A first attempt at a back cover blurb

This is a story about maps, and what happens when you fall off of them. About how you lose your self to find it, the thin line between a blessing and a curse, and – like all stories ever told – about family. It's a story about dreams, what can come to pass if we lose them, and the prices we may to make them come true.

Once upon a time, perhaps tomorrow or maybe yesterday but not that long ago, a boy found his way out of the Wasting at the end (or, some said, the heart) of the spirit world, so far from the real world that the sky was devoid of even moon or sun. His name had been lost, and even the name of the person he had entered the spirit world to find, but the boy was determined to find his quest and the questions he had come seeking answers for.

There is a also a fox, because every real story has a fox in it.

Or, as I think of it, pretentious twattle. But it is something: it's hard to write any kind of blurb for this story that doesn't give it all away.

Journey's end

“I was going to call,” she says.

I speak a silence filled with unsaid words.

Her eyes flit about the room, taking everything and nothing in. The walls peel with the smell of chemical cleanings.

“I was going to say I love you,” she says brusquely. “But I thought, you already know that. Not much point in saying what you know, is there?”

I am dying, I think, or whisper, or say.

She pats my hand as though it were the paw of a dog. “I was going to talk about the weather, but it's not nice. All rain and chances of snow. It has to be above freezing to snow, you know. I read that somewhere.” And she laughs, the sound entirely devoid of a sob. “And here I am talking about it anyway.”

She reaches for the cigarettes in a pocket, drops her hand. “The doctors tell me you aren't in pain. They have you on drugs, so many drugs. You might not even know what I am saying.”

She looks at me, holding my gaze with hers; I see no tears, but a tenderness that confuses me.

“You never sent me letters; I almost didn't find you,” she says, soft, almost gentle. “But I did, and your eyes are so empty now, so very empty again.”

I want to ask how that can make her happy, what she could even mean, but my voice is a single breath, croaked, and she squeezes my hand and tells me she is here.

And somehow, despite everything, it seems right.

travel

I remember you, sometimes. Not as now, but when your eyes were empty, drinking in the world without conditions, watching to learn and learning to watch. That is what a mother can love, what is remembered. There was a time when you were so empty you were beautiful.

I left when you were six to return when you were sixteen. I do that to all my friends, all my family: vanish and return, to see you with new eyes. We change slowly, but we do change, and if I had stayed with you, remained with any of you, I would never have been able to see your song except to confuse it with my own.

I don't have roots, you understand: I don't want to cease changing, to be a stone ground down by the river. And I want to see you change, how you grow and become someone new, each time I visit. I can remember each you that was, and each you that is, and when I try I can love them all.


I wonder if our eyes become empty again when we die?
I would love this to be true, but love has no place in truth.

You prove that to me with your tears, and all those letters you never write. If you really missed me, you'd find a way to find me, I said, gently, and you said you were going to travel too, as if you could hurt me with words. I remember your colic-crying; nothing you say can hurt worse, and I told you that you won't find anything that you can't find here as well.

I should have told you that we only travel to lose ourselves. I should have asked you if you ever thought I had changed as well. I wonder how empty my eyes are.

Tanabata

They have done this since the time when the stars were young, when the earth was fresh and new, each year one meeting, one night on the earth and together.

"It should have rained," he says, after their bodies have had their way with each other,as flesh cools and they become two people again, no longer strictly whole even with their breath enfolding each other.

She looks up, startled; they have met for so long that no words are needed. One a day, aye, but more lifetimes than the human mind can easily compass.

"The rain makes it more piquant the next time," she says. "We never talk, then."

"No." He does not ask how she is, she does not ask of his year: they are here, and nothing else has any meaning before that.

"We could," she offers. "Only not politics," with a smile at some private joke he does not know.

For a moment he is angry with himself, and then with her, but he lets it pass. "I meant the magpies," he says roughly. "The rain would have washed away the oil from their wings."

She looks surprised at that, then looks at the bridge with fresh eyes. One hand rises to her mouth, reminding him of when he first saw her, but her eyes have ages and lifetimes in them now, and her hand lowers as she smiles sadly.

"I would have come anyway," she says. "I could not call this day off."

"Do you live for any other days?" he says, half-dreading her reply.

She just looks at the birds dying for them and says nothing.

He holds her tightly for a moment, savouring the smell of her hair.

"We could end our night early, send them home," she whispers.

And it is his turn to be silent. He kisses her again, to end speech, to dissolve thought, and loose and lose himself in their aching greed.

Why I should not have begun work on a sci fi novel

On the second page of the first draft of the opening, a character asks what day it is. There is an hour-long pause while I realize that they wouldn't use the current calendar and consider various metric calendars before settling on one, altering some bits of it and printing it off. End result: "It's the 42nd day of the second month."

OTOH, it does add a certain realism that is fun, but damn .... :p

Time and cultures

Via a friend on facebook, the secret powers of time. (For what it is worth, the video is 10 minutes and I do plan to watch the 40 min. version on youtube linked to in the comment. Fascinating stuff.) |The gist is that different cultures are oriented to the past, present or future. Geography fits in to an extent, but it got me thinking that it would be a large basis for making culture clashes in novels work.

A different focus on time gives different ideas about the past, present, future, and one kind of person (say, Future) would be driven batty by a Present-focused culture that can be told smoking is bad, knows this, but it fails to register at some level. Insert other ideas as appropriate.

First thoughts ...

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - Alaska State Troopers are puzzled by a gruesome discovery in the city of North Pole: 26 headless chickens carefully arranged at a coop.

Oh, Santa, what have you done this time?

Witches and familiars

(via the morningstarr)

Word quickly spread amongst the villagers that the mystery child rapist was a tokoloshe, a hairy dwarf zombie created by witches for sexual purposes by removing the eyes and tongue of a human corpse. According to African legend the corpse then shrinks, grows hair and is reanimated to life to act as the witch’s familiar and sex toy.
A tokoloshe cannot be seen by adults, it carries a magic pebble in it’s mouth to make it invisible to grown ups.

Keeping this critter for possible (modified) use in something down the road. It makes for a fascinating mythology and, really, if one is going to have witches as evil, then this makes a hell of a lot more sense then black cats and the like. If a myth has witches as evil, then make them be evil. (I'd personally nix the child rape, for obvious reasons, but the idea of a familiar that is a witch's sex toy is amazing.)

Facebook Status Updates

I've fallen into the habit of posting bits of writing on facebook as status updates. Some are just lines jotted down in a file, others are bits and pieces that may (or may not) end up in a current WIP and some are short stories seeds for stories I will never actually write.


Bob knew he was being fired if he didn't upgrade to BrainBot 6.0, but all his education and programs worked with 4.0. Her'd avoided 5.0 by claiming it was too buggy, and now it was too late. Pushing thirty, he didn't even know if his brain could handle the upgrade. But he had no choice.

He told everyone he was a paranormal detective, but really he just liked seeing naked ghosts. Almost as much as watching them have sex.

He stepped out of the time machine, staring at his mantle clock and thinking it had worked, that he had moved an hour into the future and time would be his for the plundering. And then he read the paper, and damned daylight savings time with a heartfelt bitter sob.

"Why did you invent the time machine? To see the battle of Waterloo? The birth of Jesus? To meet Genghis Khan? Find out about the dinosaurs?"
"I wanted to go to my high school prom."
".... For the record, I'm writing down Jesus."
"I can't visit Jesus with a death ray!"
"What death ray?"
"The one I'm taking back with me."

The secret of magic is this: every work of fiction is really a travelouge. Understand that and you know all of magic you need to learn.

"Sanity is nothing more than proof your mind is a virgin," the man in the lab coat said with his cheery smile. "It will all be better soon. Scapel."

Cassie shrugged away Terry's question, her response light and dismissive: "We have an infinite capacity to bear the pain of others."

Jared smiled crookedly. When he spoke, his voice was terribly gentle. "To forgive requires a kind of judgement too."

"College girls?" The vampire managed to look paler than normal, like wamed-over oatmeal. "You don't go after them, little fledgling. What do you mean, why? They have mace! You want to know what it will feel like when the sun burns you to a crisp, get some mace in the eyes."

"Catching the pack of werepoodles was quite easy," Detective Christensen told the press conference. "We just went to pet stores and found out who was buying an excess amount of flea collars."

"You have to understand, mom and dad. I paid Joe Chill to kill you. I had to. There was no other way to become the Bat. The Bat needed your sacrifice for me to grow strong, to become the Batman, to fight crime. Because I couldn't do that with the vast fortune you ... left ... me. Oh."

"It is not that the dead don't wish to return; it's that they lose their way in the other world, lost without a Starbucks to guide them back through the darkness to the day."

There is a moment before the burning begins. The brief, fragile hope that you might escape, might not burn, that even fire can be kind.

"I don't think I get it," Terry said. "I mean, you've helped create a goddess. Doesn't that make you spiritual more than, you know, religious?"
Jared grinned. " Spirituality is just the privatization of religion."

A ghoul and his mother, a conversation

"This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes."

Terry held the phone in his hand and said nothing. She always answered the phone like that, a family joke that now seemed strange, forced now that her husband was dead.

"Terry, I know that's you," his mother said on the other end.

"How?" he whispered.

There was a brief pause. "Call display. What did you think?"

"I don't know. Sandra called, about dad."

"And?"

"You know." Terry took a breath. "His body was missing."

"Ah. Missing."

"Mom," he began, the urge to confess choking his voice.

"Don't," she snapped. There was a longer pause. "I did tell you this call may be monitored, didn't I?"

"That's always a joke," Terry said reflexively, mind racing over the conversation; he didn't think he'd said anything incriminating yet, and nothing to tell people he'd eaten his father's corpse. He remembered to hang up a moment later, fingers trembling a little. Real police work wasn't hollywood; Ethan had told him that long enough. They'd have traced him, if they wanted to.

He set his phone down on the counter carefully and turned. His fist hit the wall before he'd consciously considered it, drywall cracking as he hit it again and again until bones broke, the smell of his own marrow easing something inside him. Terry shuddered slightly and watched the hand mend itself and pretended his tears were only from the pain.