D is for Devotion

     (No, none of you have met these two yet, but this is also a spoiler for THE SHATTERED SYLPH, so if you haven’t read that, you might want to skip this one.)

     Five-Eighty had been tending the fields when the Queen rose.

     He and a half dozen other battle sylphs had been pacing their slow way through the rows of crops the lesser sylphs tended. Locked into their tall, green, mouthless forms, they looked for weeds to cut, pests to kill, thieves to destroy. The smell of the growing plants was rich in his nose, their leaves damp with the moisture the water sylphs sprayed them with. The earth was soft and dark underneath his clawed feet, so different from the endless sands just beyond the edge of the field.

     For decades, he’d tended these fields. Since he was drawn through the gate by the lie of a woman to be his queen, he’d guarded them, silent and sad. Just one more battle sylph in a kingdom that held over seven hundred of them.

     He was as shocked as any of the rest of them when he felt the Queen ascend, the pattern of her flowing into him and filling the empty place where his first Queen used to be, the place where the men here had staked their own claim, crippling him with their rules and commands. She washed all of that away, giving him back the gift of himself in a rush of emotions.

     Rise! A battler’s voice cried. The lead battler, he realized. The battler of the Queen. Rise and destroy them! All their rules are gone, all of them!

     Five-Eighty stared towards the city. He could see the battlers rising, hear the screaming and sense the fear of the humans. The other battlers with him leaped into the air, changing shape to those of dark clouds as they swept forward to join the battle.

     They were free. Free to inflict vengeance, to destroy their oppressors. Entire buildings were falling and the floating island over the city being harried by hundreds of his brothers towards the ocean.

     He could have revenge? He didn’t care. He only wanted one thing.

     Five-Eighty leaped into the air, shifting his form from that horrid, green thing to a black cloud filled with lightning. He raced for the city, darting around the crashing ruins and the blasts of destruction fired by outraged battlers tasting their freedom. Air and fire sylphs swirled around him, frightened and wailing. Thousands of sylphs were headed for the edge of the city and the queen, moving through the air or along the ground.

     Five-Eighty went the other way. He raced for one of the vents into the underground complex where the feeders were kept and slipped inside. 

     Thousands upon thousands of humans were trapped down there, held in cages with their tongues cut out, bonded to sylphs so as to act as their food supply. Each sylph had five of them, but Five-Eighty didn’t go to the ones that belonged to him. He went deeper instead, into levels of the pens that had been specifically forbidden to him before now. He passed signs of battle as he passed, but he didn’t care. He passed still trapped men yanking on the bars of their cages and soundlessly screaming and he didn’t slow. 

     He went into levels of the pens that were filled entirely with women, feeders made for the elemental sylphs, not the battlers. They were cowered and broken, sick and lost. He stopped there and focused, listening, feeling, trying to find...

     A familiar scent came to him, one he hadn’t smelled in thirty years. Not since the day that the guards realized that a battler was in love with a concubine in the harem and took her away to be a feeder, forbidding him to ever see her again. For thirty years, she had never left his thoughts, and as his brothers wrecked their terrible revenge above, Five-Eighty raced towards her.

     She huddled in her cage, her once glorious hair grey and tangled, her skin sagging and pale. Her face was covered with wrinkles and her eyes were filled with madness. Five-Eighty shifted to a human form and wrenched the door off the hinges, tossing it away as he took her unresisting into his arms. She didn’t react as he stroked her hair and kissed her cheek.

     “Fareeda,” he whispered. “It’s me, it’s Five-Eighty. Do you remember, you used to call me Haru? I’m here, sweetheart.”

     She didn’t react, but that was alright. “I’m here. I’ve come to take you home. I never forgot you.” He cradled her to him and felt her start to shiver, one hand rising to cling to him with feeble, desperate strength. 

     “I’m sorry it took so long, but I’m here. I’m finally here.”

C is for Cold

(By the way, I really appreciate the comments on these snippets. Thanks)

     It had been snowing all day, just as it had been snowing all week, and the cold was bitter.

     Airi didn’t feel that. Cold didn’t mean anything to her, but the winds came from the northern glaciers and when they reached the bluff the community built its home inside, they swirled the snow in wild patterns she wouldn’t see again once they moved south in the spring.

     Airi danced in the erratic winds, along with a half dozen other air sylphs, diving and darting over and around each other, and it was wonderful. Claw floated by, dark and ominous in his natural form while he guarded the bluff, and they swept around him in play. He flinched and darted away as the air sylphs laughed.

     It was wonderful, so utterly glorious. She lost track of time until she finally noticed someone trudging his way through the thick snow, masked in a heavy fur cloak as he made his way to the edge of the bluff.

     Airi left the other sylphs and darted down to him.What are you doing out here? she asked.

     Devon peered up at her from out of the cowl of his cloak, squinting against the snow and with white already frosting his hair and beard.

     “I c-came to k-keep you company,” he stammered.

     Airi laughed in absolute delight and danced around her master.

B is for Blocks

     “No!”

     Betha felt like tugging her hair in frustration. “Lizzy, you’re ten years old! You’re too old to be playing with blocks. You should give them to your little sisters.”

     “No!” Lizzy shouted again, tears of rage in her eyes, and she shook her head vehemently. Betha found herself wishing her husband were here. Lizzy never misbehaved when Leon was around. A moment later, she steeled herself. She could deal with this without him.

     “I never raised you to be so selfish, Lizzy Petrule.”

     Lizzy shook her head again, her pigtails flying. “No! They can have all my dolls and the wooden rocking horse and even my paints, but not the blocks!”

     Betha was startled. “You’d give all your other toys away? Just to keep some baby blocks? Why?”

     Lizzy wiped her eyes. “They’re important to me,” was all she would say.

     Betha would never understand this child. “Fine,” she snapped, wishing it didn’t feel as if she were giving in. “Keep the blocks, but you will share all your other toys, understand?”

     “Yes, mama!” Lizzy cheered, all her tears gone as she hugged her mother. Betha sighed and hugged her back.

     A door opened. “I’m home,” Leon called.

     “Ril!” Lizzy shouted, tearing away from Betha and pounding down the hall to the front door. A few moments later she came back, having essentially ignored her father in favour of taking his red feathered hawk on her arm. Ril sat there with his sharp claws not even dimpling her skin and his vicious eyes locked on her face. She chattered to the battler non-stop as she headed for the stairs.

     Leon came around the corner behind her and smiled as he saw his wife, his eyes flickering towards the girl while she headed upstairs. “It’s so nice to have a daughter’s love,” he laughed.

     “Well, you certainly have mine,” she said and went to him.

     

     Upstairs, Lizzy went to the nursery and to the corner that she’d sectioned off for her own with a hanging blanket and dire threats to her little sisters. She let Ril perch on top of an old, battered chair and dug out the blocks her mother had wanted her to give up. They were old and worn, the paint chipped and faded.

     “Mama wanted me to give these away,” she said as she spread them out. “To my sisters. I talked her out of it, but I had to give up all my other toys.” She looked at him. “It was worth it. Do you think it’s worth it?”

     The bird hopped down to the ground, his body shifting from side to side as he walked over to the blocks and used his curved beak to pull certain blocks to him and lay them in order.

     ALWAYS, he spelled.

A is for Allowed

(Here's hoping the typo faerie doesn't strike....)

     Blue still couldn’t believe it was really true. 

     He was here, in this strange, harmless world, bound to a woman who felt like a Queen to him, and despite how there was a hive, he wasn’t nameless in it.

     “We’re allowed to do whatever we want?” he asked, staring around at everything and still amazed by all of it.

     “Yup,” Heyou said, grinning. “Anything.”

     Blue turned his head to look at him. He felt light-headed, drunk, stunned. “We can belong to females of our own?”

     “Absolutely. That’s one of the best parts.”

     “And change shape to whatever we like?”

     “Sure. I recommend ‘handsome man’. That one’s always popular. It’s way better than ‘giant eyeball’ or ‘multi-armed snake creature. Just ask Dillon.”

     “And we don’t have to worry that the Queen will reject us?”

     Heyou shook his head. “Solie would never do that.” He raised a finger. “Mind you, she won’t sleep with you. You have your own master now for that.”

     “So we protect this valley now?”

     “Yep.” Heyou was starting to look bored. “We really are free here, you know. We really are.”

     “So I can kill any man I want?”

     “Uh, no.” He frowned. “We’re not allowed to do that.” The grin returned. “But the rest of it makes up for it!”

Updates

I've been working on a new book. THE OMEGA, which is the fourth and final book in my Cuckoo series (nope, not sold yet). I just passed 10,500 words on it.

I've also been working on the painting. I'm actually starting to be really happy with the results. There are certain expectations with the writing, but not with the art.

I was wandering the web and saw a writing challenger. Basically go through the alphabet, have each letter stand for a word and write a very short bit on that word.

Would anyone be interested if I did something like that for the Sylph universe and posted it on my blog?

Here, have a painting.

Internet wanderings

Wow....suddenly I feel like I have no artistic talent whatsoever.... O.O

http://www.creaturesfromel.ca/index.html

I've tried sculpture work. I really have. I suck at it. I've never seen anything like this artist's work before. It just blows me away.

I love vacations

One of the things I love about the military is they give you a lot of days for taking off on vacation. Except for when they call you in twice during your break, but that's another story.

I'm getting so much writing and painting done. I feel like I'm in a creative glut right now that I never want to end.  I've finished editing FINDING THE CHOSEN. I've finished writing the first draft of THE REVENANT. I've started writing THE OMEGA (sequel to THE REVENANT). I've written about four novellas and short stories  and am on the second draft of one that I'm selling to a friend who's starting up his own online publishing house. I've painted a lot. I've knitted a lot. I'm more than 2/3rds of the way through Asssassin's Creed II and nearly to season three of watching Xena on Netflix.

I don't want to go back to work.  :D

Happy Holidays

Happy holidays to all my readers! Whatever beliefs you hold, I hope you have a very good day.

In writing news, I've finally finished putting in the red pen edit changes for FINDING THE CHOSEN. That took the book from 93,000 words to 101,000 words. Now I read it over one more time and send it off to my betas.

For those who've forgotten, FINDING THE CHOSEN is the prelude for a massively long book I wrote a number of years ago titled HUNTING THE RAPTURE. My agent sent Hunting off to Del Rey to look at and they liked it, but they wanted me to A: Take this 200,00+ word book and make it shorter, and B: Take this flashback scene midway through the book, make it longer, and stick it at the start. Instead, I suggested that I take Hunting and split it into two novels and take the flashback scene and expand it into a new book. So by the end of it, I'll have FINDING THE CHOSEN, HUNTING THE RAPTURE, and BREAKING THE LIMITS. Hopefully my Christmas present will end up being Del Rey buying all three.

It was actually interesting going back to a world I created about ten or more years ago. If I didn't think making this change wouldn't improve the book, I wouldn't have done it, but as it is, I enjoyed the process a lot more than I originally thought I would.

BTW, have a painting. Merry whatever. :)

Books, books, and more books

I was wandering the web and found this list. Apparently the BBC feels that most people will only have read six of the hundred books listed here.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I've read thirty-three of them. Not too bad. I found myself wondering why some books made it and some didn't. What about Bambi? Or Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Or King of the Wind? I also kind of wonder if they don't know that The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is part of the Narnia Chronicles.

I notice I never did finish an Alexandre Dumas book...man, that guy's writing is dry...

I also see a list of books here I really need to give a looksie at.  I so have the urge to read Oliver now.

Unclogging the mental log jam

Right now, I'm writing a series I call The Cuckoo series. I'm on book three of four. No, I haven't sold it yet. I'm working on that.

Writing this series has been like pulling teeth. I think it's very good, but the plot has been fighting me like a rabid weasel. I had to put book one aside for six months until I figured out what to do with one of the plot points (the answer was toss it out and do something different).

Book two went quite easily, but book three turned into another slog at about the 85,000 word point. The other two are about 100,000, which left me with 15,000 words to decide what to do with this one jackass of a character that I needed to resolve before book four starts. I've been stuck at this point for about a month now and I've been dreading the thought that I was going to end up with another six months or more of writer's block on it. Or worse, that the whole thing would die on me.

This last week, I've been in Toronto for professional development with my coworkers. It was a good time. One of the seminars we attended, however, turned out to be a lot more relevant than I'd thought it would be. It was a seminar on creative thinking offered by the Fred Pryor Institute and taught by a woman named Glynis Devine, who was an awesome instructor. She taught us different ways of looking at a problem and finding a solution.

One of the techniques she taught us was to take a problem you're stuck on a solution for, like say a stalled plot line, and write down whatever you do know about it. The information you have, that is. Then write down what resolution you want. You do this right before your nightly ablutions, and then you go to bed. You literally sleep on it.

I forgot to do this the first night, but I did try it on the second. I know how I need the book to end, after all. I just hadn't figured out how to get there. That's normal for how I write. I know the beginning, I know the end, and I sort of discover the middle when I write.

At any rate, my phone died during the night, and I found out I'd slept in when my boss knocked on my hotel room door. This was our checkout day, so I had to frantically run around packing and trying to wake up and didn't think at all about my little experiment. Not until I was sitting in the car on the way back, reading a book on my kindle, and bemoaning the lack of coffee.

The plot for the book just dropped into my lap. Suddenly, I thought of something I hadn't considered before and the entire remainder of the book just came together. It was fantastic. I hauled out my Mac Air and typed on it until the battery died (forgot to charge it the night before too) and then I wrote in a notebook. Since I've been home, I've written 4000 words and it's flowing out of me as easily as anything else I've ever written, and it feels good.

My long, rambling point is, I highly recommend this as a technique to clear out a mental log jam. I know I'm certainly going to use it in future.  Thank you, Glynis.