Diminisher of Peace
Always Becoming
A Corner Not Dipped In Styx
Nanowhere Chapt. 1
Thanks, Lori! An interview I did with author Lori Devoti a couple weeks ago just went up on her site, and looks great--I'm a little blue, however, but that's just my author pic from the Juno Books site.
http://loridevoti.com/blog/2008/07/01/interview-urban-fantasy-author-chris-howard/
I'm in the final stage of editing and building the HTML for The Gatherer, a short story that will go up on SaltwaterWitch.com around the middle of July (Free to download). The Gatherer orginally came from a flashback chapter in Seaborn that I cut before sending the manuscript out. It was backstory and didn't drive the plot. I've reworked it into a complete story. It's gone through a reading and crit from my writing group, and it's about ready to go.
I'd intended to create a graphic version, but I haven't had time to do the work. Someday perhaps. For now, I've added seven or eight illustrations through the text.
I'll be posting it for review in a couple days. If you're interested in reading and getting me some feedback, drop me an email: chrishoward.author@gmail.com
I have a character in Seaborn, Michael Henderson, who's a minor character with a background in science, and I've sort of left it up to him to try to explain how people can live and breathe under the sea. He has the "curse" himself, all the abilities the Seaborn have. He writes pages of notes, sketches the things he sees in the deep, imagines why things work the way they do with the Seaborn--all with a scientific mind.
I've written and drawn a bunch of stuff in the character of Michael Henderson, which started out as part of the worldbuilding exercises, and just kept going. I wrote the chapter headings in Seaborn from Henderson's perspective, taken from his notes, his journal, his "conversations" with various notable characters.
Here are some samples from my journal:
Seaborn Notes
Michael Henderson
I have been to the deep ocean, the Very Deep, and I have set my feet down in billion year old sand. I have kicked through the dark with blind animals that change shape with their moods, with fish ten meters long that glide through the deep sea without fear--and only eat microscopic food, with arthropods made of glass, and creatures that defy classification, I have touched the bioluminescent lures of fanged ambush predators in the abyss, and I still have all of my fingers. I have done all of this without equipment, without SCUBA, without feeling the pressure, or need for air. I am no longer a surface human--or as the Seaborn, say--a surfacer, a Thinling. I have become one of them.
I have experienced, l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs, Jacques Cousteau's "rapture of the deep," but not as the nitrogen narcosis that Cousteau described in Silent World. Say, rather, that I have experienced the rapture of the unexpectedly normal in the most unexpected place on earth: the deep sea.
The Seaborn do not suffer from any of the affects of breathing compressed gases, for example the squeeze of barotrauma on descent, because presumably, these do not exist in effective amounts in their bodies.
SCUBA stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. This is a device enabling surface-living humans to recreate, as near as possible, and within well-defined limits, everything the human respiratory system needs above the ocean surface, in the air. While in the water, it appears that the Seaborn do not--or even need to--breathe in the same manner, possessing a different, possibly more advanced system for taking in the same gases and nutrients directly from seawater. Out of the water, the lungs of a Seaborn human appear to function the same way as the lungs of any surface human.
Lungs: Alveoli are the small grape-bunch like structures that line the lungs and take up oxygen, CO2, Nitrogen--gases the human body needs to survive, with oxygen fueling so many of the processes. The Alveoli are highly susceptible to damage from heavy substances like seawater, which really shouldn't be in the lungs. Damage then leads to low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) , low tissue oxygen levels (hypoxia), and then death. The alveolar-capillary membrane is a delicate, one cell thick membrane through which the gases we breathe are exchanged. It appears to be the case that the Seaborn possess a more rigid surfactact--a sort of stiffening coat for the alveoli to prevent them from collapsing under the weight of heavier substances like water in the lungs.
Good ones. Skott points to a great source of European names, what looks like a scan of an early census document at the Internet Archive:
http://textiplication.com/2008/06/06/where-have-you-been-all-my-life/
...and I come out pretty good.
"[Little Brother] kind of reminded me of Nanowhere, only without the emphasis on philosophy and magical talking AI foglets. In fact now I mention it, I'm pretty sure that I preferred Nanowhere: at no point in Little Brother did you feel that the characters' lives were in mortal peril (though that may well have been deliberate)." (Emphasis added)
http://explodingbat.livejournal.com/54773.html
READ Nanowhere here:
READ Cory Doctorow's Little Brother here:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
I finished a journal while out at Wiscon, the last four pages in a Moleskine notebook. Alice and I were out Saturday night and I picked up a new one at Barnes. It's interesting to go back and see what I was thinking a year and a half ago when I started the old one--and then what I've put into the pages since.
Here's the new one and the old--all stickered up:
This last one has been with me through several cons:
…and trips around the world, India, Europe (Swiss railway ticket)
...and, of course, writing. Here are the opening pages of Hammers and Snails. Most of the journal's stuffed with Seaborn scenes, character studies, sketches, story ideas, bits and pieces of stories:
Or, how do mermaids cry and sweat, and what it looks like in the water. This is the second in a set of posts for those speculative fiction authors out there who have already--or are planning to--dive into a stories with humans/half-humans that live and breathe underwater. (See the first, How do mermaids hear? on underwater acoustics).
Right off, I'll say if you're a mermaid and someone's trying to sell you the "never let them see you sweat" line, keep your money.
Let's start with an experiment. Take a glass of fresh water, a glass of saltwater (mix in a few tablespoons of salt into 4oz/118ml of water), and with a teaspoon, pour the saltwater into the fresh a few drops at a time. What do you see? The mixing of fluids of differing salinity affect the refraction, the way light comes through the fluid. Where the two mix, there's a blurry swirl in the water.
I've tried to capture it here in these images. The one on the left is the glass of freshwater, the right has some saltwater mixing in. This also works in reverse. Pour the freshwater water into the saltwater, and you get the same swirls and blurriness.
Close-ups of this:
What's happening here? It's all about salinity, or the measure of total dissolved salts in water. (Salts come in many flavors and compound varieties, but we don't need to go into that here).
The salinity of human tears, sweat, blood plasma, amniotic fluid are around 9PPT (parts per thousand) and seawater is around 35PPT (These numbers vary, for example seawater sampled in the north Atlantic is less saline than water sampled from the Red Sea).
What it comes down to is that even though we have much the same properties as seawater, we are, well, less salty. When a mermaid cries, her tears take some time to blend into the saltier water around her eyes. She may have trouble seeing through a good fit of sobbing.
The lacrimation system, primarily used for cleaning and lubricating the eyes, includes the gland, reservoir, and canals that manage tear production in most land mammals. Tears are salty, but they don't sting because our eyes are already accustomed to the salt content in the fluid that protects them. This protective fluid for the eyes is actually a set of three different substances that make up the tear film, each layered on top of the other, the outermost lipid layer, aqueous layer, and a mucous layer. (For the different kinds of tears, basal, reflex, and weeping, see the Wikipedia article on this).
No sweat.
There are around 650 sweat glands in an average square inch of your skin, and although the mineral composition of sweat changes with the individual and the source of sweating, the blurring effect of mixing two fluids of differing salinity still applies. In other words, you would be able to see a mermaid sweat, a thin blurry layer of water over her skin.
All of this assumes that your mermaids, mermen, selkies, nereids, people of the sea, have typical human skin and tear functions.
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/mermaidshear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears
The concentration of sodium in thermal sweat, M. G. Bulmer and G. D. Forwell
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1363543
http://the0phrastus.typepad.com/the0phrastus/2008/03/the-sea---water.html
Among a few million other things. But this one's crucial. While I try to refrain from spitting with the exception of brushing my teeth, my characters are apparently enthusiastic spitters. So much so, that my editor had to step in a put a limit on expectorating. Even I was a revolted by my characters' bad habit--some of them very nice people, the last people you'd expect to go around ejecting matter from their mouths and thinking nothing of it. Shocking.
Paula sent me the post-copyedited version of Seaborn yesterday morning, along with a long email describing some of the interesting stats turned up in the editing process. For instance, the need to reduce the number of times my characters roll/rolled or were caught rolling. Those crazy characters...how delightfully spherical of them.
So, looks like one more quick pass from me, and maybe another one or two from Paula before the book's ready for the Show. (There are several out there already in reviewers' hands, but an error here or there, rolling, spitting, and a few more overused words are accepted).
So, today's lesson? Editors are the most overworked people on the planet, and really don't deserve to be hassled by anxious authors.
Not in what you eat but what you write. (Think Dr. Seuss). So, I'm wondering about the world that fills the pages of what I'm writing right now, and I'm looking back at my last three Seaborn novels--and then I'm studying the Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom painting by Repin, and one of the thoughts that strikes me--rather sharply--is that many of us writers of fantasy fall into the worldbuilding groove of basing the fantastic on something very real, familiar…solid fortress walls of stone, cities made of towers. Even when we take a few steps over the edge, and say, make our characters live in the trees, we tend to think of houses in the branches, flat level floors, rectangular windows, gabled rooflines--the familiar bolted on to the fantastic.
Is it because it's the simpler path? Is it because we need to stick with something readers can reference--I mean we're already asking them to accept magic, faeries, things that live off human blood? Could we lose our readers with a blind rush over the imaginative edge--into the absurd--readers scratching their heads a third of the way into your book, thinking, why can't the protag live in an ordinary house--you know, stucco, Spanish tile, etc. Why does the author insist on dragging me through the character's "house"--some amorphous, self-propelled, windowless, floorless, jelly candy the size of a gymnasium with shifting walls the consistency of yogurt?
Here's Repin's masterpiece, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876). Click to view the larger version.
Back to Repin: What I noticed right off is that here's this fantastic underwater world, and everybody's dressed like they've stepped out of a fête in Victorian England--with a few nice eastern touches to add an exotic element. Where's the weird natural ocean feel? Where are the spines, fins, bold coloring, bioluminescence, organic branching coralline growth of the world under the sea?
I did some doodling for this post. Wouldn't a city under the sea look like this?
What do you think? An author needs to hook readers with something of the familiar? Or should an author sprint for the edge, not look back, readers be damned? Somewhere in the middle?
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I printed out the latest PDF of SEABORN, and I'm going through it with an orange highlighter, slapping on little yellow stickies to mark the pages.
All of them are minor, and all but two or three are very minor, a line that should be italicized but isn't, that sort of thing.
Don't know if I officially announced this, but the sequel to SEABORN is done, and the title is SEA THRONE. Things can always change, but that's what works right now. Expect publication sometime in 2009.
Cheers! On to the next book...
How many of the characters in the stories you write are artists? Any kind of art. What do they do? How deep do you get into it as part of the story? Do you find—or think it's the case—that visual arts would be more difficult to portray in writing—or is it pretty much the same? Unless your character's a writer or poet—in which case, you can simply include some of their work to pull it off—or you're writing a graphic novel, it's tough to get the art across to the reader.
I have three different artsy characters in Seaborn. One who paints and draws, one who dances, one who's a music composition major at a music college. I'd guess these abilities or interests help define a character. A dancer would certainly be athletic, someone who plays music, paints or draws might be thoughtful.
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Or, What happens between the acceptance of your manuscript and the launch of your book
(from someone who barely knows what he’s talking about--since he only has the experience of one book going into publication).
What does happen to your manuscript after the publisher accepts it? I've always been curious.
What follows is my documented ordering of the events, editing, extra work, writing, pitching, and other stuff an author has to do before one precious copy of the book hits the shelves in a bookstore.
Anyone writing for years and breaking into the published market, reading the blogs of authors, agents, editors, will have heard all the terms and processes, things like copyediting and ARCs (Advanced Reading Copies--books printed ahead of the release date specifically for book reviewers, sometimes handed out by the thousands at conventions like Book Expo America).
But I've never understood the order of the activities clearly. When a writer says his book's "gone into copyediting," where exactly is that in the process? How far along the road to release is it?
What I've done--and I'd love some feedback from those who know a lot more than I do--is mark the road with all the various things I've had to do, attend to, understand, agree to, and receive in order to get to that glorious release day...July 20, 2008. (Obviously some of the stuff in the timeline has not yet happened, so I'm guessing with the dates there).
Click the image below to view the readable version.
Here's what the process looks like from my perspective:
Okay, my work on this planet is nearly complete. (Click the image to view it)
In a related note, over on Fangs, Fur, & Fey, the topic this week is... How "real" are your characters, do you talk to them, are you the god(dess) of your world?
My comment:
I talk to them--does in my head count? Sometimes out loud, but I try to keep that locked down for obvious reasons. I don't think my characters tell me what to do, but it is their drive, their lives, their stories. I'd call it more interactive, with me hammering a stake in the ground for the ending--it should end something like this, and then nudging them all in that direction.
A quick painting of Kassandra--still looking good after all these years, digital, about 45 minutes.
...
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
Oodles of them from Sean Wallace at Wildside Press (Juno Books is an imprint of Wildside). These contain the first ten chapters of Seaborn, with a very nice introduction by Paula Guran, and an essay at the end of the book (last couple pages) by me--on underwater acoustics.
You can find these at a Juno Books or Wildside Press booth at conventions like RTC (Romantic Times), ComicCon NY (I think), WisCon (definitely--because I'll be there), ReaderCon, and others.
If you want a stack to drop off at your local bookstore, library, writers meeting, just let me know where to send them (chrishoward.author@gmail.com ).
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I've said it before--two or three times, in fact. If you write fantasy (any kind--even contemporary, urban, mythic, etc.) you should be a subscriber to the long and detailed book reviews at The Medieval Studies Institute and Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Every week you get in-depth book reviews that often contain enough information to use without buying every cool title that happens to hit your inbox. Things like 3000 words describing what's in:
The Occult Sciences in Byzantium
Magdalino, Paul, and Maria Mavroudi
ISBN-13: 9789548446020
Or this: Games and Festivals in Classical Antiquity
To subscribe to The Medieval Review, send an email message to listserv@listserv.indiana.edu, with nothing in the subject line and the message: "subscribe TMR-L"
Here's the subscription form for Bryn Mawr Classical Review: http://newmailman.brynmawr.edu/mailman/listinfo/bmcr-l
http://www.indiana.edu/~medieval/
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/
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I’m doing sort of a lather, rinse, revise, repeat thing for the last few posts leading up to my 1000th post on theophrast.us.
Here’s one of my short stories that appeared in The Harrow in 2006, and is--to date--the only time I have written a childbirth scene.
Always Becoming
It was the clouds, something in the clouds that convinced Mozell her own death was near. Wispy strips of transientness coming down from the North, catching the sunlight, thickening into wide bands of gold that crossed the sky, scattering coin-like dabs against still blue.
"The message's clear if you just look that way. Perhaps not death, but something close to it?"
From the South, fat drifting dirigibles lumbered up, heavy with moisture, tops billowing white like full sails rigged over hazy gray hulls.
"Heaven breakers, those," Mozell said in a conversational tone and volume to anyone who might be listening.
Her garden was large enough to hide dozens of human-sized listeners, hundreds if they could shrink to a ferret's leanness, and didn't mind crowding in the weeds between the sunflowers and bloodchirps. A full-grown man could stand straight behind the string bean rails and not be seen easily.
Mozell scanned the rows of plants, mostly vegetables, her eyes partly closed as if she possessed a sense of sight that didn't require them.
"I'd detect anyone in my own garden. Only a fool of a gardener wouldn't," she said, her eyes returning to the clouds.
Shaking her head and standing on tiptoes to take in as much sky as she could, she said, "I see it coming. Not sure how it ends, though." She twisted her lips in doubt, fixing her hair, pulling long strands of iron gray into a tighter ponytail. She studied the clouds another ten seconds, and added with a slow scowl, "Not really sure if it does end."
Mozell Jirsa released a long, unsteady breath and returned to earth. "I'm going to miss the gardening," she said, turned that into another question, and looked to the sky for the answer. She frowned. "Hmmm. I don't see myself missing it. I don't see myself even leaving the garden. Funny."
She bent low into the bloodchirps and snapped off seven bean-like pods, long lumpy fingers of deep glossy red. One of them oozed a bloody pus where she'd pinched its stem, and Mozell licked the trickle off her thumb.
She straightened in the garden's center, steering her eyes through the hedge that blocked her house from the view of vehicles traveling along Echo Road.
"Not my view," she said, glaring at the wall of green as if it had offended her. "I see right through you." Her head swiveled along the hedge, following something moving at high speed on the road. "There you go, Jan Corliss, the father, always running away, off to Heydel's in your dad's car, audio blaring...guitar squeal, playful bass thrum...SnapDragonflies? Mother's fingernails, haven't heard that in a long time." She made a satisfied snapping noise with her lips. "There's a cycle for everything, isn't there." She didn't make it into a question, because the answer was plain to hear.
Her head swung back and stopped when her senses picked up the next traveler along Echo. "Jacinta Yahl. Breathing quickly. Overwrought. The girl shouldn't be running like that, not with the baby due..." She stopped herself from saying, "anytime" and quickly added, "at three o'clock this afternoon."
Mozell frowned, lifted her nose and pulled in the slow path of some nidorous smell on the road about a hundred feet behind the girl. "Yup. And something dead drifting along in her wake. Got a good pair of legs on it, too, not the junior high-school dance shuffle you usually see with them. Should've expected that."
Mozell moved through the row of plants, shoved the bloodchirp pods into her apron, and rubbed her hands together, shaking off the garden's dirt while she made her way to the front of the house.
Jacinta shot through the open gate at the end of Mozell's drive, brown legs bent and kicking, flowery dress rippling, black hair pulsing and coiling past her like a shredded banner in a gale, her arms folded over her full pregnant belly.
"Mother Jirsa! Mother Jirsa!"
Mozell gave Jacinta a growing smile. "Always liked that girl," she said low and to herself as if there were listeners roaming her property who weren't privy to some of her chatter.
Jacinta skidded on the gravel a few steps beyond Mozell, spun around and looked over the old woman's shoulder at the space where the drive met Echo Road. She bent forward, her chin pushing into the Mozell's soft neck, panting, her eyelids shuddering against the pain and pressure in her back, hips, belly, thigh muscles, against her cervix.
Mozell stiffened, becoming a brace for the girl. "Just rest your head there for a minute before you ask any questions, all right dear?" She smiled when she felt the nod, Jacinta's chin digging deeper into her neck.
"You're a strong woman," said Mozell. "Carrying a child, running two miles, and a slice of a day before you bring him into the world."
Jacinta gasped something that sounded like the weak start of the word, "him?" Her body pressed harder against Mozell's back.
Mozell shushed her and drew one bony finger across her lips. "I'm old, but I've borne children, delivered even more. You never forget what it feels like. My back was what really got to me. Yours? I know where you're hurting. Let me give it try. Something like this..." She rubbed her chin. "Imagine a boy with a stick running up and back along a fence, dragging it over the pickets and the gaps between them, serrated popping, chipping the paint, denting the wood. Got that? Now imagine some osseous plane of existence that cuts through ours but only exposes your skeleton, and now a boy living in that plane uses his stick on your spinal column, with bone-chipping rhythm, thumping up and down your vertebrae, loosening them, rapping on them like a damn xylophone, the little bastard vandal," she snapped the last under her breath, and then went on cheerfully, "Something like that, right?"
Jacinta straightened, nodding uncertainly, her fingers gripping Mozell's shoulders. "I guess so." She scowled a little, trying to picture an existence where she only saw the skeletons of the inhabitants of some intersecting plane. And, funny, the pain in her body eased.
Mozell patted her hand. "Did you bring the letter?"
"What letter?"
"It's in the trunk, a wooden trunk, under the hutch in the dining room. Addressed to your great grandmother Isabella."
"Oh," Jacinta said in a small voice, shaking her head, as if Mozell had asked her if she'd brought the ladder they'd need to climb to the moon.
"Now run along and fetch it."
Her eyes went wide. "What about him?"
Mozell waved away her question dismissively. "Just get the letter, and I'll explain everything." But her eyes stayed with Jacinta's, and she nodded. "It's good that you can sense him. Not many can. Damn, that's a wicked curse." Mozell looked at her watch, and then at the hedge, scrunching up her nose at the reek. "He's a steady one, strong, but not that quick. You can make it to your mother's place and back at a brisk walk. Go."
"I mean, what is he?"
Mozell waved a finger. "Not till you return with the letter."
Jacinta looked deep into Mozell's eyes, jerked back as if slapped, and then bowed her head slightly. "Mother Jirsa, you've always been fair to me."
"I'm always fair to everyone."
"You've always been good to me."
"That's a fair way to put it. Yes. I think you, Jacinta Yahl, are here for something important. Three or four important things all coming together at the same time. It'll all ravel or unravel about three this afternoon."
"What happens?"
"Letter. And cheer up. You're having a baby. Mother Yahl has a nice sound though, doesn't it?"
The girl looked at Mozell, avoiding her eyes, sensing something, a uniqueness, emptiness, something she couldn't pin down, except for a trail of sorrow.
"Don't look at me like that," said Mozell with a slow smile. "It happens to us all. I showed up one autumn day with a basket of blueberry muffins, young as you, chattering like a cricket, and Mother Elquist just got up from the table with her knitting bag, said, I'm off. See you when I see you."
"Have you seen her?"
"Not a peep since."
"Are...are you going?"
Mozell raised a critical eye to the sky. "Apparently not. If you find my body, do something with it. Just don't bury it in the garden. That's my only request."
Jacinta backed up a step, clutching at her belly. "You're dying?"
"No. No. You're going to take my life, dear, and I brought you some ripe bloodchirps to mix up a batch o' near-death that'll send a good chunk of me off without a fuss."
Mozell glanced at the sky one more time, pursed her lips in disapproval, and gave her garden a good long stare.
Jacinta staggered away from her. "But...I don't want to."
Mozell looked over her shoulder at her. "Oh, you're still here. Get the letter, girl. It'll tell you everything you need to know. A brisk walk, now. No running. It's not necessary."
Jacinta pulled in a shuddery breath, turned and left by the side gate through the hedge, an old-fashioned, narrow, iron barred gate, rough with rust and hinges that growled.
Mozell wheeled at the sound, but her eyes immediately drifted back to the presence of the dead man at the end of her driveway. He moved along her hedge, smooth, with purpose, back down Echo Road, following Jacinta home.
"A nice gait on him. Perhaps I'll be able to study him a bit before..." She frowned.
An hour later, she was standing next to her garden, glaring at the clouds, when Jacinta bolted from the gap in the hedge, down the drive.
"Here it is, Mother Jirsa." Jacinta seized her belly, fiddling with the letter with her teeth and the fingers of one hand.
"Slow down." Mozell held up her hand to stop her from opening the crinkly brown envelope. "I know what's in the letter. Know it by heart. We won't bother with it. I don't need the letter to tell you the story."
"But...I just walked—!"
"In order to get your slowpoke of a womb into gear's all. That baby needs to be out and braying by three if we're to save him from that monster."
Jacinta swung around, her eyes fixed on the drive's end. "He followed me home and back," the girl breathed, and then with a lot more strength in her voice, "But you sent me out there with him!"
Mozell smiled and waved away her defiance. "Oh, he's not after you, dear. He's waiting for your child."
Jacinta threw her arms possessively around her middle.
Mozell patted her shoulder. "He fears me, and he won't be able to pass the front gate until you've given the world your newborn."
Jacinta stared at her for a minute, stunned. "Boy?"
Mozell jerked her chin at the driveway. "He wouldn't be here if it wasn't."
"There's more," Jacinta whispered. "There are things you're not telling me."
Mozell glanced at her watch and headed to the patio, waving Jacinta in front of her. "There's iced tea in the fridge. Get me a glass."
Jacinta stopped halfway to jumping at her order. "Wait, I'm preg—"
"And I'm old. That outweighs you. A nice tall glass now, lots of ice, and hurry, while I think back on how this started."
Jacinta nearly dropped the glass on the table in front of Mozell, and then dumped her pregnant body into the chair to Mozell's right, panting as if she'd just run another couple miles for the tea.
"Mother—" Jacinta winced, pressing a hand to her waist. "—Jirsa?"
"Quiet, girl, I have a good start for the story. It's about how Arden Covitt released the witch Awilda from a shadow and the price he paid." After a sip, Mozell nodded, and then jerked her chin at the thick forest behind her house. "Our world's a bright place, Jacinta, but it wasn't always so. It used to be darker. There was shadow in the woods so thick it sometimes clumped together and formed into...dangerous things. One of these shadows grew very strong. It choked the life out of passing animals, and took something from each corpse before the soul faded, a single hair, a tooth, an eye, an ear. It took only one portion from each, and over a thousand years it filled itself with them. It was made of the hairs and teeth and eyes and ears of the things it killed, and it grew mighty. It heard thunder from the other side of the horizon, it could hear your heart beating a mile away, its eyes of every kind, insect eyes, rat eyes, fish eyes, human eyes, bear eyes, swiveled in every direction and took in different lights, penetrated darkness and mist. It stole the paws from cats, the hands and feet from men, hooves from stags, and it learned to move at great speed. When it had completely covered its shape in the skin and hair and fur of its victims, it sought the organs beneath them. It stuffed its shadowy core with the warm hearts of animals. It breathed because it swallowed the lungs of those it killed. It fed its shadow with the stomachs of men and deer and bears. Then it hungered. And it had teeth. "Arden Covitt was hunting deep in the woods when he found the shadow's trail. He followed it to the end and he released the witch, Awilda, from the shadow's core. She came out like she went in, whole. I don't know how long she was inside the thing. Evidently, Awilda didn't die when the shadow bit her, when it spilled her blood, when it tried to cut her into pieces. It had devoured her as one piece, and she'd become part of it."
"This Awilda wasn't strong enough to defeat it?"
Mozell froze, studying the girl, the small creep of admiration showing in the tightened corners of her mouth. "That's what I asked myself when I first heard the story. Awilda never told us that. It makes more sense that Awilda's ability to keep herself intact was some sort of strategy. She went seeking the monster, knowing something of it's...methods."
"Maybe she'd seen the remains of animals, missing an organ, an ear, an eye?"
Mozell nodded. "And her purpose was subjection, to control the shadow, master it, become it, and drive it. That was Awilda's way."
"Arden Covitt destroyed the shadow?"
"Or defeated it, reduced its capacity to hold all of the things that made it threatening. It kept a few teeth and claws, but released everything else, including Awilda. Arden feared her, thinking that she was the shadow's real source of power. Awilda, however, always seeking more—and recognizing a bold man when she saw one—smiled, and granted him a wish for releasing her from the monster's bonds."
"Did she need releasing?"
"Probably not."
"What did he want?"
Mozell hesitated, and took a sip of iced tea to cover it up. "A son."
"And Awilda gave it to him?"
"In a way. She seduced Arden, who was already married, and Awilda bore a son, Roman. She wanted Arden as a lover, but he already loved another." Mozell raised an eyebrow. "I think she was lonely, and just didn't know how to deal with people. All she understood about others was how to control them. Arden, as he'd shown against the shadow, had the strength and courage to resist her, and, a year after he'd gone into the woods to hunt, he broke from her secrets and webs and ties. He fled, and never returned. Well, until now."
Jacinta leaned forward, glaring, trying to pull the next part of the story from Mozell. "Then what happened?"
"Awilda cursed Arden, a bad one, too. Arden and his wife already had a three-year-old daughter, Isabella. In the spring after Arden's escape, his wife, Theola, gave birth to a son. Arden relaxed. He thought Awilda had, well, taken something from him, but at the same time, granted him his wish."
"No?"
"Twenty days after his son's birth, Arden choked him to death."
"He didn't!"
Mozell nodded, then shook her head. "Not really him. It was Awilda's curse, put on him for spurning her." Mozell frowned. "One of Awilda's favorite words, spurn. There was always a lot of spurning going on in her life. Anyway, Arden had been...well, he'd been foolish. A little overconfident. He'd been a dragon pointing out its weakest scale, a general the fragile point in the line, a jailor the weakest link in a murderer's chain. Arden had handed Awilda his deepest vulnerability. His want of a son. She cursed him, strengthening his desire to have one, and then forcing him to kill any son of his seed or their descendents. His guilt nearly stopped his life, but he wasn't certain that he'd been the killer. He didn't remember doing it. Theola gave birth to another son the following spring."
Jacinta shuddered. "Again?"
Mozell sipped her iced tea. "Three times Theola gave a son to Arden, and he killed each. The next autumn, Theola told Arden she was again pregnant, a fourth time. In grief, he hanged himself."
Jacinta swung her head around to the driveway's end, to the presence of death that stood there.
"The curse makes him kill his sons?"
"Awilda thinks these things through. She's very...methodical, very thorough. The thing at the end of the drive's your great great grandfather, Arden Covitt. He's family. After his suicide, he came back and killed the fourth son, and many more. Isabella's son, grandson. He's returned every time one of your family has given birth to a son."
"Oh no!" Jacinta cried, getting to her feet in a hunched position, her face bent down over her round belly.
"Oh, yes. That's why he's here."
Jacinta looked up. "No, I mean, oh no. My water broke."
Mozell sipped her tea, looking mildly attentive. She waved the girl back. "Sit. I'll get you a towel. It's only eleven. Your boy won't be coming into the world till three this afternoon."
Mozell managed to bring half a dozen pillows, a blanket, several towels, and a glass of ice water all in a single trip to the house. "Can't do much about the pain. Hopefully these'll make bearing it a little easier." She spent fifteen minutes arranging everything, bending the straw so that Jacinta could lean toward the patio table and take a sip, shoving pillows under her arms, behind her knees.
"How do you know the STORY? " Jacinta shrieked the last word, huffing and shifting her body in search of the ever-elusive comfortable position.
"Awilda's my grandmother."
"Then that's why you're a...you're a..." Jacinta sat upright, her eyes squeezed tight in pain. She gasped. Her mouth swung open, but she couldn't manage much of a scream, just a little gagging noise.
"Witch?" Mozell held her hand firmly and patted it. "I'm something like a good old-fashioned bake boys and girls in the oven witch. Not one of those new ones. I'll not have any of that black fingernails and lipstick Goth crap. If my fingernails are black, it's because I've been gardening...or baking. Not children, no. But I do make a mean pork pie, and, well, you've had my eleven grain bread. With some fresh butter, is there anything like it on earth?"
Jacinta shook her head, no, then stopped herself. They were getting off the subject. Or there were too many subjects coming at once and she had to weed some out. "What are we going to do?"
"I think it has to be you that does it."
"How can I stop him?"
"By taking some of my blood and soul, by becoming a little bit of me." She didn't add, I hope.
"A little bit of Awilda?"
Mozell nodded. "If you like."
"What—" gasped Jacinta, now willing to pay any amount of money for relief from the pain. "What was she like?"
"In one word," said Mozell, looking up at the sky. "Awilda was real. Is real. No one witnessed her death. There was something about her, something really real, beyond real, hard and absolute, like one of that old Greek chap, Plato's Forms. You know, there's the world of Forms and the world of particulars. Particulars are the half-real. What did Plato say of the Forms? Something that's never becoming but always is? Awilda was whole, complete...always is. It's like she was born fully armed and armored, Athena-like. Her problem was that she never grew. She didn't have room to grow. Didn't realize growing was possible. If she wanted more power she wouldn't even think of bettering herself. She always sought it outside of herself, in other people, by controlling them, making them do her bidding. And, Holy Mother! If you crossed her you ended up...like Arden, cursed to kill your own children forever, beyond death, an eternity of self-inflicted pain."
"Are there others? Who—" Jacinta breathed, clutching the patio table, rattling the ice cubes in her glass. "Who else?"
"Cursed by Awilda? No one knows but her. Some she thought beneath a good curse, though." Mozell looked up at her house. "This was her place, you know. One time it was deep in the forest, no roads, just a weed-choked old deer path through miles of woods. The town grew up around it, building houses closer, till you live just a couple miles down Echo from me. Anyway, this is an old old place. There are graves here and there on the land, pets that died, family, relatives." She swung her head away from the house to the forest. "Over in that corner, there are three graves, unmarked, but I know who's in them."
Jacinta stood up, hands holding her hips, one eye still attentive to Mother Jirsa, the other squeezed painfully shut, her face curled into a torture-me-all-you-want-you-won't-get-any-information-out-of-me look.
Mozell stood with her, guiding her into the house, past the kitchen—although she did something, a wrist flick or just a mean look, and the fire on the stove whooshed into life under a pot of water. Mozell eased Jacinta into the bed in the room at the end of a long narrow hall.
"Awilda always kept the doors unlocked. She said it saved her fixing them later because they always knocked them off the hinges. It's not like a lock was going to make them stay away from her house."
"Who?"
"Bad men. She lived in the forest alone, and she kept a small cemetery for those who visited her with...unfriendly intent. Awilda called them, 'untoward incidents.' Word got around after the third incident, and few people bothered her after that. She wasn't exactly evil or stupid, just a bit lonely and, of course, way off kilter when someone wronged her—at least in Arden's case. She enjoyed a chat now and then with passing hunters or trappers, and was generous if they knew their place."
"What did the three...OUCH!...do?"
"They raped her. They used her body, and she in turn rewarded them with dinner. Awilda always laughed when she told this part of her story, saying, 'Funny. They never drank the wine, fearing poison. And I had a nice selection of mature bottles in the cellar. What a waste.'"
"How did she stop them?"
Mozell shook her head. "Never eat the garnish. My advice. She didn't mix anything with the food. She set a little something from the garden on the edge of the plate, and they—she'd assessed them as the rough sorts of fellows who'll eat everything on the plate—ate the garnish." Mozell laughed. "Blue devil's creeper or Bad Goatswort, some poisonous member of the Forget-me-not family. Awilda's favorite flowers."
"So, Arden Covitt found out...the painful way. He'll never forget her."
"I think that's Awilda's point, dear."
#
"Crowning!" Jacinta shrieked the word, in pain and anger. Pain, because it felt as if she were pushing a brace of frozen turkeys, a bolt of lightning and a box of woodscrews out from between her legs. Anger, because she'd been reduced to shouting single words, and had completely lost the ability string any two of them together.
"Not unless the little guy's wearing it around his shoulders," muttered Mozell, distracted with the delivery. "Here he comes. Come to Mother Jirsa. Yes. Easy now."
Jacinta's eyes opened to somewhere into the middle of her forehead, sweat pouring into her eyes. The whole world hurt. Her teeth felt loose, aching in their sockets. Her mouth widened till she'd have sworn she felt her chin touch her naval, then it slammed shut like an angry teenager's bedroom door. She felt stretched and ripped like a cartoon, bent into unnatural shapes over two-dimensional space.
Then there was an immeasurable sense of release, emptiness, not doing much for the pain, but it was as if someone had come in with a giant grapefruit spoon and scooped out half her insides. She sank into the pillows, her body running at high idle, a marathon burn in her lungs, her dark eyes blinking at the ceiling, trying to focus. Is this euphoria? It wasn't all good, not the diner's Special Sundae piled high and sweet, but a tight ball of perception of...everything, everything that she was, every second of the world that had come through her senses since she'd come into it. Here it was. Good and bad, sharp points of strength and weakness, rumbling ugliness and fear, courage striding across her imagination, soft singing beauty, all of it bundled into one pinpoint feeling, but with the scale, the magnitude, the thunderous depth of an ocean.
She vaguely noticed Mother Jirsa moving in and out of her field of vision, cleaning her with a hot towel, working on something across the room, and singing a really old song, "...overfull glass of desolation wine."
And then Mozell pushed something into her arms, a warm, cloth-wrapped bundle that shivered and wailed.
Jacinta held her son, her body shaking weakly, feeling something like the shadow monster in Mother Jirsa's story, a soft center under the loose bits and pieces that had once been her body. Her fingers moved slowly, only half under her control, to uncover his dark red face, scrunched up, distressed, and beautiful.
"Back in a bit." Mozell threw the words over her shoulder as she whisked from the bedroom. She dug the bloodchirps from her apron, hanging on a peg in the kitchen, dropped them in the blender, and set it for puree.
She returned to Jacinta, who was grinning like a fool at her baby.
Mozell poured the bloodchirp shake into a glass, pulled one of Jacinta's hands from the child, and pushed it into her weak grip. "Drink up. Quickly!"
Jacinta looked at the dark red syrup for a second, and then tilted it into her mouth. The warm, slippery liquid never reached her throat. She upended the glass. It rushed over her tongue, heading for her esophagus. She swallowed air. The liquid wriggled sideways off her tongue, squeezed between her teeth, and went inside her, absorbed into the lining of her mouth and gums.
The bedroom door flew in and slammed against the wall, shuddering on its hinges.
Mozell turned slowly, standing in front of Jacinta. "Been expecting you, Arden Covitt."
Jacinta felt...not just alive, but...there. Really there. More there than she'd ever felt in her life. Whatever Mozell had given her, it heightened her euphoria. She felt a tinge of annoyance, as if the world had invaded her space, encroached on her personal territory. She smelled its breath. It looked over her shoulder, through her own eyes. The universe hovered, adhering like plastic wrap to her senses.
A man's dry voice came through the doorway. "Have you named him?"
Jacinta's eyes shot up. She dropped the glass, pulled her baby against her body protectively, kicked the blankets away, and scooted to the right side of the bed.
Arden Covitt walked into the room, his arms at his sides, his eyes aimed at the bundle Jacinta held. He wasn't as decayed as she'd expected, only halfway there. All the color had faded from his body and left his skin papery, almost translucent. His eyes were watery gray, almost indistinguishable from the whites. There was more rotting skull showing than hair to cover it. Pale scabs littered the floor in his wake. In her peripherals Jacinta saw Mozell shaking her head, and heard her faint tsk-ing, as if someone had left muddy tracks across her clean kitchen floor. Arden Covitt stank, like mold and an ancient forest's floor, but there was a sour edge to it, the smell of the curse that drove him.
Mozell straightened, arching her back, and bashed in the side of his head with the heavy glass blender container, knocking him to the floor. He got up again without even appearing to notice how he'd ended up there.
His head swiveled to Mozell, and he threw one hand out, flat against her face, sending her across the room and halfway into the wall.
Jacinta's eyes darted to Mother Jirsa's limp form, and then back to Arden Covitt. Her baby cried in her arms, the thin peal like a knife ricocheting around the room, unable to stab the walls, but cutting everything in between.
Arden bent, grabbed the corner of the mattress and heaved it against the wall, knocking the lamp off the dresser. He hooked one hand under the bed frame and tossed it away along with the box spring, leaving Jacinta exposed in the corner.
He moved steadily toward the baby, arms out to catch the mother if she tried to run around him, his pale eyes fixed on his mark.
He batted away Jacinta's fist. His fingers dug into the warm wrap, found the soft neck, and squeezed off its wail.
Jacinta clawed at Arden's throat, feeling the lumpy rope scars from his hanging. She pushed his head back, cried in agony and anger, and bit into his arm just below the elbow. She felt the tendons and muscle slacken under her teeth, and the dead tissue dissolved in her mouth. The rotting meat sour taste sweetened, and then drifted away, leaving nothing, just cold, like ice-cubes against her teeth.
The baby's cry hit her ears, sharp and clinging as a nettle's seedpod, and perfect as Nature intended.
Jacinta straightened her back against the join of two of the bedroom's walls, breathing hard, staring around for Mother Jirsa. Her cursed great great grandfather was gone. She didn't see Mozell either, but her eyes were blurry with tears and the room was so bright. Maybe the witch ended up beneath the thrown mattress and frame. She pushed off the wall, and her footstep jarred her senses.
"What is this?" She blinked away her tears, giving the world a really good look, and it came back more vivid than before. "Mother Jirsa?" Her ears rang with her own voice.
Jacinta's eyes snapped to the lampshade rolling into the middle of the room. Mozell stood up in the opposite corner, shaking the glass of a shattered light bulb from her dress.
A smile started on Jacinta's lips, stopped, and then contracted into a frown. "Something's wrong. I can't see you like the rest of the room."
"Name him Roman," whispered Mozell shortly, and faded into the flowery wallpaper, became colorless, and drifted through the wall.
#
Five days later, Mozell returned to her old house, walked from her garden, and met Jacinta and baby Roman on the patio. Jacinta shot to her feet, keeping one hand on the bassinette.
"You came back!"
Mozell gave her a disappointed look. "I never left, really. Took a stroll through the woods. I'll always be here, like one of Plato's particulars, something that's always becoming but never is."
"But...you're not...solid."
"Still here, though. I'm just more becoming than is right now. I need to be. I don't know if you broke Awilda's curse. I think you just stopped Arden Covitt from hunting down your boy. He might be back the next time one of your family decides to have a male child."
"I bit his arm. Something in that drink changed my sight. I see things...I didn't see before."
"I wish it had kicked in a bit sooner. I thought about giving it to you before you gave birth. Maybe some of it would have passed to the fetus, although it's not something a child should have, but old Arden gave me an idea when he asked if you'd named your baby. I don't think the curse'll work on a son named after Awilda's."
"You knew the drink would work on me?"
"A cycle for everything, right? We're related, you know. My hand-me-down puree of bloodchirps wouldn't have passed some of my soul into you otherwise."
"How?"
"I'm the daughter of Roman, the son Awilda bore from Arden. I think that makes you my great grand-niece? Maybe a remove or two?" Her lip curled down with a few seconds thought, and then she shrugged. "Who knows? We're related, and now you're one of us, a witch."
"But...do I want to..."
"Oh, yeah. You'll love it. Just take my lesson to heart, dear—or Awilda's lesson. Never be an is. Always becoming, and you'll do fine. It's all about the growth. About being a gardener, not owning them—gardeners, I mean. I'll be back on Thursday to help you start your own growth of bloodchirps. Have a pint of yours ready for germinating the seeds. Keep it at body temp. Mid-morning sound good? Ten-ish? Have some tea ready for me, too." Before Jacinta could answer, Mozell bent down to the bassinette, grinning foolishly and cooing. "And I'll bring something icky for little Roman? Shall I?"
END
I love the grandeur and possibilities offered by fantasy, science fiction, historic fiction, and romance in the 19th Century sense, for example, Hugo, Dumas, Dostoevsky.
But even when you're dropped into a world with grand struggles and possibilities, it's almost always about following--or even living with--individual characters who have lost something, have been left to fight on their own, or been reduced to seeing the world from the trenches with much of the grandness filtered out; you get to experience their internal struggles, the devastating effects of the big conflicts on the individual, on a family. Sometimes you have to grow with the characters to get into them. Sometimes you come into the story with an attachment to them, and it's that reference for what it would be like for you and me that, in many cases, makes a story worth reading.
I just read Carole McDonnell's post over on FBTO: Wars, small, great, undeclared, and recurrent, and if I take Carole's meaning of "normal life and what makes normal life tick" as what most of us know about, then the reader has something to hold on to--automatically, the reader has some sense of a stake in the game, has an easy-to-imagine connection to a character, a sense of "if this could happen to that character, then it could happen to me." The farther away a character is from any reader's own life and world, the more work an author has taken on to bring any reader into the life of that character.
I agree with Carole that sometimes it takes an act of will to keep the plot moving when it would be so much fun to discover what some of my characters are up to on any given day. Carole puts it perfectly: "wandering leisurely among the poor folk of that culture, ambling along the country folks...and not pushing the plot along." My own remedy for this is to let it happen, but let it happen outside the story, by making a character who keeps a journal or is in the process of writing a history of the culture and their ways. (And then post it all online for readers when the book launches!).
As much as I love worldbuilding on so many levels, and admire the art in many F&SF writers, the workings of the world alone are never enough. If a writer takes the reader through the day-to-day details of someone's life then it's difficult to stick with. Even if there's a connection to one of the characters, or they're family is a lot like yours, there's nothing to make readers wonder, nothing to make them pay attention, nothing to lose.
Bring the reader in right after the evil Duke has slaughtered all of their children except the girl hiding in the kitchen cupboard, then there's a story to be told.
Links:
http://fictionbeyondtheordinary.blogspot.com/
Wind Follower
Carole's post: Wars, small, great, undeclared, and recurrent
It's business. I have to keep that in mind.
An author is in the business of writing books, and if you want the world to read your books (unless you're writing for yourself and a few close friends), you need an editor, someone who is in the business of selling books--specifically, of taking your story and making it into a book that is as attractive to readers as possible. This includes everything from working with authors on suggestions for changing, cutting, adding to the manuscript, to shelf placement in bookstores.
Here's what I find new and cool and interesting to ponder: sure, I'm a newb, but I'm guessing in many cases, publishers spend more on you--the author--upfront then they send to you as an advance. I don't know what cover art and design, and typesetting/formatting costs, but I'm pretty sure in my case, the publisher has or will spend more on those than on me to get this book off the ground. And that's a good thing. The publisher commissioned a piece of art. The publisher pays salaries for in-house designers, editors, and running the business. Your book requires some of their time--maybe all of it for a while. The publisher is investing in you the author, taking a reasonable chance that your book will sell many many copies and make money, so that they can publish more books--maybe more by you.
I'm in the middle of making a pile of changes to SEABORN sent back from the terrific editor of Juno Books, Paula Guran.
It was a bit daunting at first, and I wondered what others in my position thought. What are their first reactions to their manuscript coming back red-lettered, highlighted in three different colors, and pages of notes and suggestions in blue?
This being my first time through this, I wasn't expecting so much, but I have quickly come around to the view that most authors would stumble in a world without editors (or the editor's assistants, art staff, designers, and everyone else with a hand in the publishing process).
I gave this a little thought, also nudged here and there by writer friends (I meet for lunch frequently, to write and discuss the business of writing, with Skott (Textiplication) who's just completing a YA novel).
The editor is looking out for you, the editor is a bridge between you and the business details of a publishing company, the editor is your evangelist inside and outside the publisher; you're the investment--the editor is going to work for you, the editor's going to do what has to be done to make your book successful.
I want SEABORN to be successful, which means I want everyone to read it, and someone--yes, the editor--has spent an awful lot of time with my story, exploring plotlines and characters and chapter sequence, down to individual words, in order to help me.
You know what's really crazy? Hold on to your seats. She's asking me to do some more writing. Yeah, I know, downright zany. But I'm a writer, and writers love to write, and someone telling a writer to write some more doesn't really seem like a big deal--does it?
What did I get back from my editor? I'll skip the business subtleties, and jump right to the obvious things, because it's something a zombie would love: fresh eyes, cutting, fractures, a bit of severing and splicing, grafting, and lots of red red ink.
Damn tasty, those fresh eyes. They also work well when looking at your book. Not just fresh eyes, but fresh eyes connected to an editor through inscrutable channels to a bunch of stuff in the brain that knows about selling books, what sells them, what turns readers on and off.
Cutting, yes, there will be cutting. Words will be sheered, shifted, yanked out, discarded.
Fractures. The editor will find fissures, fault lines, yawning gaps in your story that you apparently stepped right over up to this point. And you'll have to fill them.
Splicing. Take this chapter, cut it in two at this scene break, and move it up three chapters. Yup. Got splicing.
Something new. Need a new chapter here that explains this...
Red ink. Use a different color for your changes so that we know what's been changed. I'm using purple, btw.
Not a lot, right?
I'm halfway through the long list for my story, and as great as it already is, when we're done--me and my editor--it's going to really kick ass.
In conclusion, book success is about...well all that editor stuff above...and brazen self-promotion.
So, go out an pre-order SEABORN from your favorite bookshop, retailer, wherever:
Barnes & Noble
Amazon.com
Booksense (will direct you to your local shop)
Powell's
even Target.
Really, there's no excuse.
