*stretches*

Nanowrimo went well this year. Got the first draft in for novel #3 in the magician series, which was the intent. Unlike the second one, this draft held together far better even if I did do some horrible things to Jay. Getting messages from people on how a fictional character 'better be OK' was definitely a surreal part of it :)  Granted, I did inform people that Jay's blog would have spoilers for the series during early November but most of the readers didn't avoid that. It definitely made for interesting interactions.

Other stuff was 3 novellas (ranging from 12K to 25K) getting some ideas out of my head and in one case having fun with the thriller genre. Unlike in previous years, I didn't turn the 'other' nanos into true novels, mostly because I knew I wasn't going to do anything with at least one of the concepts. (The Egress one I will probably revisit for a YA story at some point; the concept was fascinating even if the execution sucked and my ideas for the characters didn't work as planned). I also did a chunk of short stories for the magician series, some of which will end up as part of the third novel in the second draft I think.

All told, it was a good year. End total was just over 113K and it took 9 days to hit 50K - I also wrote out four pages of notes that will go toward next years nano I think. And a small chunk of Boy & Fox as I figured out another plot-problem with that story too :)   Plan to do some short stories for the magician series the rest of this month, one entry for a writing contest (if I can find a paying one I can get an idea for) and not sure what else. Given that I will be away for a good chunk of February, I have no desire to start any Project until I get back. At which point the mass-edits of the magician series will begin.

So, so very much not canon :)

"Oh, man! He looks really sad inside and out!"

Reynard Fox spun to face the doorway, a deep growl filling the room. Boy didn’t stir from his sleep on the cot.

The boy standing in the doorway looked human: young, with the white cane of the blind and a huge innocent grin that put even Boy’s to shame. “Hi!”

"This is not your place," the fox said, and his voice was low and hard, full of more than teeth.

"But he’s really sad and I totally have hugs to give!"

"Hugs," the fox said, as though he had misheard words though Reynard Fox has never done so.

"Yup! My name is Jay and —."

"You have other names as well."

"Well, I am a Jaysaurus and also Jaysome!"

"You do not belong here."

"But he is really sad-face and I’m all kinds of good at hugging! Please?"

The fox sighed. “You’re not going to go away, are you?”

"I’m really good at not going away."

"I shall endeavour to pretend that made sense." The fox stepped aside to let Jay hug the sleeping form of Boy. Boy whimpered in pain, almost waking as Jay sprang back in shock.

"He is still sad?" Jay demanded.

"You are, perhaps, kin to the Wasting. All you did was wound him."

Boy blinked. “You knew I’d hurt him?!” His eyes narrowed behind dark glasses. “You are not a very nice fox.”

"I am what I must be. As you may someday be what you must as well." Reynard Fox smiled, a barring of teeth. "You will go now."

"You made me hurt your friend," Jay said, and his voice contained harmonics nothing human could hear.

"Consider it a lesson cheaply given."

"Fine. But you do mean tricks and I don’t like you so you are never coming to my home!"

Jay vanished and Reynard Fox stretched slowly, then paused, shocked enough to speak aloud. “He barred me from an entire universe? What kind of creature can —.”

"Mr. Fox?" Boy said sleepily.

"It is nothing. Rest."

And Boy fell back into sleep without any nightmares at all for the rest of the night. The fox did not sleep at all.

Boy & Fox: Scene 1.

Perhaps all anyone needed to know about Oak Shade Street was that the city had cut down every oak tree on it over a decade ago. The street was the usual near-downtown litter of apartment buildings designed by paint-by-numbers systems in a fight to see which one could be the drabbest along with two-decade old homes that apartment developers circled hungrily. Not every yard was unkempt but that was pretty much the way to bet. The street ended at Oak Park which boasted a small copse of birch trees that local lore called a corpse of trees. At least three bodies had been buried in it in a single decade. though people always claimed it was more even as they fought attempts to have it bulldozed down.

The street had lost their oak trees, but were determined to lose nothing else.

The playground was a rusted out shell no one has used since a pedophile moved into the neighbourhood – even if it had been a couple of neighbourhoods away, never proved and the bearded man had left after having his house spray-painted twice. Some stories claimed he moved to a bigger city and became a department store Santa Claus, but that is hardly a surprise. It is the nature of stories to grow with the telling, and like rivers stories tend to grow crooked and follow the path of least resistance. Everyone knew the park was a bad place and no one had to say why any longer.

The park the street had fought for sat empty, and the local animals migrated to it but even they stayed away from the birch trees. People who took notice of that – and there are people who notice many things, even if they do not realize they noticed them – assumed the stories they had been told were right and thought no more about it. And so the park was half-buried in fall leaves when the boy came walking out of it. The boy was bare foot and devoid of hair, his eyebrows pale suggestions, hints more than facts and he wore jeans and a t-shirt that laundromats had long ago turned a dull grey.

There was no dirt on him nor his clothing and he walked slowly, testing each step with a foot as if expecting the leaves to conceal more than earth beneath. He crouched down slowly at the edge of the trees and ran his fingers through the leaves as gingerly as one might prod broken glass and let out small, hoarse gasp of surprise when his hand came away unwounded. Something crossed his face that was far too wary to be hope and the boy stood again, turning slowly back to face the trees as though pulled by some force.

“You can remain in the world.” The voice was assured and calm, but the boy still spun about to face it, his unmarked hands raised protectively in front of himself. The speaker was a fox, though to say that says nothing at all. The fox was as red as any fox that had ever been, the fur on his feet darker than shadows. His chest was snow-white and his tail was the envy of all other foxes, and many other animals as well.

“Oh,” the boy said hoarsely, and whatever caution he carried with him was lost. The boy’s eyes widened slowly: they were the pale green of things seeping from wounds, eyes which seemed bruised, felt hollow, looked empty until he took in the fox. “Oh,” he said again, and the fox seemed to accept such statements as only his due.

The boy crouched, held out a hand toward the fox but pulled it back slower and just stared in soft silence until the fox began to feel almost uneasy; there are many things that foxes will accept, perhaps a great deal more than people do, but worship is seldom one of them. “I am called Reynard Fox,” the fox said with a smile that was all sharp teeth.

The boy said nothing.

“You may have heard of me?” the fox said.

“No? I don’t –.” The boy bit into his lower lip, slow panic building in his face.

“I trust you have a name then, boy?” Reynard Fox said.

The boy gulped, steadied himself a little. “Boy.” The word seemed to push back panic and he repeated it again in his hoarse voice.

“That is your name,” the fox enquired after a short pause, though it was well within his nature to inquire as well.

“Yes.” Boy smiled then, and the smile transformed his face; even the fox drew back from the gentleness behind it. “I was in the woods,” Boy continued, and cleared his throat, though it remained no less hoarse, “but not those woods.”

“I know; have a care, Boy. To speak of it gives it power,” the fox said. And then, because he was a fox and it may well have been true: “To not speak of it gives it more power still.”

“Oh.” Boy scratched his scalp with his left hand, pulled it away and ran both hands over his head slowly, as if it belonged to a stranger. He stared down at his hands, flexing them slowly. “Hands should have lines on them. Fingertips have whorls. Mine don’t?”

“One does not leave the Wasting and not leave some things behind,” Reynard Fox said, and the gentleness in his voice was as close as he could come to the kindness of Boy’s smile.

Boy licked his lips. “Wasting,” came out in a soft whisper, as though he was tasting it on his tongue. “I ran. I ran so far the world changed. Then I ran further still and I don’t know how. I don’t know if I ran. I don’t know if I walked. I don’t how how I made it back,” he added, softer still.

The fox merely sat, bushy tail twitching gently.

“Help?” Boy asked.

“I am Reynard Fox; it is not a safe thing to ask me for help.”

“Anything is-is better than the Wasting,” Boy got out, words falling into each other. He said nothing else, wasn’t capable of articulating more.

“There are worse things than the Wasting,” the fox said, but so soft that it is possible Boy never heard; even hearing, he would not have believed. The fox stood then, teeth and eyes bared in a smile. “Come.”

Boy trembled all over; the woods, what was beyond them – something other tugged at him, but the fox was real and kind – sharp-toothed, but Boy took that for an honest kindness. And he stood in turn. And walked one step. And then another. And each that followed was easier as they walked away from the birch trees of Oak Shade Park.

Boy came to a halt in the small parking lot at the edge of park, toes trying to dig into asphalt. “This isn’t the Wasting. This isn’t a trick,” he breathed.

“How do you know?” the fox asked, with nothing cruel behind it.

“The Wasting paves nothing over,” Boy said, and even Reynard Fox said nothing more to that.  

A bevy of updates

So. Progress reports. HAH!

Let's see. I wrote ~30K of the darsverse tales short stories as an experiment in serial story fun all based on prompts. Did a novella for the magician series for nano in the summer (most of it won't survive the next draft, but that's normal so what they hey.) Wrote over 50 short stories for the magician series, and 3-4 for the Charlie Series.

Began rewriting the Ghoulish first novel in march. It hit about 20K and Boy and Fox rammed into my head to say hello violently all over the place. I blame Reynard Fox. I started work on that in May and It's September. It has hit 30K. Most of it is decent stuff, I think. I'm trying to write drafts I don't toss out entirely for the next draft, because I am horribly at writing drafts when I mostly know the plot already for what I'm writing. Boy and Fox also requires me writing it in short bursts or the tone slips more to my default style.

I've also been asked to consider contributing completed stuff for Things I Am Probably Not Allowed To Talk About. That may or may not happen. Which means finishing up the Miskatonic Elementary short YA bits because the only other thing I could really submit would be the magician series short stories, and short story collections don't sell.

As for the magician series, I'm going to do a novel for it as Nano. And then let it sit for several months while working on novel stuff. The short stories have been fun, but I have done over 110 short stories set in the world, 3 novellas and one novel. So this novel in November will be a stopping place for it for a good time, and a break from those characters. The downside of having multiple projects on the go with magic is that things can seep into each other and I'd rather avoid that if I can.

There's also 20 other short stories. It's not that the year hasn't been productive, but it has been relatively slow. A slowness that will lead to better finished drafts, I think, but still an odd place to be in for me. I've also realized that I need to have far more detailed notes on plots for stories after I finish the story, so the second draft doesn't involve quite as much flailing around. But that will be another post.

Planning out camp nano....

See, I wasn't going to do Camp Nano (The last two times I did it the results were essentially forgettable), but it's been altered to 'pick your own WC goal' and added private cabins so -- yeah.  The goal is to write 30K worth  of short story material for the magician series: which, to be fair, I'd be working on anyway though not to that extent. In order for it to work I'm throwing in a new character and some odd situations and problems before Lucas runs into Charlie and Dyer and then later the magician and Jay. At least, that is the plan.

Currently trying to figure out Lucas a a character. Did one backstory-story idea that failed, so scrapping it and trying to work out some other ideas. The other characters in the magician series have all left (or abandoned) their families and I want Lucas to be in a position where he believes he can't just walk away from them, even if he technically could.

Lucas is a talent: he has one ability to work magic, but in his case this is the power to put curses on people. Amd he's learning, fast and hard, that he can't undo them and that he has a lot more anger inside him than he ever knew, anger that is finding its way out into anyone who even annoys him ... the results should be pretty fun to write.


I'm also planning to continue Boy and Fox during the same time. Naturally. Progress has been slow and steady; I've been trying to keep the pace in a slower mode so I don't end up with 'wrote 4000 words, only 400 can be salvaged in the next draft' outcomes. Shall see how it all goes :)

echoes

The first thing, the truest thing that Boy noticed were her eyes. Pale ice over an artic ocean underneath, a dead-grey suit trying to blunt them, a plump body to disguise. He didn’t think the disguise was deliberate but couldn’t have said if that made it a good thing or not. The room he had been put in was small, off-green: a cheap table and cheaper chairs. There was a smaller table by the door with coffee and water; Boy didn’t understand coffee. The world didn’t need stimulants.

“You have been sitting here for an hour,” the woman said, her calm a cracking ice. “You didn’t have water once.”

Boy said nothing; there were rules about not taking gifts, about drinking and eating in strange places. That they might not be true didn’t stop them from being rules.

“The officer in charge called me.” She placed a small square of paper on the desk.

Boy picked it up, read it aloud to himself. “Arabetha Franklin, Social Worker.” There was more, but that was the important bit. Speaking things gave them power. Sometimes.

“And your name?” Arabetha said.

“Boy.”

“That isn’t a name.”

“It’s mine,” he said, with some heat behind the words.

Arabetha let out a sigh. “We can’t help you unless you help us as well. Who are your parents?”

“I said I don’t remember.”

“That only happens in stories.” The social worker stood, staring down at him. “Do you want your face plastered over every paper and tv station in the city as we find your parents for you? Do you think they will want that?”

Boy went still at that. Behind Arabella, his shadow smiled against the wall. His shadow had hair, which Boy didn’t, and a smile that made Arabella’s eyes seem kind. Boy didn’t like the smile but he had no way to stop it as his shadow reached into Arabella’s and pulled forth ghosts to plaster them onto the wall like faded photographs.

Arabella’s smile was a flash of ugly victory at whatever she saw in Boy’s face. “Well?”

Boy stared past her into the phantoms that faded even as his gaze took them in, listening to whispered words at the edge of hearing. Arabella’s hand slammed into the cheap table, shaking her coffee. She’s said other things.

Boy looked up. Her words flattered, faltered. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “You were kind to Zoe. She was lost, scared, had run away from her step-mother like they do in a children’s story. She went back home, after interventions with her parents, but it wasn’t enough. You were less kind to Joseph but still helped him get into a community college, gave him everything you could but nothing replaced the high in the end.”

“What?” Arabella’s voice is a knife blade, ugly and scared and other things Boy isn’t sure about.

“The ghosts we carry with us are the ones that break our hearts, until we have nothing left for them to haunt. I think it’s like that sometimes,” Boy said. “Danielle isn’t a ghost yet but she is terrified her parents will refuse to accept she never should have been Daniel, will never see the truth inside their son. Too many stories like his end badly, and those are the only ones she knows.”

Boy stood, and it hurt to see Arabella flinch back from him.

“How do you know that?” she said. “Is this some trick?”

“I’m not Mr. Fox,” Boy said, though she had no way of understanding that. “I think, I think I gained some things, when I lost myself. Or they gained me. I don’t know. I just know everyone carries anb echo of the Wasting inside them and sometimes I can see that.”

The social worker said nothing. Boy wanted to try to explain, but somehow ‘sorry’ didn’t seem enough and he had no idea how to explain what he didn’t understand himself. She didn’t move as he walked to the door, didn’t even react when the locked door opened for him (though Boy was unaware it was locked at all); he asked his shadow to take her phantoms with it but had no way of knowing if that happened at all.

No one stopped him from leaving the police station even though Boy was certain they should have tried. He found the nearest streetlight and just stood under it, as if somehow the light could make his shadow go away.

The oldest tricks of all

Mr. Fox came out of the shadows as Boy left the soup kitchen. The fox seemed to not emerge as much as step through them as though the darkness was a kind of door, his eyes sharp and cool as he stared up at Boy. Boy’s stomach was gurgling happily and he had to resist the urge to poke it and see if it would make more noises; being full was a new experience, and one he was quite enjoying.

“They don’t let us take doggie bags. Or fox-bags,” Boy said, quite proud of the joke.

“I imagine not. They fed you, yes?” the fox said softly, for his ears alone.

Boy rubbed his stomach under his shirt and grinned a nod, which is perhaps even more foolish than it sounds but he was full and happy with it.

“Good.” The fox paused a beat and slipped into a small side street, leaving Boy to scramble after him. “I trust, Boy, that your stomach is as full as your mind is empty?”

“Huh?”

“Their food is not without cost. They would have told you stories.” The fox paused another beat. “Parables.”

Boy scratched his scalp in thought. “They said we’d be reunited with our families in heaven?”

“And you think that is a blessing?” the fox asked, words as quick as sharp as movement as he spun back to face Boy, his eyes cool and bright under moonlight.

Boy bit into his lower lip and shook his head. He remembered enough about his parents to know that wasn’t anything he’d want. Not their faces or names, but the feel of them came to him easily, disappointment and anger rising through him like bile. “They didn’t want me,” he whispered, his voice hoarser than normal.

“I can’t imagine why not,” Reynard Fox said, and his tone was so dry that Boy giggled despite himself. “There is this about stories, Boy: the more seductive they are, the less truth they are apt to contain. A story that speaks only to the heart is seldom a true story at all.”

“I don’t –.” Boy flattered, in word and step. “I don’t understand why anyone wants a life beyond this one, Mr. Fox.”

“Many seek reward, Boy. Others redemption, or the punishment of their enemies. Or to regain what they believe was taken from them, or perhaps lost. Few can boast a life free of desire, and desire is no small thing. There are many whose lives are so very small because they believe it will be far better for them in he world they believe is to come.”

“You’re saying it is a lie?”

“Nothing so simple, Boy. But it is a terrible story to trick anyone with, and one I myself do not use.”

Boy stared at the trickster for a long moment, then continued to follow him without a word.

Boy and Fox: notes

And there is Bess, half-homeless and all hard choices, a blade sharpened by the world and not yet dulled by friendship or trust. Where Boy fled his life, she walked away from hers. She did not run, and that is her strength, but she hates herself so for not cutting ties entirely, for not being able to break free of family. She is anger and angry and there is no power to that but she is not enough yet to know this. She lashes out at a world that will not break, for not being what it promised, what all the TV and stories ever promised and her mom drowns the world in pills, her father in business meetings and affairs conducted with the same emptiness as each meeting. Their lives are voids Bess cannot fill, and resentment runs between them all like dead electricity. Their names are Jason and Samantha and Bess will never call them anything else

Boy and Fox rummagings

I have had a project for five years called Boy and Fox. It is about a boy stripped of memories and a trickster fox called Reynard and a girl named Bess who is perhaps a wolf and always more than she appears. And there are ogres who eat the fox, because what else should happen to your spirit guide?There are finished drafts that did not work. There are many, many half-finished drafts.

The first 10 pages work. The rest always falls apart once the plot rears up to interfere with the story. The plot has changed a lot over those five years, from the world Boy wanders being his own mind and him being in a coma to it being another world with him having been forced into being the heir to a throne.

And for some reason my brain circled back to it over my first cup of coffee this morning. And went: what if? What if I took the story and put it in the real world? Boy wanders out of the wasting and the woods with Mr. Fox into the real world, his head as empty as his heart is full, and has to try and navigate the edges of his own loss -- to find out what was lost, and perhaps why -- and stumble a path toward the person he was.

If he wants to be them, of course. Because in most iterations of the tale, Boy was not a nice person. Or, more accurately, a nice person who was easily led to doing evil things ....

DAMN YOU, BRAIN! I AM DOING OTHER THINGS, OKAY?!

Ogres!

The female ogre turned from the fire, tossing the rest of her half-burnt meal to her mate and surveyed Boy with more cunning than malice, which worried him all the more. “The other meal is a feisty one,” she said in a voice twin to her mates. “You will make a better meal while hunger and thirst soften that one up.”
Boy made a scared sound at that, unable not to.
“You didn’t think we’d eat you?” the ogre said, quite baffled.
“I don’t know what you are,” said Boy.
“We are ogres,” she said, though she named them without a morsel of pride.
The male ogre looked up from peeling charred flesh from bone and bristled, tossing the remains of their food into a fire and raising his voice in a terrible wailing chant.

”Oh, an ogre is a monster made of shadow, made of spite
Always in pairs of him and her yet only one is ever right!
An ogre is a creature that slow-hunts and stalks their prey
And among their many features is a desire (cruel!) to play!
Far and wide the ogre wander to seek prey with claws and teeth
If up to you an ogre saunters, death is something of relief!
For an ogre is a nasty beast, steeped in hunger, born of bile
But if made an ogre’s feast you’ll be cooked with vim and style!”

“Must you?” the female ogre said.
“It is our song, my darling,” he said, and Boy was certain the ogre had made it himself, so deep was his wounded pride.
“And if you sing it again today, I may have to kill you.”
“It is my fondest hope, poppet,” he said and they shared a ghastly smile.
“You’re going to eat me?” Boy said, more concerned with that than even how bad the ogre’s song had been.
“Of course!” The female ogre looked considerably surprised. “What else are humans for if not eating? You don’t even have any pesky fur to remove at all.”

***

“Are you a hero?”

“I don’t think so,” Boy said. “You have me tied to a chair,” he added.

“Real heroes are always in traps. That’s how you know they are heroes,” the other ogre said.

“Well said.” His wife smiled, and her husband drew himself up and smiled back in turn, the moment strange and private, as though smiles devoid of nastiness were foreign to them.

They were monsters, and they were going to eat him, but there was something so sad about them that Boy couldn’t bring himself to hate them. They were ugly, and they knew it even more so than he did and it is awfully hard to hate someone more than they hate themselves.

“Do you want a hero?” he said.

“Well.” The male ogre coughed. “We wouldn’t mind, as a rule. Heroes are good eating. Unless they kill us,” she added as offhandedly as they’d mentioned eating Boy.

The female – Poppet, as Boy decided to call her – let go of his chin and then tugged at the ropes binding his hands, loosening them a little. “You could be a magician,” she said. “We’d never have caught a witch, but a magician can work magic with their hands free.”

“I don’t even know what a magician can do.”

The ogre blinked a few times. “Excuse us?”

“I don’t.”

“It might not be worth eating his brain, Poppet: it seems to be very empty indeed,” the other ogre said with a sniff.

“Quite so. Quite so, indeed. But it wouldn’t matter: a magician is hardly a hero, but it would have been something. The other one just shouts a lot and claims that she is a hero, if you’ve ever heard of such a thing!” Poppet snapped her fingers. “Are you sure you didn’t drop a sword?”

“I had a fox,” Boy said.

“A fox is hardly a weapon,” she said with a sniff. “It was barely even a morsel of food.”

“What?”

“Scarely an apetizer,” the male said, waving a hand to the remains of what Boy had assumed to be cooked bird.

“What?” he said again.

“Oh, dear.” The female ogre rubbed her hands together. “Maybe you’ll be a hero now? There are so few heroes out this way, you know.”

Boy said nothing. They had cooked and eaten Mr. Fox and the knowledge sank into his stomach like lead. Whatever magic was in his clothing did nothing at all in response to ropes or chairs or ogres. It was hard to hate them more than they hated themselves, to be sure, but in that moment Boy was quite determined to try.

And then there was today ....

The current version of Boy & Fox is at almost 17K now as Bess, Boy and Reynard Fox reach the outer borders of the Kingdom. The last two major characters -- the king and his son -- will come into play soon and from there? From there we shall see where it all goes. 

I know how the story ends, or at least some beats of it. I don't know how it gets there and I know there's some plot things I need to change but so far the story is holding together. The only thing really slowing it down is that the scenes were Reynard (or Bess) offer up stories about him tend to lead to two days of not writing as I try and make up a story-within-the-story fairy tale. There have been two: I think there will be a third near the novel's end.

Aside from that, I have been able to make use of a little of the 66 pages I hand-wrote in Italy.  From it, a poem-thing I will not be able to use:

I have not walked beneath the hills
Where man nor iron dwells,
Nor seen the clash of sun-drenched wills
Twixt angels fair and fell.

I have not seen a dream lord's snare
Hold fast a night-borne bane,
Nor seen a sword of blood rent bare
Or felt a mist-gods tears as rain.

But I have followed the empty songs
Of nameless children in the Waste,
And held to duty weighted of wrongs
And truth still bitter to the taste.

I have walked paths long left untrod
To tame a dragon's searing flame,
And followed dreams and death where led
To shoulder love – and loss – and blame.

... and yes, even in that version of the story, I have no clue why I put it in :p

Evolution of a character ....

I am, at present, almost 8000 words into the current version of Boy & Fox. A good 3000 words of the previous version remain, edited and altered (mostly description) and things slowly come together. The previous version was a finished draft, but contained too much plot and not enough story. For this version, I am leaving much unsaid, trying to let the surface of the story mirror the depths without bonking the reader over the head with it. Shall see how it goes. I know the final act, but not precisely the ending.

And am going to write, later today or tomorrow, the introduction of Bess into this story. She is important to it as Boy needs a friend to help him come to terms with his life and Reynard Fox is many things but friend is stretching it a lot: even Boy knows that without knowing it. She explains the Kingdom to Boy and is both fun to write and essential to the story. Having said that, I never really had a handle on her as a character before. She's been everything from a werewolf to under a curse and even a quasi-assassin in various drafts.

For this one, I realized that I needed to establish boy Boy and Reynard Fox first before she came in and set up the basis of their own odd relationship and will come close to my rough idea of introducing her at ~10K into the story. She plans to use Boy, but at least will be honest about it. Much of her past will be unsaid in this version, just terse hints about the Academy though not really what the point of it is -- or why the Kingdom finds it necessary to have a place to train girls to be ladies. There's a couple of secondary characters I need to fix, but we'll see how it all goes.

Being the hopefully final version of Boy & Fox

Being the story of a king who holds love higher than his kingdom, how far one has to run in order to escape destiny, and how sometimes we have to betray ourselves if we want to survive. This is the tale of a boy and a girl, an alliance that could be friendship and the long, hard paths we take to return home, and the stranger routes some must take to find a home at all.

And it is a story about a fox, because every story worth the telling has a fox in it.

There are things about the Wasting everyone knows even though they have never been: that the trees are bleached bone, that the sky is not a sky, that the dead are drawn there to die. That it grows when dreams die is also known, and that lies make it strong, and a truth told to hurt makes it stronger still. It is north of everything, as near as despair and as far as hope. Anyone can reach the Wasting, and the holes in our hearts can draw it to us. It is all that is wrong with the worlds and no one who enters can leave.
        These are known things and believed things and, with one exception, all are true.
        There is a stream that separates the Wasting from everything, a trail scoured into the skin of the world; water once the colour of tears long since mixed with mud and sediments. A brave man could cross it, but no brave man would for it is not bravery that brings one to the Wasting but emptiness and darker things beside. The desperate cross it at times to find loved ones, to make amends, for forgiveness. Each gesture is as hollow as the last.
        The Wasting only takes.
        A forest borders the wasting, though to call it that is to insult even weeds: the trees are plague-grey twisted things, corpse-thin branches grown sideways rather than up, for the Sun cannot bear to shine down on such a place. Ruins can be found, if one looks: scattered rock and wood, echoes from ae past when men would built castles before the Wasting and roar defiance at it.
        It was a long time ago. Now men seek battles with other men, the Wasting a nightmare's dream left to stories and the quiet tales told long after the taverns have closed and the press of the night draws out such stories from tellers who should know better than to give voice to such tales.
        Because there are trees, the forest has insects. Because there are insects, small animals live even here, eating and being eaten, hunting and being hunted. There is an order to the chaos of things that not even the Wasting can wholly blight. The small animals that scurry about the forest are thin things, fur dull and matted and eyes duller still. There were few of them in any age, and in this one fewer still as a fox roamed the edge of the Wasting, and had done so for long enough to leave tracings of his passing even in such a place as this.
        The fox's fur was as deep and red as any fox who had had ever been, the legs of his feet as black as night, his chest white as mountain snow and the bushiest tail that was the envy of all other foxes and many other animals beside. His steps were light on the cold ground and he paced the brook that lined the Wasting without pause. If dwelling that close a land the colour of a widow's heartache touched the fox, he showed nothing of it in a smile almost as sharp and bright as his eyes, for he was the first of all foxes and coyote and raven mere echoes of his tales.         Days passed as he walked the edges of the worlds. Cold followed warmth and cold again, the changing of the seasons barely real in the deep north of the world. The fox heard men and avoided them since even his desire for tricks and games was blunted by the Wasting.
        Time passed.
        The fox, whose name was Reynard in all the worlds that were, waited.
        Even more time passed.
        Other men came, and other species beside: an army even, once, that flew through the air on the chants of magicians. The fox avoided them, and mourned them not at all. He moved south, slow but sure, as the Wasting crept deeper into the world, and still the fox waited with a sureness hinting at hope that can outlast even despair. One could have asked what the fox was waiting for, and perhaps he would have said – for there is no fox born that will not spin a tale for the asking – but the truth is a tale too precious for any fox to tell.
        This is all the truth we need to know: Reynard Fox waited until he waited no longer.

in which things are explained

<alcar> New blurb done:
<alcar> Being the story of a king who holds love higher than his kingdom, how far one has to run in order to escape destiny, and how sometimes we have to betray ourselves if we want to survive. This is the tale of a boy and a girl, an alliance that could be friendship and the long, hard paths we take to return home, and the stranger routes some must take to find a home at all.
<alcar> And it is a story about a fox, because every story worth the telling has a fox in it.
<Chaos`^> every story does? :p
<Chaos`^> what about your other stories without foxes?
<alcar> the foxes are in disguise :P
<Chaos`^> hahaha
<Chaos`^> that's cute

A snippet of the story

"I asked you not to do kill a witch here, nor bring them to the apartment to burn them in the oven. This is the second since I asked. I won't ask again."

"You won't, magician?" That there is nothing kind in Jack's smile goes without saying.

Boy's answering smile is kind, but does not reach his eyes at all. "I've known you for two months, Jack. I could tell the police so many things and they would hound you like a wild hunt, drive you from city to city without needing any magic at all."

"And that would free witches to do terrible things."

The fact hangs between them, ugly in its truth.

Boy stands, heading to the door, snatching his coat from the kitchen table. "I've done worse," he says, and does not slam the door behind him when he leaves.

⁂

Jack hadn't burned a witch in their oven, not even once. Three times he'd claimed to, neither had been true. Boy does not consider himself a man of many talents, but one that required no magic at all was knowing when someone was trying to trick him. Why Jack was doing it was more a matter of guesses, and Boy is rather certain that trying to guess the motives of a centuries-old immortal is a waste of time.

So he doesn't. In many ways, the people who become magicians aren't like you or me at all. He is angry at the lies, at Jack trying to push him toward anger, and that he burns off by walking through the night. The rain has fled the sky to leave behind clouds that the dawn dances through. Cities don't sleep, not as people do, but the stirring of animals and vehicles, of life and movement, of people and coffee machines, cannot but be noticed.

Electric lights flare in windows, tamed lightning cutting holes into the darkness the sun has yet to reach. Boy walks with the waking world until he finds a small coffee shop to duck inside, the local paper and a coffee enough. People slip in and out of the shop as he watches, coffee cups in hand. Modern talismans, but for the life of him Boy has no idea what they protect against.

The world changed when he was away. Some days it feels as though one day there will be more coffee shops than people in the city and no one will think that odd at all. He refills his coffee twice and watches the city through the prism of a single storefront. The rhythm of the city is as old as the village, a beat thrumming between people. Two hours produces nothing off-tempo at all, and Boy fills his coffee a third time with a frown.

Consider: put three people in a room and no one is going to entirely get along. Add more and you get factions, political groups, religions, fear, hate: all the noble sentiments about humanity cannot disguise the fact that we are fundamentally insane. Extend that to a whole city and the fact that nothing seems wrong at all is worrying on many levels. Boy finishes his third cup, leaves, walking quickly through side alleys and along small paths known mostly to cats and children. Two more neighbourhoods are circled; nothing leaps out.

No lost animals. No spike in the pulse of a city that needs a mage to soothe them, a city gone strangely quiet. His search widens, a brushing of fingers over telephone poles, asking them secrets, receiving images of posters torn down by wind and rain in reply. He shoves his hands in his pockets and begins a slow walk home. He has no idea what is going on nor why.

We can only see so far. Our failures of imagination are those of the world.  

What I am poking at

This came into my head a few nights back, I finally had time to begin working on it Sunday in a notebook. I have some idea what it is, no idea where it is going. I should, probably, be working out stuff for Nanowrimo. Instead, I began writing whatever this is:

---

Listen: the world is never how we think it is.

Listen: it starts with Jack. Twelve years young, giant-killer, walking the world with a smile as sharp as his knife. The weight of the world sits behind his eyes and his damnation is the damnation of the world. He is that sort of boy. It is that sort of world.

(The underneath of things is always ugly. We throw shade and shadow over the world and the ugliness slinks out into the opened cracks. We are taught, so young, to never turn over stones. Who knows what you may find below?)

Listen, please: there is Mister Anthony, the most selfish man in the world, and Jillian who broke the hills of kings and the Junk Food King and the last fox-friend in all the worlds waking and dreaming. It is sad, yes, but all stories are sad. We cannot free ourselves from sadness, or we would be gods that the gods would envy.

There is love, which holds the world together. And secrets, which keep us apart and whole. And we are here to listen, and we are here to witness, because judgement is easy to make and pass and there are enough hard people in the world already. A heart is a thing that sickens and grows cold: this is not in textbooks, but it is a true thing.

There is a man named Boy. This is not where his story began, but it is where we will start. He has been away for a long time, and has come home. There is an ugly truth about homes. We leave them but once, and thereafter they become a thing to be sought and nothing we ever reach at all. We can burn the past behind us, but its shadows follow us as ghosts and our memories are not always out own.

Here is a beautiful truth, that we carry each other. There are as many truths as their are people, and many others beside them. And every one I tell you isn't true at all: a truth can only be discovered, it cannot be revealed.

Read these words with care.

Plodding as writing

So. I am currently technically editing Boy & Fox (I've been stuck on ~page 15 for a bit now...) and working on The Empty Book (Horror) and Rites of Exorcism (Urban Fantasy) slowly but surely. Both are at about the same word count, but the TEB comes far slower. Strangely, it's also the only project I've worked on the past year that has involved no 'kill and start over' in its writing. Oh, scenes have been deleted and there's a few I know I need to move about later on but 'add a bit, go away, add a bit more' seems to work for it, somewhat to my surprise. It probably helps that the story is dark enough that I can only write about it for short periods anyway.

Rites of Exorcism is pretty much moving slowly as I try to get the scenes I write to even remotely match the ones in my head. I suspect I need to re-read the previous draft entirely and figure out what scenes from it will be kept at all in order to have some sense of real progress. As for Boy & Fox, I'm still running into the tonal shift: the first 8 pages are quite different from the rest of the novel and I'm still working on meshing them together better so that Bess's arrival in the story is less like a live grenade and more a movement forward for Boy.

In other writing news, I'm giving serious thought to doing scifi for nanowrimo this year. I have a story that's been rummaging about my head in various forms for years now and it would be nice to try having a first draft of substantial length for a change. I just need to figure out which of the various iterations of it make the most sense, and am certain the version involving incestuous census takers is pretty much off the board.

And the not-so-easy-part progresses...

Edited  more pages, realized the editing was sub-par and redid it, altering and removing things. As entire sections need to be re-thoughts and -written I am not sure sure to what extent this truly qualifies as editing ... mostly because I will have to re-write the edited sections presumably at some point as well.

That I go over what I just edited to edit it again each time I open the file is going to make this very slow.

But hopefully also make it work :)


From this morning's output of ... 15 lines:

"You didn't need to hit me."

Bess stepped forward, only to stop as Boy flinched back, the wariness in his eyes matching her own. "I had to be certain: assassins have certain skills they can't hide."

"Why would assassins be hunting you?" Boy asked, then rubbed his stomach, his pain answer enough. "I bet you make enemies like other people make friends."

And the easy part is done....

Edited the first 8 pages (until Bess shows up); removed and clarified a few things, got rid of some words. From here on in it is going to be much harder .... Also working on notes for the Story That Died early in June; planning for 2-3 pov characters but plan to let it ferment in my mind while I work on editing Boy & Fox into a proper shape.

I think most of the extraneous characters will be removed to try and pare the secondary characters down, but shall see how it all goes ....

An update I did not expect to have ...

Managed to hit 50K last night on Boy & Fox, largely because the story is almost done. I have to figure out the final major scene, which -- along with the scene after it -- should be about 5K. I know a few things to change in the next draft, namely that Tychus has to show up more often and Do More Stuff, but I shall finally have a finished first draft to build onto for this story. The scaffolding works, the plot works pretty well though I need Reynard to be wrong about things more often and will need beta readers to figure out if the one secret is as obvious to the reader as I think it is.

(Essentially, there is a secret about Boy that the reader should figure out long before Boy does, and probably before some of the characters in the novel do. While it seems obvious to me, I'm well aware I wrote the story with that secret behind it so my view on 'obvious' is, frankly, skewed.)

I plan to wait on it a month or so, print it off, and then do the second draft after that -- which, unlike all my second drafts of late, will  NOT be a rewrite from scratch -- and then lob the result at the writing group and see what they turn it into :)