Retirement: a parable

The assignment was simple. There is a wandering magician. He interferes in matters that do not concern magicians. Find him. Kill him.

Working for the Metric Commission meant dealing with problems. I had killed several with magical Talents in my time. And one magician, though she was new to her power and I’d barely escaped with my life even so. This assignment wasn’t like that.

They gave me the aendar, a stone that nullified power. And promises I’d be able to leave if I did this one thing. I said yes. Sometimes that’s all you can do. There were ways to find him, of course but I wasn’t about to try them: magicians have good instincts for traps.

Instead I ended up in the town of Cresthaven. Because it carried a scar in the skin of the world that was opening and the magician would end up here. It was the sort of thing magicians fixed and there were none around here. There were four talents in two surrounding towns: killing them proved surprisingly simple.

That was probably a warning. Only I didn’t think so at the time.

The magician arrived three weeks later. Places feel different once a magician comes to them. Like the calm at the centre of a storm. As if everything was more real, more important. There was a fulcrum here, and everyone knew it without understanding what they knew.

He looked ordinary. That surprised me. He wandered the streets and if I hadn’t been told what was wrong with the town, I’d have never noticed him. But he paid attention to the wound. I followed, waiting until he was done mending it.

He turned to me as I came up behind him. The aendar was cold in my hand and warm as well as though the stone were somehow liquid and solid as once.

“Ah,” he said, and then words in a language I didn’t know. The aendar was in his hand a moment later. The stone purred.

I didn’t move.

“You brought two snipers with you.” He didn’t use power, not in the way magicians can. But he was certain in a way that shook me.

“Three,” I admitted.

“Including you, yes.” He sighed. “If I asked, would you tell me who you worked for?”

“I am trained to resist such things.”

“Mmm. You think that will matter to me, considering you planned to kill me?”

“No. The stone was going to my my method.”

The magician blinked once, studied the stone. “Few can carry an aendar for three weeks without it leaving them. Whatever agency you work with, you know how dangerous a magician can be.”

“In a place of power, yes.”

He smiled, and the smile set me back a step. “I am the wandering magician. Each place I wander to is a place of power for me.”

I fell back another step at the truth behind those words. I swore. I don’t often, but sometimes it’s the only way to voice fear.

“Even if that were not true, you must have known this would not work. Why did you do it?”

I think he threaded power into his voice on a level so subtle I never sensed it; I’d like to think that’s why I answered. “I wish to retire. Almost no one has. I am tired of – the things that have to be done to keep the world safe. Of how much I’ve lost and given up of myself, my own dreams. I wished to be free from those I worked for.”

He laughed. The magician’s laugh shook me with the kindness that lurked under him. “You have an aendar stone: they unmake bindings, and some magics as well. Whatever connected to you to your employers is gone, Aram.”

“And those who came with me?” I asked.

“I have dealt with them.”

I didn’t ask. If I have learned anything, it’s that some things are best left unknown. “And what happens to me?”

“That is up to you. I will let the stone go: no one is meant to hold one, and certainly not for three weeks. You may forget some things you knew, but some of that will be the stones doing on the behest of your former employers I imagine.”

I nodded. I could have asked for his help, but there are some things you don’t do.

“And Aram?”

I paused, half-turned away. I’d never told him my name, but he was the wandering magician.

“If you try and kill anyone else with a Talent in your life, you will answer to me.”

I said nothing; I continued turning and walked away. Sometimes there are no other options. Survival has a cost, and I accepted the cost of my own.

Plans and plots (and things to never do)

"Let's talk about legitimacy. I think that's always something to talk about with hitman websites."

That was part of research on YouTube a couple of nights back. That and some harrowing videos I had to FF through and barely watch because people are the kind of monsters fairy tales warn you about. I tend to start gathering research for stories very early when they need any and eventually everything you come by counts as research.

The plot for the story is as follows: 'Near-future scifi where everyone lives off grid, and the real rebellion is living on the grid, being exposed, part of corporations and governments and with few secrets to your life at all. Most everyone lives off-grid following the PrivAct Wars – which some call Privacy Wars, other Pirate Wars; depends on what kind of history one wants to remember. The idea that being open, being known, is scarier and far more transgressive than hiding ever is.'

I figured the rough idea out long before the various election fiascos though I'm not about to pretend they won't influence the story. Science-fiction is, after all, a reaction to the present, and to the kind of future we see it leading toward. Often, the issue of privacy is pitched as that one can have freedom (privacy) or security, but you can't have both at once. This can be seen as a false equivalence, however - privacy advocates are generally not against 'here is data, we can use it to stop crimes' but where it reaches the point of thought-crime they are. But this is a novel, so it is going to go to extremes in both directions.

My notes include the line that 'History is the blade that informs how deep the wound is' and this is a deep part of the story. Much of the history of the setting is data. Most of that has been post during the PrivWars when advocates for privacy went far off the deep-end and wiped census records, tore apart databases in the deep web etc.  To be fair, it was reactionary. Also to be fair, a lot of it was earned. Immigration rules had been tightened the world over, insurance companies using data on citizens to only further their own goals (money) and many corporations doing the same. Governments, hemorrhaging money, were selling private data on citizens to keep the lights on. Everything was going sour and both sides wanted to protect the future.

The end result of the wars is that over 90% of the world lives off-grid, with many cities half-empty shells of themselves and the internet entirely decentralized, with cloud storage being spread out over the world and encrypted to hell and back (we're talking post-quantum cryptography, and probably stuff even further down the line) in an effort to be private and off-grid. This of course makes it much, much easier to do really dark shit and never be caught.

Governments still exist, in the ideal small-government form and mostly just provide very basic services such as trade arrangements, some import and export issues and basically keeping control over - and an eye upon - the much smaller and transparent corporate sector of society. If you work for the government, your life is an open book. To anyone. Ironically, this also keeps them far more honest and upright than other people ever need to be. The MC works for the government and the story is going to be about an assignment they are sent on and their exposure to the wild and dangerous 'world' of freedom.

And also fun things on cultural stagnation and how the obsession with privacy and freedom has limited the growth of technologies, nations etc. and issues over at what point the drive for anything goes too far and how the quest for pure freedom can created a totalitarian regime all its own. Should be very fun to work on.  If the research doesn't get Authorities knocking on my door, of course :)

*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.

Sweltering Stars: the cast

This is a sci-fi novel being written pretty much for the sheer fun of it. It’s sci-fi horror (the horror stuff showing it’s first glimpses about the 5K mark) exploring transhumanism, the far (very far) future and essentially what happens when the hubris of a humanity that has spread out among six galaxies realizes it means nothing when the stars turn right and the Great Old Ones come out to play.

Cast:

Kaden: An archaeologist, Kaden is an explorer of the past who finds ways to interface with ancient technologies using modified old tech, techtweaks (sometimes alien in nature) and modern technology designed to break, scan and hack ancient systems. Nominally the leader of the expedition to the space station Nanospark VI, he knows the least about what is going on and nothing about the true nature of the universe, though he carries one alien item on him he’s hiding from everyone else, and it may be both their salvation and destruction.
He was pretty much based on how difficult it would be to get technology in the future to interface with ‘modern’ technology now, so in the future you’d need people who specialized in such things.

Lillias: a very, very well-trained security officer who is actually a cyborg (this is only technical: nothing of her is human, her memories implanted into a mechanical body - it actually makes her the most transhuman of the characters in that sense), she has done everything from bounty hunting to bodyguarding and running entire planetary security systems. If she has a flaw, it’s thinking that she is actually better than she is and being a bit too reliant on her various offensive and defensive systems and scans.
She is terrified of true darkness, though no one remembers why.

Otli: a flowing liquid entity with a human mind Otli is basically a sentient puddle that explores places and is close to unkillable (since it can switch between states of matter at need), Otli has run into one of the Great Race of Yith and barely survived the experience, its memories of the event being very, very vague. Otli definitely appears to be the most transhuman of the characters and is quite happy to use that in order to be underestimated or ignored.
It is well aware that they’re meant to all die at the station - Otli is often sent into situations to explore by the Charter where only it survives to report back - but is quite up front about this and rather puzzled as to why the Charter organization would sent along assets as valuable as Lillias and Kaden if they were meant to not survive this exploration.

Other people will show up eventually. This far all the main case have secrets - from each other and themselves - and no idea what their real mission is, or if they’re intended to survive it or not.

Yup Still alive!

Hoy. Heading toward the third act (I think). Charlie just discovered that the reason secret Canadian government agents have been trying to kill her and Jay since they came into Canada was for budget reasons.

It turns out that keeping an eye on the wandering magician and friends was using up too much of their operational budget, and executing them is far cheaper. Hence the attempted murders.

Nanowrimo 2015

8000 words of notes (and pre-stories) so far. Some of which is trying to get my brain to stop coming up with scenes for nano. The plan this year is two nanos. The third volume of the magician series novels, called Lagan Magics, and then a space opera sci-fi story called Peace Crimes.

The former is about the wandering magician curing Jay's blindness, a god attempting to take over the world and finally an encounter with the Order that made god-eaters. It wraps up a lot of stories, sets the stage for the future of the characters and is intended to end the series. I will definitely do more short stories in it, but I think that will end the novels. Possibly.

The latter is a space opera about humans and aliens, about wars and the methods to win them. At the core, it's about the monsters people create and the fear that engenders worse monsters. And about  how one can judge a society not by how it treats the least among them, but by now it treats those it doesn't admit exist at all.

Brain == Dead.

So. Turned out this year was the most I’ve ever written. (2009 was 3 different nanos all a shade over 50K). This year had the magician series second novel Drowning Magics at ~60K for its first draft. The pre-nano idea that became Loss & Gain was 50K, complete in itself with no sequels or anything planned. Too Many Murders got shelved for another time [doing a murder mystery without planning doesn’t work for me] and the literature-style One Night ended at 16K words as a novella — I could have continued it, but only with rubbish so I figured it was best to end and then redo at a later date. The rest of the month was other stories, mostly end-pieces that might  become part of Drowning Magics. So, technically, I did two nanos and one collection of stories centered about themes of forgiveness, so it wasn’t all that bad.

I doubt I’ll ever do this much again, but that’s what I said in 2009. 2015 will be slated for the first draft of the third (and final?) novel for the magician series.

One Night

So. Yeah. this story is Literature. Which means, given me, it's going to start dark and get worse.

Which it does, and has. It starts at the ending and works back from there, scattering across time as a series of notes/diary entries written by the MC to a court-mandated psychiatrist. The amount of profanity is impressive thus far. I have some idea of the events leading up to the 'one night' but nothing specific yet. Hell, I don't know much about the characters yet.

The sheer amount of angst is going to be staggering I think.

Huzzah and Hooray!

7K written today, at 103K in total at present. ~62K was the first draft of Drowning Magics (as ever, the ending came too quick and was too rushed, but that is always me and first draft endings. It's a framework, with things to fix and alter.) ~8K is the Too Many Murders draft piece, which was set aside. I could have finished it, or finished something, but it would have been just words for the sake of words, which I find to be a waste of time.

(We will pause for the irony of that, given how much I sometimes write in November, but it is true.)

Generally I use nanowrimo for one real draft, one get-this-out-of-my-head draft and generally, depending on time and desire, something that comes up entirely during the month of brainstorming crazy-fun. It all depends on time, energy and inclination. If it stops being fun and feels forced, I stop doing it.

Also working out plans in my head for Dec/Jan writing, and figure to spend Feb-? doing the second draft of Curdled Magics and then look into collecting the first year of the magician series stories for a print version (via lulu and/or create space, I think). After that I get to figure out how to fix what was going wrong with Boy & Fox, damn it. Sadly, the actual plot-thread the evil Elm Street house) is something that fits the magician series far better than Boy & Fox, so I'll probably scrap 10K of words as I clear it out and fix it up. Shall be fun :)

Depending on how things go, I might alter the plan for the Boy/Fox and magician series stuff. Nothing set in stone in the order of them, but I do want to get them all done.

Loss & Stations

I don’t have a will, or even a testament. I’m not big on testaments or commandments and won’t leave anything behind when I die. Not by choice; I just won’t. It’s entirely possible what when I die, no one will ever remember I existed, which isn’t a trick most people can pull off in an age of social media and internet feeds hungering for data like cats ravaging catnip. There are a lot of tricks in the world. Some big, some small, some useless and some flat-out terrifying. Mine falls somewhere in the range of wth.

My name’s Parker, and I lose things.

I have vague memories of being married once. That’s really all anyone needs to know about that.

Right now I’m in an actual nest of vampires under the disused Cooper Line subway station. Built in the 1960s and then never connected to the subway at all for reasons involving politics and possibly bribes just to piss off the architect, who drank himself into oblivion a couple of years later. It’s likely he did something to this place when dying: concentrated bitterness can do amazing things at times.

All I know is that vampires are solitary creatures, as far as tulpas go. And this place of stone and earth lit only by the city workers hats and safety vests we are wearing, is showing us at least six vampires. Human-form, vast, moving along ceiling and walls in blurs too quick for most of the gunshots to reach them. I’m here with Brodie Tavish; she asked the oldest ghoul in the city for directions to this place because the city wants to reopen it and all the maps had been burned or lost.

That should have been our first clue something wasn’t at all kosher. I also should have wondered of Brodie had pissed off Utlk recently. For a two-hundred year old tulpa, Utlk can be a remarkably petty creature at times according to some stories I’ve heard. I made Brodie tell me everything she knew about him, just in case. First rule of dealing with tulpas: remember they’re not human. Some of them can play a very long game.

Or murder a small expedition funded by the city because – oh, hell.

Gunshots fill the air from the other ten people with us, few hitting the vampires at all. “Brodie.”

She turns to me, speaking between the sound of gunshots keeping the vampires at bay. “Parker. You have a plan?”

“Not as such. You do work for the city: does the mayor’s office have any plans in the pipeline involving Stateview Waters?”

“They are limiting tourist buses in the oldest parts of the city because of stress on cobblestone,” she says after a short pause. It’s why I like Brodie: no question about why I’m asking it, no ‘what the hell are you talking about?’, just what she knows, fast and quick. “Do I want to know why you’re asking this when we have six vampires who are going to kill us?”

Not trying to: we have weapons, we’ll run out of ammunition long before er manage to kill enough vampires to matter.

“Utlk lives in Stateview Waters; if the city does that, it will limit tourism to the cemetery and he does so love showing off the mausoleums.”

She blinks. “He does know more about the underground of the city than anyone else. You really think he didn’t warn us because of a fit of pique over something else?”

“You met him: do you?”

She swears, soft and ugly, fires off another shot with her pistol and wings a vampire. She’s good. Everyone she’s brought with her is calm, collected, and we don’t have a hope at all. “Go. Tell someone important.” She hands me her ID. “This might help.”

“I could make them lose us; we could get out,” I say between another burst of gunfire.

“There is at least six vampires. And a dozen humans to hide. You really think you can do that?”

We’ve known each other a week; she knew she’d end up forgetting me, because my trick does that. Didn’t mean a damned thing to her at all. “I don’t know.”

“Go.”

I step to the side. The vampires lose sight of me, lose my trail, lose the very thought I was here at all. I walk, until I can’t hear anymore gunfire, and I keep walking. I’m smiling and the smile doesn’t feel nice at all.

My name is Parker, and I lose things. Often when I can’t afford to. But sometimes, just sometimes, I can make sure that what is lost matters.

The death of a draft

And Too Many Murders is being set aside. Too much research is going to be needed and way, way too many people were dying. I need to rethink the MC a bit (he needs to work instead of be a perpetual loafer; probably fix/sel UnWaves for his dads company) so there is more logic in how he funds/runs across the bodies. I like the characters and the setting, just can't get the story to work as pure pantsing. I was spending as much time writing notes on on who died, who killed them, how they died etc. as I was writing the story, which slowed it down to a crawl.


So I'm working on a story idea that popped into my head just before nano. Urban fantasy, of the noir/grimdark sort. Thus far the MC has possible agreed to murder someone and also effectively fed one kid to a vampire. Need to sleep; thoughts on draft and tenses tomorrow.

From nano #2.

“Did you want to get arrested?” I snapped once she was driving down the road.  “You don’t go about telling the police you believe aliens killed over three people!”

“What I wanted was for the police to not lock you up, Dennis.” Mel said.

“Lock me up? I haven’t done anything.”

“You think that matters to the police? Just because you’re a white male doesn’t mean you’re immune to being jailed for crimes you didn’t commit.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Mel snorted. “Well, not all the time and definitely not in the way you mean.”

“Point is: something damned weird is going on in Kennebec. We need to find out what.”

“We what?”

“Murders? Solving then? Try and keep up,” she snapped in turn as she twisted the wheel, tires skidding as the car rounded a corner.

“We have a police force. They’ll be calling in state troopers and the FBI, Mel.”

“So? They don’t know this town: we do. Fact: it can’t be just one person. Fact: they know our police force isn’t equipped to deal with this. Fact: they are getting away with murder. Fact: they knew who they killed and are trying to distract the authorities so it isn’t just about murder.”

“They tried to make it look like Alex and Emily killed themselves,” I said in spite of myself.

“And killed animals for the same reason. Amanda was an accident, presumably, unless they killed her first and then the animals as an attempted cover for that. There is at least a plan to this.”

“So we are assuming it’s humans rather than aliens that did these killings?”

“Without proof otherwise, yes. It probably isn’t the seven foot tall lizards in human skinsuits since they are busy being the British royal family.”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

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.

Jay and Charlie

(Altered to remove the lisp, for clarity)

 “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

I stare at him. “Okay, I’ll bite: why?”

“It didn’t! It got hit by a car so it could get to the Other Side!”

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 :)

Nanowrimo musing bits

So. I began my notes a bit back with a single line: 'Jay buys a cell phone'. From there, the story is spiralling out into why magicians loathe the internet -- and, if they believe creatures from Outside are in it, the question of why they haven't damn-well banished them. It will involve entities from far, far Outside the universe, the death of a ghost and .

Some Story Bits:

• Why does the oldest magician in the world take selfies at least once a day?
• What if there truly is a monster from Outside the universe dwelling in the internet? What if they have made the internet too big to fail, and what does that phrase truly mean? 
• The wandering magician once took on the Bank that dwells behind (or beside) other banks, and the scars of that are still with him: is he willing to do the same to the Internet, regardless of the price others will pay for those actions?
• What happens when Jay isn’t allowed to play games on his phone for days?

It is basically intended to mark a new chapter for the characters and will probably be the last thing I do in the series for some time. I've been writing this series since the end of June 2013. The result has been 4 novella, over 120 short stories and, with this year's nano, 2 novels. Which is a lot in anything, and definitely something I need to take a mental break from or it will get far too stale and repetitive.

I might try another series of some kind, but not sure what genre or even the kind of story I'd end up telling. Shall see where things take me.

The madness. It is over. Day -1.

Huh. Ended up with a shade over 140,000 words this year. Pretty interesting all around: did a lot of write-ins with the local chapter, had two weeks of the month off work and had a lot of fun in the process. A breakdown ...

Curdled Magics: The magician series novel draft went well. It ended up at a shade over 50K when I had figured on, oh, 90K. I cut some parts out as 'not necessary' that were in retrospect necessary yo write. The second draft needs some fixing (the first 6,500 words are in past tense rather than present, for example) and there will be a lot to change, fix and improve in another draft but the framework of the story turned out to be rather solid. I do need to give it more room to breathe, but I can work on that as well.

Ghosting: A novella set after the novel from Charlie's POV. I wrote it for myself alone, so that I'll know how she met Dyer and what CASPER is and the like. Pure backstory. In the middle of a story, but even so.

Rogue Dreams: I don't generally do sci-fi, which is one reason I wrote it for my second nano. I try to do at least one genre or story I never do every year as a kind of crazy challenge. This story almost ate my brain a couple of times given the first 7,500 words were a mess and the story that followed on a new attempt bore no relation to the story I'd wanted to tell. On the plus side, that does mean that I can still tell that story at some future date. It also never lived up to the promise of the first scene, but trying sci-fi without any real worldbuilding or notes at all is a recipe for disaster anyway. A fun disaster, but still that. I will probably re-read it in a few months but likely do nothing else with it.

War & Pieces: A mainstream-attempt at a novel/satire of nanowrimo and thrillers. It started getting far more serious than it should and I borrowed a plot threat from a story I wrote 2 years ago that probably didn't work at all. It is a neat story but probably could never get published for reasons of, well, liability. I will go back to it in a bit, but I'll need to alter a lot of the character and, probably, make his family far less important to the story. I also need to figure out what kind of story it's going to be at all. It was a fun start to a story and should be great fun to tweak later.

All told, this year counts as a success as far as nanowrimo goes. I had to cancel nothing to do it, which is definitely a plus, and am left in that state of: 'Wake up! Wait. No need to write. Sleep?' mental place which is fun. I have in the past generally done one serious draft (sometimes a redo of a nano) from Dec.-Feb. but am mostly taking December off save from short stories. Will begin the edits/revisions on Ghoulish Happenings in January and then the re-do on the sequel to it after that. At which point I will probably begin edits/revisions on Curdled Magics. But we shall see how it all plays out.

Day Close to 30. Too close 30. Too close. Bad day.

Cutesey title aside, work on the one magician series novella is going well: it is basically about Charlie's first adventure in the weird on her own after the events in the Curdled Magics novel. I'm mostly doing this as backstory for Charlie's own, later adventures on her own in order to flesh out some ideas for the world and give her reference points to weird stuff that don't involve the magician and Jay. I am not sure I will finish it before the actual end of the month, but hope to.

So far the series timeline is:

• piles of short stories (Over 30).
• Road Trip novella, during which a trip is made to Oregon to stop creatures from Outside who want a new cold war. 
• Curdled Magics. The novel, which is about the families of the MCs and the attempt to help a town that has sealed itself off from the world; as a result of the climax of it, Charlie leaves the magician and Jay to travel on her own for a time.
• Ghosting. Charlie novella.
• ?: Probably more short stories, once I get back into the flow of them.

I will mostly take December off from stuff, I think, to let my brain recharge a bit, and then spend January - ? on editing Ghoulish Happenings into a viable second draft for people to critique. I have stuff to expand for it and a few minor/major plot issues to fix but once that's done I'll be able to do another attempt at the second novel in that series.