Retiring this blog
I’m streamlining my online presence. Still enthusiastic about Social Media, and still planning a very special campaign for my Wild Times series, but I’m pulling back from a lot of the stuff I got sucked into during this year of exploration. I’m not saying any of that stuff is bad, or useless, or anything like that. It’s all legitimate and I know each bit of it works well for many people. But my own activity has sprawled all over the place while I’ve been learning about Social Media, and it’s time for me to get focused again.
This week I’ve slimmed down my dot com site and closed my Blog Catalog, Digg, & StumbleUpon accounts, and from now on will do all my blogging on my journal. I’ve been duplicating a lot of content for weeks now, so this wordpress blog seems redundant.
I’ll leave it up. There’s some good stuff here, including several great guest blogs. But I won’t be adding new material.
If any of you would like to follow me over to my journal, you’ll be very welcome. The feed is here for Atom and here for RSS. Let’s stay in touch. 
Waving, not drowning
A quick update to let you know I haven’t fallen off the edge of the planet. I’ve been feeling pretty broken after two nasty falls in a week. No bones broken, but too much pain to tango. My doctor visited yesterday. He’s sending a physio to see me and we’re going to try another new drug.
Thanks to my Forward Motion and Litopia friends who’ve asked how I’m doing. I’m okay, and will be back with you as soon as I can.
Oh, and I wrote last night! First time since this relapse dropped on me a month ago. That’s a yay!
Flash fiction
Trajectory
Kicca trembled in the coal bunker for a long time after the Guard took his mother.
By now, he knew, she would be branded; banished from the Citadel; beaten by circumstances and by the Guard. A wife of tainted blood, she faced whoredom or starvation in the Hinterland, or barbarism in the distant mountains. If she survived the beating, she must decide whether to live or die.
Kicca faced no such decision. Boys of tainted blood died with their fathers. The sons of black marketeers lost their lives in the marketplace, their tainted blood flowing in the gutters.
No bolthole remained for him, in the Citadel or the Hinterland. His tainted bloodline could stay here and stop, or it could continue in the mountains or on the sea. Recalled snippets of tainted conversation informed him that Citadel dreams extended to the coast, where Citadel screens monitored trade with ever-tightening efficiency. Danger there, then, or barbarism in the mountains.
He chose danger, as danger had chosen him.
Ragged, cold, and coal-blackened, he crept out of childhood; walked in shadows through threatening streets; slipped into the sewers and swam south, leaving the Citadel in an appropriate fashion: stinking and shivering, scared of death and scared of life.
A night at the Standing Rig Inn
Kicca wiped his rainbow knife clean and checked his reflection for traces of image powder, pattern radiation, or track identification. The slightest clumsy key would betray his genes upon the Citadel-controlled screens of Oldcobble Harbour.
He avoided the window, left the tassled lamp unlit, and used friendly moonlight to eye the straw pallet for signs of rodent life. He’d not hand the Revenue Men his head on a plate.
He wedged a chair under the doorknob and gauged the drop to inky water from window; stretched out on the straw, hungry as ever, fully-booted, with his knife and sharpened horseshoe to hand; and fell into a light and wary sleep to the creak of hawser, the wet slap on timber, and a sad harmonica in the distance.
Dreams lent him the faceless warmth of family and friends, until another cold dawn woke him to healthy danger.
A day of discovery
Kicca worked his passage on a freebooter and sailed north up the west coast, selling weaponry to barbarians; happy as ever to increase Citadel insecurity, and yet never happy.
He jumped ship at Inisrock, stole a horse, and headed for clean air, for solitude and cleansing, for cold mountain streams and freedom from screens; discovered a timeless peak, where the view showed him a dozen futures waiting to be chosen.
The one he chose led him to a holy woman: a wise hermit in a cave, blessed with bamboo wind chimes and a warm well, blessed with votive offerings from barbarian women, blessed with calm serenity and a Citadel brand on her cheek. He discovered his mother and shared her final weeks, her forgiveness for his father, her patience and her balance.
When her last smile died, he buried her body and took her spirit back to her Abbey for release from pain.
And he stayed there to study.
Slogan
He heard their approach and searched with sapphire arrows through the grey place where snowladen sky met frozen moor; watched the past winging in to merge their futures with his.
Three local horses carried the village girl Vira, and two foreigners. Powerful frames: mountain merceneries far from home; warriors about their business, about to discover him.
“That’s Kicca,” he heard Vira whisper. “He’s our holy man.”
“Kicca the Vicar,” sniggered the warrior youth, to Vira’s hush and his father’s flared glare.
Kicca saw himself through the father’s eyes: an ancient figure sitting cross-legged in a small island of greenery amid melted snow and bluebells.
“You are?” he asked.
The warrior blinked away a snowflake. “My name is Slogan.”
“And Slogan means?”
“In my language, it means war cry.”
“Of course it does.” And Kicca smiled in the knowledge that, one day soon, Slogan and he would gather their diverse forces and breach the Citadel walls together.
Moonshadows
To appreciate the appearance of a place, an event, or a being: look at it under the sun.
In moonlight, you will see its true nature.
How does your world look today?
Here’s what I see from my writing chair.
The valley is sparkly cold in the early morning sun. Delightful, and particularly so when I have a lovely log fire keeping me warm on this side of the double-glazed picture window.
Like to share your scenes? What do you see when you’re writing?
Why older characters are interesting
Yes, that is a photo of my backside further down this post. I’ll explain why in a minute.
Fell heavily while leaving my morning shower two days ago. Hurting bad. All upper body. Well, from twisted left hip upwards. Ribcage, shoulders and neck all hammered. Right elbow’s immobile. The ME/fibro fallout from damage like this takes a long time to pass. Four months on from the fall I took in the summer and some things still hurt.
And you know what? It’s all invisible. People still say, “you’re looking good.”
Here’s the photo.
a rear view of me
No big deal. I enjoy photography and sometimes model for friends. Anyhow, it isn’t the bum I’m talking about. It’s the legs. You see those muscles? Old distance runner’s muscles. They still look good, don’t they? You can’t tell they hurt all the time as if they’ve been hammered with a baseball bat. Unless I tell you, you don’t know.
And that, finally, is the point I’ve been rambling towards.
Older people usually have more hidden stuff going on inside than younger people, simply because we’ve been around longer. That’s true in real life and it’s true in fiction.
That’s why my favourite book and movie characters are old buggers. Tough and moody, like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Vulnerable and brave, like Rose Sayer. Melancholy and many-layered, like George Smiley. Torn between a true love from the past and a vital loyalty in the present, like Ilsa Lund. Courageous and creaky, like Indiana Jones.
Beautiful young things are lovely, and they can be very interesting, but they really can’t have much of a past. And it’s the bruised onion layers of experience being slowly revealed that makes a character come alive for me.
What do you think?
Quick update (and a mildly embarrassing fanboy outburst)
I’m still borked. The logic of ME/fibro experience would suggest that after a very quiet weekend…
(lots of international rugby on the telly in addition to my beloved RealityTVfest of I’m A Sleb and Strictly Come Dancing and the X Factor – yeah shoot me if you want but it’s sparkly telly to brighten up the dark winter evenings – followed by the opening 90 minutes of the promising new Survivor series)
…I should be feeling relatively okay today. Except that I don’t, and there’s neither rhyme nor reason so I won’t bore you with theories or explorations. It’ll pass when it passes.
Meanwhile, I started work on Quarter Square’s second draft last week. After a two-month pause since finishing the first draft I still love the story. That’s a yay.
What else…
Oh, yes: Stephen Fry and I are following one another on Twitter. He’s the famous person I would most like to have as a friend. Lovely man. So that’s a Yay!
NaNo’s a no-no
Even though I’m still relapsing like a big relapsing thing, my voice was strong enough on Saturday to dictate for the first time in 9 days. When I started, Saturday lunchtime, I was on 10.5k – which was 15.5k behind schedule.
I gave it my best shot. Managed 1.3k words in about 4 hours, then slumped into a heap and stayed there for the rest of the day.
I’m out of NaNo. No way I can catch up. When I’m in ‘good’ health I can do 1k per day comfortably. I did that through the summer to first-draft Quarter Square, and it worked very well. But more words than that for more than two or three days is pushing too hard, even when I’m ‘well’ – when I’m in relapse it simply isn’t going to happen at all.
I’ll continue writing this story in realistic time. It’s a good story and an important part of Wild Times.
But it seems I must accept that NaNo is in my past.
Back in the nano-saddle
I’m still sucking relapse-plankton and coming up for air briefly at random intervals, but my voice has recovered its strength this morning so I plan to dictate nanowords for the first time in 9 days.
Yes, you could say I’m slightly behind on my schedule. By the end of Day 15 (today) I should be at 26k, which means I need to do 15.5k to catch up over the next 12 hours, and I think we all know that ain’t gonna happen. But I’ll do what I can and we’ll see where we are when the dust settles.
The voice strength thing is significant because Dragon Naturally Speaking doesn’t recognise me if I slur my words, which happens when pain has exhausted me for a few days. If it doesn’t recognise you, and you insist on continuing with the dictation anyway, the software starts to retrain itself. Obviously, that isn’t a good thing. It’s a physical obstacle to dictating in the same way damaged hands are an obstacle to typing, and it’s one I never could have foreseen.
But, hey, I’m back in the saddle.
Pause for thought
Trying to NaNo while dealing with a family crisis last week was like juggling soot, then a stealth attack relapse hit me on Friday. Hey, shit happens.
So, no nanowords since last Thursday, which is a week tomorrow. I’m at 10.5k: a good foundation for when I can get back to work on it. That’ll be sometime this week if at all possible. I plan to dictate some this afternoon if I can (and it’s looking good right now – I’m still sitting upright after posting this) but I won’t jump the gun. There be dragons in that direction, and they ain’t friendly ones like my Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation software. They be nasty snarly dragons that’ll chew me up and sink my nano if I try to beat the storm instead of waiting it out.
However, I will complete this first draft with a minimum of 50k words by 30th November. Relapses are as much a part of my life as writing. The trick is balancing the buggers and finishing up with a well-written piece of work despite everything.
Or even because of everything. Ah, now, there’s a thought. I’ll inject feelings from this real life experience into my fiction. Yes.
