And so it begins...

Catherine's Wheel is beginning very well. I have my map of Europe carefully marked out and the plot has clicked into place in my head. The first chapter is finished, and I'm on a roll. I have a very good feeling about this one. Just judging from the first chapter, the writing is much better than what I perpetrated ten years ago in Sacrifical Lamb, the pre-editing incarnation of Sacrifice.

Refocusing

I was rampaging through my notes and scribbles for the Clans universe and found the prologue and four chapters that I'd already written for Catherine's Wheel. They're infected by the same off-balance focus that I had to correct in Sacrifice, so they will definitely not be used. I'm almost thinking that there's nothing in the 1870 Berlin era that's important enough to be a whole book, so I might just skip ahead to one of the next books, either Le Club Madrid or The Belly of the Beast. I don't know. I have a lot of material about intervening years and secondary characters that would probably make good short stories or novella-length works, but I'll have to be choosy about what gets to be a book. I don't want to take a slender plot and stretch it to illogical lengths.

I need to review the timeline and pertinent events that I mapped out all those years ago and really decide what goes in and what gets left for side-line projects. I know that I need to keep focus on the triangle (Tobyn/Ara/Dumas) and where that leads. Some of the books that I had synopsized in my notes have nothing to do with any of them, and will be left for later.

I have a lot of work ahead of me. The Clans universe is the monster that ate my brain!

Accomplishment, but ever onward

At long last, I'm pleased to say that I finished the re-write on Sacrifice. I celebrated with dinner out, then came home to start researching for the next book, Catherine's Wheel. It's set in Berlin in 1870, and I confess, I don't know much about the Kingdom of Prussia or the North German Federation (which became the German Empire in 1871). I'm taking copious notes and need to obtain a map so I can get a handle on the geography of the place. I try not to bog my writing down with too many historical or geographical details, but it helps me to have a sense of place and time. I'll be doing a lot of reading and probably spending some quality library time.

Research is so much a part of writing, even if your work isn't technically a historical piece. I think it's important to try to ground even the most fantastical work in some breath of reality. Even if you're creating a new world, it should bear at least enough of a passing similarity to the real world to be understandable to the reader. Besides, history is filled with fascinating nooks and crannies where the seeds of many stories can be planted and eventually bear fruit.

So, until further notice, my brain will be living in a city I've never seen, in a country I've never visited, in a time long past. It will be vivid and alive when I return .

I love this part of the process.

Title change

The original title of the second book in the Clans series was Sacrificial Lamb, but when I began to re-write it to be truer to the main character, I decided to re-name it Sacrifice. There are people in this novel who are sacrificing themselves to their ambitions, to their pride, to their fear, to their self-delusion, and ultimately they sacrifice everything they love the most. Like a lot of second acts, it's rather sad.

I'm almost finished with the re-write, and happy for it. I think the new version is better than the old, and it fits better with Nightchild. The first draft was hijacked by a secondary character, and I lost track of the fact that this story is essentially a triangle: Tobyn, Dumas, and Ara. Everyone else is just ancillary, or sometimes just window dressing, and even if their impacts are occasionally profound, they serve mostly to trigger an action or a reaction in one of the three main actors.

Now comes the hard part, when the triangle has been blown apart. We'll see how this works out.

Awake too late

Once again, I've stayed up far too late at night working on Sacrifice. It's a little funny, really, how my normally diurnal self turns markedly nocturnal when I'm writing my vampires. I guess I need to be in the night to really feel them, as if the grainy quality of electric light vainly holding off encroaching shadows helps infuse the writing with a sense of darkness.

The ending, I think, will be strong, and it certainly sets up for the third book (working title for book 3 is Catherine's Wheel, by the way). I'm still uncertain about the rest of the book, but once I've finished the re-write and given myself a few days of mental quiet (characters permitting), I'll have a look and see what I think. It's very difficult to be truly objective about your own work, but I'm the only editor I have right now.

the shadow of a doubt

I think I'll be finishing the re-write on Sacrifice today. I'll then be in a position to get at least the poetry and this novel copyrighted and available on the website. Hopefully there will be some sort of a response to the website going live, and hopefully I won't drop off the face of the earth into a self-indulgent wasteland. I'm certain that I'll open the website for business with a big, "Ta-da!" only to be greeted by the sound of crickets chirping. I want this writing thing to succeed, and I have no idea if I'm making a huge mistake by going this route. I'm at least doing something with the writing, and hoping for the best. Maybe if I beg some people, or more likely pay them, they'll be willing to download a chapter or two.

I'm feeling very blue today, and by rights, getting so close to the finish on Sacrifice, I should be happy. I don't know why I'm not.

music and lyrics

I've found a good deal of enjoyment in going through my music library and making mixes and playlists of songs that could be about my characters, or that illustrate their situations and/or points of view. It's amazing how just listening to the right congretation of songs can inspire me to keep writing on a discouraging day, and how the rhythm spurs my typing onward. I should be nervous, I suppose, that lyrical turns of phrase might work their way into what I'm writing, but it's never been the case. I take such inspiration from music, and I always have.

It seems that all art forms dovetail into one long stream, draining into an ocean of human expression. Visual arts, theatre, cinema, poetry, prose, music...they all swirl together like the colors in the petroleum film on rain puddles in parking lots. They don't make the water muddy, though, their individual colors staying discrete and true while making all of the colors around them more beautiful. It's all part of the same artistic, creative impulse that first drove Cro Magnon to decorate the caves in Lascaux.

I wonder when and why we started thinking it was such a good idea to put things into pigeon holes. Life is never so neatly categorized; why should we expect that the expression of life should be any different?