...

So. Uhm. I don’t wanna write this. But Charlie thaid I have to. To explain, and things.
Last week was bad. I’d been having nightmareth for months, sucking my thumb raw and Honcho was pretending he didn’t notithe because friends do that even if we were bound together and it ended up in this town up in Canada which wasn’t real. I mean, the town wasn’t real.

Canada is real. I’ve googled it. (Charlie wants me to thay that googling doesn’t equal real, but I knew that.) The town was a trap made by an ex-magician Honcho had me strip the magic from and he’d become some anti-magic and evil and called an Emissary from the Far Reacheth which ….
It’th a really bad place. Plathes. Bad ones. The Emissaries undo bindings in the univerthe just by existing, by being present like a wound, like something too real and it hurts to thee them even. And Joey called one, and Honcho asked me to see every binding of it to stop it and it hurt and

my eyes smoked. Eyes don’t do that, not even mine. And there wath smoke and it hurt a lot and Joey was gone and I wathn’t unmade. I could have been, but I survived and my lisp thomehow is mostly gone before you don’t survive that and not be changed and I don’t need to suck my thumb at all anymore. I can, but it doesn’t do anything for me binding myself.
Tho I don’t, becuase Charlie doesn’t like it and I’m just delaying now because I don’t want to talk about thith at all but my vision is all weird and blurred and bad, but I can still see bindings just fine! I’m fine! I AM! But Honcho didn’t think so and it hurt him and

he said he had to leave me with Charlie
and left with a fae named Dana
and he’s gone but he’s my friend
and bindings are breaking
and it hurts all the time.

I can’t cry right anymore, but I make sounds and I guess that made line breakth in the speech-to-text program on my phone. I don’t know. I like Charlie, but Charlie ithn’t Honcho and it hurts that he won’t come back and everything hurts too much and I’m trying to be happy so I don’t hurt Charlie but I think that hurts her too and I don’t know and

Charlie just gave me a huge hug.

It helps. I’ll be OK tomorrow. I’ll be better then.

I’m thorry if I made you sad:(

the last scene

There is not enough magic in the universe to form bonds that cannot break. But there might be enough, in what we are to each other, in friendship and in love, to fix this. I don’t know. I wish I did.

I wish a lot of things.

I am crying as I drive, and I wait for Jay to make some comment about thinking girls can’t cry, to make fun of me for tricking him, but all he is doing is sleeping and making sounds of pain as we move away from the magician.

Some things even a magician cannot forgive themselves for doing.

And a New Character is introduced...

 “Dana Hayden, CSIS Border Patrol,” she says, showing a badge with CSIS – whatever that is – and the Border Patrol insignia for Canada, which turns out to be a moose with glowing antlers.

“Charlie.” I add nothing else; she doesn’t ask.

“I am here to inform you that, as per the Meech Lake Accord of 1987, the god you summoned is not permitted entry into Canada.”

“You limit the immigration of gods?”

“Unless they are bilingual in English and French, yes.”

Learning Secrets...

Via some of the many, many stories I've done in the series, I knew the magician had been involved in some event in his last (~8 years ago) involving the Grand Canyon and his refusal to talk about that to other magicians -- or even mention it to Charlie and Jay at all. During last night's writing I discovered he had actually managed to lose the Grand Canyon. Exactly how, and why, and for how long, I've no idea, but that is a pretty impressive thing to lose.

Working on why Charlie gets so crazy uptight over Jay sucking on his thumb right now; I know some of the reason (involving her mother and her sucking her own thumb into she was four) but I figure there is more to it than that, so trying to tease it out of the story as best I can.

ETA:

Also, Charlie got to troll Jay, which is always all kinds of fun.

 “There’s nothing wrong with crying.”

“You don’t cry.”

“That’s because I’m a girl. You’re a boy: boys are allowed to cry.”

Hoy.

Two days into nano. Just over 20,000 words of crazy-awesome fun. Things that are working:

1) The pacing. I am pacing this nano a lot, lot better than other ones. I re-read the first magician series novel [last years nano] twice, pulled apart what worked, didn't failed to work etc. I had a plot for it, and at some point figured certain elements and characters were slowing it down when really they gave the story room to breathe. Room it needed.

So this year I have an outline (4,500 words) that covers roughly the first 3/4 of the novel and the very end, leaving a lot of room to juggle, alter, twitch things and such in the end scenes. I figure those will need the most work, since I tend to rush endings.

2) The characters. Things bounce together well, and how things are explained (to the reader and between the characters) seems to be working well. Jay is a veritable gold-mine of adorable, and his attempting to explain the concept of OTP to Dyer (while trying to get the 100-year dead ghost to join tumblr) is awesomely fun and more than a little crazy.

I wrote one scene I refuse to google, just in case that OTP does exist somewhere.


I read a great quote recently that people read a story once for the plot; if they return to it, it's for the characters. So I'm focusing on that, trying to make what happens in the plot follow the characters and the story to natural conclusions. We shall see how it all goes, but for now it's a blast.

Now for a break and sleep before tomorrow :)

Drowning Magics: Cover

And, thanks to mojo5050 allowing me to use her photography, the second novel has a cover! A very badly done one, but hey.