Weird aspects of a novel....

Tonight's small fragment of finished words included the following two segments:

"You have to hate to change; if you don't hate your life enough you'll never find the will to change it."

"I think," I pause, the words coming slow, halting. I don't want to hurt hurt her. I still speak. "I don't think anyone is all they could be. We're all reflections, echoes, smudges. Fragments of what we could be, of things never done, of things left undone." I lick my lips. "Every choice is a grief."

... it is at once a fun and odd worry that someone would, some day, read this story and try to find autobiography in it. 

OTOH, it would be damn funny to use every novel an author wrote from a first-person POV and assume it was all about the author themselves and do up a giant essay or thesis on them based on thatt.

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.

This is me procrastinating

A section from The Empty Book turned into that, for fun.

Small progress is small

Slowly but surely progressing on The Book of Going Forth by Night along with The Empty Book. Current word counts are ~18K and 14K, respectively. Hoping to spend a good chunk of the weekend on BOGF alone. Jumping from project to project isn't a bad idea, but when they work in different tenses it becomes a little trickier.

(Effectively, I went to work on BOGF again to finish a scene and had trouble not writing in present tense, which is what TEB is in.)

And, to keep this post from being boring, the latest lines in TEB:

"I screwed up. I didn't die, and now," I lick dry lips, "and now it's hard to see how those reasons made sense."

"So you won't try and kill yourself again."

"No," I say, a little surprised to find it's true.

... which goes to show why I only work on it in short spurts.

finally ended a scene....

I fall back a step, half-drunk sober stagger, vision shattering. Not just between the alley, my eyes strobe, spots dancing. My head feels full of broken glass. That was something, somewhere, somewhen, some ... but I can feel it slipping away like grease down a drain, the memory a residue of – of –.

I rub my face, sweat slicking off onto my hand, eyes squeezed tight as I stumble down the road. It feels like a toothache behind my eyes. Whatever Sam thinks I am, that I'm becoming, I wasn't ready for ... I don't know what it was. Memories being destroyed, things charged with that task. Who, what? Nothing comes. What was memory is now a movie screen, the distance a necessity borne of desperation, fading from my mind before I can grab it.

There was an alleyway, long, narrow. People in it, things taking them apart. Taking what made them people apart, and .... nothing else comes. I saw, or was shown, more. But now, nothing. I tried to kill myself yesterday, but my brain is protecting me from this. Laugh or cry? What isn't both? I shudder a little, arms around myself, and move. One step. Another. Walking is easy, even if you hurt, even if you can barely see, when it means you're getting away, running. It mustn't have been hard to end up on land, long and long ago: be chased hard enough, run far enough, and you would. Fear wins. Only cowards survive.

Somehow I make it back to Ed's apartment, hurting all over. Even my fingernails ache. Everything looks unreal even as I walk into the solidness of it. My eyes hurt, even squeezed shut, but I'm not bleeding from them. It's not a horror movie; somehow that makes my life worse. I strip clothing soaked with sweat, fall into the shower. The room is thick with steam, wallpaper bubbling by the time I exit. Eyes feel gritty, as if I have sand in them. I take stock: the rest of me hurts, but I've been worse.

The wallpaper smooths under my fingers, a metaphor for the world. Gaudy designs pasted over bare walls, bubbling up, smoothed down. A laugh escapes me, strangled. "Nothing is metaphor now," I say, and my voice matches the one whispering inside my head, perfect. It shuts up. I leave. Ed isn't home. It's good, better: I don't want to be seen like this. Not vulnerable, but broken. Something broke inside me. I sleep. Fix it. Sleep fixes things.

I hold the mantra even as part of me is so scared of the darkness that will follow.

Two short snippets

I let out a breath, fingering the money in my pocket. “People can see you, right, when you want them to?” She nods. “Coffee.”

“Excuse me?”

I start walking again quickly. “There is a coffee shop down the road here than I like. We can drink and talk in it. You know more than I do about what is going on, about what I am or I’m becoming and I’m not up to pretending I know. There’s a point where treading water becomes drowning.”

The Third Cup was a small coffee shop cluttered with seats and tables, serving coffee, sometimes cookies, and nothing else. The menu boasted that the coffee came as one size fits all coffee and a free third refill. The owner was known to be quietly discreet, and so far in the closet that he made regular visits to Narnia. It wasn’t my place to pass judgement; I did so anyway.

***

Naomi puts down the cloth, fixing me with dark eyes. “That woman, she is all wrong. Her heart is full of ugly things.” She looks like she wants to spit on the floor, but her fear of inspectors runs too deep. “She is the kind of monster who makes all whores look bad.”

“It’s not like that. We’re not – .”

She cuts me off with a wave of her rag in my face. “Psh. I don’t care about that, boy. But knowing people like that, being friends with: it stains souls. It is not safe, not safe at all.”

“I know.” I smile as I stand. “But I’m not safe at all either.” A sound comes to me; warm water rushing over rocks. I’ve no clue how I know it’s warm but I step back regardless.

I don’t want to take anything, but that I could, that I could call part of her into me, must show on my face because Naomi steps back and lowers her rag. “Maybe you are, but not being safe does not make someone strong.”

this is not going to be a feel-good novel

“Does that count for nothing?” he says, trying so hard to understand why I’d tried to kill myself.

I bite my lip, teeth digging into stitches, then: “It’s everything.  School. Family. The world we’ve made, the race we’re in. It’s all futile. It doesn’t matter and I ran out of reasons to pretend it did.”

“You wanted to get the business of dying over with,” he says. “And now?”

“Now ….” I pause, Sam coming to mind, “now I think the world is too layered and complicated to be that simple, for death to be that easy.”

“The world has never been fair; what makes us think we’d get oblivion after we die?” Emma says behind me.

I jump, turning, and she hands me coffee without a word. I take it, not meeting her gaze, fearing the fire that burns behind her eyes would be full of scorn and judgement.

“You could have told me.”

“And said what? There are limits to how often I can explain something I can’t explain. I tried to kill myself. Saying why, giving reasons, never fits. People keep wanting it to make sense.”

“It’s easy; you were afraid,” she says with a certainty common to tv talk show hosts, the authority of Saints Oprah and Jerry Springer in her voice.

from things written last night

Worked on a page each on two stories; this is from the darker one:

I pull up the hood on my jacket, jamming hands into the pockets and walk down the stairs. The air is knife-cold, slithering between layers of clothing. I let a breath out, let the cold in, driving out morning angst and the last of the coffee’s warmth. I think if one of us was good with mornings, Ed and I might have lasted, together. Without that we always said too much that hurt; I know it’s not that simple, but I like to think it could have been. I don’t know what scares me more: that we might be too complex for the easy labels of psychology, or that none of us are as complex as we think. We complicate everything by making in into a story, love more than anything else, when a wildlife documentary shows how uncomplicated such things are.

"The first man to tell a story ruined the purity of living. Every word we speak is another loss, a further step taken from the world," a voice says, soft, beside my right ear.

the slow crawl of writing

Sometimes things come fast, sometimes they don't. When you're writing bits and pieces of three projects at the same time, nothing comes fast at all. Not that I haven't been writing, but the end result has been 2-300 words added every day or three to one story or another, which seldom feels like progress. That each story is a very different beast in tone probably doesn't help either. Currently, the following are being worked on:

Boy and Fox, under the title of Falling Toward the Sky, a story about a boy and a fox. Also a werewolf on the run from a prince, a kingdom whose king is going mad, foxes, self and memory. At heart, it's about a Boy who perhaps does a very terrible thing and gets to start his life over, wiping away memories of what came before it, only to discover it's never quite that easy. I consider it YA, but I could be wrong.

The Empty Book is about a failed suicide attempt and the insanity that results once Brodie begins to see more of the world than humans are meant to. It's about gods and religion, madness and family and is very, very dark. I tend to add to it in fits and starts, half when the weather is crappy more than anything else, and take breaks from it simply because it's not all that fun a mindset to immerse oneself in.

The Book of Going Forth by Night is the first book in a quadrology* of stories centred around an exorcist, his friends and allies, and the various situations he gets himself into via being hired by dubious people over the internet in a world where most people don't believe ghosts really exist because the servants of the gods alter their memories. It's very much urban fantasy and the story I'm planning to focus on for the next month or so in an effort to get a working first draft of it done. Again.**

---

* Meaning that 20K exist toward a draft of the second novel and the third and fourth exist as one-line notes in a file somewhere.

** In the space of about six months I've redone this story from scratch over 4 times. The fact that I have not burned out on it surprises me, to say the least.

secret truths. eh?

 Ed comes into kitchen, yawning, taking his coffee with a grunt and raising an eyebrow at mine after he's begun to actually wake up. "Since when do you not take cream and sugar?"

"Since today," I offer with a shrug. "Condiments hide the truth of things."

He snorts, says: "That almost made sense."

"Sorry."

"Sorry?"

"It's far too early in the morning for things to be making sense."

Okay, so this might be a little dark

“Of course it’s your fault your parents aren’t together,” the shape in the mirror whispered to Johnny. “Little boys should known to be heard and not seen, not bug daddy after a long day at work, not ask mommy about her new perfume.”

A hand the colour of tears slips out of the mirror. “If you come with me, all the pain will stop and you won’t ever be a naughty boy again. They might even love each other again with you gone.”

nanowrimo - titles!

Nanowrimo #1 is now going to be called The Empty Book. It's a horror story about a man named Brodie who learns the true nature of the world following an attempt at suicide and gets involved with the wars of magicians, angels, demons entirely against his will. It is emphatically not a feel-good book in my head.

Nanowrimo #2 is an urban sci-fi story involving a small town in northern Ontario and alien invasion of earth. The plan is for a trilogy called Dogs of War. The first book will be Contact and be about three high school students and their encounters with aliens, being altered by (other) aliens. It's going to be about war and religion and the sacrifices made on all sides. It will, however, have more humour than the first nano.

Word-wise, I am hoping to do two 80K nanoes this year.