Subconscious Theater

Somewhere far and beyond the other places passed by in everyday life, there is a distant sea. It is a rolling, dark thing bound above by cloud and fog and below by sorrow and need. It stretches away before the eye, going a long way after the horizon. Too long to comprehend for most of us.

To get to this sea, one must walk through a forest. The forest encompasses all of the forest of the waking world, and none of them. Within it are cool shadows, the bitter smell of rotting leaves, the soft feel of pine needles beneath the feet. The trees soar into blue sky, sometimes crowding it out so completely that walking among them is like walking through the tunnel of a cave, trusting only instinct for the surface world to get out again. The rush and roar of waterfalls echo in the background. Streams babble, talking even when no one is listening. And the narrow deer paths lacing through the trees always lead to a sudden meadow, or the top of a hill overgrown with flowers, perhaps the side of a dusty cliff with red rocks all the way down to the canyon's bottom.

The forest goes a long way too, but not as long as the sea. And when one comes out of the trees, there is a road of hard-packed earth. The road goes many places backward and forward, but the real destination is always the sea. To get there, one has to cross the road and walk beyond a barrier of shale and tumbled stone. On the other side is the shore, a gentle curve of white beach that hugs the water and stretches out into two long arms of rock and seaweed. Gulls wheel and cry overhead. Otters dive unimpeded in the greyness of the water.

At the end of one of those rocky arms is a rowboat. Tied to a long-forgotten stake, it rises and falls with the tide, old and unpainted. The rowboat has one purpose. A few hundred meters out from the bay and the jetties that form it is a lighthouse. Tall and white, its light flashing around and around in a constant unhurried circle, it stands alone. Within, it is a simple building of few rooms. Attached is a house with kitchen, cellar and bedroom. And at all times it is jammed to the gills with individuals all trying in their turn to be the center of attention.

It's amazing the light is lit at all.

Strike That, Reverse It

Strike everything I said about Stormwatch being my superbook project. My real project is going to be.... dun dun dun... Mortal Coils! I've set up a glittery new blog for it and the first post is already up. I figure this is a great way for me to develop the story further AND to get to hear from more of the characters than I had originally planned. Everyone's a winner! Drinks all around!

Blog is HERE.

Superbooks part II

So the other member of TTT (Monsieur Tra La La) jumped on the superbook bandwagon. Hallelujah! Check out his awesome sciencey, magicky, heroey project here: Mighty

Turning Into My Mother

It's true! I've spent the past two mornings of not working (curse you, weather gods, curse your miserable selves) doing things my mother has done on a regular basis for as long as I can remember.

Drinking this -

I think I've finally become an adult.

Doing this -

Captain's Inn by Little House Needleworks (one of my current stichy projects)

With this beside me on the couch -

Actually the other one is with me today but my camera isn't charged.

But it's all good. I love my mother, and can't imagine ever being upset about turning into her. If I can be half the cook/artist/wife/mother/friend that she is, then I'll count my life a success.

I probably wax poetic about my family a lot, but it's because I'm related to so many wonderful people.

Superbooks

My best writing friend and I have long-discussed writing exercises that are especially good for character development.

A few years back, I began a word document titled "Subconscious Theater" specifically for this purpose. It's the place all of my characters go when I'm not writing about them. It's a place where they can interact with each other - across genres and plot lines - and tell me things about them I might not find out otherwise. I add bits and pieces to this document all the time, but most especially when I have writer's block. It doesn't seem to matter how much I can't write in the midst of a novel or short story, I can always get someone to say something to me in the theater.

Anyway, last night, best writing friend was telling me about this man named Henry Darger who worked for years and years as a janitor - and was all the while writing and illustrating a fairly epic fantasy novel (15,145-page, single-spaced manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion). This excited best writing friend into something he's calling superbooks.

It's a writing exercise in which hundreds of characters are treated in four to five page installments in an interconnected world but without necessarily interacting. The purpose is to develop characters, concepts and scenes for later use in conventional writing.

This made me insanely excited because it sounds like a better organized version of my Subconscious Theater, or the soap opera project I've been trying to put together. So I suggested: oh, hey, blog format. And he agreed.

So, here we go. Two superbooks for you to lose yourselves in. Two very different superbooks, I might add.

Best writing friend's can be found here: Godhead of the Immortal Moth-King. He is a fantastic writer (the Terror member of TTT) so I can attest that his blog will definitely be awesome.

Mine will be the polar opposite of his in many ways. A somewhat trashy, but hopefully immersive and possibly surprising, soap opera style story. It can be found here: Stormwatch 

Life Update

Best laid plans too often go awry. For weeks now I've been trying to meet up with one of my long-lost best friends and it just never seems to work out. I'm eager to see her cause we've haven't seriously gotten together in something stupid like five years. So why, Fates, why?

In other life news, the boy is actually living with me now. Excitement and wonderfulness. He was living here pretty much all the time anyway, but it's much nicer to know we actually have a "home" together. I have so many homes now. I'm just waiting for the day that I have the one home that's truly mine. Some day. I'm not in a huge hurry. But it will be nice to have a mortgage payment and a garage and a garden that I can plant whatever I want in.

Work has been sucking a lot lately - but only because the crews I work with have been stuck in a series of horrible wood lots. I'm talking about seas of one and two inch birches and poplar that have to be marked and noted in the computer, as well as surveyed. And they're all on hills that are covered in poison ivy and ticks and are impossible to flag with any kind of normal lines. Basically this means work is annoying all of us and I hate coming home in a bad mood. Hopefully we'll get through it soon and move back into residential work for awhile. In the meantime, they keep finding more and more positive trees. We've had to extend the survey zone into Auburn. This beetle is going to wreak havoc until the city gives in a cuts down all the trees.

But anyway. Soon I get to go stay with my parents for a few days in Cape Cod. I've never been there so it will be nice to have a mini vacation and see something new! I miss the weekends my mother used to wake me and my brother up and get us into the car to take us somewhere we'd never been before. I can't wait to do the same thing to my own kids.

Mwahahaha.

Mortal Coils

I'm starting a series of posts about my various novels and writing projects. And since I've been recently rereading it, we'll start with Mortal Coils, a novel I came up with for 2010's NaNoWriMo and which I failed utterly to finish.

Thistle and Weeds by Mumford and Sons - theme song for the story

This is one of those novels that I feel has been in the back of my mind for a long time. Because it's set in what is essentially my parents' hometown - a small but ancient (in American terms) mill town on the coast of New England. As I mentioned in my last post, I have tended over the years to write many detailed descriptions of places and people on random scraps of paper. I have a rather large collection of those scraps pertaining specifically to spending time in that town and being around the people who live and have lived there for most of their adult lives.

Here's a rundown of the story.

The Macpherson family has lived in Lamprey Falls for centuries. And for centuries the citizens of Lamprey Falls have known that there is something about the Macpherson family that is not quite normal.What they don't know is the family's long-kept secret that they are witches with demons bound to their service.

Noah Macpherson

Noah, a young scion of the Macpherson clan, has been summoned back to his family's house after finishing his college degree halfway across the country. His grandfather is dying. His sister is about to have the first baby of the new generation. His alcoholic uncle has moved back into the house after his latest divorce. And his grandmother, the clan's matriarch, is trying to choose an heir.

But Noah has his own problems that his family and even his demon can't seem to help him with. He's dreaming.

Miranda Fairchild 

Noah dreams repeatedly and with increasing frequency of a red-haired woman who is destined to fall in love with and destroy him. Not long after he returns home, he meets this woman from his dreams and is terrified to find that she is real - and working at his favorite bookstore.

Another theme song - for Noah and Miranda.

Miranda likes Noah right away. They both love art and history. They both want to visit Europe. And he makes her laugh. But there is something not quite right about him. And sometimes she catches him looking at her as though he's trying to decipher a puzzle. Then again, sometimes Miranda thinks something isn't quite right about her either. Ever since she moved to Lamprey Falls, she can't sleep at night. She wakes up from daydreams she doesn't remember having. Not to mention she can't quite explain to anyone why she wanted to move to this town in the first place.

What Miranda doesn't know about herself could not only kill her new boyfriend - but it could destroy his entire family.

There's the rundown. I'll post more in-depth about the characters later. This ought to be fun, considering I have a Macpherson family tree going back four generations (and heavily linked to two other witch clans).