Well, the schedule's a lot stranger (potentially, anyway) and a lot more fraught than just the first 25K of this one. There's a high probability that my bloody publisher will blackmail me into crunch mode yet again. They have the whip hand on the Haunted Ballads: if they decide they want the fifth book, New-Slain Knight, and that they want it NOW, they can simply announce that it wouldn't make next fall's release lineup unless they get it by X date.
Gun to head.
Meanwhile, what I really want to be writing is book five of the Kinkaid Chronicles, Book of Days, but that one is number 3 on the "I get to write that now" rotation.
I've just been trying to get my sea legs back. Practicing with bits of poetry, reading anything in front of my face, playing with the thesarus, putting into words anything I've tried to get out of my brain for the past 6 years.
These days, I never seem to stop writing. Very odd. It's as if deliberately turning my back on writing anything for ten years combined with the midlife climacteric jolt of getting my memories of the years with Nicholas Rev.1 back, and turned on a nice steady niagara.
Because I've been in full freshet mode since about 2002, and I'm liking it.
For the first time in a long time, I'm actually trying to experience whatever the hell is happening instead of pushing it away, and the only way I can cope with that is putting names to things. When I was younger and less self conscious, when everything I put on paper didn't seem so ironic, I was a lot more honest with myself. I need to get back there.
Well, remember that the book we write at twenty bears very little resemblance to the book we write at twenty-five, or thirty - and I', not talking about quality, just perception of self.
The you you filter through changes, grows, shrinks, becomes an entirely different flavour of homunculus, as time moves on.
Sometimes, we hit dry spots.
For a while anything I wrote was a reaction- a choice not to be someone who writes a certain way, or about certain things. There were some shining moments of parody, but mostly, from here it looks snarky and cynical- and not in a good erikaj way. Y'know.
It's like a joke I was playing on anyone willing to read it, and I don't think that's the way to use language to touch hearts and minds. It's mean and doesn't really ring true.
Well, you know where I sit about that one. Be real or be gone is my motto, these days.
I know. Devoured the thread in a week :)
Still working on it, but it feels better than anything I've done in a while.
Untitled
I’m done with this last dram of hemlock. Suiciding in speech. I’m not sure I don’t deserve at least part of this pain. I’m not an innocent. I will wear the scarlet letter. My crime was betrayal, but you betrayed the woman who committed the crime for you.
I built my prison with you. Your sweet lies encouraging me the whole way. “I’ve always loved you.” “I’ll never get over you.” “My greatest regret is hurting you.” Lies thick on the ground, stretching all the way back so that I almost can’t see what the truth was or is.
Almost. I’ve bitten the poisoned apple now, Eve’s apple, Newton’s violent moment of clarity. I can see the whole of the web now. I know the actual meaning behind words.
There’s some music in it, some sort of harmony. You don’t love me. I love him, your friend. You love me. I love you. You don’t love me? You love her, my friend. It was like Hamlet’s Mouse-Trap, perfectly staged, brilliantly executed. You reveling in her kiss. Him, just behind you for the reveal. Waiting only for my climactic entrance. Gertrude, masking her reaction at witnessing her own infidelity and incest.
You would leave me in this prison. I didn’t begrudge you the freedom, but now you would flaunt that freedom I struggled not to envy you. You would throw it in my face everyday, until my only hope of escape is confession. And still, I don’t. I don’t dare scream the truth and bring down the walls on you, or myself.
But at least I have knowledge now. The liar has power over those he lies to. That was God’s sin, keeping us corralled in that garden with pretty lies, shielded from ugly truth. My sin against you was claiming a little bit of that power for myself. You were a god, controlling my world, shaping my history. I asked if you loved me above all else. I asked for grace, an unmerited favor from God, one grain of fact, a tiny slice of power. Yes or no. You couldn’t even grant me that.
The serpent is my only companion inside these walls, but she whispers the power of the actual. She’s shown me how to molt from the flesh you touched, the flesh that willed itself to believe, and become new again. Showed me how the eyes turn cloudy and scale over, but that the scales fall. She tickles my ear to ignite the spark and says, “You’re becoming more, your skin is hard and won’t stretch. Can’t you feel it constricting and itchy against your soul?” A fork-tounged beast has more grace than my false god.
I’m not perfect. I can’t conceive of what a perfect person would do, anymore than I can imagine what a believer would do. So, I will do what I have to. I will die so that they can carry me out of my cell. Some may mourn her, but the serpent and I will smile, clean in our new skins.
Our little jail will stand; I think you may have need of it soon. I know the old and new lies you’re now telling her.
No, no - I got hijacked into AIM with Laura Anne Gilman. We're talking about books and piano players and furniture.
Brain is focus over there.
But this is a first draft, yes? You need to spellcheck it.
And it's vivid, also passionate - but I'm only getting the edges of what it's actually about. Personal with metaphors, or is it referencing an existing story?
