I've been working on the "King Lorcan" book off an on since I last posted. I owe a lot of thanks for keeping up my inspiration to my friend Wendy (her blog is sarahwynde.com). We initially met as fellow fanfiction writers and have remained in touch for years since our shared fandom went dark.

Wendy offered me a read of a scene that wasn't working out at all this last week, and it helped put a crack in the dam. When people finally read this and they get to the Princess Maria, I hope they know that pretty much anything good about this character is directly due her influence, so thank you, Wendy.

The title still sucks, but the story is progressing. That's alright, titles change easily, and it's no reason to keep from moving on. I can already see that the editing is going to be a huge task, and I will need to find a medieval history major who wants to take pity on a hack writer. Oh, said person also has to appreciate my peculiar take on historical fantasy.

I keep vacillating on the subject of magic. It is unquestionable that the people of the age believed in a magic I find no more credible than the existence of dragons or yeti. It would add a distinct character to have a kind of magic, but I certainly wish to avoid diving after the trappings of high fantasy, so no fireballs.

Before Gravity and the -ly Disease

In trying to write historical fiction, however loosely it's based on actual history, is requiring some severe mental gymnastics on my part. A find myself, time and again, wondering just why the character thinks a certain way, and just how much of that is my prejudice. It helps to argue points with a friend, so thanks T___ for that.

So lets take one case in point. There's a fairly silly (to me and to skeptics in general) theological discussion about just how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but it helps to illustrate that I'm writing in a time before the concept of gravity was even formalized. To my characters, gravity doesn't exist.

Let me reiterate that:

GRAVITY DOESN'T EXIST

Put that in your head for a moment and imagine living in a world where you don't understand why objects stay on the floor, or why the clouds, which you do not know are water vapor but are instead apparently solid objects with mass, float. Why doesn't water flow up hill? You don't understand things like species and genus and phylum. Infectious disease isn't a matter of mutating pathogens that can be isolated and engineered against, but tailored curses by a distant God with a simonist between you and him. A wolf and a dog are similar not because they're from the same stock, but because God Almighty made them that way. (I often wonder if dog breeders were the first people to speculate about natural selection.) It's a mindset so alien to me that I have difficulty imagining it.

At some point does writing about pre-enlightenment man qualify for John W. Campbell's version of an alien, that being something that thinks as well as or better than a man, but isn't one? Ah, that prompted a whole thirty minutes on the intertubes reading what people have said about Campbell, which led me to an old article by Moorcock. Politics and fiction are such happy bedmates.

Also it appears I have the dreaded -ly disease. That affliction of bad fiction writers where every possible -ly adverb is and should be used, in one case four in a single paragraph in my latest draft. Ye gods and little fishes... As much as I know I shouldn't edit while creating, just wow.

This site explains it quite well if you don't understand my cryptic reference.

Now, I must quickly turn things about and rapidly edit my work so that I may more accurately bring good prose happily to light.

Or not...

A Poem and Progress

The alternate history of my King Lorcan the First continues as I'm actually in chapter 2. I'm not using Mur Lafferty's magical spreadsheet, though I should. Nonetheless I am trying to write at least 250 new words every day, and succeeding most days.

Also, as the post title suggest, a poem:


Cold and gray looms the morning sky,
A shroud of unbroken expanse,
The regard of a distant god.
The blanket weighs heavy on the heart
And saps the will of those below,
But still we scurry about our tasks
'Neath the gaze of Odin

King Lorcan the First

I've begun a new story, presently titled "King Lorcan the First". This story follows fictional characters through a fictional history that began when King Harold Godwinson won the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

It is a century-and-a-half later, and King Manchann I is the King of Ireland and Scotland. His only surviving heir is his grandson Lorcan mac Donnough, issue from second son of his third wife. When the heir and the king's new (fourth) wife take up an affair, the repercussions of their actions will shake the world.

http://www.fictionpress.com/s/3108718/1/

It's A Monday Through Friday Thing

It's a Monday through Friday thing.

She waits every day at the same place to catch a bus that remains parked down the street, within sight, obeying the almighty schedule. Cars pass by in the morning gloom, their tires a constant sussurus, their engines a constant rumbling flatulence.

By the fifth day it's routine, but the hundred and fifth a habit: walk to the assigned point on a map drawn be people who might've passed the corner once, stand in the cold, and look at the bus parked a hundred yards away, lit and warm. The cars have their own pattern, unchanged and ever changing. There are irregularities to witness amongst the patterns.

Every day the silver truck with the dent in the right front fender comes around the corner too fast, the driver is somehow perpetually surprised by this and brakes excessively. Some days an espresso from the stand up the street is in his hand, others his phone. Once he almost killed someone in a head-on collision, the portly old lady coming in from the ferry. She supposes that at forty you've probably lived a full enough life, but still.

There's the guy that rides his scooter like it's sport bike, everything so shiny he must think he's Tom Cruise or something. He's old enough to think Cruise is cool. He putters by every single morning at 7:52AM on his own personal highway to the some danger zone. She even set a borrowed watch by it once, then compared it to her phone later. It was strange; no one wears a watch anymore. Not anyone from this century anyhow.

In a strange way, though, these strangers are commonplace and familiar. The wait becomes like any other line, anywhere else. She amuses herself with a quick vine of the Seinfeld soup nazi. The solace is music. With the music on the wait blurs into choruses and stanzas, the ebb and flow of the bass, the songs on a constant rotation.

Every changing, always the same.

It's a Monday through Friday thing, after all.

Call Me Something Other Than Ishmael

So it's fairly obvious that I never finished NaNo. I'm not too concerned about it. I've discovered that unless i am absolutely obsessed with a project (to the point of willingly shutting out my friends and associates) then I am not going to achieve a massive word count in any given day. To do that I must love my project.

I guess the real problem with the Embassy, which started cute, but got melancholy too quick, was that the tone was far off, and I just couldn't get any emotional latch to any character. Now, three months later I couldn't even name any single character in the draft.

Mur Lafferty (http://murverse.com/) spoke recently on her podcast "I Should Be Writing" that she was going to use a word count goal of 200 words a day. This seems very small, especially if you're trying to bang out a novel, but it's a real easy goal to reach, it builds a work ethic, and at the end of the year even if you're only half trying you should have at least a 60,000 word/200 page book. It isn't great, but darn it, it's a book.

Maybe this is why Martin and Jordan take/took so long to release their epic (read epoch) fantasies...

Current prompt: Take a story from the Bible and set it against a sci-fi background.

Answer: Liberal theft. I'm modifying some of Barsoom (I love flying ships and the ability to still have sword fights), and throwing a fantasized version of Israel from the Book of Judges into an alien world. The story will follow a version of Jeptha from Judges 11, and be told from the POV of his chronicler, a man named Irin (which means Watcher, apparently.) So yes, there's more theft, since it's meant to "pay homage" to Melville. If you don't get it, that means "Call me Ishmael."  If you still don't get it, read Moby Dick or watch a bunch of Star Trek.

So, if you read this, wish me luck.

--ZG