Echoes in a Hollow Space

It's so odd writing again for characters I first created 5 novels ago (Jeremy, Susan, Carmina, Maff from Blood Geek). Kind of like meeting up with old friends you haven't talked to in 20 years. You kind of know them, but you kind of don't, and it's partially getting to know them all over again but with this strange deja vu.
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Oh, criminy! The December 19 Democratic debate is going to be held about two blocks from here, at Loyola Marymount instead of UCLA. Looks like I don't leave the house that day.
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The Lao Tzu quote I used for the November 8 random quote of the day is so ubiquitous that it appears on t-shirts and coffee mugs, but I couldn't verify that he actually said it. I don't normally like to use quotes I can't verify because there's already too much of that on the internet. And I try to avoid ubiquitous quotes altogether, because generally the more ubiquitous they are, the less likely they are to be an accurate attribution. But when I pulled this one out of my random quote file yesterday shortly after posting about learning to live with limitations on Twitter, I thought, "Okay, Universe, I get the message." I felt I had to use it. So, "attributed to Lao Tzu" and adding to its ubiquitousness. (Any time I use "attributed to" it means I couldn't verify the authenticity of the attribution but decided to use the quote anyway.)
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An interesting article on art and arthritis:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-07-26/art-arthritis-aging

We overcome what we must. I'm kind of in a place now where I've said to myself, "You can either limit yourself because of your legs [arthritis] or do what you are able to and not make excuses." This is almost a daily argument I have with myself.

I think I finally turned the corner there (and I really am so much better off than so many others). I'm still limited but trying not to limit myself. It's tough not to give in to despair and self-pity sometimes, though, when you can't do things like you used to do. But that accomplishes nothing. The lady in the arthritis article come through it, too, after a requisite period of mourning.

Losing my eyesight would be utter devastation. I think of what it did to my mom. Her stroke left her with severe vision impairment and she'd been a visual artist all her life. But she never gave up, not until maybe the last six months of her life when other things started to take their toll.

I fear sight loss, too. But that's a fear for another day, and not part of my current objective reality. We have to deal with what's on our plate right now, and keep digging deep to find the resources to continue in some way to be who we truly are.
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If I had an RV, I'd call my RV Maria.
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Yoiks. So many talking heads in the chapter I’ve been working on, and characters standing around frozen until it's their turn to talk. I look forward to the rewrites. A very long scene, and possibly told from the wrong POV, but talking heads are easy to write when you’re trying to get through a lot of information. Not so much interesting to read, though. I still look forward to the rewrites.
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People love to hate, and they love dancing around in their underwear feeling superior to everyone else.
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Here’s another interesting article: “Ancestor Worship with Mother Nature: How Indigenous Death Rituals Illuminate the Web of Life” by Maria Popova:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/08/27/david-abram-the-spell-of-the-sensuous-death/
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The worst earworms are ones that play in your sleep and every time you wake up the tune starts up. Or is that just me? For a week, every time I woke up “My Darling Clementine” started playing in my head. I finally had to unleash extreme countermeasures by singing "Brandy" to myself until that replaced it. Lately, they have improved considerably. “Brandy” was replaced by “Look At Me,” which is heavy rotation on a VW commercial right now, then “Ave Maria,” also in heavy commercial rotation (Amazon). But that has now been replaced by Leonard Cohen's “Anthem” which is not in a commercial but a gift from the gods. A much classier run of earworms.

I’m dying to write something new, itching for it, and I know just what novel I want to work on next. It’s been plumping in my mind for weeks now while I work on other things.

All of which is a good thing, except I can’t work on anything new because I’ve got to finish revisions on Blood Geek first. Then there’s the question of when to finish the next round of revisions on Venus in Transit. I wasn’t entirely happy with it when I got through with that last hard slog. I’m not talking about perfectionism here. I’ve long since given that up. I’m talking about having a workable draft, something I can polish and start sending out.

Yet if I diddle around too long with old ideas, I’m afraid the new idea will die on the vine. It might anyway, because as I’ve said before, my writing time is extremely limited these days. I’m determined to chip out time every day, but weekends have become very difficult, and mostly the default has become my lunch hour at work. That’s always been somewhat sacrosanct, but last week, even that got eroded away. I had to run errands at lunch every day last week. It made me despair a little. Or more.

But this week I’m back on track with my revisions and feeling generally better about a lot of things. I think Venus will have to wait, though she’s notoriously impatient. I really do believe I need to balance the old with the new, the revisions with the creation. Carmina has been talking to me consistently lately: low whispers while I sleep, a sudden bright snatch of song as the sun dapples the leaves while I’m driving to work, shared shadowy confidences while I move down a hallway and turn a corner.

She’s there. She’s waiting for me to be ready for her. I really think I have to follow her lead.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Revamped covers for Blood Geek—but first, a musical interlude:

Here’s the new mini version:

And here’s the new click through version:

Please let me know if you think they are better than before.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I’m conducting an unscientific poll. Does this teeny icon intrigue you enough that you would want to click through and see what this is all about?

I am inspired to ask by this article.

This strikes me as a fairly balanced article, presenting both the giddiness of the new frontier, as well as words of caution.

Now I must come up with a better blurb. Which is why I didn’t put that with the click through.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

The upbeat (for me) tone of the current WIP has not been matching my mood or life circumstances lately, so I find myself wanting to write something darker.  I also thought perhaps I should work on something with series or trilogy potential since I understand that standalone novels might be a tough sell these days.  I don’t think I should (and don’t want) to write to the market, but  the circumstances of mood/market might be an excuse to work on something my subconscious has been leaning towards for weeks now—maybe much longer.

My second novel, Blood Geek, was set in a traveling carnival in 1938 and although the novel itself was flawed and I trunked it long ago, I’ve always thought there was quite a bit of life left in the setting I created for it.  I could see a number of potential stories revolving around minor characters in that carnival.  Apparently, my hindbrain thought so, too, because I have been assiduously collecting historical data and pictures from the 1930s and early 1940s. It’s been an almost unconscious process.  I see myself stashing this information in folders and occasionally ask, “What do you propose to do with this stuff?”  To which my backbrain answers coyly, “You know perfectly well.”

I suspect I do.  I’m not sure it’s the place where I should be putting my energy now, but I reckon I have little choice or control about some things in my life or in the market. I’ve got to write what I can when I can, and push through to the finish of something—which takes a lot of commitment and a certain kind of obsession.  If I am not properly obsessed with an idea or a piece of work chances are it will be an interminable struggle with little pay off.  Without the obsession, it may not be the right time for that work.  Perhaps it will never have a time, or maybe it will take the vast, subterranean journey through the aquifer that my carnival idea has taken and come bubbling up again years hence, fresh and full of life.  Done with waiting, it declares its time is now, that I must set all else aside because it is finally ready.

But the question is, am I?

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I bought seasons one and two of Carnivale for $80 off the list price of the two seasons combined.

My second novel, Blood Geek has left me with a permanent fondness for carnivals traveling through the American midwest in the 1930s.

Yes, it does. Especially in the first draft, but sometimes even in the final draft. I have to accept that and move on. There is no perfect thing on earth. Rather than beat myself up for not attaining perfection, I remind myself (on my good days) that we are all striving for enlightenment, and must not cease striving for it, but nirvana does not exist on earth.

And I also realize that if I don't have a crisis at the front end of writing a novel, I will have one in the middle, or at the end. (Please, God, not all three.) It seems to be part of the process.

Night Warrior/Born to Darkness seems the worst of the four I've written, but I wonder if that's colored by not remembering the sturm und drang of the previous experiences? I think the life stress of the year in which I've written it contributed to that feeling, but there were life stressors going on for all of them. It's probably a function of selective memory that this seems worst. I remind myself it took me twelve years of false starts on this novel before I could get it to go. At least the middle went fairly smooth.

Shivery Bones was also a bear to start, had the predictable saggy middle, but my perception is that once I'd passed that, it went well in the last half. Blood Geek went great at the beginning and end, but that middle was soooooo nasty. Heart of Power, my first completed novel, was a real puzzle piece, trying to figure out how to do this for the first time. When I'd finished, I lived for a time under the illusion that I'd finally figured out how to write novels. It wasn't until I tried the next one that I realized each one basically starts at zero. Each time is a different process and has to be figured out in different ways because, hopefully, I'm writing a different book each time with unique problems of its own.

Not what I wanted to realize at the beginning of a project, but there you are. And having realized that, I didn't have quite as big a crisis of faith when it came to novel number three. There were plenty of other crises of faith for me to get over, but . . . it's not a perfect world.


Quote of the day:

"Everybody owned their memories, no matter who was in them. She had a brief vision of the scattering of selves she'd left behind all over the country, snakeskin [selves] in the heads of this person of that, [selves] she had stepped out of but which still held her shape and character."

—Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Past the Size of Dreaming


Ironically, in light of my post of yesterday, this came out of the random quote file today.

In other news: Dr. Dramaqueen last night told me I was lucky. My eye healed completely without any scarring. He was sure I'd have a scar. I'm glad he was wrong. I now have my contacts back and can see again. Huzzah.

Forgive me: I'm still processing this trip and it's probably going to keep spilling over here.

Someone asked what the high point of my trip was. There were so many things that made such an impact, but I suppose if pressed I’d say the most impressive was Tintagel. The place is breathtaking, even if you don't buy into the Arthurian associations—and I'm not sure I do, although recent excavations there have produced tantalizing clues that seem to support some Arthurian-era associations.

Tintagel village is a little place, heavily influenced these days by the New Age shops, although they haven't gone completely mad with it, thank God, and it still retains some of its village feel. To get to the "castle" (13th century ruins), you have to first go down a long, steep path into a kind of seaside gorge. You can go even further down to the actual rugged beach itself with its spectacular sea-carved caves lining the cliffs, but that's a pretty strenuous climb down then back up and you'd better be prepared to get there early in the day and eat your Wheaties if you want to do both the cliffs and the castle. We wanted to see the Castle and then decide about the rest, so we turned away from the sea path and headed towards the "island" on which the castle sits. Once we'd climbed up, then down from the castle we were too tired to climb down (then back up) from the beach. Hell, we were too tired to make that steep climb back out of the gorge. We decided to say, "Screw pride" and pay the enterprising man with the Land Rover to drive us back up again.

Actually, the island is a big hunk of rock once linked to the headland by a narrow land bridge. The top of the land bridge has eroded away but the National Trust folks have erected a metal bridge for folks to cross over it. It's a steady uphill climb to get to the bridge and the day we were there was moody, gray skies, threatening rain, the wind blowing strong and cold, the sea pounding against the black rocks of the cliffs below and sending up giant spumes. Crikey! The genuine Daphne du Maurier atmospheric Cornwall experience. Perfect!

Once you've wheezed over the bridge (also an upward climb) you still have to scramble up the cliff face to get to the top of the island and the castle. I'm talking very steep steps, chipped out of the rock and then lined with slate—nearly vertical in some places. Okay, okay, okay, so there's a very sturdy, multi-layered handrail, but you do feel rather out there on the cliffs. We had to stop for many "photo ops" along the way—our running joke whenever we were seriously out of breath, begun when I actually faked photo ops earlier in the trip so no one would see how winded I was getting going up the steep hill at Chysauster. I actually raised the camera to my face for fake pictures, but later confessed what I'd done to much hilarity. (Fortunately, we scrambled up so many hills, et al., on this trip that by Tintagel I was in pretty good wind--but it was a challenge for all of us.) Was it worth the climb? You betcha.

On the island there are really layers of ruins, from 5th century Dark Age foundations, to 9th century monastic ruins, overlaid with the ruins of the 13th century castle. Apparently Richard, Earl of Cornwall, built a castle there as a show piece because even by his day the Arthurian associations at Tintagel were well known. Whenever he had important visitors, he'd send out a legion of workers a week in advance to the castle at Tintagel to bring in all the luxurious furnishings and what-not and then take people out there to show off. As soon as the visitors left, he'd remove all the good stuff and leave a small cadre of guards behind to look after the place most of the year. It was just too windswept and dramatic for a full-time presence.

And that, more than the ruins, is what makes Tintagel a magic place. Breathtaking—not just from the climb, but from the views along the coastline--black and gold slate rock topped by bright green turf, pounding surf, angry white-capped sea, gulls screaming and gyring. It's just one of those places that makes you vibrate with the raw power of nature. It made me feel insignificant while at the same time making me feel part of the continuum of nature and of the ancestors who struggled to survive in such places. It really did strip away a lot of the modern pretensions because I realized, looking at that untamed coast, that no matter what man builds up, nature has the last word. We can build our show castles, but in some places, it's a constant fight just to stay even.

Oh yeah, we have a tendency as a species to try to conquer nature, but we rarely succeed at that long-term. We can destroy a place, change it utterly to suit our short-term needs, but ultimately . . . the rust never sleeps. What was there may not come back again the way it was once we've laid our heavy hand on it, but something else will come along that we have to fight against. A place like Tintagel reminds me, if I need it, that humankind is not divorced from nature. We sometimes have the illusion that we are, but nature always has the last word. We can't survive in a world we've destroyed anymore than any other endangered species.

And speaking of places destroyed . . .

Low Point: Bath. When I visited it fifteen years ago, I really liked the place. It was a graceful, beautiful, historic city with loads of interesting things, a lovely river, well-maintained. When I visited it this time, I was distressed by the heavy invasion of American-Internationalist stores everywhere: The Gap, Starbuck's, Orvis, etc. Store after store cramming those once-graceful streets, making it like any ol' mall anywhere. I mean, I can understand the residents wanting to be part of the modern world, not wanting to live in a museum, but I think they've lost something precious along the way. I spent two days in Bath on the last trip. This trip I couldn't wait to get out of town and realized I would probably never go back again.

Fortunately, most of the things I was interested in for this trip are not heavy tourist destinations. Oh yeah, Stonehenge and Avebury. But they've managed those places really well, not let the rapacious internationalist conglomerates take over. The National Trust has kept commercialism very much to the minimum, very discreet, and I was happy to see that these sites (which I also visited fifteen years ago) had not changed much. Avebury is still the coolest because you can go right up to the stones and lay hands on them and it was a thrill, even though we were marching around them in a pouring rain. And Stonehenge…well, what you've heard is true. They seem smaller when you first get there, it's crawling with tourists. But again, they've managed it well and although you can't walk amongst the actual stones, you can get quite close to them and walk all around them. You can manage a genuine Stonehenge experience (if you keep an open mind and lowered expectations) and it can still be a mighty impressive place.

My biggest disappointment regarding Stonehenge is due to the weird, near-dissociative experience I was having in all the places I revisited from the previous trip. It was like I was seeing it through two different windows in time, having trouble sometimes jibing old with new. The first time I saw Stonehenge it was autumn, past the tourist season, and I remember driving through the undulating landscape approaching it, cresting a low hill—and there it was right by the roadside, stark and dramatic against a blue-gray sky. You still do come over a crest and see it, but they've planted a coppice of trees in the middle distance, so the dramatic effect of Stonehenge against the sky has been smudged and diminished.

Everything changes, nothing remains the same. You can't step in the same river twice. Or the same Stonehenge.

Oh, and on a writing note: I received a reply from Anna Genoese at Tor on my novel in only two weeks. =:0 The letter was waiting for me when I got home. She passed on it, but she wrote me a very encouraging personal note. She loved the title, loved the setting, thought I'd done an interesting take on vampires, but the characters didn't captivate. However, she did say she'd love (her word) to see my next work. So I'm consigning this rejection to the plus column—and really, I'm not at all upset about the rejection. No, I'm not putting a brave face on things, I'm not in denial. I truly didn't think this novel was up to snuff, but I promised myself that I'd give it one last shot (I've sent it out numerous times) and if AG passed I'd move on to other things. Like my next work, my just-completed novel, the one I may well send to her when I've got it polished up.

Usually I wait until I have some inspiration to write these journal entries, but the only inspiration for this one is to say I'm busy as @$*!.

A couple of weeks back I had a nasty respiratory thingie that knocked me on my butt and put me behind on everything. Then I was both scrambling to catch up and busy as @$*!. I've finally managed to get mostly caught up, so my condition has been downgraded to merely busy as @$*!.

Where's all this @$*! coming from?

Work has been unreal—I hold down a full time cubicle job—and it's non-stop action all the time these days. And there doesn't appear to be any let-up on the horizon there. Don't these people know I have a creative life to keep up with???

Then there is the creative life: I was on a big push to finish my latest novel. I did that a couple of weeks ago, as few days before the respiratory thing hit, had the usual post partum blues, moved on. But I had to edit it so I could post it to the OWW (did that yesterday), had a gazillion crits to catch up with, and was working on getting a couple of stories out the door. "Band of Angels" didn't grab Joe Adams at F&SF but he took longer then usual to be ungrabbed by it, so I was hoping I might get my rejection from Gordon, but alas... And speaking of alas, I sent "A Tale of Two Moons" to Asimov's. I hope not to hear back on that for at least a couple of months—that way I don't have to think about it again in the interim. Oh, and I've been trying to get the first 60 + synopsis of my second novel in shape to send out again. I've begun to hate that novel. (Sorry, Tara, but I just don't want to look at it anymore.) That should be ready to go by next week, then maybe I can swing back around to some of the other stories that need revising and sending.

Added to that, I'll be leaving for England in about 4-1/2 weeks and of course I've left everything to the last minute so I'm running around like the proverbial chicken with the head cut off. Unlike the poor chicken, I hope not to collapse and end all motor function at the end of that mad scurrying.

I've been trying to squeeze a life in here somewhere, too. In that vein, tonight I'll be seeing Secret Window with Le Depp. Ah, the ineffable! Never too busy for the ineffable Depp.

Then again, every time I think about how busy I am, I remember my friend Tara who has more stuff going on in her life than anyone I know. (You're a good girl, sweetums, and we're all proud of you.) Compared with her, my life at its busiest is a walk in the park. So I'll just take a deep breath, realize it could be worse, and say a prayer for my friends who are going through hell at the moment.

Busy as @$*! is not nearly so bad as Hell and I hope everyone returns to Middle Earth right soon.