over 50,000 words on Orchidelerim

As the Upstate Steampunk Extravaganza draws near and as I interact with steampunk folks more often, not to mention, that they are all writers, artists, musicians, costumers, mechanics, electrical engineers, I find myself inclined to impose goals and deadlines on myself.  As a photojournalist, editor and publisher, I had to of course always meet deadlines and hold others to them, but with my novel writing, I've had only vague notions of deadlines. And one of my goals in January was to complete at least one novel, which I did, Shaman in Exile, so a second novel would be gravy.  But with the steampunk world steaming up, especially in this area, and my fascination with all things Victorian and a recent yet growing interest in science, I'm finding it more fun and less struggle as the novel moves forward and the characters actually write the story themselves.  Some of them have thrown me off track, veering into their own realms, and so I've followed, knowing from Shaman Circus, that this is the last sprint, the more the characters dictate plot, they more they develop as characters and the better the story.  I am no longer in very much control but feel like someone taking dictation. All the easier for me - except I'm now compelled to the keyboard when I'd prefer to finish a movie, or in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning when I should be getting ready for work.  But there it is, the writing experience, the writing magic, if you will, which occurs when you least expect it like a divine gift and leads you merrily to your conclusion (often not quite so merrily in my novels).

So I'm happy to report, that while listening to the goth band ThouShaltNot, (a little bit The Cure, a little bit Peter Murphy) I've met my writing goal for this weekend despite no air conditioning and 90+ degree temps.  51,091 words now on steampunk novel, Orchidelirium, averaging 3,000 words a weekend, which is poor compared to my writing days when I didn't work full time, but good for me now, when I do need some downtime to watch movies or socialize on the weekends.  And gathering experiences and influences has always been a major part of my writing, in addition to research.
In between the research, the story is now writing itself as I enter the Zone. New characters are entering the story and the locales are so vivid I can taste, touch, smell and walk about their fascinating places.  Indeed, despite all the trials and travails I would surely love to live in this world.
I even found time to sketch some of the supporting characters, as well, Mignotte and Lazar. And I'm also reading Gypsey Teague's Victoria X, finding her different take on Victorian England to be quite informative.

The Lure of the Sea, sea glass, mystery and magic

Even as I work on art mini books and albums, thanks to Cindy coming by this weekend bringing me a ton of vintage metal items, lace, flowers and paper ephemera, I've also been writing.  Thanks to the encouragement of Brian K. Ladd and Chris, I'm now up to close to 23,000 words on Foxglove Broadsides, which has taken an oddly macabreand disturbing turn which seems to have ramped up the story.  At first I had planned it to be a pure adventure story. but it is now devolving into something a good bit darker.  I think it's due to all the research I'm doing for other projects such as Fireworks.
 I'm also, oddly enough, writing poetry again.  I've been reading a lot of Anne Shrive novels and although her style is not poetic, she writes a lot about the Isle of Shoals and the 1/4 stretch of coastline where I lived off the coast of New Hampshire.  The Weight of Water and Sea Glass are two of her books located there and in Portsmouth, NH.  The Weight of Water has a different take on the Smuttynose murders which occurred on one of the Isles of Shoals in the late 1800's.
While I lived there in my mother's 1940's cottage (little changed even in 2006) about a two minute walk from the rocky cove she loved near Boar's Head, I painted, wrote a lot of poetry as well as wrote a large chunk of Shaman in Exile. My memories of my time there are bittersweet and sometimes I fear I'll never see it again.
So, as is my way, to keep it alive, there shall be a sea glass/Isle of Shoals and Portsmouth minibook in my future.  Not your usual pretty little vacation book, but a more mysterious looking work, as the area is saturated with ghost and murder stories, shipwrecks and even pirates. I've also been immensely inspired by the artwork of Jack and Cat Curio and intend to learn some of their techniques in my larger collage pieces.
Mysterious, haunting, wildly imaginative. Perhaps I'll include bits of the new poetry in some of the new books. Who knows. This is the time of year for the macabre! I can't wait for it to get cool enough again to wear black.
Here's a great shadowbox by Jack and Cat Curio.

Graphic 45 Steampunk

Writing and art go hand in hand at my house and I often work on art as I write my novels and short stories.  For Shaman Circus and Shaman in Exile, I painted a series of paintings, for Foxglove Broadsides, I'm creating art journals for my Etsy, but also a massive one for myself.  It's Steampunk and Victorian themed and it's almost full.  I'll have to start another.  Yesterday I created a collage, which may end up being on the cover or may end up framed.  I've fallen in love with Graphic 45 Steampunk Debutane and Botanica papers and tags.  They're the most beautiful altered art papers on the market in my opinion and I hope they come out with more on a steampunk theme. They have a real feel for the Victorian and Art Noveau eras.  
On the large collages I also get to use the found objects find  every time I walk somewhere. My friends know how I stop and pick up every piece of scrap metal I see - sometimes for 3D  assemblages and sometimes for art journals and altered books.
This collage is called "Into the Aether" and relates to my character, Cecile Bainbridge, the Botanist of Deadly plants in Foxglove, who becomes a reluctant hot air balloon pilot of The Midnight Sun, a hot air balloon which only flies a night. It incorporates vintage photographs, key, clockwork parts and stamps with found metal objects.  And I always have fun embossing real copper (from a roll of copper chimney flashing found at Home Depot).

Gardens, Murder, Sea and Secrets

The skies are dark and threatening, much like the skies one often sees of the shore of  Hampton Village, New Hampshire where I was living four years ago.  The Atlantic Ocean there, a three minute walk away from my mother's tiny cottage to Rocky Beach or North Hampton Beach, is dotted with a string of islands from the brief 19 miles of NH to Maine, The Isles of Shoals, were settled in the 1600's and named by John Smith of Pocahontas fame.
From the shale and wet sand cove littered with massive rocks, you can see beyond the vigorous waves to the ragged humps of rock, reaching out like an animal stretching it's spine, as if it they would claim the space occupied by a restless sea.  The thigh high waves tug at my ankles, threaten to tumble me backwards or pull me out on rip tides. The peninsula, Great Boars Head hulks and broods to the right, inviting only because of the Victorian cottages hanging on it's cliff edges or nestled in the center. To the left of the small beach, Plaice Cove sweeps away to Rye Beach displaying the few ancient fishing shacks not washed out to sea in a nor'easter several years back.  Whalers were launched from this beach. A number of three masted schooners ran aground here, some with their masts and timbers slowly rotting over decades.
The islands incliude:  Star, Malaga, White, Appeldore and Smuttynose, the site of Blackbeard's honeymoon, the shipwreck of the Sagunto, and double murders, ... so it's not surprising that in the northeast, these names conjure stories not only of literature, art and gardens but also of  tragedy and  death.
Appledore was the home to the late Victorian poet, lighthouse keeper, gardener and botanist, Ceila Thaxter, who helped run her father's hotel where she played hostess to many literary and artistic figures of her time. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett.  Artist Childe Hassam painted many aspects of her garden and a few with her tending her plants. She found the body of her painter friend, William Morris Hunt    drowned off the coast of her island.
As the most popular female poet of the 19th century, Ceila gained respect for her poetry in a highly competitive literary realm, slightly less so for her paintings. But this New England writer attracted the most international interest with her account of the rescue of  Maren, a friend who survived the brutal attack of an axe murderer after he killed her sister and sister-in-law. Celia tells the tale of how the terrified woman was rescued aboard a tiny boat from the bloodied Smuttynose to the safety of Appledore.  Two years afterwards,  The Atlantic Monthly printed Celia's first hand accounts of the aftermath of the murders in their May 1875 issue.
But even beforehand, Ceila's poems were not the innocent, pretty pieces one would expect of a Victorian female writer who spent her entire life in New England.  Instead she is a writer of paradox from the spirited flight of sparrows to the sinking of ships, from descriptions of her riotous bank of poppies to men mouldering in dank jails.  Celia's work is dark and foreboding, observant of both the natural world and human nature in both it's beauty and dark extremes.

So to honor her, I worked in the rain in my own garden today, accompanied by a writing spider nestled in his zig-zag trap, mummy-wrapping a Japanese Beetle in shiny silk.
Despite the off-kilter lifestyle at those northern beaches, I miss the place with a longing which is never sated. This morning's downpour washes my tears into southern soil, but failed to rinse away the memories, a sad absolution, cleaning and polishing my own experiences and secrets of the strange string of events I experienced along that shoreline. Smatterings have turned up in my 2nd magical realism novel, nearly finished, Shaman in Exile; others are wrapped in poems and letters, elaborated in art journals and painted on canvas.  Perhaps the brooding atmosphere instills a macabre creative streak or breeds a nature which looks beyond the sun and pleasures often associated with the coastline, to view or write the tales of tangled human lives and nature's capricious offerings: gifts or trickery, one never knows.

Losses and Failures - character building, right?

I have the distinct feeling I'm not supposed to leave my hermitage at the moment.  The fact that I have had interrupted internet service for at least 6 to 8 weeks now, first with a really nasty virus then with problems with my internet provider who needed four days and four different technicians to fix (it was a burned out card in a box up the street from my house).  And not five minutes after my internet was fixed I went outside to drive to a dementia class for work only to find a dead Saturn Vue.  The ignition switch is gone again.  I replaced it two years ago.  Not cool.
On the high side, it's a good thing I'm in a writers group because the virus wiped out all my new writing on my second novel, Shaman in Exile, which is one chapter away from being finished and a good bit of my new writing on Foxglove Broadsides (a short story becoming a novel).  I also lost half the Shadow Archer Press catalog of books by authors from all over the world. but thankfully have them all on hard copies) and lost the entire Steampunk issue of Fissure magazine - everything: all emails, all contacts, all submissions, all pieces accepted, all artwork. I am not a happy publisher.  Luckily, thanks to bringing hard copies to writers club, I can retype everything I lost on Shaman in Exile and some I lost on Foxglove - although about three chapters are gone - just gone.
This hit me so hard (at a time when I am selling a number of Shadow Archer Press books and back issues of Fissure) that I'm veer between scrambling to recover, retype, relocate hard copies of everything I lost to abject despair which I funnel into escapism by making steampunk journals (on Tesla, absinthe, aeronauts, chrononauts, etc.) to sell at Upstate Steampunk Con and on my Etsy (Gail Gray Studios).  Not wise as far as my writing goes, but otherwise I'd be out of control. Other mechanical things broke (and even non-mechanical such as a toe) at the same time, which is the way it is with mechanical things for me.  How about all of you? Am I the only one who gets it in 3's or 6's?
So I do advise you all, especially writers and artists - make a backup copy frequently of your work!  Don't trust that you are protected.  The virus sent to me, disabled ALL of my security systems before attacking various parts of my computer and corrupting the files. 
Remember:  Back up or face heavy losses - some of which may be irreplaceable. 
But I'm trying to look at all this calamity as if I were one of the characters I write about.  These losses and failures are what we put our characters through to build their character, in the old fashioned sense of the word - to expose their vulnerabilities in order to showcase them transforming faults into strengths, right?  So I should look at this as a great opportunity for transformation, right?
Maybe the best thing to do at times like these is to step back and take a philosophical look at our role on the world stage, as if we were characters. No one likes characters who get everything they want, no one cares about characters have it made.  No, we love the characters who face insurmountable obstacles and endure a constant gauntlet of setbacks.
I'm trying...

Coming Back after the Crash

After being a month or more without my main computer, after it's crash, I'm getting back on track.  I lost the entire issue of the Steampunk Fissure issue due to be released later this year as well as all of my new writing on Shaman in Exile (I think I have most of it in hard copy, so will have to retype it.)  But so far I think that's all.  I may have lost some later bits of Foxglove Broadsides. 
So this week I plan to get back into digging around in those folders and finish Shaman in Exile so I can get into editing the second in the Shaman series.
I'm gaining more and more hours at work so that's taking up a lot of time.  There's a good bit of work I do at home even.  Setting up a new art program for a head injury and spinal cord center is a lot more work than I imagined, but it's fun and valuable and I have the bulk of the planning stages and supply gathering finished so now it's down to implementation.  So far everyone seems to be enjoying it and I go home feeling very satisfied at the end of the day knowing that amazing things can happen in the alembic of a group art studio.
I'm also taking some personal time to work on my own art journals again, as well as make some for the steampunk world.  Those are a ton of fun.  And thanks to Nick Valentino, author of Thomas Riley, for awarding me a set of goggles in his twitter contest!  Wow!  That's so incredible, especially with the timing, since I don't own a pair and was going to scout out a mechanic at the Upstate Steampunk Meetup and commission a pair.  I'm already honored to wear the crew credentials and flight patch (now on my poison bag) of the airship, Blood Countess. 

When Magical Realism becomes Too Real

I don't know about other writers who dabble in the magical realism genre, but when real world events are more bizarre than magical realism,things get a bit scary.
As  magical realism authors we create  alternative realities, even though they happen in real time and in real place.  But now, with all the global shaking going on, egged on by human failure to keep up or manage our own technology, the planet and its inhabitants are plunged into a world stage even a magical realism author could not imagine.
Warning us all  - there are some things too big to ignore.
So I have scuttled my final plot line for my second novel in the Shaman series, Shaman in Exile and am rewriting the final chapters after a long hiatus.  So much has happened in real life which impacts the characters of Shaman Circus.  Afterall, for a Haitian voudou practitioner, a Haitian hermaphrodite (who features more in the second Shaman Book) and a host of characters who are  residents of New Orleans, and remain after Katrina, I can't ignore the actual real world events, even though Shaman in Exile takes place in New England and France and not in New Orleans like in Shaman Circus.
But now with the oil spill in the Gulf, following close on the heels of the earthquakes, my main character Jacob LaGuerre, will not allow me to ignore these major catastrophes which affect his family and friends.  So I'm having to rework the final concept and have decided not to have Shaman in Exile the final book in the series.  My original concept would be trite and unbelievable in the light of these recent disasters.
Besides Jacob won't stand for me pretending they didn't happen. He has too much to do and say in regards to both Haiti and Louisiana to let me escape with a simple closure.  To him it's turning a blind eye.  And that he will not allow.
So I've been writing, and I have to say, it's a painful process even as it's great to be back in the Shaman landscape - but I had hopes of happier times for my characters after all I've put them through.
But alas, as it often happens in life, those hopes are sidestepped by unexpected events.  I had also previously planned to avoid my favorite approach to endings as a cliff hanger or ambiguous ending.  I've received both praise and critiques for my preferred modus operendi.  And this time,  I was going to cut my characters some slack and let them have a a nice tidy closure after all the chaos they've endured. 
But world events proved more powerful than my good intentions.  So now it's back to the intricate work of trying to tidy things up while also paying heed to the "realism" aspect of the genre and facing the unfortunate facts.

Art shorthand as character triggers

Eventful weekends are not only inspiring my writing, but helping me to get out of hermit mode. The Art Bomb, a group of art studios where some of the most innovative local artists work, once again had one of their rare shows in their renovated historic building in Greenville, SC.
 Often one or two of the pieces I see at Art Bomb shows will infiltrate my imagination and end up in in my writing. 
The pieces are owned or viewed by my characters. In Shaman Circus, two characters are artists.  Mavis, the Katrina survivor is a painter, and Lily is a painter  who also  creates 3-d sculptures in copper and pottery. 
 I thugged this concept from my favorite author, John Fowles, whose character, Nick in the The Magus, visits a house on the Greek island of Phraxos. The house's charismatic and mysterious owner, Conchis traveled the world and owns  large valuable art collection. However, among, all the paintings, Nick is drawn to the Bonnards.
When I first read The Magus, I was unschooled in art. I was young and foolish, and didn't bother to look up the artwork, but years later, after about my 5th or 6th read, knowing the painter and his subject matter (nude and semi nude women in the boudoir or bath) added layers to the scene. Fowles used the painting, instead of words to speak volumes for those who knew Bonnard's work.
Granted some of the pieces I mention are not internationally known yet, but I believe they will be or should be. my character's reactions to the art, is another way for me to do characterization, even character development. I call this technique art shorthand.
 Twice these have been pieces by Greg Flint, but the artists there always offer something which challenges my preconceptions about art and writing, which then filters into my characters mindset. For instance, a piece I own of Greg's and its message of the hero's journey is incorporated in Shaman in Exile. The piece and it's meanings are touchstones throughout the entire book, reflecting one of the main themes. The characters refer to it over and over again, and even carry symbols of it as a talisman. A second a piece I drooled over but which was eventually bought by someone else inspired parts of Fireworks, Interference Equation. 
I know a lot of you who are writers already use music to augment your atmospheres, what your characters listen to hum or play, but don't forget art.  Look at your favorite pieces and see what they tell you.  They may tell your characters something as well, who will turn around and tell your readers, thereby  making your writing richer, deeper, multi-layered.
I'm curious, who of you out there have used art in your writing....and how?


 

The Conundrums of releasing a novel

Many authors have said releasing a novel is like giving birth, with both pain and excitement. However, I believe it's even more, it's like giving birth, sending your child off to kindergarten and shipping your child off to college all at the same time. At the same time the novel is given birth it's cast out into the wide world, to stand alone on its own merit.

A frightening thing. I couldn't quite understand why I've been in a funk for the past few days. It felt familiar but not recently so. And then I recalled the feeling. I've had it before. It occured each time I released an issue of my goth literay mag, The Howling, It did get easier over the 7 years and 15 issues of the mag; went from a miasma of two weeks to a recognized down time for two days. For lots of different reasons: the project is finished, the soulmade project is out in the world to be judged, and the new project hasn't yet taken hold.
Since Shaman Circus went to the printers, I've fiddled with various projects and ideas, from whether to edit the second Shaman novel or to focus on my third novel, Fireworks, etc. I've written and edited a few stories, started a few more, submitted a batch but still this haunting feeling of being out of place lingers.
I may not suss out all the reasons for a while. It's not really white page syndrome or writer's block, it's more like I'm in a holding pattern, holding my breath, waiting to see what happens and until it does, not sure what next step to take or what to do. It's an eerie, disturbing psychological limbo. On one hand, inside I'm jumping up and down with joy to see my first novel published, but on the other, there's fear and a sense that what if I can't ever finalize another?
I don't know if other writers have experienced this. As the contemporary Thomas Moore recommends in his Care of the Soul series, its better to go into the dark places and see what secrets they have to tell you, than to deny they're there. Maybe this is postpartum depression and separation anxiety all at the same time. I don't know.
These days I teeter on a tightrope of words. Below me the carnival explodes in glorious color, freaks and frenzy, jangly music and garish trellises of light. The words want to run away with the carnies. I must grasp these scattering syllables with my toes or herd them to my aid, for without them I'll fall.

Perhaps to cheer myself up and not feel so isolated, I'll collect quotes from other writers on what its like to see a first novel published.

Shaman Circus edits completed!

Finished the Shaman Circus edits and emailed the clean manuscript back to Deb at Alll Things That Matter Press yesterday.
Meanwhile Shadow Archer Press is picking up with Christmas sales, so in between the holiday celebrations, garden work, the new part time job and writing, I'm constantly printing books.
As Shaman Circus moves onto the mock-up stage, I'm writing chapter 15 of Fireworks: Interference Equation but also have this thought in the back of my mind that I should finish and start the rewrite process on Shaman in Exile, while the Shaman Circus book is still in my head. It's odd. We've even discussed this at our writers' meetings, how one character will grab us and not let go.
Jacob snatched Shaman Circus away from Alex, and now Merri is threatening to do the same thing to Sean in Fireworks. A writer relates to each character differently for various reasons. So it's a juggling act to give each one the "page time" they deserve where they can say or do what they need to.
While I do write poetry by hand most times in a notebook, I write novels on my computer. I write quickly and need the advantage of a keyboard. And while I live close to downtown Greenville, I look out on trees, part of the roof of the house next door and a quaint shed from one window and from another look out on my back garden with it's azaleas, camellias, wisteria and flowers as well as my pecan and mulberry trees and an Ent. It's peaceful and always changing.
At the time I wrote Shaman Circus, I worked as a barista at Quarter Moon Cofffee and The Villge Cup, one of the best jobs I ever had. Fun, yet hectic. I was also working part time in the office for a company that served legal papers. I was also painting a good bit, oils mostly and getting involved in the local art scene when it was rapidly growing into one of the main cultural attractions of our city.
At this same time I managed the art gallery at the airport and met lots of artists and was exposed to many types of art. My life was built around work, weekly writing meetings of the Reedy River Rats Guerilla Writing Group, the occasional cooncert if one of my friends were playing, and art openings and even had a few of my own shows, one of which appears in the book. In fact, many of the events in Shaman Circus are based on my real life experiences, while other events were triggered by the headlines in the Times Picuayne after Katrina. I also followed a number of blogs about how survivors were coping.
I'm a huge fan of mythology and alchemy and was a professional astrologer for many years, so many of those influences are interwoven through the plot.
I didn't watch TV while writing Shaman Circus but did enjoy movies. Vanilla Sky, the Serpent's Kiss, Brotherhood of the Wolf were pivotal movies for me at the time. I was reading a lot on alchemy and writing a lot of poetry on the subject, reading The Magus by John Fowles, as well as the Aristos, his book on philosophy, Daniel Martin and Fowles' journals. I'm a sucker for biographies of writers and especially their journals and letters. (Rading Kerouac's and Anais Nin's journals in tandem at the moment along with the rare & wonderful little photographic supplement to aAnais' diaries that j michael niotta gave me.)
Two of the Reedy River Rats, Chris and Brian, are heavily into philosphy so they peaked my interest and for the first time in my life, I started studying philosophy, reading books they suggested, asking questions. There's a lot more philosophy in the second Shaman book, since it takes me a while ti digest all the various ways of looking at humanity, the world, our purpose for being here - all the usual questions. I tend towards the existentialists but am known to flirt with the ideas of other philosophers, as well.
I use a lot of bird omens in my writing both fiction and poetry. So they show up in Shaman Circus as well. I use astrology often, and the Morgan Grier Tarot a good bit as kick-off points for the angles I want to take on a chapter or in character development. These are tools I used for years and find they're great at opening doors to the subconscious where I beleive all our best writing comes from. Like Jung, I fell the subconscious is a storehouse of evry single thing we've ever encountered, even some we barely noticed at the time. And once we let the subconscious percolate on an idea, it will pull together things we would never think of on a conscious level, simply because we don't have time while dealing with the facts and actions we must encounter during day to day life.
That's why, when I say a "passage wrote itself" I'm speaking of when my subconscious pulled it all together while I worked in the garden, cooked, or was involved in some other project. And when I came to sit at the computer, if I was open enough, thanks to visual stimulation, i.e. art or the tarot, aural stimulation with music or even taste stimulation with savored flavors such as a glass of Muscadine wine, a very robust coffee from Leopard Forest or West End Coffee or Ancient Pleasures from Chocolate Fetish - handmade chocolates laced and dusted with cayenne pepper in the ancient Mayan tradition
Back to writing Fireworks: Interference Equation. Here's the music I'm listening to as I write: Din of Theves http://www.myspace.com/dinofthieves
and The Embalmers http://www.myspace.com/embalmers
and In a Lonely Place http://www.myspace.com/inalonelyplaceinalonelyplace.