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The sounds of battle were cleaning up outside, but Torquesville was not there to hear them.  Or if he was, he was willfully ignoring them.  Instead he was focused upon the dirtflecked, unpolished lookingglass set before him, its edges rough yet straight upon his washstand.  He was eying his reflection within, mysteriously, as if expecting sudden moves, though none were made.  The face within rotated back and forth like a cobra, moving from one near profile to the other, the eyes locked in place, forever staring outwards.  He noticed, as if for the first time, though also he was certain the thought had crept about before, that he could not quite place the age of the face behind the glass.  It was much too set, too defined to be within the third decade of life, or even into the early years of the fourth.  Yet the comparative lack of wrinkles meant he could not have been older than five and thirty.  No face should have appeared quite so lived in, and yet so unmarked.  And to top it off, the subtle, practiced motions of the face, the dart of the eyes, the slow raising of brow, the set of the mouth, betrayed the easy practice of a soul that had been living for over a century.  It was a face that was perfectly unnatural.  And it was his. 

"How weird," he thought.  "Men should no longer be living."

Outside, there could be heard the sound of a man falling to ground nearby the tent, and being set upon and torn open by long blades, screaming in wet horror.  The dying sounds caught hold of Torquesville and pulled his soul back across whatever oceans it had crossed.   The fae were making sport of another town, and he had business out-and-about.

Fragment for later

"Greetings to the last soul to speak to my father while living."

Jack looked up.  Floating out from the forest was a bowl of thorny horns, a stag's crown, growing out from a head almost human.  The face was furry, and ancient in a way beyond age, bearded and chiseled, everything a dark nutmeg in the pale moonlight, crossed by shadowbranches.  The face was bound to a body, the bulk of a bull in the mold of a man, massive and mighty.  The apparition passed from the forest, walking with a cadence of one entranced, but the beastman's eyes were as lucid as lakeripples. 

"He has rejoined us now, and is once more beyond us all."  The voice was whistle of wind through wood, breath across jugs.  Deep and warm and rich and soft.

This makes no sense, thought Jack.  He stared at the creature before him, rising up above like an ocean wave headed to shore, and felt a creeping sense of the familiar, and of the unreal. 

"Do I know you, sir?" asked Jack of the creature.  

"We have not met, though we know of each other.  You have been told of me, by journeymen across the sea.  I am the Horned One.  The Second One.  The Good One."

"I see," said Jack.  Suddenly he wished he had a weapon.  The party was close, but now oh so far away.  "Well then—hail, sir.  Well met."

Book I

Well, not too much new writing, these last few days.  However, I did do a substantial edit on book I of SK, which took a fair amount of time tonight.  It was quite taxing, with lots of ping-ponging around to make sure I had all the continuity right and stuff.  But it's basically done, and, baring any missed continuity efforts, I think it is done.  It actually works quite well as a stand-alone story. It had motifs and an ending the references the beginning and everything.  Also, themes.  and an emotional arc.  I am quite proud of it.  It is probably, even on it's own, the best piece of writing I have completed yet.  There are parts that are poetic, and parts that are mostly dialogue, and parts that are just purely engrossing action sequences.  I still kind of find chapter one scary.

So yeah, feeling better about my abilities. 

I am not going to post this one on scribd at the moment, but if anyone wants to read it, (cough mom cough) send me an email or leave a comment.  At the least, if would be nice to have someone who can spot any of those continuity errors I missed.

2974

That's how many words I wrote today, in one story, which basically means that book I of SK is done, except for the edits.  I have reached the end.  I was thinking that I was going to stop before I reached the dream sequence, and think it over, but then I just pressed on ahead and wrote it, off the top of my head, no planning, figuring the momentum would serve better.  And I think it did.  It had the quality I had wanted, where the images slowly over took and I didn't actually know which ones represented which event, but somehow the whole arc of the dream made it's own kind of musical sense.  I expect I will not need to be making very many changes to it. 

I felt good.  I just sat down and basically just started putting one word in front of the other, until it was done.  It had all been there, somehow, I had just had to actually write it.  Well, that and do some research on the folklore concerning trees, but mostly, just write the thing.  And now the first draft is done, and I can begin editing in earnest. 

Well, not right now.  I think I am going to rest on my triumph for a while. 

Update

Whew, long time no blog!

Today, I did quite a bit of housecleaning, though I am by no means all the way there. I have been spending the last couple of days agonizing over SK. A few weeks ago, I wrote a detailed outline of the last section I had been putting off grinding out, and then I just kind of let it sit there. I could sense I wasn't happy with the way the story was taking shape, or the way it sounded. I kept coming up with things I didn't like about it, and I felt that the endless edits were just killing it, bleeding it of any vibrancy. Then, after cleaning, I tried doing some writing, skipping over the part I was working on to work on the next section. This section pretty quickly got to a point where I had been meaning to drop in an old story I had written, oh, years ago. I cut and pasted it in, and started reading it, to edit for (hopefully mostly) continuity. And sweet Jesus, it was terrible. Just really really really poorly written. Made me really begin to doubt myself. Was the stuff I writing now any good?

So, more cleaning, then I watched an interview on youtube with Salman Rushdie*, where he talked about developing your voice in writing, and that's when I realized the problem I had been having with what I was writing was that it wasn't in the voice I wanted for it, and I knew this all along. Maybe spurts of it are but...I don't know. I jotted down a couple of notes in my scrap notebook about elements I wanted in the "voice" of SK. Then, a new way to telling the beginning the first chapter came to me. I grabbed a fresh notebook and started writing it. The events of the opening are now so fresh to me I can almost write its events from memory. I got a couple leafs in a felt much better.

So, I have committed myself to completely rewriting it, by hand, in a notebook. I am thinking the improvements in the new take are worth it, but one way or another I need to stop being so precious about it all and get used to rewrites.

I also reread the first two chapters of Wheelock's Latin today. I really want to regain that skill again, and I think a firm knowledge of Latin is essential to getting the eventual voice of SK right. So, here's me committing to making sure I stick to writing in the notebook and working my way through Wheelock.

...Oh, and here's the interview with Salman Rushdie:

Watch it! It's very good!

*At some point while letting the interview play, I also readjusted the distance of my double-bass drum beaters, making half the distance from the head. This has immediately increased my speed and accuracy. I can get reasonably close to thrash speed now, and with no noticeable change in sound or volume!

Update II

I am starting to feel better than I was last night—listening to the Offspring and generally chilling out. Maybe all that Slipknot was getting to me. (Also Dreams From My Father, which I have been tearing through. Incredibly well-written, incredibly depressing. The community organizing sections leave me feeling profoundly depressed about the nature of the human race.)

But what I have realized just now is, thinking about Susanna Clarke, I don't need to concentrate on writing short stories. Susanna Clarke wanted to write her novel. So she worked really hard on her novel. It's what drove her. Sometimes, she stopped and wrote a short story, and got it published, but the novel is what she was concentrating on.

It SK is what I want to do, what I need to do, then that's what I should do. if some other idea comes to me, I will do that. But I need to be writing, and that means working on what drives me. That means SK. So that's what I will work on.

I have two scenes to work on.

Update

I haven't really been writing anything lately. I feel like I am in some kind of post-Gibbon funk. The thing I want to work on is SK, but I feel like I need to do more research, but I have worked on two separate scenes, and don't feel like picking them up again. I feel like I need to figure out the overall structure, like I need to do an outline, but I feel like I need to do more research, but don't feel like reading anything more. I just finished the third volume of fucking Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! Unless I didn't, which is even more depressing.

And I want to write something. An actual story, with a beginning, middle and end. I just tried starting on something from the M stuff, but it wasn't working. I just don't feel connected with that thing right now, or I feel like it there is something sophomoric about the whole enterprise. I just can't think of a short, simple story that I want to tell (well, maybe not simple, but something not tied up in some huge megaplot that I am working on).

Maybe I should just continue trying to work on my scenes, see where that leads me, I don't know. I just know that I am starting to go antsy out here. This state is getting to me, and I don't feel like an am getting anywhere. There's all these questions and desires and thoughts kicking around in my head about things and stuff and big questions and little errands and dreams and I can't sort and of it out and feel like if I don't make some progress on something in this whole life thing soon, within a couple of months, then it will just never fucking end and I will just keep spinning my wheels here forever and ever and ever. I need something, some valediction, some sign of accomplishment, but I have done nothing to earn any, and right now, I just feel directionless.

"He turned."

I seemed to be typing this sentence a lot. Or variations on it. People seem to be doing a lot of turning in my story. I don't know if this is some weird tick in my writing that needs to be hunted down and eliminated, or some motif of some sort, something going on that I am not yet aware of. I do seem to be focusing very heavily on vistas and views, and the turning seems to be about people taking in some new tableau that comments on the last one. And the way I seem to be heading in this opening section is to relate the beginning of the story in a bunch of short sections told from various characters perspectives. So maybe it means something. I am feeling, kind of, after some of my attempts on M ended up feeling as if all the life had been sucked out of them, to to not worry to much about editing at this point. If I edit to much I might just draw all the vitality out in my urge to streamline it. Better to let the quirks lie for now, until I figure out what they all mean. Any changes should concern themselves with getting stuff that is plainly shit out of there, providing I can find something better to replace them with. Oh, and typos and awkward sentences, of course.

Creative Devolution

I have been trying to get some fiction writing done on SK today, but it has been going nowhere. I have been continuously falling down rabbit holes of online pseudohistory, looking for just enough information to come up with a description of some event that has taken place as background for my story, but isn't even a necessary part of the story itself, just some historical flavor to get the ball rolling, but doing that has become a kind of insurmountable task as I try to sort through all the various historical sources to find the one "correct" image of the past that should be pithily described, and the whole time I am kicking myself for not having finished Gibbon already, since that might actually supply me something of an outline to all these various quandaries. As such, my writing quickly became little more than editing that rapidly devolved into research, and I got less than nothing done. Literally: My work so far today has soncisted of removing a paragraph that I realized was historically inaccurate, but I don't know yet what to put in it's place.

I just wanted to get some writing done, to work with words and such, but it seems that that is nearly impossible to do as I am working on the bloody opening of this book.