November Hangover and an Excerpt from Bloodstone

November was a devil of a month!

No, I did not win NaNoWriMo. Far from it. But! It did stoke me to continuing writing! Lir and Simon have been with me in my waking and sleeping since the first day of NaNo. In fact, I think I've written more in the last week than in the entire month of November.

The cleaning and preparation for Turkey Day near did me in and left little time for writing. But it was worth it! The Loomis Clan Plus ate, laughed and laughed some more, and told their stories. Hilary, my daughter-in-law, positively glowed with the completion of her first trimester of pregnancy. It was the first time she and my son, Critter, met the Loomis bunch. Our little house overflowed with family, friends and dogs (who simply wriggled with delight and were as exhausted as we were when it was over). On the Friday after T-day I could hardly move, but it was a good feeling of exhaustion and aching muscles.

And then there came the demise of the vacuum cleaner and the death of the garage door opener. Ugh. Money and Bud's Holiday Cheer (which is always in short supply due to an understaffed Post Office) flew out the front door. Ah, well.

Anyway, here is another excerpt. This one is from last night's writing.

******

It was a great relief to have Caddy take charge. Lir envied the children she greeted as she headed toward the sleeping caves. No responsibilities, all the time in the day to have fun, and Caddy to stroke and kiss the hurts away. She pulled the curtains back that surrounded her bed-shelf against the cave wall. Her groan of pure relief echoed against the wall as she slipped off her boots and wiggled her toes. Then she fell, face-first, onto the wool-filled pallet atop the shelf. Her mind still whirled with the days events, though, so she turned onto her side to face the wall. She reached out her hands and placed them flat against the chill stone. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, cleared her mind as well as possible, and sent her prayer into Euphmum, the Mother.

       Mother, fold and embrace Onodath Zumcar into your loving arms

                                           as we send him to you. 

      Hold Caddy, Cort, Torn, Simon and all the children here in the Caves

                          in your fierce protection and abundant love.

      And give me strength, Mother, to face these days - to face [spoiler here] - 

                              and to do what is best for your children.

         If it be in the best interest of ALL, please ease these burdens I carry.

                    Help me find my place within the Weave and live it 

                                   with strength, beauty and love.

Lir felt the familiar warmth of the Mother’s love and energy flow from the stone into her arms and through her body. It had been this way since she was old enough to leave the cradle and sleep upon this shelf-bed. Each night before sleeping she would pray herself and her small problems into the Mother through the stone of the Cave walls and be filled with comfort, assurance and strength for the next day. She hadn’t known until she was about eight summers old that not everyone did this. She’d taken it for granted. No one had told her to do it. It just came as natural as breathing to her. She’d flattened Purdis, a portly youth apprentice to the Foundary, for teasing her about it. No one bothered her about her odd habit of praying into the Cave walls after that.

It was not that praying was unusual in the Caves. Indeed not. Caddy had instructed them all from the time they were tots to give thanks to the Mother for their food, shelter and friends with the usual prayers at meals on the first day of a ten-day. She had told them the stories of the Weave. They celebrated the festivals of the Winter Moons, Spring Blossoms, and Harvest Moons. But most of the children took them as “Caddy’s tales” and had little understanding of their importance in the history of the people of Euphemric.

Lir lay back and snuggled down into her pallet. She pulled her ragged quilt up under her chin. She had struggled to make that sorry quilt under Caddy’s frustrated tutelage. She had no patience for needlework. She wanted to be running. She had squirmed and complained the entire time of the making. It was moot who was more thankful for the quilt to be done - her or Caddy. 

She now fingered and stroked the pitifully embroidered symbol of the Weave that decorated the top of the quilt. [Describe the symbol]. A small, gentle voice whispered in her head and it wasn’t Simon’s voice. It was a voice she’d heard most every night of her life.

You are an important strand in the Weave, my daughter. A strong and vibrant thread. I am with you. Take heart. 

She had always thought that voice was the mother who had given her birth, [spoiler].

She suspected she had been mistaken.

******

It always amazes me how things pop up while I'm writing that I never could have expected. That symbol, fer instance. I have no idea what it is. I suppose I will have to draw something? Or have someone draw something? I don't know. But I'll leave that until later and just go on writing.

Confession...

I have a confession to make. I am now a Romance reader. Perhaps I'm just getting sentimental in my old age, I don't know. When I was younger I wouldn't touch a Romance novel with the proverbial ten-foot pole. I was above that sort of thing, don't ya know. But now an entire, very diverse, genre has opened up to me that I had dismissed outright. And I have discovered some damn fine writers to boot!

It started with Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. Now that series is not solely Romance. Diana's writing touches so many levels and crosses over other genres that it gets shelved in bookstores not only as Historical fiction or Romance, but Sci-fi, Paranormal and Horror. (Though the Horror categorization totally defies understanding!) But the relationship between Jamie and Claire galvanizes the novels and keeps us coming back for more, hence the tendency to call it Romance.

Diana's books led me to the Compuserve Books and Writers Community. And there I was introduced to some excellent writers of Romance. I eagerly await Joanne Bourne's next Spymaster novel and Darlene Marshall's next Pirate adventure. Who'd a thunk it?

I've even stretched myself into Romantic Comedy, aka Rosina Lippi's Pajama Girls of Lambert Square.

I've gone through many different genre stages as I've plodded through my almost 60 years. I read Mystery novels by the boatload when I was pregnant and had toddlers running around. Then I discovered Sci-fi and Fantasy. Ursula LeGuin remains my favorite and most admired writer and Jack McDevitt still gets my imagination traveling into other worlds.

I've recently delightfully discovered Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and found Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union one of my all-time favorites. Urban Fantasy, here I come!

I guess the draw is just plain good writing. It doesn't serve for me to be a genre snob. If it's well-written, I want to read it!

The Flits

Obviously, I haven't been writing much lately. It's a period of having a myriad of ideas all running through my head without time to give them attention. Flit! And then it's gone. I can't revisit the moment without something else grabbing my attention. Often a dog needing out when I'm home, or a phone ringing and/or someone walking into the office at work.

When I do have "time" I am so exhausted and longing for the flits to go away so I can just "be." I read then, taming my brain into order so that I may later sleep.

I sometimes worry that the flits are my way of being, that focus and writing is not to be mine. But it's a season, I believe. A time of busy-ness that I must undertake.

But I do wish it would end soon. It is exhausting.

Research?

I have long wanted to write something based on my grandmother's (maternal grandmother's) life, as she told it to me. She grew up in St. Louis round the turn of the 20th century. She came from an Irish immigrant family. Her mother died when she was a child - thrown from a streetcar - and she and her two older sisters were farmed out to aunts, as their father was an alcoholic and not able to take care of the girls. My grandmother got the aunt who was, as my grandmother called her, an old harridan. Grams tried running away many times to join her sisters in Chicago, but always got hauled back to Aunt Alice...until she didn't, and made it to Chicago to join her sisters. There she met and married the boy next door, a blacksmith and prize-fighter, my Gramps.

Okay. Good stuff. Lots to base a good story around. I have lots of little Grams-tales to add, too.

But, this takes research. Lots of it.

Now I do love history and that's not the problem, but I keep seeing the "C's" on all my efforts that took research in high school through college. It just wasn't my thing, I guess. I get very impatient with details, you see. I know they are needed, but they frustrate the heck out of me when I'm focused on "the bigger picture."

This may be different, I don't know. I may have "grown up." I also know that once the story is down, lots of the details can be changed and filled out. That's what you do when you write. Slice, dice and edit. I know what that's like. I've done it often enough. I do pay attention to the details there, because it is...well, my passion.

I have something else I've been working on, a fantasy novel. Doesn't mean I couldn't work on them both, does it?

And I did live and work in St. Louis for awhile myself during my former husband's seminary days - across from Forest Park where the 1904 World's Fair took place. I have a sense of St. Louis.

I keep debating with myself - should I or shouldn't I? Would it be a waste of time and another disappointment?

A New Pack

I am amazed, thrilled and overwhelmed. I have for so long felt the Lone Wolf when it came to writing. I never in my wildest imagined there were so many other Lone Wolf writers in the world. Now I've discovered blogging and I've seen a Pack, so broad and diversified, connected through the internet, accessible through the internet, that I am - to use an overused expression that I normally avoid - blown away! Pow! I'm out of my vintage chair with the back slat that needs gluing and falls out if I wiggle wrong, and smack on my back on the floor blinking in wonder, gasping to catch my breath!

There are so many of us!

And not just the beginner with the wisps of a novel pixellating across Word in front of his/her nose in silent, exquisite pain on a ten-year-old monitor. But there are successfully published best seller authors, editors, agents, publishers out there encouraging our joyous addiction!

How did this happen? When did it happen? While I've been scurrying about, trying to juggle a job that doesn't support me with family, studies, and eeking out minutes to spend on my fix, a global Writer's Pack has grown like Topsy just a mouse-click away from me!

Wooo. . . .

I shall have to go have a think and a cup of coffee. My knees are still wobbly.