For those of you who've read my books or have otherwise become acquainted with my main character, Tobyn Reyes: I've found something, a little blast from the past, that I wanted to share.

Back in the day, when I was living on the campus of Michigan State University in beautiful (haunted) Mayo Hall, I was looking at a magazine and saw this picture of Adam Ant:

For whatever reason, my brain said, "Hmm. He looks like he could be a vampire." (I don't see now why I'd think that, but I did.) I started poking in my cranium, sort of rummaging through the toy box of misplaced people, and found Tobyn. 

On a different page of that same magazine, I saw a picture of Alannah Myles (not this picture, but a different one):

My brain said, "Hmm. They could be twins." Seconds later, Araminah Reyes was born.

As they say, the rest is history...

Rolling rolling rolling

Catherine's Wheel is rolling along nicely, and it's clicking into place with The Belly of the Beast, which is the next installment. I can see how they're going to just flow together, and it might also reach into the next book, The Methods of Madness. There's certainly a solid narrative flow to the story. I'm very happy with how things are going, and Tobyn is being nicely talkative.

Outside of the Clans universe, I woke up this morning from an elaborate murder-mystery story that was playing out in my dreams. I lost most of the details, but I can remember enough to put together a skeleton of the plot. Some of my best work has come out of dreams. I really should keep a notebook at my bedside so that I can record these things.

new old characters

I think I've finally figured out where this new character works into the Wheel, and it dovetails with a short story I wrote and lost ages ago about Tristan of Carmaugh called Toujours et Toujours. I was going through a phase of using foreign language titles for a while. Should be interesting.

Left turn at Albuquerque

He's done it to me again.

Just when I think I know exactly how the plot of Catherine's Wheel is going to go, and how Tobyn is going to be moving through his world to tell the story, the little bastard takes a left turn and totally discombobulates me. I just added two pages to the book where I just have to shake my head and type what he "tells" me, because I have no earthly clue where this is going. I know what he's supposed to be doing, but as always, Tobyn has his own ideas.

Sometimes I really believe that my characters develop lives of their own, almost independent of me, as a result of all of the energy that I put into them. Some of them are very cooperative, others are complete pains. Tobyn, naturally, falls into the latter category. He's such a jerk sometimes...but I guess that's why I love him. His unpredictability makes him interesting to write, and, I hope, interesting to read.

And still I have no idea where he's going or who this Frau Schulmann is who just blundered into the book, but I have the sinking suspicion that she's not what she seems. (Really, who in the Clans universe ever is?)

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!