What dreams may come

Random quote of the day:


“Without darkness there are no dreams. Without dreams we’d stand like brittle dead limbs and break in two."

—Karla Kuban, Marchlands






(Thanks to stillnotbored.)





( Illustrated version. )

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Inching towards a novel

I am moving forward on the WIP, but some days it's just not there, or I only get a little bit done. I don't feel stuck, exactly, but it's definitely inching along. Rather than waste my precious writing time on the days when the WIP isn't moving, I've been working on other things. Stories. Older novels. Novels-coming-up-next.

*sigh* This book has really blown my novel-a-year pace out of the water. Maybe I'll get back to that pace some day because the imagination certainly hasn't deserted me.

One thing that's been tickling my mind is an old novel, my second, Blood Geek. Not the novel so much as the world I created for it: a small, very strange carnival traveling through the Midwest in 1938. Sound familiar? When people started telling me about the HBO show, Carnivale, I despaired and was glad I wasn't trying to market my carny novel. Subsequently, I've learned that while the outer trappings of that show are the same, my novel is very different.

Besides, what's tickling me these days is not really the old novel but a character who played a minor role in it. Those who read the novel expressed a lot of interest in her and I've always thought she deserved her own story. I guess I must be seriously considering it because I just went online and ordered volumes one to three of A Pictorial History of the American Carnival by Joe McKennon. There are a number of books on carnivals now, but back in the day when I was doing research for Blood Geek (1992ish), there was not a lot to be found. Tons of stuff on the history of circuses, but carnivals are very different fish. Although they've featured prominently in fiction and movies, there wasn't a lot of hard facts to be had, or it was in rare book collections and hard to get access to (for someone with no travel budget like me). McKennon's book was a lifesaver when I found it at a local library. The used book trade online wasn't really up and running at that time, so I still had to depend on the UC system library catalogue (online/offline) and etc.

And what about Blood Geek? I did try to market it back in the day, but I probably won't be marketing it again. It's the closest thing I've written to a paranormal romance, but it's not really a true paranormal romance. Loads o' sex, sure, but there are some very dark elements—and it is an early novel, after all. I haven't reread it in years, and shudder to think what I might find there, but there are characters in it who really think they deserve books of their own and who might be rather interesting protagonists. Maybe they'll get a novel of their own—one of these days, if I can ever finish the current WIP.

The Hidden Ireland

In appreciation of St. Patrick's Day, here's a bit from the book I'm reading now, Meeting with the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland by Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green. It's a marvelous book, full of stories, and the lyrical voice of Ireland. Eddie Lenihan is one of the few seanchai, the old time Gaelic storytellers, left, and he's been collecting tales from other seanchai and common folk for decades. Like this little bit from Croom, October 12, 2001:

"I know that the whitethorn is always associated with the sioga.* That's why 'tis called the fairy tree. But 'tis the lone whitethorn in the middle of a field that's the dangerous one. There was a reason why that was left there, you see. No one but a fool would interfere with that.

And this from Drumline, September 19, 2001:

"I s'pose, if a fairy is molested, if you go tampering or meddling with 'em, well, they'll retaliate. 'Tis only kind o' natural, retaliation when you're interfered with. Nearly everyone in Ireland is aware that it isn't the done thing. Was never the done thing. The most ignorant people in Ireland, people that were illiterate, wouldn't bring a thorn out o' them forts."**

And as Mr. Lenihan puts it:

"Country people...would laugh....' 'Tis only children believe in them old stories, that old kind o' nonsense.'

"And yet, later that same night, in the pub, when all the laughing and mocking is done, the serious talk will begin, hesitant at first, then more freely, until at last, many pints of Guinness later, even those who mocked earlier in the night will finally—and not for the first or last time—admit that, yes, 'There's something there, all right. Petey (or Johnny, or Paddy or whoever) is not liar, whatever else he is.'

"And in such unpromising companies, by not retreating from impending scorn, ridicule, I have very often come away with a completely different knowledge of people I thought I knew before.

"And such confrontations have, I think, brought to the surface for some of those mockers, too, something deep, something that may have been forgotten in our hurly-burly world of 'acquire, have, experience, spend'...a lifting of a corner of that veil that separates us from a world that is right beside us, but for most of us as far away as Heaven...or Hell! "

*The fairies.
**Hill forts, of fairy forts, patches of land long associated with fairy activity.