that the Expurgists would definitely find her more appealing if they believed she had killed a templar out of class rebellion.) How can the LOE put Cillian/Ume to work for them with the current plot? Could Ume “confess” to the murder and claim it was self defense? As a sacred prostitute, is there prescedent for this? Would that then somehow give Ume access to the Meer? And, if so, what, then, does the problem become? Ume must find out who killed the templar before he kills her? Is she receiving anonymous threats? If the Meer has a penchant for courtesans, who would introduce Ume to him? (Since the LOE don’t trust the templars.)

Also, what is the movitation for framing Ume? Has Ume heard something she shouldn’t? Is she merely in the wrong place at the wrong time? And why was the templar killed? Did he know something that was dangerous to the killer? Was he about to inform the Meer of a plot against his life?

[Note: The idea that they want to recruit Ume because MeerRa was “brought down” by a “courtesan” (Ahr ) does not work. The Meer hasn’t been brought down, since this is pre-Expurgism. Therefore, RaNa is also still alive if I want to bring her in somehow tangentially. This could, however, be the first meetings Ahr attends; check Anamnesis for references to where. She could share what she perceives to be the Meer’s weaknesses, and testify against their coldbloodedness.]

Okay, the templars and the LOE both want to assassinate MeerAlya. Why not have them already working together? The templar frames Ume, then Cree appears by design. Or—or—what if, working together, the templar convinces Ume that she has killed another templar, and he is keeping her secret to protect her. Meanwhile, the LOE approach him as though unrelated, with “suspicions” of Ume’s involvement in the murder? They say because Cillian is “two spirits” he can meet with them under cover of his male identity and keep Ume from being associated with them so that she can infiltrate the House of Alya? So Ume is first a suspect when Cree meets her, then “cleared” by templar Nesre’s testimony, and the LOE persuade Ume to use her familiarity with Nesre and other templars to gain access to the Meer, who has a penchant for “two spirits” courtesans. (Now why wouldn’t Ume have been requested by the Meer before? She’s top-notch after all. Will have to mull this later.)

Cillian has to steal some men’s clothing in order to get through the streets undetected. (The classic “clothesline” device? Or does he accost someone?) He hates dressing like a man. Cillian offers a drunk gold coin for his tunic and slacks (relieved to discover he has not been robbed of his purse), and reluctantly throws away his veil and gown. Arriving home, he sees the Meer’s Guard surrounding his room, so he hides and waits until they’ve gone, then sneaks in a window and gathers what he can carry.

Later, Cillian is drinking in a pub and hears gossip that a courtesan has been murdered in some brutal fashion. The girls on the street are huddled in fear trading stories. Another patron starts to hassle the girls, and Cillian picks a fight with him, but gets outnumbered. Who should step in to save his neck once more, but the courtier Cree? Cree comments that Cillian has rather a fair face for a boy, and they exchange a volley of puns and double-entendres, making it clear that Cree knows Cillian is Ume, and Cillian knows that Cree knows. At this point, Cree offers Cillian a proposition, and asks him to join him at a meeting of Expurgists (not called this yet?). (Save Cree’s identity until later in the story; perhaps Cree and Cillian end up in a drunken roll in the hay.)

The plot quickens

2005-07-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

So. Plot.

Setting: Soth Inla, a city in the Delta region of the River Anamnesis, during the reign of MeerRa of Rhyman; the city is on the verge of an industrial revolution

Protagonist: Cillian Rede, a transsexual courtesan, aka Ume Sky/Ardea? UmeLa? (Deltan name; means?) [Japanese: plum, plus Latin: genus of Japanese Night Heron]

Antagonist: A templar in the service of MeerAlya of Soth Inla; Expurgists

Balance: Cillian is living on the streets of Inla as Ume Sky, content with his lot, and doing quite well at business. He takes a commission from a templar one evening, who takes him to the temple itself. The temple at Inla is vast and has unused quarters where the templars often entertain, unbothered by the Meer. The templar has a guest, and while Cillian is reclining after their transaction, he overhears the two speaking about “Expurgists.” He’s not sure what this means, but files it away for future use, thinking it might be something he could use to exact more money from the templar. He departs with his purse for the evening and stops for a drink at the pub he frequents.

Disturbance: Cillian wakes up alone in an unknown bed, with no memory of what happened at the pub. He slips out and heads toward home (where’s “home”?) only to find that the streets are in chaos. He is nearly overrun by a carriage (horseless?), when a young courtier whisks him out of the street and into a side alley. (Cillian, of course, is dressed as Ume Sky.) The courtier, Cree, explains to him that a templar was murdered the night before, and the Guard is in search of woman meeting Ume’s description, last seen leaving a pub with the slain templar the previous evening. Cree claims to be doing Ume a favor because of her fair face, says he’s sure to see Ume around, but Ume should lay low for awhile. Cree departs, leaving Cillian standing baffled and alarmed in the alley.

Problem: Cillian has been framed for murder and must clear his name, and keep from getting killed by the real killer in the process.

Crisis: After being recruited by the newly formed League of Expurgists to seduce MeerAlya so that they can assassinate him once he has let down his guard, Cillian discovers that Alya is a complex person who is not the source of the ruling class’s oppression of the common. Cillian decides he can’t go on with the deception, but he is in too deep, and now has become a target for both the templars who pretend to be trying to root out the Expurgists, and the Expurgists themselves. Meanwhile, the Butcher of Bank Street is targeting courtesans (especially/only trannies?), and Cillian is his next target.

Climax: Cillian is betrayed by Cree, who believes she is doing the right thing. Unfortunately, since the Butcher of Bank Street and the templar who is secretly funding the Expurgists while plotting against them are one and the same, Cree has put Cillian right in the Butcher’s path.

When Cillian goes to MeerAlya at last with the plot against his life, Cree has set him up, and it is the Butcher/templar who hears Cillian’s “confession.” The Butcher has been plotting all along to frame Cillian for the murders, intending to out him as male at the same time to make it seem more plausible (Cillian has been “masquerading” as what he envies and hates), and then blame the Meer for his death. The Butcher reveals himself after Cillian makes his confession, and begins his ritualistic torture of Cillian in preparation of the killing.

The Meer himself comes to Cillian’s rescue, with the help of Cree who has realized what she’s done before it was too late.

Dénouement: Cree and Cillian don’t see each other for some time after the Butcher is apprehended and the plot to kill the Meer foiled, both feeling betrayed. Cillian spends some time with the Meer, further alienating Cree, but at last the two meet in the pub where both have returned to their prior personae, and grudgingly reunite.

Swimming in the Anamnesis

2005-06-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

Here begins a stream-of-consciousness tributary of the River Anamnesis as I jiggle my brain to try to knock a novella out of it.

Absurd ideas for titles:

“Delicate Stamina in the Devil’s Garden”
“Pistils at Dawn in the Devil’s Garden”
“Ambrosia in the Devil’s Garden”
“Trifling in the Devil’s Garden”
“In the Beds of the Devil’s Garden”

MeerAlya becomes aware of dark thoughts in the flow and becomes disturbed by their prevalence. He wants to punish those who harm others. “The same shall be visited upon you.”/“It shall be visited upon you in kind.”

What is the definition of a god? Effectively immortal and able to create with words. So how are Meer not obviously gods to my readers? Too many vampire stories maybe? In classical mythologies, gods almost always have a natural genesis, and can be killed. They are simply stronger, immune to aging and sickness, and able to perform magic. Perhaps that’s how The Devil’s Garden should start.

Why The Devil’s Garden? Cillian regards the Meer as a devil, perhaps. “Cillian Rede held no truck with/put no store in? gods, but devils, he believed in.” Third or first person? Third, so that the Meer’s POV can alternate.

The Meer has long, white hair, but is not old. (?) (Silver?)

I like the “Ripper” idea…but how does that fit in? One of the templars? Is the Meer suspected? A rogue Meer. (Whispered about, but no evidence.)

What is needed for Inla to be industrialized? Gas lighting, motorized bicycles (maybe this comes later? or maybe Cillian or Cree are somehow involved in the invention?); MeerAlya’s whims, in part, dictate what is created in Inla, but there should be a sound infrastructure to support the industry, as surely MeerAlya himself will not be creating every “modern convenience.” Will need to research Industrial Revolution, gas lighting, coal mining; I don’t think there’s any need yet for petroleum. Electricity should be in the works; research Edison and earlier inventors. (Benjamin Franklin experimented with electricity; what became of that? Is the kite-key story just a legend?)