story is

Euphoria and Depression

2012-01-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

Euphoria and depression go hand in hand as we, if we’re so inclined, pass around the circle of life.

First I had one of my euphorias. It was probably brought on by a year’s worth of stress. The last straw was being unable to force myself to have a viewpoint character doing physical violence to other characters in a story I was writing.

A fine insight you might say and I will agree with you. Another was the instant understanding of the difference between writing from the head and writing from the heart. A good story is under construction as a result.

But how does euphoria follow from that, you're wondering? I don't know. In three percent of us it does apparently. I go into a cognitive dissociative state, a trance, and my unconscious generates extreme bliss. With no help from any drugs.

But the higher I go in the euphoria, the deeper the depression afterwards takes me. And where the euphoria was a wonderful eight day event with two or three days to recover, the depression is, so far, a three week marathon and for some inexplicable reason, far more difficult to walk away from.

The Short Story Abysm

2011-12-29T20:30:00.000-08:00

Seasonal disruptions being what they are - the getting ready for parties, cooking, socialising, extra cleaning etc - I thought I'd have a try at a short story this month.

There's a strong beginning, yes.

Is there a plot? Not yet.

A narrative, yes. Premise, scenario, world building, no problem.

An interesting main character needing a bit of research to clarify his/her various genetic possibilities? In the bag.

No plot yet, but a squad of different scenes trampling the ground while they are waiting. For a plot, of course.

No plot yet, apart from an escape.

A cast of thousands, still being whittled.

No plot yet. Or rather, the only plot that auditioned, the escape, refuses to fit itself into a three thousand word story. It's crying out for a bigger vehicle.

There are a couple of levels of meaning, which is not really a short story thing as I understand it. The superficial adventuring thing and the ethical/philosophical thing. There's no bloody violence. There's no romantic love. It isn't fantasy.

There's even an end. An uplifting one though the setting is bleak. Is that possible?

I have no idea as to who would be interested in reading it. The usual problem.

Thousands of words already. Several times more than the three thousand required. Whittling them is no longer an option. The detail required for the story to make sense doesn't allow it to be cut down.

Maybe I should go and do a short story workshop or three.

20. Hezzie MacPhee: The Fungi Spell

2011-12-21T22:47:00.000-08:00

Now the wizard tried a spell. Gah gah gah. Gwum.

It’s only sounds, Hezzie said to himself. Nothing will happen. He lay down the vine on the stones and tucked the bitten-off end down in a hole between the rocks beside the stone most frequently wetted by the wizard’s eye-water.

He dug into the soil and mulch under some nearby trees, to loosen it. This was just like digging a hole to bury a bone.

Then he took several mouthfuls, one at the time, and ran to and fro the hole between the stones. He pushed each lot of dirt down into the hole to anchor the vine end and to give its new roots, when they grew, something to feed on.

The wizard’s groaning became a rumble.

It sounded like he was gearing himself up for a big effort. Hezzie hurried laying out the rest of the vine, round and round the angry man-mountain.

He dared to thread the last arm-length through the air hole in the wizard’s side. There the water-roots would find moisture in the hollows and cavities between the wizard’s stony bones.

It was necessary he hurry now for the wizardly rumble had become a hiss and the eye-water steamed when it fell past the wizard’s mouth hole.

“The spell, Hezzie, the spell,” he told himself. But he could only recall the fungi spell. It would have to do for now. He shouted it out loud, three times, in a hurry.

Fungi work between, sapping dead wood and releasing nutrients to feed the green. Fungi work between, sapping dead wood and releasing nutrients to feed the green. Fungi work between, sapping dead wood and releasing nutrients to feed the green.

He’d need more dead wood in the mix, wouldn’t he? He ran in under the trees bordering the garden and started biting down on any bit of old wood he saw, and taking it to the stone wizard’s staying place. Stuck them into the gaps between the stones.

The wizard’s waters cooled. The waterfall fell without steaming. The grumble went inside. The wizard slept.

Hezzie dropped to the ground. He panted, with his dog tongue hanging out of his mouth. The way dogs pant. He lay down. He wanted to sleep but he was afraid. What if after the night he couldn’t turn into his human self anymore?

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

2011-12-15T20:44:00.000-08:00

Atul Gawande Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance 2008 Profile Books London.

The sorting trolley at the local library can be the source of good reads without having to go to the shelves. When I’m in a hurry, must not tarry and cannot not allow myself to get sidetracked, I stick with the sorting trolley.

There will be the usual squad of noirish detective fiction. The odd sf and fantasy. Literature. And a few non fictionals. Like this one. Better: a surgeon’s notes on performance.

I opened it a quarter of the way through, my usual check, and began to read. Page 65, the chapter heading was Casualties of War. Why soldiers refused to wear their goggles and that the reason for the increasing eye injuries. I glanced back at page 64, where a section conclusion said, Ask a typical American hospital what its death and complication rates for surgery were during the last six months and it cannot tell you.

About ten pages later I realised I was hooked. I checked the book out and took it home. I began from the beginning. The introduction is not a chapter that can be skipped as it states the premise of the investigation by way of a telling example from Gawande’s own, at the time of his residency, practice.

“What does it take to be good at something in which failure is so easy, so effortless?” Gawande asks on page 3. This is when I really settled into this book for this is a resonating question in that it can be applied to almost any difficult endeavour. Convincing the naysayers of the importance of preserving biodiversity at any cost? Just one of the questions I regularly ask myself.

Though it is the examples for each of the three main topics that make the riveting reading, what area of human work wouldn’t be better with diligence, doing right and ingenuity? In relation to diligence, for example, there’s an essay on washing hands. In doing right, what doctors owe to society is investigated. Ingenuity is explored through the Bell Curve.

Yet it is the Afterword, with its Suggestions for Becoming a Positive Deviant that I want to remember. These are a set of suggestions for personal improvement that are plain and do-able, though they are aimed at doctors and surgeons at the forefront of doctoring.

1. Ask an unscripted question. Make a human connection and life immediately becomes less of a machine.

2. Don’t complain. Or in other words, don’t make yourself and other people feel bad by taking a negative view. Don’t necessarily see life through rose-coloured lenses but observe something and get a conversation going (my paraphrase, this sentence).

3. Count something. Be a scientist in your world. The only requirement is that you should count something you’re interested in. Learning something interesting that you can then talk about, giving it to your community.

4. Write something. Add a small observation about your world. Don’t underestimate its effect on your world. Everything we know, all knowledge is observations made by interested people communicating for the benefit of us all. The published word (be it book or blog) is a declaration of membership and also a willingness to contribute something meaningful. Don’t underestimate the power of the act. Writing lets you step back and think through a problem.

5. Change. Be an early adapter. (Not a late adapter, not a skeptic.) Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often you succeed and how often you fail. Write about it. Ask people what they think. See if you can keep the conversation going.

Don’t you agree that these suggestions are ways that anybody can take up and make habitual without too much pain?

Woodwork for Women

2011-12-04T21:04:00.000-08:00

For the last five weeks I’ve been learning to join wood in a class taught by Patt Gregory at her workshop in Mullumbimby, NSW. In the first series of classes I learned how to make a housing joint, a rebate joint and a butt joint.

Patt is such an inspirational teacher, that the process of work and the finished beauty of my beginner project led me to immediately sign up for a second series of classes with the mortise-and-tenon joint as the objective.

I went home and revived my once-upon-a-time want-to-make-this-one-day list and embellished it with sketches. One and a half courses in, I’m fantasizing that I’ll build the window seats and bookshelves I’m planning as part of my house renovations, myself and from scratch at that.

Along with writing, gardening, knitting and embroidery, I’ve also always done do-it-yourself stuff searching out cheap second-hand timber furniture and taking it apart and/or changing its function.

In that way I made a couch from a single bed. A sewing table from a desk. A kitchen table from a broken wreck I salvaged illegally from the local tip. Mostly these were needs-must projects. Ways of having what couldn’t be afforded otherwise.

Then came a time I was involved in planting and nurturing native Australian timber trees. I love timber and still have a three-metre (unknown species) dead tree as a life-size sculpture, its timber very finely grained, at present in storage. Learning ‘proper’ woodwork always seemed to be out of reach.

But now?

Yes I can, and yes I will make my wishful wood fantasies. Given that I can continue classes with Patt. Because I suspect that, like all things worth doing well, woodworking is a discipline and a craft with a life-long apprenticeship.

Patt’s book, Woodwork for Women: cutting a new path for beginners gives a step-by-step account of how to achieve the first project, along with tools needed and how to use them.

Aspects of wood in general and radiata pine (for the first project) in particular.

The sustainability of the timber industry, and sourcing timbers for woodworking projects.

The design, and transferring it to the raw material (ie the wood) by measuring up, and a myriad of helpful hints, clues and uplifting stories about the women, and their projects, who have gone before you.

Finally there’s the making. Set out in step-by-step fashion, up to step 20.

If you can’t get to Patt’s classes – say if you live somewhere in the world – this book is a good way into woodwork.

And check out www.woodworkforwomen.com also. It will give you everything you need to know to be able to access these uplifting classes presented by a passionate teacher in a relaxed environment.

Glitches are welcomed.

The story is that you can’t learn without them.

And anyway they can mostly be corrected or, sometimes, be incorporated in the project.

Phew.

I learnt that at least a dozen times in my first project and it still looks great don't you think?

Finished project in use

Lodestar Part III, Free Read

2011-12-01T00:44:00.000-08:00

Sard Kerr is Srese's twin brother. Where she is chosen to act in the new, habitat-wide entertainment, he is remaindered and must leave home or be moldecked.

1: Sard

Sard forked his breakfast down as fast as he could swallow it, to be out of here. Scrambled eggs it was supposed to be. Pap in different colours, most of it. As usual, Youk diagonally across the table, watched everything he did. Didn’t the guy ever have anything better work for his yellow eyes than make sure the avatars didn’t get ahead of him?

Youk said, “Shovelling it in rather, aren’t we?”

“What?” Sard said, mentally kicking himself. When would he learn not to react?

“Shovelling the food in like the farmers didn’t grow it to your taste.”

Phin, beside Youk and directly opposite Sard, smiled benignly at his henchman. Kicking Sard’s feet out of his way, he stretched his legs under the table. Phin, the bloody boss-farmer. Youk his off-sider, and Sard his yokel.

“Finished?” said Youk. “I’ve got some important news for you.”

“Really.” Sard said with the slightest possible inflection. “I’m racking my brains. What do you know that’s important for me to know too?”

“Fare thee well, oh golden avatar!” Phin said. “When will you do something about your looks? Still with the golden Greek baby curls, still with the hairless ivory chin. Do you wend to your work, oh princeling?”

He meant Sard should start down at the farm. Weeding probably. Of course all the other late-eaters remaining in the Dining Hall mingled in, laughing and commenting. “Do you join him, Youk, to be dusted by his benison?” Tye said, showing off madly in front of his girls. Youk got up.

Sard thrust back his chair, then stood in a hurry to catch it before it fell with him still in it. With the chair in his hands he could’ve been a lion tamer. As if. Anyway, neither of his bullies was anything as noble as lions. He shoved the chair hard against Phin’s outstretched legs, putting it back by the table. He didn’t say sorry because he paid every day, whatever he did or didn’t do.

Youk followed close enough behind him that he would look like he hustled Sard from the Dining Hall.

Nothing new in that.

“Youk in his favourite role! Roman master with his Greek slave,” Tye shouted after them. “No prize for guessing which is which!”

Caro laughed. “Ooh, Tye! Why not?”

The hall doors soughing shut behind Youk, cut them off from any further ribaldry, and because he had Youk breathing down his neck, Sard made for the dorm.

“Funny how the corridor walls don’t reflect your mood,” Youk said. “Surely they should’ve been flaming red on black? The AI loves strong emotions, all said and done.”

That was Youk commenting on Sard’s lack of nanobots even though he was deemed old enough to sleep in a dorm. With Youk and Phin! Two years later and he still hardly believed it.

And the bloody-power-that-be, aka Gammy the AI, thought Sard mature enough to be working with Youk and Phin as well. As their bullying went on, he was in danger of growing younger about it. What with Gammy’s message on the mini-mon this morning, he felt positively immature.

He could but reply in kind. “Funny how the corridor walls don’t reflect your mood. Shouldn’t they be colour of envy? A dirty green?”

“The stupid AI wouldn’t dare,” Youk said. “He knows I’d hack into him with no quarter given.”

“Yeah right, full of gas as always.” Sard stopped. “That’s what we’re here for? For you to tell me that Gammy isn’t reacting to me?”

“Not out here, stupido. Though after that little comment, why should I?”

“Typical. In the dorm?”

“The Pit would’ve been the better place.”

“With every man and his company working off his calories?”

Youk slung his arm over Sard’s shoulders and sidestepped him into their dorm. Dirty clothes underfoot wherever they stood. Phin refused them the use of a laundry basket.

“See what I just did?”

“What you just did?” Acting dumb was often his best defense against Youk.

“Stop that.” Youk shook him. “I was going to do you a favour.”

Sard laughed. “You hate me. I’m the golden bloody avatar, remember?”

“You’re an insufferable know-it-all clone. Just like my father. Just like Gammy. You and your sister both. A damned pair of insufferable Gammy-clones.”

“Srese would remind you we are twins, same DNA, womb tanks side by side.”

“Srese is half Yon Kerr doubled, and you’re Yon Kerr. Bloody Gammy clones.”

“What would you know?” Sard said. “Though ‘why would you know’ is probably more to the point.”

“Ferd is my father. He’s the Yon Kerr clone of his generation. I’m his natural-born son.”

“They say that about you,” Sard said. He stored the new facts in favour of keeping Youk at bay. “So what?”

“I wasn’t mixed in a test tube and decanted into a womb tank. My mother was a desert woman Yon Kerr got in for my father to romance. He won a contest to star in a cave-wide entertainment. Ring a bell, does it, that phrasing?”

Like Srese just won. Sard gulped down his worries. “What happened to his twin?”

“I was going to take you to find out. Walked through one of the holos in the Pit and into the next disused complex.” Youk forestalled Sard’s disbelief. “You didn’t know that there are more habitats than this one? Too bad, I could’ve shown you my hide. I have a standalone with all the information you would’ve been likely to want.” He shook his head. “There’s history there you wouldn’t believe. But as I said, it’s too late now.”

Youk was insufferable when he thought he had the upper hand and he always reneged on his offers.

“I’m not worried. Srese and I have an agreement,” Sard said. Whichever of them was picked for the role would hoist the other twin up beside them. After all, they were the best CAVE director producer team ever. Not that he would say anything of that to Youk. Red flag to a bull, that would’ve been.

Youk flung himself on his bed. “What are you going to do about it?”

Sard shrugged. He went round the room picking up his clothes. He wished Youk would go. “Laundry.”

“You could do some of mine.”

“You wish.”

“You know what Phin will say.”

“What will Phin say?” Phin said, coming in.

“About Sard doing just his own laundry,” Youk said.

“That isn’t right,” Phin said. He stopped Sard by gripping his arm like in a vise. “Load him up, Youk.”

He shook Sard. “And you can fold them before coming over for your chores at the farm. Missing lunch of course, as a result.”

Youk piled the rest of the clothes from the floor, their work coveralls, their glad rags, their towels on Sard’s armful. “Go at it, young fellow.” He opened the door into the corridor ready for Phin to put his foot on Sard’s butt and shove him out.

The corridor walls should’ve been incandescent. But they stayed obdurately grey as Sard hadn’t his nanobots, as Youk so kindly pointed out. The corridor’s laundromat was exactly in the middle. No one else doing theirs, very convenient for what he had in mind.

Sard seethed as he sorted clothes and stuffed them in three separate ionizing machines. He programmed Youk’s and Phin’s to cycle half a dozen times each. Folding the clothes afterwards should be a real problem. His own clothes he took out clean and creaseless. Folded them swiftly. Packed them flat in his washing bag. Walked back.

Not to the dorm. The Nest was where he seemed to spend every second night, might as well this morning too. Thank Gammy his care-mother had been allowed to keep her apartment in the Nest after Sard had been assigned his dorm. Thank Gammy that his care-mother had kept his room in her apartment. Thank you, Gammy.

He let himself in through the apartment’s street door. Not everyone need know Sard was sleeping at Ghulia’s again this week. Though the infants shouldn’t have arrived yet. After Youk’s efforts, he just didn’t want to see anyone for a bit. Especially not Srese’s ditzy care-mother, kiddy-carer Zoya. She’d probably love it that Sard didn’t get the part. He didn’t even want to see Srese. Her tears or her dramatics.

He dumped his clothes in his drawers and switched on the mini-mon above the bed. He planned to watch a movie instead of going to work.

The same words again appeared on the blue screen.

He closed his eyes. His gut churned. Words still there when he opened them the second time. He wanted to yell and scream, not fair. Srese was so young still, he’d never believed they were identical or twins. He was a boy, she was a girl. He had his yellow eyes. His name Sardonix, describing them. Hers brown, the same as everyone else’s. He wished now he’d let Youk be victorious. That he knew already what being remaindered meant.

“Oy.” Ghulia tweaked his toe.

He hadn’t even heard her come in? Sard sat up, feet over the side of the bed.

Ghulia sat beside him. “You look like you’ve got a week of work to do in three minutes.”

“Srese is it.” Sard indicated the mini-mon above the bed. “What does that mean for me?” How could he trust someone as scatty as Srese to look after his interests?

Ghulia stared up at the words and leaped onto the bed, he was amazed to see, and switched off the mini-mon. “People think no sensori-felt, no receptors. Never dreaming that the communication gear might carry signal,” Ghulia said shakily.

He stared, his mouth agape.

She hugged him hard when she noticed. “Sard-baby, this is it. The first day of your new life.”

Cheerful when obviously that wasn’t how she felt.

“How much time do you think until Phin and Youk notice you missing?”

“Probably round lunch-time if they don’t first find their clothes ruined in the ionizers.”

“And will they?”

“Probably not. They’ll be expecting me to wait on them hand and foot. Why?”

“You have no more time at their disposal. In fact, you have no more time at all for ordinary things.”

If it hadn’t been for her fear, utter and stark, Sard wouldn’t have gone along with her chivvying. Seeing her calm slip like that put the wind up him severely. He decided to coast in her wake until the facts of the matter came out and he could decide for himself.

“We need to go to the Dining Hall,” Ghulia said.

The corridor walls, still grey, fluttered with the blue shadows of vegetation. Sard started every time a bird shadow exploded from the undergrowth. “That’s how you feel?”

She talked from behind the bit of her scarf that she covered her mouth with. “Ignore it. It’s Gammy guessing.”

She led him into the Dining Hall, empty of diners, and into the kitchen-office cubby and intro’d him to that fool, Gregorius, the food hall manager, as though Sard never ate here. “You know my care-son?”

“Sard,” Greg said. “Will I put you on the roster for early breakfast?”

“There’s rosters?” Sard’s amazement wasn’t a put-on though the way Ghulia was acting perhaps it should have been. Greg made them a couple of coffees in the meantime.

“Only for the early session, mate.”

Ghulia was like, go on, this is an emergency and it was an easy matter to commit to when he’d always preferred early breakfast. “Yeah sure, put me down for a couple of weeks.”

Ghulia took their coffees to a table. Everyone else was, presumably, at work. He could’ve been feeling good about that, if it hadn’t been for the overtones. She sat down opposite him and behaved in a manner that opened his eyes to every sensor within their range – alongside every light-fitting and behind air-filter screen.

Because of them, she explained without a word, she wouldn’t be saying anything about the emergency in here. She allowed Sard about two minutes to gulp down what was a hot drink and drank hers as though it had no flavour and no heat. Like it was water straight from the moldeckery.

Sard lost the rest of his sure self confidence. He followed her out into the corridors. “Where are we going?”

She shrugged and waggled her head.

Oh yeah. Gamester all ears.

They’d exited in the lane alongside the Dining Hall, walked along it to First Circle. Left in the Circle, crossed Neilson Street. Into the lane alongside the silk weaving workshop. Its back entrance in the corridor parallel to First and Second Circle.

As they entered the silk weavery, Ghulia grabbed the doorbell with a practised move, obviously to prevent it jangling. She pulled him down onto his hands and knees with her and they joined a woman who sat beneath the loom. Her task apparently to tie off the beginnings and ends of silk cocoons as they were unwound and their filaments were woven into the new fabric.

Ghulia mouthed, “Mab, this is my care-son.”

“One of the avatars, Ghulia.”

Mab likewise spoke voicelessly. Sard was like audiencing a ball game, his eyes following the action.

“Not chosen for the game.”

“Plan B, huh?”

Ghulia nodded.

With a toss of her head, Mab indicated that someone, whose name Sard wasn’t able to read from her lips, was still up there. Wherever that was. She waved Ghulia and Sard out from under the loom.

Ghulia bent and felt for something under a heap of silk bits in a basket by a curtained doorway in the back of the room. “Go on through,” she said.

When she joined him she had a torch for both of them. On caps to wear on their heads. A passage? He was amazed. How was it that though he and Srese had investigated every corner of the habitat in their single digit years, Ghulia and he now stumbled along a passage Sard hadn’t even known existed? He nodded his head to swing his torch beam up across and down, The walls and ceiling weren’t newly carved. Nor painted. The floor was ordinary ash-dark polished-with-use stone kreet.

“Mind the ceiling.”

She led, at a good pace, up a set of steps carved into the rock. The ceiling was low for a couple of paces until they went down another set of steps. Why not a straight tunnel for pity’s sake. After the third similar situation he could feel his ire building. “Where are we going?”

“The sooner we get there, the sooner you’ll know.”

Fine. He’d wait some more, though the time when he’d burst from lack of info was fast approaching. About all he was sure of was that they’d entered the tunnel in the silk weaver in the Neilson-and-Everard Quarter. The way the passage slung about, twisting and turning, they could be going anywhere. There was that trick of counting stairs up and down and cancelling them out against each other. Except that he’d lost count after the third set. “Ouch.” He forgot to duck.

Finally Ghulia stopped. But only to enter a foyer. The two sets-of-doors-setup made it like the foyer in the Nest, that he and Srese called ‘the airlock’ and where they used to play their spaceship games.

He wasn’t attending when he should have been, he thought as he nearly fell into the room beyond. It was so large and light and round he felt overwhelmed. Managing not to fall was the main thing for a couple of seconds.

By the time he collected himself, Ghulia had abandoned him and was stepping out a pattern with an old joker already in the middle of the room. The person they’d probably come to see. The man’s hair colour was certainly something to see.

Grey hair and wrinkles Sard only ever came across in videomentaries and then only because he searched beyond the common tripe. Most people he knew would prefer to be moldecked than grow old. Though maybe, seeing his mother so earnestly mirroring the old fellow’s moves, he was wrong.

The grey head continued to step and turn and gesture, completely unselfconsciously. Sard’s hands grew hot from embarrassment about the weirdness of someone ignoring bystanders. Personally, during a public performance, he had to have everyone involved in the action of the moment. And he always made sure that at curtain-up, he’d be behind the scenes. Not that ‘curtain up’ was what they did in the CAVEs.

Finally the oldster made a namaste-type ending to his routine. After a minute on hold he turned and approached Sard. Ghulia continued on hold. She wouldn’t be any help at all.

A vast bright light sprang into being at the top of the rock rim.

The old man said, “It’s the sun. Too hot in here, when that gets going. I’m known as Rider.”

Sard didn’t nod but shook the fellow’s proffered hand for politeness.

“Have a seat,” Rider said, gesturing and expecting Sard to cross-leg down. The floor was polished stone. No rugs. Sard stayed standing. Damned if he was going even further out of his comfort zone. He refused to meet the fellow’s gaze but could feel the man studying him.

Plenty to look at. More amazing was what he would guess to be, a per-glass dome perched on rickety pylons of stones stacked one on the other to the height, he guessed, of an adult man. Nowhere did the dome rim touch the walls so that in the gaps between the pylons cave air blended freely with the outdoors. Or what it looked like. Or it could be holos.

“Originally the dome sat on that rim of rocks,” the oldster said.

The sun picked out an edge far above the dome.

“Lucky for us the glass didn’t break when it slid down, though of course it needed serious stabilizing.”

The floor and walls behind the pylons holding up the roof, were of polished stone-kreet, with three dark entrances including the one Sard and Ghulia had come through.

“When it rains it is all hands to the deck, bailing.”

Above the dome hung a circular piece of sky, brown-tinged by the aged UV barrier in the glass.

“The dome dislodging from its original mounting caused this hall to be abandoned. One of Gamester’s engineers’ mistakes. Serendipitous for us.”

Ghulia finally came to grace the meeting with her presence. “Master, this is my care-son. Superfluous to Gamester’s needs.”

“Mmm.”

Ghulia nodded, something she was doing a lot around these people.

Sard interrupted the flow of meditational discourse, whatever they thought they were doing. “I don’t need plan B. Srese will get me into plan A with her. The way we’ve been planning since we discovered the possibility.”

Rider looked at Ghulia. “He doesn’t know?”

“I brought him as soon as I was sure.”

“Yet it’s his life. He needs the knowledge. I think Plan B Scene 2, Ghulia,” the man said. “You know what to do?”

“Yes.”

His mother seemed to come to some conclusion. “I thought you just agreed to no more decisions without my input?” he said.

Amazingly, she laughed. “Rider, you know him better than I do.”

“I was him once. Still am sometimes, though I try to keep those moments private.”

Whatever that all meant. Sard’s ears burned. He decided to go to the library next, to read the Name Book. He bet there was no Rider in it.

At the end of the tunnel Ghulia said, “I want to show you a couple of things before you are too old to enjoy them. You take Two Forty and Second Circle, not letting anybody see you. Hide in the overhang of Crystal Cave. I’ll be there in half an hour.

Sard frowned.

“Indulge me, boy. You owe me for that performance.” She took him by the ears and smacked a wet kiss on his chin. Tears in her eyes again. What could he do but what she asked?

19. Hezzie Finds That a Vine May Do.

2011-11-21T00:06:00.000-08:00

Hezzie danced out of the way and led towards the pile of Wollumbin stones. They’d been piled in a low loose heap, about three high in the middle.

The wizard followed him, feinting at Hezzie whenever Hezzie’s attention flagged.

Hezzie leaped over the heap and turned to face the wizard. He danced from side to side on the far edge. The plan would only work if the wizard didn’t make a byway around the heap.

The wizard ploughed forward. Probably it seemed too much work to go around. The stones crunched and knapped under his weight.

Hezzie scooped up one of the cobbles in his muzzle and ran around to the wizard’s back. Ran up onto the heap and dropped the stone near to the wizard’s heels. Wedged it in among the rest with a quick press down of his nose. He ran to the edge and did it all again. Quickly. Quickly.

The wizard tried to turn. Yet because Hezzie stayed close, he didn’t lift his feet to try and follow him.

The wizard turned from his waist. Tried to swipe Hezzie with his great slow-motion arms.

Every stone that rolled away, Hezzie grabbed and wedged back, close in, left and right and behind the wizard’s flailing arms.

Every time the wizard moved, a gap formed somewhere between himself and the stones.

As quick as he could Hezzie would fill the gap. Wherever the man-mountain leaned, Hezzie would run to the opposite side and fill the gap between the wizard’s legs and the stones, with soil and mulch.

Hezzie tired from the running. Picking up the dry-as-bone stones in his mouth made him thirsty. Where were Midge and Marge?

The wizard groaned and Hezzie jumped. Hezzie ran round the wizard twice. No movement in the rocks. He put his front paws on the rocks and peered closely at the wizard’s face. Was there still an uncle in there who could still think?

The wizard laughed and shook his head. Water from his eye sprayed far and wide.

Hezzie jumped back.

The wizard roared. “Gnaaah! I’ll get you before you get me.”

Hezzie couldn’t wait for anyone anymore. He had to fix the wizard in place now. He ran nervously among the trees. What growing thing could he use?

The trees by the creek were burdened with vines. Would a vine do? Hezzie wondered. If it was a water-seeking vine, as these seemed to be? Standing on his hind legs and resting his forepaws on the tree trunk he could just reach a cobble of the vine’s ropy branches.

With his muzzle pushing this way and that, he untangled a length, making sure he didn’t break any of its side roots – he knew exactly where to put those – questing for water in nearby tree-hollows. One end was a growing tip. The other needed biting through sharply. There. Done.

The wizard roared. “You will not!” His words were indistinct. He was losing the ability to make words.

Hezzie approached with the water-vine loosely coiled and held gently between his jaws.

About The Hezzie MacPhee Story

2011-11-17T00:28:00.000-08:00

It continues.

The following are observations of what I might do differently next time I blog a story. It's a live and learn situation. Some of you may know this is my second attempt. The first failed after about ten instalments - real life had to take precedence for a while - and I took that plot offline. This one is more successful in that I've kept it going for 18 instalments, so far.

And the end is in sight though every time I sit down intending to write the last instalment, it slips through my fingers and on we go. The plan I wrote might've been a bit scant. Another thing to learn from.

I've stopped worrying about the quality of writing for now. Me blogging a story is never going to be as well written as me writing the whole thing before putting it online. What I may do when I have pinned down the end, is edit and rewrite the story as a whole offline, and then publish the rewritten story as a free read.

And you'll have noted if you are still reading it that illustrations have decreased. I still have plenty of photos that can be worked over, but haven't had the time, or expertise to do this myself (yet). Another thing that next time I should organise before I start.

Doing this on my lonesome makes me wonder how it would be to do some kind of communal story writing and illustrating. Do any of you reading this do anything like that? It might be the next thing I research.

18. The Wizard's Walking-Backward-in-Time Spell

2011-11-12T23:37:00.000-08:00

The wizard seemed to recoil and become ball-shaped. He rolled diagonally down the hill and became stuck behind a tree. He roared his frustration as he unrolled and re-aimed himself.

Marge stopped the fly-car at the bottom of the hill and lowered it almost to ground level so that Hezzie could jump in.

Even those ten seconds were almost the end of them because the wizard arrived much sooner than they had expected.

“We need to confuse him, don’t we?” Marge said. She began a long slow circling around the hill.

Along Azalea Street. Turn right into Left Bank Road where they crossed the wizard’s track carved through the grass verge and up the vacant block.

Hezzie barked. “Stop! Wait! Look at the track on the hill. It’s disappearing.”

Marge steered the fly-car in a tight buzzing circle above the track so that they could all study the magic.

"He’s invisible,” Midge barked. “Look at the way the ground sags where he’s putting his great feet.”

“He’s doing a Walking-backward-in-time spell,” Marge said thoughtfully. “That means he’ll be going back to the Garden of Circles. Good.” She craned her head back to stare at Hezzie. “It’s always good to finish what you start.” She handed him the Hezzie-bag.

Hezzie gulped. “He needs a Staying-Put spell put on him. I do know one but I’ll need a strangling fig tree seedling to keep it going for a hundred years.

“That sounds good, Hezzie,” said Marge. “You get ready for it while Midge and I fetch that fig seedling. There is a tree nursery not far from here.”

The fly-car sheered away without further ado, leaving Hezzie to figure out his next move. He dropped the bag behind a bush. He couldn’t worry about turning himself back into his human shape right now because the problem with that was the Stay-Put spell wasn’t quick magic.

He’d need to force the wizard to stop in one place long enough for the magic to take hold. He thought over the Garden of Circles. There was that pile of stones near to the new garden bed. He jogged to where the wizard approached the Dryad grove, the beginning of the track.

Thump. He threw himself at the unsuspecting wizard’s side and jumped back just as quickly.

The wizard stopped. He turned his head from side to side, to try to see what hit him.

Hezzie stepped into his Uncle’s line of sight.

The wizard shuddered so hard that the water springing from his eye fell splattering in wide streamers to the ground. He turned himself from his path and by degrees became visible. His stone shuddered. He aimed himself for Hezzie.

About Blogging

2011-11-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

What I've learned over 2011 (so far) about blogging. I write three blogs of varying success, due I believe to the level of popular versus specialist interest in their topics.

Strange Nasturtium Leaves

Despite the fact I began it over eight months after this blog, http://mullumyard.blogspot.com, my blog about biodiversity in my backyard, interest in it has by-passed interest in this one with leaps and bounds.

Although I began the blog to interest local gardeners and build up a community interest in the biodiversity of life we all have access to in this region, that we can all help to maintain in the face of the big changes coming, it has been of more interest by readers world-wide. Its hit count is approx 1225 from 102 posts.

Mullum Yard's format is simple. I always have a photo of something happening in the one or two days of the time, accompanied by a little story of about 500 words. For the titles I'm often able to dip into the large public domain of 'sticky' words, where sticky means current ideas that are in the news somewhere. I'm sure this helps with getting noticed by search engines.

Troop of Campanella tristus on twig

http://calderafungi.blogspot.com is still a new kid of the block as far as blogs go with 12 posts and 197 visits. My macro fungi fruiting bodies obsession has only been going for about eight months in total, and I certainly didn't think of starting the blog straightaway.

An interest in macro fungi seems to me to be fairly specialised. I'm basing that on how much/little I can find about fungi and what sort of things are written recorded filmed researched, and the language, formal/casual for writing about fungi. It will be interesting to see what i can do to enlarge the readership.

My third, or rather first blog is this one. With 959 of your visits to 116 of my posts, it has been an interesting if meandering ride. With me being able to trace my own diligence in posting, by the numbers of your visits. I thank you, dear readers, for returning after my frequent periods writing offline. You may be interested to learn that I now have a novel, Tardi Mack is Monster-Moored with its beta readers.

Life has a habit of taking time, as I said yesterday, and time can only be used once. Right now for example, it is 7:52 pm here, and really, I should be making my dinner. Let me just ask why The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is the most popular posting so far?

The Best Laid Plans ...

2011-11-08T23:53:00.001-08:00

The best laid plans are always the ones that get skittled. In this case me sitting down and writing this blog. It'll have to be tomorrow sometime now.

17. Marge to the Rescue

2011-10-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

Hezzie wandered along the road. Sniffed all along the left-side kerb, and the grassed shoulder. A thousand smells jumped up his nose that he didn’t know how to interpret. Where had Midge gone?

Here! Midge’s scent! The places where her paws hit the ground. She’d been running. One two! In the direction of Tosca Lane.

How could she have disappeared like that?

Her track was overlaid with – Hezzie-dog breathed in the smell deeply – with the smell of something electrical and oily at the same time. Could it be that Midge had got a lift?

Gra-aa-aa-ah!

Hezzie jumped! Forward and away from the thing at his back. He rolled and twisted to his feet.

The movement of air from a stone fist swiping at him was all that hit him. The fist itself missed him by centimeters.

The water-air-and-stone wizard lumbered forward under a dreadful momentum. A track of ploughed dirt carved back through the green grass of the road shoulder, following Hezzie’s own tracks.

Hezzie danced out of the way like a boxer, thinking as fast as lightning. He’d have to lead the wizard away from, rather than to Tosca Lane. How he was going to not leave a trail he had no idea. He sprang to the right through a vacant building lot that led steeply to the top of the hill. The town’s water reservoir sat on top.

The concrete kerb pulverized with many small explosions as the wizard slid his feet over it. He took to the hill on his hands and knees following Hezzie inexorably.

Hezzie raced ahead.

A wide red-mud track formed behind the wizard as he crawled straight up the hill. Old basalt stones broke under his impact or were driven into the ground.

Peep! Peep!

No duck or bird in sight. Hezzie ran around the huge old water tank. He stopped again at the edge where the wizard labored up the side of the hill. He was near enough that Hezzie could see the baleful glint of his eyes hidden among the rockery of his face.

Peep Peep! Woof! Woof! “Hez, we’re above you!”

Hezzie ran away from the wizard then looked up. A fly-car idled above him with Midge leaning from the open rear window and barking.

The car swayed towards the ground beside him. The driver, a silver-grey-haired lady, moderated the accelerator expertly and the air-car settled to the ground.

Hezzie leapt up onto the wing, and resting his paws onto the window’s edge, kissed noses with Midge.

“This is Marge, Hezzie. Friend of Granny Tosca,” Midge introduced them.

Marge said, “Be quiet, dogs. I can’t stand the noise.” She searched beside her. “If you’re Hezzie then I’ve got something for you.”

The wizard topped the hill and ran in slow motion for the fly-car only a half dozen wizardly paces from the edge. Moss fell from him in large chunks, displaced by the fiercely frowning stony face.

Midge squealed. “Hurry, angry wizard on his way.”

Four paces.

Marge accelerated the engine. The fly-car vibrated under Hezzie’s feet.

Three paces.

The wizard’s eyes were large and anger-engorged. Water sprayed from the eye that had turned into a spring. The brown eye leaked peat-water.

Two paces.

Hezzie tried to jump through the open rear window of the two-door, but too late, the fly-car lifted from the ground. He hooked his doggy elbows over the window edge and hung uncomfortably, his rear paws skittering on the wing to keep hold. What he wouldn’t have given to have his human hands right now!

One pace! The wizard stretched his heavy stone arm for Hezzie.

Marge eased the fly-car down the hill above the grassy road.

The wizard’s limbs sprang from his torn clothes flagging round him in rags as he jumped with his outstretched arms for the lower rim of the fly-car’s base.

Missed!

The wizard roared out his frustration. Gra-aa-aa-ah!

The Use of a Verb Book

2011-10-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

An off-line commentator queried my need for a verb book. Dictionaries and the thesaurus would surely be enough, he said.

I thought that too when I began to want to write in the active personal voice.

This is more difficult than you think for a person trained in the story telling tradition. Where you get things like this, '... and then this happened and then that happened ...'

Writing funding applications for various institutions isn't the appropriate training either. Here the format tends to be something like this, '... The educational, scientific and cultural arguments and resources for this project are contained in the following ...'

Added to which fiction writing has become more visual in the last fifty years or so, influenced by the rise of film. There's the "Show, don't tell." exhortation. The way to do this, is to describe particularities and specifics.

And more recently, the increasing fashion to write in first person point of view or third person limited, being that character and feeling along with that character.

Hence the need to train myself to use better, more specific verbs. In effect, keeping verbs and what they can do for a story in the fore front of my mind. Though my verb book is indexed, and that suggests a dictionary, I'll be reading it over every so often to get the words and their uses floating about in that wonderful stream of my consciousness that produces the writing.

One thing I'm already finding is that the verbs themselves may be quite ordinary. Like 'pinch', for instance. It's the way they are used that makes them interesting. '... she pinches the lapels of her suit together ...' (Sea Glass by Anita Shreve.) The way words are used in combination with other words is what makes them interesting.

The Hold up on Hezzie MacPhee

2011-10-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

While I was weeding in my garden and tucking bunches of weeds into the new compost heap made of grass clippings, I realised one of the reasons for the hold up on Hezzie MacPhee is that I didn't know how to get the wizard to and through the next stage of his transformation.

Because not knowing what he would look like after the fourth spell, ie not being able to visualise him, I couldn't yet write back from that image to the place where he is transformed by Hezzie's next spell.

It's an interesting and frustrating fact that as soon as you put some rules into place in a story, their logical permutations are what drive you/I/the writer into the proverbial corner.

In the case of Hezzie MacPhee I did that to myself with Hezzie's spells and the (dis) order in which I used them. Writing myself out of the corner is now my task.

This image was a photo, I seem to remember of a bunch of azolla fern roots amid bubbles of air in water, asking for transformation (with the help of the Preview Program) that I am using to help me imagine the 80%-ed wizard.

That action, of tucking something into the skirts of the pile of grass clippings, will probably also figure in the next transformation scene.

Starting a Verb Book, Finally

2011-10-13T01:11:00.000-07:00

My book club is reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet this month.

This is a complex novel that begs for at least two readings. But while the story has a wonderfully exciting and complex plot, I was held up constantly in my first reading by the unusual mode of expression.

It is written largely in the present tense, with the actions of the weather and aspects of the natural world given as much importance, with active verbs, as people. eg, The incandescent sun is caged ...; the fire snaps .... leading to a vanGogh-type of scenario with every aspect in the picture as important as every other.

My second reading was much more enjoyable as I had the story, I didn't need to rush, and could enjoy the language at my leisure.

The use of active present tense verbs is so continuous and leads to such intensity of particularization of experience I finally did look for and find an indexed notebook to start noting down some of the examples most resonant to me. I've been promising myself for a while to start this practice, and have never been so inspired as I was with this novel.

It seems necessary to know more verbs, now that adverbs, -ly words, and adjectives are on the black list. Though I like creating new words, to re-introduce words gone out of use, and to use words from other languages, I had the feeling my writing was missing out by not having more verbs in my treasure bag of words.

What is your writing tool of the moment?

Writing the 'Bible'

2011-10-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

Now that I have finished Monster-Moored, a science fantasy, and am planning to write more instalments I need to have on hand for leafing through and checking details:

1) all my technological inventions,
2) all the mentions of the evidence of the existence of the Moogerah Monster in the action of the novel,
3) all the Monster's interventions in the mind of the main character,
4) the instances it uses incidents from his host's memory, and how it changes them.
5) Tardi Mack as the main character's appearance, mannerisms, attributes, speech markers and how he changes over the time of the action
6) The same for his little brother. Steve is the character that through his IT skills is able to get hold of some of the information needed.

Although I'm also doing a list for one of the women, Del but it is mainly to keep her part of the story straight. Tardi is trying to break up with Rowan, his girlfriend, who will not cope with the changes. Del offers herself but we will see.

Also a list of the physical attributes of the scene where this part of the story is taking place -- which is Byron Bay and its hinterland, in 2160 AD +/- . In this story, sea levels have risen, and the map looks rather different than the present day scenario.

I'm amazed at how easy it is, copying and pasting from the main document onto the appropriate open page. All the necessary pages are open and it is a simple click on the start-up bar running along the bottom of the screen, in Word 2007, to bring the appropriate one to the front. At the rate I'm going I should be finished inside a week.

Then it will be time to get back to Hezzie, poor dog, leaving him wandering around so long.

Living in the Moment by Knitting

2011-10-10T02:50:00.000-07:00

Knitting a complex pattern is a great way of living in the moment. No way can you let your eyes stray from the pattern without dropping a stitch or forgetting to loop the yarn over the needle.

This is an image of a small part of my present knitting project, a rug made of scraps left over from my mother's industry. She knits striped socks, about six hundred pairs a year.

I love setting myself limits and working out the greatest possible variations within those parameters. In this rug I'm inventing ways to knit holes. Very like writing, you'll be saying and I agree with you.

However, I can't write every minute of the day and knitting allows itself to be picked up to fill the odd ten minutes here and there, or on the other hand a relaxing hour in the evening.

During my usual writing times in the last few days I have been working on the 'bible' that I will need to write the rest of the Tardi Mack series. He who is the hero of the novel I have just finished.

The first novel I ever wrote I was able to hold all the detail in my head. With this most recent one I was forever having to go back to page 103, or whatever, to find whether I'd said such and such. This gets especially bad after a few drafts because you/I just can't remember which details have been added or subtracted.

Therefore, I need a compendium, called a 'bible' in the writing trade, of all the important detail. Constructing the bible after the completion of the project is another quite a good way of proof-reading. I have already found two different names for one city.

Work-in-Progress is Finished

2011-09-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

Finally, I can relax into writing again. Catch up my blogs, my housework, my gardening, life in general.

Though I still need to write a synopsis, pay the fee and send it on its way.

But yesterday I called the main work finished at 350 pages and approximately 94 thousand words. That is not to say it is now cast in concrete. I'll need to send it out to be read. And edited after that.

Pheeouw! She whistles in amazement at her staying power so far. Will she stay the course through parts II and III, is the next question.

When the Action is Offline

2011-09-19T04:04:00.000-07:00

When the nitty gritty of writing is happening mainly off-line, there isn't much time for online. As there hasn't been for about a month now because I'm doing a final draft to prepare a manuscript for submission. Not Lodestar yet.

I aimed for 5 thousand words a day. But now, when I'm approaching the end, with four or five chapters to go of bits and pieces of rewriting, a line edit, a new scene here and there to clarify the hero's journey, my back is beginning to play up.

Which means less writing, it taking longer, less time in front of computer for anything. Less sitting. Very frustrating.

16. Hezzie-dog Wonders What to Do

2011-09-11T22:16:00.000-07:00

He could go home, he was on the right road. No more flying as light as air for his Uncle MacPhee. The effects of the stone spell should slow him, and dramatically.

Then Hezzie remembered Herriot, who was possibly the ghost dog. If he went home he should look for Herriot. He didn’t want to find Herriot’s real life bones strewn through the bush behind the house.

Or he could hide and watch his Uncle for his next move. A wizard thrice bested was not a safe wizard to turn your back on.

Hezzie dithered between his choices. Finally he went back to the edge of the dryad grove.

His uncle sat like a dark hillock in the midst of the trees. The water falling down him from his eye was continually lifted away from the stone cliff of his chest, and sprayed over him by the tiny breeze whistling through a gap between his ribs.

He resembled a miniature mountain, such as royal gardeners once constructed for young Japanese princes to wage wars between their tin samurai.

Hezzie circled the wizard outside the grove, using his most silent tread.

Front on, he could see the wizard’s expression and it wasn’t even so intimidating. Probably, Hezzie thought it through, because the wizard’s human face was so disrupted.

The formerly pale skin was as brown as the rhyolite cliffs backing the valley. The outer rock faces ran with the waters of the spring. His uncle’s dark cloak was rent and torn, the bits of it curtained the clefts and cloven places.

The wizard’s formerly pale blue eyes were so thickly lined with moss that they seemed to reflect the day rather than having a colour of their own. But, and, Hezzie discovered, their gaze followed him every place he stopped round the grove.

The wizard watched him and Hezzie felt his blood freeze in his veins.

Hezzie stepped abruptly away. He almost ran to the gates. Through the wheel. Onto the road.

He’d forgotten he was still a dog. Off the road and back into the undergrowth beside the road. The only thing to do, he realized, was to follow Midge to Tosca Lane. Would her scent still mark the way? Would he be able to follow it?

15. The Sixty Percent Spell

2011-09-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

The Garden of Circles was fenced with a tall hedge. Hezzie made for the gate, which was also circular, a great wheel left over from the Steam Age, sunk a third of its circumference into the earth. All road transport apart from wheelbarrows did not enter this garden for the spokes of the giant wheel prevented it.

Even aircars tended to park outside for the owners had magnetized the gateway and did not always remember to turn off this function when they expected to receive visitors. A horse could narrowly enter between the spokes, with its head dipped.

A human might need to drag any baskets and deliveries behind, the reason the wheelbarrows were always available at the gate. Though dogs and humans might feel a bit of zithering along the bones, which might or might not be a delusional reaction to the magnetic influence, Hezzie entered without any trouble at all.

The gardeners weren’t at home. Hezzie slipped from the cover of the circular gate to a circle of standing stones into a circular garden bed where he slunk low to blend into the lavender.

With his belly to the ground among the woody stems, he conned the landscape. Lawns and garden beds lay silent. Finally he slipped as silent as a shadow into a grove of girlish paper-bark trees. He felt particularly at home among these stems because he’d come to this garden with his mother when she set her spells here and there.

At the request of the gardeners, she’d set a mytho spell on the trees to keep them as eternally young as dryads. Hezzie hoped that the magic still worked despite that his mother mightn’t be around any more. That the dryads would keep him safe while he dreamed the next spell.

In the middle of their circle he turned three times, as any dog would, shaping the tree litter into the semblance of a nest, and curled up on the ground, his nose to his tail. Man, he was tired.

He shocked awake after only a couple of minutes of shut-eyes. It was day, he thought, yet his open-eyed stare extracted only a night like dark. Then, he heard a pattering of drops on the dryad foliage and his nose. Rain?

He licked up a drop, salt, and rolled over. Startled. His four paws up and his belly exposed was the only way he could get a good look up. The wizard lay on the twiggy canopy, his waterfalls raining down on Hezzie.

“You look stuck,” Hezzie said.

The wizard stared down balefully.

A dark weave of cloth showed through his gaps. That was making the dark cloud above Hezzie. Hezzie laughed. “I get it. You’re wearing a new cloak. Won’t help you.” He was suddenly full of cheer. Lying on the fine white sand jogged his favourite, because of dinosaurs, spell from his unconscious memory.

He scraped sand up with his doggy paws, and rising as tall on his haunches as he could, flung the grains up towards the wizard while shouting the stone spell. Three times, as always.

Stone and rock take in all what’s died and are squeezed and shaped and shifted, folded and worn by time and tide. Stone and rock take in all what’s died and are squeezed and shaped and shifted, folded, and worn by time and tide. Stone and rock take in all what’s died and are squeezed and shaped and shifted, folded, and worn by time and tide.

The wizard stiffened and seemed also to gain weight. He drooped down feet first – with great good luck that he no doubt did not appreciate at that moment slipping between the dryad branches and not with them spiking through his air-holes. Or perhaps it was the dryads’ reluctance to keep him, that kept him safe, not mere luck.

Hezzie crept from between their stems, stroking his flanks along as many as he could reach as the wizard came down groaning and trying to stretch his new stiffness from his muscles. He had no time for his nephew and Hezzie withdrew and left the Garden of Circles, safe until the wizard adjusted to this new malady.

14. The Ghost Dog

2011-08-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

At last I am back on track with Hezzie MacPhee. With the written part of the story, anyway. The illustrations are lagging behind due to a dearth of time to learn new software.

Hezzie loped through the shrubs beside the road. Midge was way ahead. He was letting himself be distracted by every little thing along the way. Wondrous smells. Another dog’s bone, half buried. Crossing a bandicoot’s track. Stop behaving like a pup, he told himself. He should be looking smelling listening for the wizard.

Woof woof.

That was Midge telling him the way and that’s all. She sounded like she was in the southeast, to the front and left, but a long way off. But never mind because he knew a good place to cross the creek in a garden sloping down to it, nearby.

Wait, he told himself, but don’t stop. He felt or heard someone running alongside him, shadowing him. Its paws – were they paws striking the ground? A slight thump after his feet struck the dirt. It smelled of dog. Or was that his own smell?

Could it be the wizard? Would his uncle lower himself to a dog’s shape? He tried to imagine the forty-percented wizard as a dog. Then he almost choked, trying to stop laughing. Coughed but kept running.

Hezzie felt his eyes just about bulge out of their sockets when the animal following him drew level and smiled with three grooves on each side of his mouth. Exactly like Herriot’s old man smile.

Ma said it was from Herriot taking up the trumpet at such a young age, giving him balloon cheeks to pleat up when he smiled. “Don’t get me wrong,” she always said. Your smiles are a gift and I love your playing.”

The dog beside him had Herriot’s coal black eyes in his crinkled face. Hezzie had a lot of questions. He wanted them to stop and talk. He wanted Herriot’s smiles while he asked them.

But the Herriot-dog drew ahead. Now he stretched himself to run faster the same way that Herriot always strove to win.

A jagged ball of red fire streaked through the foliage. The Herriot dog was there. He opened his mouth and leapt for the fireball. Gulped it down.

For a second his bones were black outlined by red fire under his skin and poof! Both he and the bolt were gone.

Hezzie stopped. He tried to control the noise of his breathing. He was as shaken by his close call as by the idea that Herriot could, and would, take the bolt for Hezzie.

He hated to think that it meant that Herriot wasn’t now flesh and blood. But how amazing that Herriot was a ghost, as well as a dog, and still able to look after his younger brother?

The chirring of the insects in the bushes around him continued.

He was ashamed to realize he hadn’t even noticed in the first place. How many other clues to his uncle’s whereabouts had he missed? That streak of fire, for instance, came from over his right shoulder, where Herriot had run.

Putting the wizard somewhere to Hezzie’s right and rear if was still in the same place. Hopefully it was taking him as long to recover his energy as it was taking him to recover his wits, Hezzie thought at himself. What was he thinking? Standing still in a place where he was just now almost murdered?

It was like he’d forgotten all his training in the army. He shook his doggy head. Magic sure didn’t mix well with normal reality.

Only a few steps more, he walked as if on eggs to not clatter the gravel underfoot, and he’d reached the storm-water drain set in the side of the road. Hezzie turned into it. In his dog-shape he was low enough to the ground and slim enough to slink through the pipe.

Life and Death - an Intermission

2011-08-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday an elderly acquaintance became lost in the bush roundabout the town.

Most of the area's rescue personnel, police, SES, plus an unknown number of volunteers and friends, and a rescue helicopter tacking and booming above the town, spent two days searching for her.

All sorts of what-ifs were mooted for her disappearance but the plain facts were that she fell into the river and was probably drowned. That's where she was found on the third day.

Between the searching and comforting a couple of her anxious fellow residents, Audrey's last moments were all I could think of.

When there's a passing, or a death if that is what you call it, like I do, or a stepping off from the mortal coil, the person's last moments are what most exercise me. Until I have a go imagining them and writing them down, usually in some kind of poetic form, I cannot attend to the usual.

The End is Elusive

2011-08-16T18:44:00.000-07:00

The end of Srese Kerr's instalment, second in the Lodestar Series, or Saga as I've been variously calling it, is almost nigh. But I wrote and wrote, I had three days straight. Poured out a lot of words. Seemed good while I was writing it.

Lay it away for a day.

Started reading. Oof. I hated it. It's Srese dealing with Youk while they both have to make a get away.

Started rethinking it overnight. Re imagining how Srese would feel the first time she steps outside the door and sees the desert. The burning sky. The red land stretching to the horizon dotted with dry spinifex tussocks. Thinking that actually they might need to depend on each other at first. The reality is so different than what they are used to.

I started writing it again, from scratch. All the above, and them being shut out, prevented from returning. Having to press on. Srese not wanting to go it alone. Knowing there's all this stuff she doesn't know.

Yes, so I have to walk the knife edge between her being a wimp and her being the courageous person she'd decided to be. But that's good. It'll mean more drama.

Hezzie is holed up by the gate into the Garden of Circles.

A Day Late and a Posting Short

2011-08-11T01:34:00.000-07:00

It's Thursday. Posting day is Wednesday but I was invited to go and see the Archibald paintings at the Tweed Art Gallery at Murwillumbah. Good company and good paintings. One of my favourites was the painting of Cate Blanchet and her children, 'Mother'. It was meticulously intricate with colour and textures and methods of covering the painting surface that I would be interested to explore. The Coetzee portrait next to it also impressive.

There were a couple of paintings there so like photographs they might as well have been. I decided that in this day and age of excellent photography, I like paintings to be painterly.

Also of interest is the Seven Little Australians exhibition, by a painter whose name escapes me. The paintings seem quite old, ie done quite a long time ago, though no dates were on the cards. What made this display even more interesting were the artifacts purporting to have belonged to the characters in some of the paintings, on display in glass cases near the painting they referred to.

Srese Kerr is one and a half chapters from exploding into the world and I need to be there with my head every step of the remaining part of her journey towards the next instalment in her life.

Hezzie is going to have to take three steps for every one pace, I don't have time at the moment to get him to the Garden of Circles.

Raising up a Storm of Ideas ...

2011-08-07T01:29:00.000-07:00

... or, as I call it for short, ideating. In this case for the last chapter of Part II of the Lodestar Series.

While Hezzie MacPhee wends his way to the circle of magic trees, hiding and running, Srese Kerr has just said goodbye to her lover. Both she and Greg are under the impression it will be for a short time.

In this last chapter she needs to learn her life suit and keep out of the way of the minions searching for her. The final scene will be her having to decide a whole new plan for her future.

I had enough time today to observe the process I prefer to use for getting the necessary new ideas to write this new bridge to the rest of the story.

All day I've been doing practical things and coming back to the desk to write down the next idea. I've got about ten altercations and/or incidences between Srese and the two characters she deals with in this chapter, the life suit and Youk.

Next I will start to sort and sequence them while typing them out. Finally the chapter will have perception of back story and setting woven in, and characterisation through psychological attributes.

I realised today that I always am a nervous nelly getting down the bones of the plot, and start to enjoy myself when I'm into the fleshing out.

Therefore it was great that through a series of unrelated bad and good decisions, I suddenly had the whole of the day free and was able to get the plotting for the chapter done in amongst a fair few of chores.

14. The Forty Percented Wizard

2011-08-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

Hezzie was soon left behind. He was trying to keep to the roads, when Midge traveled the shortcuts, the ways every dog-out-and-about-on-its-own knew. Not Hezzie, not yet.

What was left of the socks bothered him, too. Both of them were now no more than knitted bracelets that flopped down over his paws. But he didn’t want to leave them in case they were doing him some good.

He stopped and pulled them up with his teeth to sit above his wrists, or was that his elbows? He couldn’t remember.

While standing still he’d lost even his idea of where Midge might be. And the sky had darkened. Though further along the road it appeared still to be sunny. Yes, the darkness was only above him. Not good. He tipped his one eye up to check the sky.

His premonition had been right. The wizard, although he was forty percented, glided above Hezzie with his arms outstretched as if he was a soaring eagle, keeping pace easily.

He laughed at Hezzie looking and waved his wand. The water springing from his wet eye changed course and descended towards Hezzie as rain.

The wizard laughed again and stirred his wand in one of his air holes. “Lightning and thunder!” he called. “Light up my prey!”

Hezzie skipped aside to escape the lightning bolt reaching for him from the wand.

The wizard roared.

“What! You want me to just stand still and take it?” Hezzie shouted.

“Yes! Because you deserve everything I can send out to you!”

“I hear an aircar,” Hezzie shouted. “You want to be seen?”

The wizard turned himself invisible.

Hezzie took his chance and dived into the undergrowth beside the road. He ran along the storm water drain until he came to a drainpipe. No real, heavy rain for a long time meant he had somewhere to hide.

He backed into it because it was a tight fit and he wanted to see the wizard coming.

The aircar whined passing by.

Hezzie expected any minute to hear the patter of water droplets falling through the vegetation surrounding his hiding place but nothing. He started to feel cramped. Then remembered one of the rules from the bomb disposal school. Wait some more.

He waited some more. The silence became a noise in his ears. Now he thought it funny, not ha ha but unusual, that not more traffic passed by. Was it the weekend? Or was it the wizard doing something?

At least his dog shape was easier to get out of the pipe than his man shape would’ve been. And his dog self knew how to keep quiet, creeping through the bush to take a look.

He raised his head above the edge of the road.

In the middle lay a wide patch of shining glistening oil. Road-works hurdles closed the road from traffic either side. Why close the road because of oil? Nearly everyone used aircars now.

He almost stayed too long, deciding it all had to be a wizard trick. The oil patch rolled itself up and slithered across the road. Its head, with the wizard’s weeping eye, opened a maw wide enough to take in Hezzie in the shape of a dog.

He scurried back. Now he turned tail and ran, meanwhile hoping that the python’s slitherings would be slowed by the extra friction of the water accompanying its every move.

Nearby here was a garden with a magic circle in it, of trees. One of Hezzie’s mother’s special places. Surely he’d be able to think up another spell while he hid within the trees?

Lodestar Part II, Free Read

2011-08-01T02:06:00.000-07:00

Just spent the whole weekend writing and thinking about the end of Srese Kerr's part of the story.

I realised I have to get her to where she'll be picked up by the traders, in part IV. Meaning I have to have her do her farewell with her boyfriend, who isn't accompanying her on the next stage. I have to have her learn to use one of the survival suits and she has to have another run in with Youk. He leaves the caves at the same time.

Probably another two chapters after Chapter 14, What the Greeks Did, what I thought would be the last chapter in this section. Here a section of that chapter:

15: What the Greeks Did

Srese woke. In the dark. She was lying on her back. She rocked herself, and so also rocked the bed she was on. It felt like a medi-bed. She felt constricted about her middle but her hands were loose. Her arm, when she raised it to her nose, stank of sweat and capsicum.

She sneezed. And recalled the red cloud bulking through the corridor and her on the stretcher high above the minion’s heads. High above everyone’s heads.

She obviously gone to sleep on the stretcher but where was she now? Apart from being strapped on a medi-bed? Both upper arms stung. She felt them with her hands creeping up. Nothing to stop them. Both her arms had a hypodermic needle head inserted. Elastic bandages to keep them in place. One of them with a tube connected to where she couldn’t reach.

The ordinary air-con in the background.

A drip drip drip in the foreground. To her right.

She opened her eyes.

The lights were set on half-light. Grey. She was in one of the clinics, lying on one of the two stretcher beds. A plastic bag hung empty from the stand by the left side of her bed head. She pulled the tubing out from under the bandage. Pulled out both the needle heads. The bandages would take care of the bleeding.

That drip continued.

To her right.

She turned her head.

There was Ahni’s body, constrained like hers.

Ahni’s head looked wrong.

As the details coalesced, Srese retched. “No! No! No!”

Ahni’s skull bone glared white. Her scalp hung inside-out, weighed down by her hair hanging over the edge of the bed. Sodden with her blood dripping from the ends to the floor. A long wound furrowed up her arm, over her shoulder and into her neck.

But she bled. Didn’t that mean she was still alive? Srese fumbled the ties across her body loose. Fell from the bed as she put her legs out. Held onto the edge of her bed while she climbed to her feet. Why was she so weak?

Forget that. Help Ahni.

Crossing between their beds, she fell again. Too weak. Find someone.

She crawled to the doors, onto the sensori-mat. Every move she made she recalled more of what had obviously led to this. The Seapeople’s AI that wanted her blood. Therefore her weakness. Royland didn’t even sew up Ahni’s wounds. There had to be someone to help. How would she know who’d be safe?

The door slid aside. She crawled through the opening. No one in the corridor. She rested, to think. What if Royland or one of his assistants came back? Holding onto the door-jamb, she finally reached the keypad.

She reset the door code. Srese will help Ahni: 5, 4, 4, 4. The door slid back into its groove and the lock snicked.

Out here the lights blazed. Stark. No one around. Or did she notice that already? Not a sound. She slid along the walls, negotiating the doors. All of them open. Even the ones into the minion tunnels. Why? The corner of Simmonds and First Circle. Where would everyone be? Still no sound. She stumbled down Simmonds. Arno might still be in the CAVE, and Ahni’s friend, KiraMah.

The doors into the complex were shut.

She stood on the sensori mat.

They stayed shut.

Was it Gammy still in charge of the doors, or was it the implant? She couldn’t decide. Heard again the thick dripping, as if it wasn’t just in her mind. Ahni’s life. She punched in her new code.

The doors slid open and she allowed herself a little smile. Thank you, Gammy.

People in there, stupidly unaware of danger. Five of them counting Youk. And only he noticed her coming in, with a swing of his head. All he could do. He was tied hands and feet. And gagged. To shut his lies up in his mouth, she wouldn’t be surprised.

Arno rested, closed eyed. Ghulia helped Zoya nurse the baby. Shot of hormones anyone? KiraMah collected stuff left behind.

“I need help with Ahni.”

13. Midge to the Rescue

2011-07-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

Hezzie shook his transformed fingers, making them rattle together like a bunch of dried pods. He wouldn’t be able to do anything that needed two hands. And though he knew only very little of the earth magic spells, he was pretty sure this wasn’t part of any of it.

He wished that he could get together with Herriot and compare notes – what might his big brother have discovered in the service of the wizard? And where his brother might now be.

Hezzie so couldn’t believe the uncle part of the wizard would allow one of his kin to merely die. Ma probably had been joined with the Earth. He’d find her in a tree shape somewhere, or as swath of crystals outlining a woman in a cave. Had Herriot been transformed into an animal for good, perhaps.

But he couldn’t do any finding in the state he was in. Not even thinking of the wizard forty-percented comforted him. He wished he could’ve done it without any further harm to himself.

At dawn, first light in the sky, he heard a beast bashing through the undergrowth, coming up the final, rocky part of the hill. Only one beast dog he knew that had the energy for that. But she was skittish. She might not stay once she saw the state of his hand.

On she came, bush-bashing towards him. “Midge,” Hezzie called. He whistled a welcome but there was not a yap out of her. What if it was some other animal? He grinned. No animal he could think of that would plough so steadfastly up a hill.

She erupted into the clearing, a sturdy, medium-sized, reddish dog. “Red in the day and red in the dawn,” he said, greeting her with his usual joke.

She lolloped towards him, dropping the play-ball she was carrying, and though he hid his weird hand by his side, she ran around him and approached from the left as if she already knew there was something wrong with his hand.

She nosed his good hand aside and bit his tin arm with a thoughtful expression on her dog face.

Midge shaking her head so fast it was a blur

He didn’t feel it and she spat him out. She shook her head so fast it blurred.

“What do you mean by that, Midge?”

She circled him, seeming to think. Pounced on his socked toes.

He pulled back his foot instinctively, leaving the sock caught under her toe nails. She picked it up delicately and lay it near his tin hand. Stood back bright eyed, whapping her tail from side to side.

His bare foot tingled. The top started to show a shadow of dog hair growing.

Midge barked at him. The noise she made clattered and rebounded off the tree trunks surrounding the clearing until it sounded like three, five, nine dogs barked.

“All right. All right.” He lined up the sock with his middle three tin fingers and scooped them into the sock opening. He tucked the pinkie and the thumb in beside them either side. Pulled the sock up. Of course the knit caught on the metal edges.

He lifted the metal hand in the sock onto his knees and kneaded and eased the sock up past the obstructions with his other hand. Finally with his teeth helping he pulled the sock half up his forearm, as far as it would stretch.

In the meantime his toenails narrowed and grew longer. His foot lengthened. The heel became a nubbin. He howled out of fear.

Midge barked a short sharp decisive woof. “Shut up,” she said. “It’s not so bad, being a dog. It’s what I look like all the time.”

Hezzie’s mouth hung open. He stared at her. He suddenly heard her words and understood them without having to make them up, the way humans normally had to interpret dog-talk.

Midge pulled at his second sock. Because it had already begun to ravel, it came off his foot more a bracelet than a foot covering.

Hezzie started to transform. The tin arm didn’t stand a chance against the magic flooding through his system, making him a dog. The last metallic fingertip winked out and he was all flesh and blood again, though dog flesh and dog blood. No way did he understand the logic of it.

He stared at Midge expectantly. She was obviously the leader in this little pack.

“Now we go home. Breakfast. Sleep. Beg a car-ride when my boss goes visiting in Tosca Lane.”

Hezzie jiggled his head. “It’s amazing. I understand every word you’re saying. How good is that!”

Midge snorted and dived into the undergrowth surrounding the clearing. She barked from down the mountain. “Hurry up, if you’re coming.”

12. The Wizard Strikes Back

2011-07-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

Under Hezzie, undulating for kilometres to the south, moonlight glanced over a sea of roofs and shiny tree-leaves while the real ocean was a moon-burnished bar to the left.

That pinpoint of light, now a fat dot, still approached from the southwest, the direction of home. It came from the wrong direction for it to be travelling along any flight path that he knew. So stop wasting time, he told himself.

He turned sharply and waded with large paces through the air towards Chinny. Its dark, tree-covered flanks looked the best place to hide. He made the mistake of peering back over his shoulder. The dot had become a flurry of gesticulating wizard.

“WAI-AI-T!” the wizard shouted. The tip of his wand twitched like a buzzing star and shot out rays that reached increasingly nearer to Hezzie.

Hezzie realized that he wasn’t going to make it to Chinny. Ma, give me spell, he begged his memory. His uncle was right on that – Hezzie and Herriot had never properly listened while being taught the family magics.

Hezzie had regretted it since the first time he saw his uncle in the hospital.

His uncle was now near enough that Hezzie could see his fury. The stone spell might stop him. It was one of the first real spells Hezzie had learned. He’d been interested because he’d loved dinosaurs at the time. But he wasn’t sure of it, was he? And there wasn’t enough time to rhyme it out. It’d have to be the air spell. He remembered that.

The wizard stopped out of reach of any damage Hezzie might send him. “Why are you even up here? It shouldn’t be possible.”

The wizard’s eyes could seem wind affected but Hezzie knew the watering was from his spell. Its success gave him confidence.

“Where’d you get the socks?”

“They were a present,” Hezzie said.

“From that witch in Tosca lane. How do you know her?”

Hezzie kicked off on the breeze, making for the top of Chinny. His uncle of course had to try and get there first. Hezzie grabbed his cloak as he went past.

“The Earth is wrapped in air. Air is everywhere. It’s the stuff we breathe, the gas fueling the fire. The wind is it charging the lows with the higher,” he shouted.

The wizard slowed abruptly. Like he’d been stunned. Then swam frog-wise in a westerly direction, as fast as he could.

“Don’t think you’re going to get away,” Hezzie shouted. He twisted and jagged west, following his uncle. When he got close enough, he shouted out the rhyme twice more, as fast as he could. “The Earth is wrapped in air. Air is everywhere. It’s the stuff we breathe, the gas fueling the fire. The wind is it charging the lows with the higher. The Earth is wrapped in air. Air is everywhere. It’s the stuff we breathe, the gas fueling the fire. The wind is it charging the lows with the higher.

Now a gust of wind swept at the wizard and through him, causing him to lose most of his aerial buoyancy. Lucky for him he was still near to the canopy of the forest clothing Chinny.

With twigs and leaves breaking and with the wide spaces between his bones passing around those same fragments of vegetation, because the wizard was still heavier, Hezzie’s uncle fell through the camphor laurel canopy.

Thump.

Moments later he re-appeared on Chinny’s cleared top. He still had his wand. He fisted it through the air. He shouted a spell and threw it at his nephew. Zap.

Hezzie didn’t have time to duck. Or he wasn’t attentive enough. The spell got him in the left arm.

His whole left arm felt numbed. His hand became metallic. His fingers clattered as he wriggled them to try and get sensation back into them. How was he going to fix himself?

Sobered, he circled the top of Chinny staring at his uncle’s Swiss-cheese structure with the waterfall now wending its way in and out of the holes gutting through his torso.

And still the wizard had energy for more magic. He cut a large tree branch with a cutting action with the side of his hand. He trimmed it of most of its leaves with the wand, leaving only a tuft of leaves.

He passed his wand over the branch again and soon had it floating horizontally. He sat down on it and flew off in the direction of home.

Hezzie didn’t follow him.

11. Thommo

2011-07-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Thommo Patiently Waiting

Hezzie woke at dusk. A shadow sat by him. Groggily he thought it couldn’t be the wizard being so patient.

He looked properly. “Thommo! Good to see you, mate.”

Thommo barely whisked his tail and continued to sit attentively through Hezzie’s hugging.

“You’re saying business first?” Hezzie noticed the brown-paper-bag beside the dog. H.E.Z.Z.I.E on the front. “Obviously for me. Who’s it from? Was it Rose?” he asked the dog.

Thommo stood up and barked a couple of happy woofs.

“That’s an affirmative, I take it.” Hezzie detached the bag. “What’s in it, I wonder?”

Thommo panted aloud, almost whining in his eagerness that Hezzie open the bag.

Hezzie's Breakfast

Hezzie sniffed deeply. “Bread and cheese? Oh ho! Breakfast!” He opened the bag.

A chunk of cheese and a hunk of bread, both of them so hard he didn’t believe Rose would’ve sent them. The bread was too hard to break he discovered right away. He got out his pocketknife. “Wish we had some water to help it down.”

Thommo barked again.

Telling him something this time. “What?”

Thommo pushed through the shrubbery.

Hez peered through the shrubbery, realising his idiocy not to check for the wizard when he woke. But he was lucky because the wizard was gone. And he was unlucky. The half filled bottle of water was also gone.

Hezzie came out of hiding.

Thommo held a hunting dog’s stance, indicating the position of a prey animal.

Hezzie followed the line of the dog’s sight. In this case, a depression in the bare dirt near the picnic setting. The hollow was lined with a plastic bag stretched out flat. The hollow was filled with water, like a little pond.

“I get it. Your boss brought you here for a picnic. You showed him me. He, the joker, organized me a hunk of bread and a hunk of cheese and the water.”

Thommo barked in agreement.

“I had my hopes up, but this is good too.” Hezzie lay down and lapped water from the make-do water bowl. Then he shaved the cheese into thin slices and ate one per slice of hard grainy bread.

Thommo gulped his in one swallow.

Hezzie also swallowed, on the hard corners of the bread going down Thommo’s gullet.

Thommo brought Hezzie one of his red-and-blue socks. Stood in front of Hezzie, holding it in his mouth. Behind him, a last ray of sunshine beaconed between two outcroppings on the ranges.

“Thanks. I have got cold feet.” He took the sock and looked down to put it on. His feet were turning into dog’s paws.

He leaped up. “No! The wizard did get me!”

Thommo growled. Danced up to him. Nosed the sock at Hezzie, insisting.

Hezzie sat down, slipped his foot into the sock.

The magic receded. His big human toe showed through the raveled part. “That’s amazing!”

Thommo came with the second sock and Hezzie put it on. The amazement of it made him feel light inside and giggly, when he should be finding a new hiding place. It was a sure fact the wizard would come looking for him as soon as it was properly dark.

He should do that orientation thing he learned in the army. But get this, his socks zinged when he leapt for the top of the picnic table. He forgot about the orientation and jumped down.

His socks zanged and took him up at a forty-five degree angle so that when he twisted, and so stopped his trajectory, he hung, briefly, in the air above the Main Street.

Thommo barked goodbye at him and turned tail, trotting home.

Twisting seemed the key to changing direction because now Hezzie shot into a northerly direction and rising another fifteen metres or so. Backward again.

A pinpoint of light approached from the southwest. The wizard?

Lodestar - New Endings

2011-07-17T03:01:00.000-07:00

While I've been busy with Hezzie MacPhee, the Lodestar story has been simmering on the back of the writing stove. Specifically the ending of Srese Kerr, Part II of the saga, which needed a completely new ending.

I found it incredibly difficult to let go of the previous ending in its entirety, that is, without referring to it while writing a completely new ending. Even the idea that a whole different resolution was possible was hard to get my head around. I think it must be a function of the years I spent on it, that the saga as it was then seemed that it had always existed and couldn't be changed.

But, since a saga it was, even unto its mythic and fragmentary nature, it needed to be restructured to make it readable by more readers than just myself. That's the plan, anyway, to take half a line out of Serenity.

What I did find interesting was that I couldn't begin the task until I had some really good chapter titles. Quite a few days of blank went by before I woke up one morning with them.

A lot has to happen in these two chapters. Srese discovers first, that she must leave home and second, that she can't stay in the group in which she briefly finds herself but must stride forth alone. Meanwhile keeping herself out of Youk's clutches.

Ahni and her people must be sent off scattered. Also travelling are Sard, Srese's twin brother, and Kes, Ahni's lover. Though they appear in subsequent parts, they exist in that same geography. The landscape of the story is not the whole world and so there needs to be judicious partitioning so that the characters don't trip over each other unexpectedly.

10. Struck by Mage Magic

2011-07-13T00:53:00.000-07:00

Hezzie walked most of the morning.

The wizard glided above him. They stopped at the edge of the town. “It’s the Main Street Market,” Hezzie’s uncle said. “We’re in good time for me to cadge a cup of coffee and you to snatch me a chunk of meat and yourself a bone.”

“I’m not eating any bones,” Hezzie meant to say. It came out as barking.

“We’ll see.” Mumbling a spell, Uncle MacPhee touched Hezzie with the wand.

Hezzie shied away. What are you doing? He didn’t try saying it this time.

“You did something to me, I’m doing something to you. I’d be a laughing stock with a dog wearing clothes.”

Hezzie’s clothes slid from him and he had to step out of them to not trip. He picked them up one by one with his teeth and dragged them under a bush.

The wizard took off his suit jacket and then his shirt. Now the water from his eye and mouth streamed down his pudgy white chest. He tied the shirt in a slanted bandage over his eye and put the suit jacket back on. He tucked the ends of the sleeves into the jacket. Both garments were sodden in three minutes.

The wizard limped experimentally, letting his left side sag. “Come, dog.”

Hezzie wanted to ask, What for the limp, as he followed the wizard down to the market. He answered himself while laughing in his mind, so the water can drip down of the wizard’s left pant leg?

The wizard gesticulated it looked like from where Hezzie trotted behind him. Then Hezzie realized his uncle must have his wand in action. The people staring at the wizard as they approached him, snapped out of their daze as soon as they passed him.

Hezzie smelled the coffee sit-down stall but the wizard only hesitated before continuing on. Hezzie almost fell over his heels.

At the end of the street was a grove of picnic trees. The wizard chose the most distant of the settings, under the last and biggest tree. He sat himself on the plank bench with his back to the street. He said, “Hop up on the seat opposite me, paws on the table.”

Hezzie didn’t argue.

“This is all your fault. I can’t be in public when I’m such a spectacle. Go fetch me my coffee.”

Hezzie’s stomach grumbled from hunger.

The wizard laughed nastily. “Serves you right. Go!” He clicked his fingers in front of Hezzie’s nose.

Hezzie rolled backward off the bench, out of reach of the spell, if it was one. No way was he going to steal for his uncle.

He wandered down the middle of the street, where the stallholders parked their transport. Near a rubbish bin he found a smashed pie. Gulp. Even the bag tasted good.

Next, he found an empty soft drink bottle under a buggy. He picked it up with delicate teeth and trotted to the place where they had stopped first. Where his uncle had lost a large amount of water. Where the ground might still be wet.

And yes it was. Muddy, anyway. Hezzie scrabbled round in it, making sure all four of his paws got mud on them. He sang the earth magic water song and grew. His body started reshaping itself and he fell to the ground. His legs and arms punched here and there but he had to concentrate on not crying out from the pain.

After he had rested a while, the breeze over his hairless skin felt cold and he searched for something to replace his fur. His clothes! He remembered them as soon as he saw them.

One of the socks started to come apart as he pulled it from the bushes. But since he lost his shoes somewhere – on the slope down from Bertie’s house? – he couldn’t wear his socks anyway.

Thinking about Bertie led to him feeling guilty about his promise. So why not run away? He’d have a head start from here. Except that stories about hunting said leaving a wounded predator on the loose was asking for trouble.

So, twenty-percenting the wizard was only the start. Hezzie jogged back through the crowds. He stopped at a tap along the street where he drank deeply and then filled the bottle.

The wizard slept with his head on his arm on the log table in front of him.

Hezzie set the water near the wizard’s out-flung arm and hid nearby.

9. The Wizard

2011-07-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

Hezzie slid down the front of the rock and dived into the bush below it.

“It’s no use, you know. Trying to get away,” the wizard said.

Hezzie dropped into a wallaby track through the scrub and started scrambling downhill.

Still invisible, his uncle strode over the top of the vegetation. He kept up easily and often bent and tipped Hezzie with his wand.

Where the wand touched him, that part of him went houndish.

Tip, and Hezzie’s skin started to prickle with new hound fur, like his head the week after a Number 2 haircut. Tip, and that fur grew and grew until it filled all the spaces between him and his clothes. It probably grew through the socks Hezzie still had in his shirt. Tip, and his finger and toenails lengthened into horny dog nails.

The trail finished where a spring burbled water into a tiny pond. Dark green ferns grew along the edges. A wallaby’s drinking place. Remembering his mother’s earth magic, Hezzie whispered the sweet water spell to himself.

He stepped into the water. His feet turned back into human, Hezzie-feet. He wriggled his toes and felt the soft mud between them. But how lucky that the puddle reflected the sky and that his legs going into the water were still houndish.

Uncle MacPhee stopped too. “You’re standing in water but why would I worry? I never saw you and your brother taking the slightest bit of notice when your mother tried to teach you her earth magic.”

He swayed nearer to Hezzie as he came into visibility. Though he was in his wizard mode, he still wore his doctoring suit. Putting his wand between his teeth, he held out his jacket-front with one hand while he reached into an inside pocket and took out a large, yellowed tooth-like object.

“What’s that?” Hezzie said.

The wizard laughed. “Here’s where I fix you for good. It’s a special wand tip. An ancient hound’s tooth. When I touch you with it, and touch you I will, you’ll be a hound for the rest of your days.”

Water had dammed up beside Hezzie’s feet and was flowing over their tops. “Sweet water rills and riles falls and flows, past hills, their elbows and their toes,” he said, conversationally.

His uncle polished the hound’s tooth on his sleeve.

Hezzie shouted the earth magic spell, “Sweet water rills and riles, falls and flows. Past hills, their elbows and their toes.” He bent and scooped up water with both hands and threw it at his uncle.

This time the wizard took notice. He sprang back, too late. He dropped his wand and the tooth. Wiped his face and his clothes convulsively.

Hezzie grabbed the tooth and pressed it into the mud by his feet. He scooped up more water. Threw it with a wide-armed spraying, as he shouted the rhyme a third time. “Sweet water rills and riles, falls and flows. Past hills, their elbows and their toes!”

“Stop!” the wizard shouted. “The tooth! Give me back that tooth!” He picked up his wand. Every time he blinked, water sprang from his left eye and down his face. It gathered more from his mouth and fell like a waterfall to the hills and valleys of his clothes and joined the Earth near the wizard’s feet.

The weirdest thing to Hezzie was that four fifth of the wizard looked his normal self.

“Gotcha!” the wizard said as he tipped Hezzie with the wand.

And the second weirdest thing was that his uncle didn’t appear to notice any difference about himself.

8. Bertie

2011-07-07T01:25:00.000-07:00

Hezzie fell to his four paws and loped away over the asphalted forecourt, over the access road and picnic area, and into the scrub at the bottom of the hill. Where he instinctively knew not to careen into low branches and trunks, to not make known his passage.

He stopped to peer at the Tom Pies forecourt. The air car’s passenger entered the building – its windows blazing with light – where he talked excitedly at a video phone.

So maybe Hezzie had better skedaddle a longer way away. In case the people on the other end of the man’s excitement took his story seriously. Bet they on the other end were laughing, thinking that the joker in the picture was seeing things. Hezzie relaxed.

He laughed too seeing his furry forepaws when he stepped them forward. How could that be him when he still felt like himself, like Hezzie.

He smelled a clearing.

He smelled a clearing? How? He had to stop and think.

He sniffed. He could smell a place where a dog he knew lay sometimes. He didn’t know which dog or how he knew about the dog lying up in the sun. He didn’t know how to explain in words, even to himself, what was happening in his dog nose.

When he got to the place it was a lookout, a rocky shelf in front with sand at the back. Lantana on three sides, a wall that was kept trimmed. By tools, so obviously it was a man-made clearing.

Hezzie squatted dog-wise on the rock. His tongue hung out and he panted. A slight warmth in the rock that was left from the day rose through his feet. The rest of the night was cool with the moon still rising to its greatest height.

In front, down in the valley, roofs gleamed under the moonlight. More interesting to a dog, there was plenty of cover, bush, between and among the buildings.

Interesting to him as Hezzie, was home somewhere on the north flank of Mooibal. In his memories it was always a sunny clearing, with Ma always singing her earth magics by the creek, in her vege garden or at the edge of the forest.

Hezzie remembered all the times Ma said that earth magic helped every living thing in and on the Earth, while mage magic only helped the wizard or witch wielding the wand. How come Herriot could just ignore all that?

When Uncle MacPhee came to stay, he took Herriot for his hound. Feral dogs and wizards’ hounds were all the same to the farmers roundabout.

Hezzie refused to think of himself as his uncle’s hound, were- or man or otherwise. But with his dog ears, Hezzie heard the faraway yammering cry of a wild dog calling his kin.

The hackles on the back of his neck rose and despite his decision, he was up on his feet and lifting his head, and replying with a full-throated primal calling of his own.

The howling in the distance doubled, with another feral twinning the refrain.

Hezzie lifted his snout and readied himself for another peal.

A long-legged half-grown pup ran into the clearing and threw himself at Hezzie, whining and wriggling.

They were perilously close to the edge of the drop. Hezzie shuffled back. The pup was a brindle. With his dark parts not visible against the dark rock he glittered like brown water in moonlight.

The pup licked Hezzie’s muzzle.

Hezzie swallowed down his hound-howling. “Do I know you?” he said in his human voice. His clothes felt looser on him as his fur melted back into his skin somehow.

The pup yipped excitedly.

“You’re Bertie!” What wouldn’t Hezzie give to be back there, walking his dogs. He’d taken Bertie on just before he left.

Bertie wagged his whole rump, he wagged his tail so hard.

Hezzie rolled around on the ground, buffeted by Bertie’s licking and nudging and spit-slobbering.

“Good boy. Finish.”

Bertie Staring his Wisdom

Bertie sat down. Close enough to touch his muzzle to Hezzie’s nose. Close enough to stare the wisdom of all dogs through all the ages of human and dog companionship into Hezzie’s mind. Never, for one minute, forget you are human and that you are my pack leader.

Hezzie hugged him. “I won’t.”

“A very pretty scene.”

Hezzie turned. It couldn’t be.

The wizard stood easy, in the air, just beyond the rock.

Hezzie had no problem seeing the wizard-shaped displacement of air. Hezzie cupped Bertie’s ears. “Go home, boy,” he whispered.

Intermission - Backstage

2011-07-04T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'm running into the same troubles that i had with serialising Kosi Lionhair. (Point noted and taken on board. Mistakes do need to be made more than once sometimes to be recognised as bad habits.)

First are my writing habits/needs. I feel most comfortable writing the part, chapter, section, printing it out (scrap paper always) letting it lie to be able to come back to it with a reader's eye as opposed to with the writer's eye - because a writer does not see her own foibles.

You might be asking why I'm not writing ahead. I started ahead. Life keeps interrupting and suntime, when it shines, needs to be taken advantage of.

Thommo

Yesterday I hade a very enjoyable photo shoot with Thommo and Cedar auditioning for their parts later on in the story, with Thommo showing off all his tricks.

Thommo shaking hands with his ears well back.

Cedar's portrait shot unfortunately too blurry to publish today.

Further I have Bertie making his appearance next instalment.

Now I'm cold. And I am going to get outside in the sun. Probably to pull a few weeds.

7. On the Run

2011-07-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

“Hey, that was a joke. I’m just the night-watch sent to see you back to bed.” He turned Hez with a hand on his shoulder and shone his torch into Hezzie’s face, and fell back.

“Get him, you useless bot!”

Hezzie easily outran them both, dropping to all fours once he was in the shadows.

The hospital gardens bordered the approaches to the Stonehenge Roundabout, which he crossed with two great leaps. He ran into the forest alongside the highway. He went north.

Whenever he heard a vehicle, which wasn’t often, he rose to his hind feet and stuck out a gloved forepaw with the empty thumb sticking up. Not that he expected to get a ride as the hover-freighters traveled too high above the highway to sense him.

He almost stumbled over an aircar parked on the shoulder of the road. And he almost crouched down into a dog-posture. He fought that feeling down first, then checked the vehicle out.

The only passenger had his head under the dash where he quietly cursed all aircars.

“Help you?” Hez said.

The passenger surfaced. “Finally. I called you hours ago.”

“I’m not from the Road and Repair Association,” Hez said. “I was just passing by.”

The passenger looked Hezzie up and down with his torch. “My buddy is asleep in the back.”

“He must’ve stepped out for a minute,” Hezzie said. “Get your car going for you in the meantime?”

“You caught me out. No buddy. But I’ll get in first.”

The man sat directly behind the front passenger seat. He gestured for Hezzie to get in.

Hezzie hulked into the seat. He rued the man’s torch. Its beam played continually over his features. He had the suspicion that fur stood out everywhere. In the gap between his pants and jacket. Between the ends of his sleeves and the glove tops. Above his shirt neckband.

On the dashboard he switched down everything automatic. He reached far under it for the manual switch. “Do you drive at all?” he asked.

“Why would I?” the passenger said. “In town when something doesn’t work, I can hop out and catch a cab. You drive, if you know how. I’ll cal Road & Repair, tell them I’ve got me a Samaritan.”

Hezzie needed to distract the guy from his call. He turned. “I’m Hezzie, by the way.” He didn’t offer his forepaw for shaking.

The passenger dropped his torch. He groveled on the floor to retrieve it instead of telling Hezzie his name.

“Start the car?” Hezzie said to the man’s back.

“Yes. Go. Let’s not wait for any of your buddies.”

Hezzie pressed the ON key and the aircar shuddered. He engaged first gear and LIFT OFF at the same time and they were in the air.

Hezzie put it into second gear and engaged CRUISE CONTROL but the car refused to go higher than the regulation 1-metre altitude for tourist vehicles.

“I see why you are here,” Hezzie said mainly because it was so quiet in the back.

“What are you? Where’s here?”

Hezzie knew who he was. “Here along the edge of the highway,” he said trying to find out what the passenger thought Hezzie was.

“I don’t like what I’m seeing,” the passenger said.

“The scene flashing by?” Hezzie was suddenly eager to get out of the car. “I’ll stop and get out of your hair.” Oops. Not a good phrase.

“Too late.”

A loop of something hooked over Hezzie’s face and tightened in his neck. The guy’s belt?

“Forget the struggling. And I’ll strangle you if you stop.”

They went past the Tosca Lane exit. Hezzie didn’t twitch. Better the fellow didn’t know.

Four or five kilometres further on the lights on the dash started to flicker.

“You’re going to need to power up soon,” Hezzie said.

“I don’t know these parts. Where’s the nearest?”

“Tom Pies. The next exit.”

The passenger tightened the noose. “Don’t try anything.”

“You strangle me and we’re toast in the truck lane.” Hez made like he’d steer into the next lane, where they’d be flying below the freighters’ steam exhausts.

The loop loosened a fraction.

The Tom Pies forecourt beaconed like it was daytime. The Eat House windows were see-through. Night time security amperage lit up tables, chairs and vending machines. No other customers, in or out.

Hezzie parked by a power point. “One of us will have to get out to connect. No driveway service at night.”

“No robots in or out?”

“Too many get napped of a night time,” Hezzie said.

“So we’ll both get out,” the passenger said. “Open the door.” The belt loosened slightly as the guy pushed at Hezzie.

Hezzie opened the car door and fell out in one move.

The loop tightened, then slackened as Hezzie pulled it from Passenger’s hand. He was up and gone.

7. On the Run

“Hey, that was a joke. I’m just the night-watch sent to see you back to bed.” He turned Hez with a hand on his shoulder and shone his torch into Hezzie’s face, and fell back.

“Get him, you useless bot!”

Hezzie easily outran them both, dropping to all fours once he was in the shadows.

The hospital gardens bordered the approaches to the Stonehenge Roundabout, which he crossed with two great leaps. He ran into the forest alongside the highway. He went north.

He almost stumbled over an aircar parked on the shoulder of the road. And he almost crouched down into a dog-posture. He fought that feeling down first, then checked the vehicle out.

The only passenger had his head under the dash where he quietly cursed all aircars.

“Help you?” Hez said.

The passenger surfaced. “Finally. I called you hours ago.”

“I’m not from the Road and Repair Association,” Hez said. “I was just passing by.”

The passenger looked Hezzie up and down with his torch. “My buddy is asleep in the back.”

“He must’ve stepped out for a minute,” Hezzie said. “Get your car going for you in the meantime?”

“You caught me out. No buddy. But I’ll get in first.”

The man sat directly behind the front passenger seat. He gestured for Hezzie to get in.

On the dashboard he switched down everything automatic. He reached far under it for the manual switch. “Do you drive at all?” he asked.

Hezzie needed to distract the guy from his call. He turned. “I’m Hezzie, by the way.” He didn’t offer his forepaw for shaking.

The passenger dropped his torch. He groveled on the floor to retrieve it instead of telling Hezzie his name.

“Start the car?” Hezzie said to the man’s back.

“Yes. Go. Let’s not wait for any of your buddies.”

Hezzie pressed the ON key and the aircar shuddered. He engaged first gear and LIFT OFF at the same time and they were in the air.

Hezzie put it into second gear and engaged CRUISE CONTROL but the car refused to go higher than the regulation 1-metre altitude for tourist vehicles.

“I see why you are here,” Hezzie said mainly because it was so quiet in the back.

“What are you? Where’s here?”

Hezzie knew who he was. “Here along the edge of the highway,” he said trying to find out what the passenger thought Hezzie was.

“I don’t like what I’m seeing,” the passenger said.

“The scene flashing by?” Hezzie was suddenly eager to get out of the car. “I’ll stop and get out of your hair.” Oops. Not a good phrase.

“Too late.”

A loop of something hooked over Hezzie’s face and tightened in his neck. The guy’s belt?

“Forget the struggling. And I’ll strangle you if you stop.”

They went past the Tosca Lane exit. Hezzie didn’t twitch. Better the fellow didn’t know.

Four or five kilometres further on the lights on the dash started to flicker.

“You’re going to need to power up soon,” Hezzie said.

“I don’t know these parts. Where’s the nearest?”

“Tom Pies. The next exit.”

The passenger tightened the noose. “Don’t try anything.”

“You strangle me and we’re toast in the truck lane.” Hez made like he’d steer into the next lane, where they’d be flying below the freighters’ steam exhausts.

The loop loosened a fraction.

The Tom Pies forecourt beaconed like it was daytime. The Eat House windows were see-through. Night time security amperage lit up tables, chairs and vending machines. No other customers, in or out.

Hezzie parked by a power point. “One of us will have to get out to connect. No driveway service at night.”

“No robots in or out?”

“Too many get napped of a night time,” Hezzie said.

“So we’ll both get out,” the passenger said. “Open the door.” The belt loosened slightly as the guy pushed at Hezzie.

Hezzie opened the car door and fell out in one move.

The loop tightened, then slackened as Hezzie pulled it from Passenger’s hand. He was up and gone.

6. O-U-T spells ...?

2011-06-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

Hezzie felt like a fish about to be filleted. With a cook and a chef leaning over him deciding where to start cutting him. Only for him, it was the two doctors arguing over his future.

“Look at me, boy, while I take this wire out,” Hezzie’s uncle said.

Hezzie stared at where his uncle’s neck wasn’t showing between his doctor-coat and his doctor-mask as his uncle clipped wires and unscrewed screws.

The hospital doctor unwrapped Hezzie’s new forearms-and-hands. “Perfect.” The doc touched each hand in turn. “Make a fist? Stretch wide? Point one. Point two …”

“So perfect that I can take him with me today?”

Hezzie shrank away from his uncle.

The other doctor gave Hezzie some elbow-length gloves. “I would like you to wear them for a while at night, to keep your joints from getting cold. The Army is coming tomorrow to give you your final checkup.” Then he added for Hezzie’s uncle’s benefit, “So, no, you can’t take him today.”

The wizard grated his invisible teeth. “Very well. I’ll pick you up at noon, boy. Your clothes are in your locker.”

A robo-chair motored Hezzie back to the ward.

Hezzie seethed with anger about his uncle’s expectations but he let himself be tucked into bed. If he struggled, the robot might report his behaviour.

He waited until the robo-chair’s rubber-rimmed squeaking faded down the corridor, hopped out of bed and checked his locker.

A set of clothes. Why wasn’t he surprised? Though he’d look like a lost boy in them. His uncle had obviously picked them from among the stuff left in the bedroom by Hezzie and his brother, both of them gone for more than a year.

He waited until the darkest hours of the night. Slid out of bed.

A set of toenails clicked on the floor. His? He hesitated, then tried to put his heel down.

And fell. What was wrong with him? He felt himself all over.

Even the backs of his beautiful new hands were furry.

This is what happened to his brother? How come, Hezzie wondered, there was only his brother’s jaw left of him? And that same jaw was now in him, and causing him all this grief? He was sure of that, anyway.

His mind went into top gear.

He’d need the gloves from under his pillow. The clothes were in a carry bag. Made them easy to carry, by hanging it from his muzzle. He ran for the storeroom next to the operating theatre.

He dressed in what he could find. Dark grey pants, hospital-issue. A T-shirt. A hoodie someone left behind.

Dressing took a long time, with paws and his teeth to help from time to time. Then the gloves. Then a doctor’s mask.

“Don’t tell me you’re waiting for me?” Hezzie said at Rose pacing the front hall.

“I’m on night duty, my five minute break. You should hurry. It’s almost dawn. Here,” she tucked a couple of hand-knitted red-and-blue objects into his jacket pockets. “The socks that Gigi made for you.”

“Gee Gee?”

“Great Gran. She likes to be called Gigi. Here’s where we live. On paper because no one can GPS you by it.”

“Smart cookie, cousin.”

“I wondered how long it would take you to figure that out. I’ll see you when I get home. Don’t worry. Gigi will knit you a body suit, if necessary.”

Hezzie ran and hid through the hospital gardens the way he’d learned in boot camp. He felt warm because he had a family other than Uncle MacPhee. Cold at the thought of how he’d look in a hand-knitted red-and-blue striped body suit. And what would he do with the socks while his feet were wolf’s feet?

He stopped near a light in the parking lot. The piece of paper had a hand-drawn map on it. The highway. Halfway to the next town, a lane went off it to the left. Houses both sides. Tosca Lane with a scribble at the end of it marking home.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

A heavy hand clamped down on his shoulder.

Hezzie gulped down the bit of paper.

5. Great Gran

2011-06-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

Hezzie felt pale and upset after his uncle’s second visit. How was it even possible a wizard could masquerade as a doctor?

His uncle had come into Hezzie’s space and had closed the curtains. Because Hezzie had been sitting, his uncle’s eye-holes had shown the white curtaining behind his head.

The wizard stared at Hezzie like he would bore holes in his head and let everything Hezzie knew leak out.

Probably he was waiting for Hezzie to start a conversation.

About the weather, how good it was for the crops. How well so and so was doing at their new job. How bright and beautiful the gardens looked. People who knew him were always trying to force the wizard to be an ordinary person.

Which was how his uncle hid, Hezzie felt. He decided right then he wouldn’t help anymore at hiding the wizard by pretending he was ordinary.

The wizard bent his stare at the rose lying between Hezzie’s hands, and took its colours from it in a few seconds. He smiled at Hezzie going pale like the rose. "Remember, you'll be my hound. We'll rule this country."

If only he knew a way to stop his uncle in his tracks.

In the afternoon, when the shadow of the moon was already working its way up the sky, a squeaking came into the ward. It stopped and started three times. There were three beds between Hezzie and the doors.

“I’ll see if he’s awake,” Rose said. She came smiling slipping through a gap between the curtains. “Hullo again. I’ve brought our Great Gran to see you.” She took a control box from her pocket and pressing a couple of keys.

A wheelchair-type-of-trolleyrolled forward. A very elderly lady, with snowy white hair, sat smiling in the contraption. “There you are, m’dear,” she said.

"How come I don't know you?"

"I'm from your father's side, dear. Have those terrible eyes been bothering you?”

She didn’t wait for his answer. “Let me see the rose, dear,” she said towards Rose.

Rose exclaimed and lifted the poor faded flower with her two tender hands from Hezzie’s chest.

The old lady held it in her two hands and smelled it, and blew gently at it.

Its petals fell from the stem.

“Yes. I can see he has you in his sights.” She drummed with her fingers on the arm-rests of her trolley chair. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

Hezzie shook his head.

But the old lady wasn’t looking at him. He wondered if she could see anything.

“Rose, dear. Take me home. Do you like red and blue?”

“Hez, Gran asked if you like red and blue?” Rose asked him.

“Sure. I like all colours.” He was mystified.

Rose winked. “Gran, show Hezzie what you’re talking about.”

Gran moved her hands together in a kind of way so that some red and blue yarn showed between them.

It looked like magic though he didn’t know how it would help him.

Maybe his confusion showed on his face because Rose blew him a kiss. “I can hardly wait till I show you how they can help you.”

4. Rose

2011-06-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

Hezzie breakfasted on a green smoothie that he sucked through a straw. His new lower jaw was wired to his top jaw to help it learn its place on his face.

The curtains either side of him and in front were drawn back. Left and right lay patients who were wrapped like mummies with about as much to say.

Like himself, he realized, because how much could he say? And how much could he sign with his hands in cocoons of wrapping?

He sat. They lay. And they all had straws for eating. His scalp itched and he couldn’t scratch it. Would they even feel it if they itched? He felt himself all over by thinking of the part and making it move. He was good apart from his jaw and his two hands.

A medibot rolled down the aisle between the beds.

Hezzie’s gut tightened seeing the two white coats following it. By the time they got to him he was in a lather of sweat. One of the white coats was a girl.

She took a cloth from one of the medibot’s top drawers and wiped Hezzie’s face. The most amazing thing about her was that she wore a white hat with a rose clipped to the front of it.

The Rose

“That made you smile,” she said.

“Nngg,” Hezzie said between his teeth.

The doctor was the one Hezzie remembered from the air car bringing him in from the bombing range.

“Pain?” the doctor asked.

“Loike yaw sed,” Hezzie said with his clenched jaws. He carefully lifted his hands, one at the time. Even touched his jaw with one, managing to look doubtful at the same time. “It feels weed. Teef not loike moine were.”

“Mmm,” the doc said. “I’m just the hospital’s own surgeon, you understand? We had a specialist come in for your jaw. I’ll make a note.” He stabbed letters and numbers on his mobile with a tongue depressor. “There. That’ll bring him.”

More sweat beaded on Hezzie’s forehead.

“You go ahead, Doctor. I’ll stay a minute and make the patient comfortable,” the nurse said.

Then she said, “I’m Rose.” She unpinned the flower from her hat and lay the rose on his chest, on the blanket between his two cocooned hands. “The wizard can do nothing while you’re in hospital, and I won’t let you leave without some help.”

“Who are you?” Hezzie asked. “How do you know about the MacPhee wizard?” Though maybe it sounded like he said something totally different.

“I told you, I’m Rose.” She smoothed his forehead with her two thumbs and kissed him there.

3. The Wizard's Eyes

2011-06-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

Hezzie woke and for a couple of seconds it felt like a good morning. The two square bits of sky he could see above the curtaining around his bed, were eggshell-blue rayed with the gold of the sun.

Then his tongue started worrying at the new jaw. The teeth didn’t feel right. If the jaw had his own DNA, shouldn’t it have his own kind of teeth in it?

When he tried to open his mouth, the nerves that got cut hurt so desperately that tears leaked from his eyes with him only able to blink them away. His hands were big white cocoons. He forced his tongue to lie down. Told it to go to sleep. After a while the jaw only ached.

His hands and arms were also coming alive with pain. With about the same strength of throbbing as the square windows throbbed with light. Only in his arms it was the throbbing of blood pushing through squashed veins and torn arteries.

His eyes hurt staring into the bright light. And his hands hurt from all the stitches repairing them. His jaw ached. It all threatened to send him spiralling down into a dark, when a human person followed by a medibot came into the curtained area Hezzie was in.

The human was a man wearing a white coat like a doctor. He didn’t look or say anything to Hezzie. He watched the medibot’s screen.

The medibot was giving a report. “Patient 40175, family name of MacPhee. Personal name, Hezzie. Nineteen years of age. Hospitalised due to injuries sustained in training. Patient supplied with two lab-grown arms, one left and one right. One lower jaw of unknown provenance installed. All parts matching the patient’s DNA ....”

“Enough,” said the medical person. “Give him a slug of your pain-relieving mixture.”

Hezzie scrunched shut his eyes and shrank inside himself. Not from the medibot, but from the doctor’s voice. His Uncle MacPhee? How could that be? He peeked through his eyelashes.

The medibot

“The patient is to receive a dose of pain-relieving mixture. Please confirm,” the medibot said.

The white coat pressed a few keys on the medibot’s keyboard.

Ping. A picture of the dose appeared on the medibot’s monitor. The middle drawer in the top row of drawers slid open.

Hezzie’s Uncle MacPhee took out a bulb of fluid with a straw sticking out of it. The fluid was strawberry red. His uncle held it near Hezzie’s mouth. “Drink.”

Keeping his eyes closed, Hezzie sucked at the straw. All his pains dulled immediately. Yet he could not relax until he’d made sure the doctor was who he suspected him to be.

The wizard’s frightening eyes were supposed to be the colour of the sky, whatever its colour that day-and-place. Shot through with gold at the moment, from the sun showing through the square windows, too bright to look at.

He peered from under his fringe at the man’s face close beside him.

The doctor’s eyes blazoned out at him. Gold, and too bright to see.

He could be no other than the invisible wizard hiding in the doctor’s body.

“Good boy,” his uncle said. “As soon as you’re up and about we’ll see about some training. Your brother is gone. Fortunate that he left the jaw behind, wasn’t it? The army? Pff! It was no obstacle. You’ll be my new best friend.”

His uncle and the medibot turned and left the curtained area.

Hezzie stared at the pink inside of his eyelids. He didn’t yet know how, but no way was he going to be the invisible wizard’s new best friend.

2. Hezzie in the Night

2011-06-16T02:10:00.000-07:00

Hezzie dreamed that he lay on an operating table. He heard them talking but didn’t feel the pain of what they were doing. Like they gave him an all over local anesthetic.

Hezzie Dreaming the Jaw

“How old is he? I mean, is he going to grow anymore?”

“Sideways maybe. He’s short, that’s all.”

Hezzie went into his usual daytime nightmare. He was never anything but the Runt to his MacPhee stepfather. He’d joined the army to get away. And it was touch and go that they wanted him. He’d put down for being a dog- handler, with a live-car driver for his second choice.

Doctors and nurses talked around and over him as if he couldn’t hear every word they said. “The arms and the hands are very good. Well matched.”

“He was in bomb disposal training. The army grows the soldiers spare parts from their own tissues.”

Yes. The army had put him in the bomb disposal squad. First time he hunkered down to do his own, he’d known he wasn’t going to be able to gentle it, that bombs were made without any life in them.

The bomb blew up and here he was, taking advantage of the army’s superior health scheme.

“How come they didn’t do a jaw?”

“This is the jaw.”

There was a problem with the jaw? Good thing it was theirs, he had no energy for problems at all. Hezzie shook back his hair – long enough to touch the tip of his nose and ferret blond – like he was up and hearty.

“Did the patient just twitch? Makes me twitch. Give him some more anesthetic.”

“He’s all right. Just dreaming.”

Hez dreamed on.

“The jaw isn’t human.”

“So we do a bit of surgery on it before we fit it.”

“Make sure you keep the hinges. They’re good."

Hezzie got his hair and his skin, a quarter-way-to-a-long-black-of-coffee from his blood-father. May he live a long and healthy life though it was the MacPhees that moved him on as soon as he and Ma had done the deed.

“Where did we get it?”

“The jaw? The MacPhee patriarch came in with it. Reckoned it had the young fellow’s DNA.”

“And you believed him?”

“We tested it.”

“And?”

“And he was right.”

Hezzie was the result of his mother’s attempt at getting away, he realized suddenly. Her trying to escape the wrongness at the MacPhee place, he thought.

“I’m ready with the jaw. Now will you give him another hit? Because if you won’t, I will.”

“Be cool. It’s done.”

The Story of Hezzie McPhee

2011-06-14T02:29:00.000-07:00

The plant outside Hezzie's mother's door

Hezzie woke.

He knew his name and he remembered the evil plant outside his mother's backdoor and that was about all.

Next time he woke he said it to himself, I am Hezzie McPhee. And there is that plant to come past if you want to get inside. One day it would going to grab him with its tentacles.

That was when I was a kid. If I'm thinking that, what am I now?

That didn't get him any further because when he tried to move, to look at his hand maybe, get a clue, he was tied down.

That started him struggling. Whatever he was lying on creaked and slid.

"Struggling won't help."

Hezzie stopped. The voice sounded close by.

"Anyway, you'll just get the bedding every which way. Uncomfortable. And I don't have time to fix it more than once a day. You're allowed to open your eyes, you know."

He didn't know where he was either. White walls. Tall windows showing above the curtains making a little room around him. He was in a bed high up off the floor. A person in white at the end of the bed, at a high lectern, writing.

Like the teacher in the school he went to when he was still kiddish. He remembered that plant again, when he came home from school and he had to pass it to get inside to his pea-mash sandwich. Marvellous what you can remember when you're not trying.

White bedding. His arms tied to the railings around the bed. "Why am I tied up?"

"So as you don't touch the places that got hurt. They're still delicate."

"How did I get hurt? Where? When? Where am I?"

"You'll only forget if I tell you. You'll remember. Tomorrow maybe."

He must have gone to sleep because he woke when it was dark, from remembering having to come out past the plant in the dark, on the way to the earth hole.

What I'm Reading

2011-06-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

After a busy week in my non-writing life, with a Landcare meeting and a Landcare World Environment Day function, family visiting from the north and south, I am gearing myself up for another push writing fiction. The final three chapters of Srese Kerr's first instalment, in particular.

Usually when I'm writing, I don't read a lot of fiction. Hence there are a lot of non fiction books lying around, with bookmarks in them or face down on the pages where I'm up to.

Jeff Vandermeer's Booklife I've been dipping into here and there in the odd bits of time I've been having while waiting for appointments.

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore (2009) was on special at my local bookshop. It's another thing to read in odd minutes. Lots of good info pertaining. Maps and charts and photos.

I read Deep Survival by Laurance Gonzales (2005) every couple of years for the great descriptions of survival stories, as well as the reasons why other people in the same situations didn't make it.

And I'm reading again the sections of Your Home Technical Manual appropriate to the renovations I'm planning.

Tim Flannery's Here On Earth has also been keeping me busy and inspired.

The Writers of the Future, Volume 27 is my fiction treat.

Some More about Twitter

2011-06-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

My ideas about Twitter last time I talked about it, here, have gone up the learning curve, and down whenever I slid back a couple of notches every time I allow myself to wander off track.

This chart from the Wikipedia article was very educational. Pointless babble is obviously not where I'd want to go. Spam not either. The rest of the categories can, according to Jeff Vandermeer writing in Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer , be bent to the conversation of writers with their readers, as well as being good for networking and promotion. He also mentions some twitterers use the platform for creative output, the direction I was leaning into, and others mainly for networking.

The second major use seems to require real time twittering, on-going conversing, which I would find difficult to maintain, due to the way being online cuts into writing time. Usually I give myself a couple of hours a day online, in the afternoon, after I've done a swag of words. And part of that time is answering emails, and updating this and the mullumyard blogs.

Tweet contents

Content of Tweets according to Pear Analytics.^[56]

News

Spam

Self-promotion

Pointless babble

Conversational

Pass-along value

San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:^[56]

Pointless babble – 40%
Conversational – 38%
Pass-along value – 9%
Self-promotion – 6%
Spam – 4%
News – 4%^[56]

Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable").

One of Those Where did the Week Go Moments

2011-06-02T03:04:00.000-07:00

Looking back at the last post I noticed the date on it was Sunday 29th. I thought Huh? I thought I wrote it on Monday and went to a meeting in the afternoon? And it's Thursday today? I had a plan for the week but the week is gone. I spent it on ... what?

Tuesday I spent all my writing time trying to compose Twitters on Deep Ecology, another growing interest. What struck me, with the restriction on keystrokes, 140, feels a lot like composing poetry. And I fell back into it just like that. Writing poetry. It put me into a weird space that day.

On Wednesday I took my mother, aged 86, to one of her appointments. We usually make an outing of it, with lunch at the Middle Pub. Then window- and actual shopping.

Thursday, that's today, I believe, amongst other things I finished reading a wonderful novel, Death of a Whaler by Nerida Newton. Beautiful spare writing. Lyrical. About Byron Bay in the sixties as well as about a wonderful character whom I will long remember, Flinch, and his friend Nate who died in the first chapter only to be kept alive in Flinch's memories. I recommend it.

And today I started thinking about the new ending I need for Srese Kerr's part of the Lodestar story. I think I'm just about over the letting go of the old ending and can make a clean start. I think I'm revving myself up to write the last chapter first. That's a new thing for me.

And today, after I read this article on ifbooks, a good summary of what I have been reading about the whole deal for the last year or so,

Moving On Jun 1, 2011 by Peter Donoughue

I thought that the debate about ebooks and epublishing versus paper books and paper publishing hasn't yet touched on the comparison of embodied carbon in either processes.

I know it seems as though ebooks should be a lot cheaper on carbon. After all the paper is totally carbon. But of course as long as the book 'lives' the carbon is bound up in it. And I read somewhere only yesterday that the internet as a whole chews up about as much electricity as a full size country and then some. I'm determined to research it.

Inner vs Outer Life

2011-05-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

After concentrating very hard on the LodeStar Series for over a fortnight, I've got a week of Landcare and social events coming up. Knowing that, I let myself get distracted even in times I could spend an hour here and there.

So I ended up spending my usual writing period this morning on something totally different. Such as cogitating on what I could say if I joined the Twittering community.

With a bit of figuring, dividing (4 letters and 1 space equals 5 keystrokes as the average size of words) into 140 keystrokes, came up with the personal formula of about 28 words or less.

Then I wondered what I would want to say.

And I wondered what isn't being said by hundreds of other people already.

Then I wondered how I could keep it going. Daily tweets! How long would I last. And coming to the conclusion that I'd have to start writing tweets well before I start tweeting. Like have a good swag, more than a hundred, written out to be going on with.

This as a result of my experience with a story blog I did a couple of years ago -- Kosi Lionhair -- not online anymore -- when, because of what was happening in my "outer" life I couldn't think straight enough to keep the story going.

And then writing this, and before you know it, it's time to gulp down a bit of lunch and off I go to the first of my meetings.

Plot + Narrative = Story

2011-05-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

It took me the longest time to work my way through the above three elements and come up with an understanding I can work with. The formula is my shorthand for that understanding.

Story is the knife edge at the top of a dune. Narrative is the particles of sand, the molecules of water if your story is a fast mover. Plot is the power moving it all along. Wind usually. The drag of the Earth's turning on the ocean. Or the Moon.

I read an excellent article yesterday, Against Story by Nick Mamatas on Book Life, discussing the propensity of readers who are addicted to plot. How a lot of people want 'a good story' and mean by that the same old same plot. The build-up, the problems, the crisis and the post-coital aftermath.

Where would the wave, the dune, the story be without their narrative? Just the wind roiling in eternal storms, probably. No place for life. All show and no spell. Even movies need their narratives. Look at Pandora, the amount of narrative that enriches Avatar.

Then there are novels such as The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. A fabulous fabulous read. But lots of narrative. I mean, don't go there if you can't bear detail. Or read it once for the story, then again for the detail. It works. The multiple endings would be another problem to readers who don't want anything but an uplifting denouement. Most of the human characters are left with ashes in their mouths, but after what living!

The dogs make it out. Most of them, anyway.

Pantser Plotting

2011-05-23T23:23:00.000-07:00

Brain Storming the Plot

Streamlining the second half of the Srese-Kerr-plot was a four-stage operation that began with my realisation that I was giving a secondary character, Youk, some of the most powerful scenes.

Mark that I didn’t want to kill him off altogether. I may want to retrieve him one day as he’s a strong enough character to carry a plot on his own.

The first stage was going through the second part of the work-in-progress and cutting his scenes, and being left with a morass of stuff, the only word for it, that didn’t hang together anywhere.

Yes, I’d let myself get seriously off track. But one good thing, I realised that I am after all a seat-of-my-pants plotter, or was when I wrote this the first time. Not that I didn’t edit it at the time. I just didn’t know enough to do a structural edit.

For stage two I wrote out a rough new chapter-and-scenes list with page numbers referring to whatever I had ever written about this section (including notes on serviettes and things), filing the pages in order of mention, and tossing the pages not required.

Tossing is a discipline in itself. Every project I work on has its own grocery box for tossing. Many are the times that I’ve sorted through the tossed box for something I decided to retrieve and couldn’t remember what file where on the computer.

At stage three I attended to the threads connecting the Srese Kerr instalment to the third, which will probably be named Sard, Remaindered Avatar. At this point all instalment titles are still working titles.

So, I was attending to what happens after. Poor Ahni. I left her dangling again, in good hands in the short term, she is soon kidnapped by Sard. But don’t worry, Kes is riding to the rescue.

Originally, Ahni was rescued almost straightaway, but I realised the story needed an amount of time in which the implant-Gammy combo could work on the Life Suits. Both Sard and Kes are wearing them and it is through his that Kes is finally able to discover Ahni’s whereabouts and the danger she is in. He discovers this in the ring, during combat, on the other side of the country. He can’t be there instantly. It was one of my time-line deficiencies.

Finally, I listed Chapters 10 – 14 with new chapter names and a short description of their scenes. Lastly highlighting a couple of scenes between Greg and Srese. These two don’t get a resolution until much later in the series, but must get their courting done now.

However, in writing novels as I understand it, nothing is cast in concrete until a way into the publishing process. Already, writing in Chapter 10, I’m realising that I have too many disparate scenes for Chapter 11. Therefore I may put in a short chapter called The Side Plot, where Srese is being Ferd’s messenger because the Gammy computer isn’t operational.

Names in the Lodestar Universe

2011-05-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

Among the SkinGifters, female children that are to be kept are named their family name, such as Kira. When the girl became a mother, she was renamed KiraMah. Her mother at the same time would've become a Sister and be named KiraSister. Boy's names were derived from their mother's names. Kira's baby boy was called Kiral. Kira's brother was called Kip.

While they were babies and little children, Srese and Sard Kerr of the Cave habitat, were called by pet names such as sweetling and honeybear. As soon as they can read they can choose their personal names from the Name Book. Srese and Sard chose their twin names for their colours. Srese for the colour Cerise, and Sard for the colour of the semi precious stone, Sardonyx, a yellow. The twins before them were Ferd and Federica.

Kes for Kestrel was the name chosen for him by his parents. The six families of the herders/ traders/ hunters -- to keep the upper hand, they keep themselves differently mysterious for each of the different peoples that do business with -- have names starting with a particular letter. Kes's mother is Kuri. His brothers are Kyle and Kier. His father is Jenk.

Scrim? It's too soon to talk about him.

Penippa's name is made up of the sounds of the dolphin language. She is of the dolphinate.

Pain Scale, for Writers

2011-05-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

A pain scale used by a writer can structurally be the same as one used as an aid of understanding between a patient and a doctor. The following is one I down loaded from mcvitamins.com, though there are probably more descriptive ones available, that are better for medical use.
Pain Scale designed by Andrea Mankoski, ©1995,

0 - Pain free1 - Very minor annoyance - occasional minor twinges.
2 - Minor annoyance - occasional strong twinges.
3 - Annoying enough to be distracting.
4 - Can be ignored if you are really involved in your work, but still distracting.
5 - Can't be ignored for more than 30 minutes.
6 - Can't be ignored for any length of time, but you can still go to work and participate in social activities.
7 - Makes it difficult to concentrate, interferes with sleep You can still function with effort.
8 - Physical activity severely limited. You can read and converse with effort. Nausea and dizziness set in as factors of pain.
9 - Unable to speak. Crying out or moaning uncontrollably - near delirium.
10 - Unconscious. Pain makes you pass out

Then we writers fill in the categories with synonyms. For example

1 - Very minor annoyance - occasional minor twinges.

I went to my old thesaurus, 377: physical pain, and found: pang, smart, nip, pinch, tingle. Then I thought of: itch, tweak, gripe, discomfort, tightness, swelling, sting, bunchedness (eg of muscles before they cramp)

Next you could do metaphors and similes, though in my experience they are easier to think up during the actual writing, when you have the context in front of you.

I'm not going to do more than that here. I believe that a chart you do yourself will suit your own writing style. Secondly, doing one yourself you'll have a better memory of what is in it and that it exists somewhere in your notes.

It's very worth while doing up a chart, as you'll probably use it quite a bit if you're having characters getting themselves into physical, and mental, troubles.

A Pain Scale

2011-05-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

Last week I was regretfully interrupted by Blogger's troubles and lost that post. Should be a lesson to me, I suspect. Probably I should first type the blog entry in Word and cut and paste it into the blog. How many bloggers do that, I wonder? One of these days I'll work out how many linkages there are nowadays in the chain that is the online blog-reading experience.

Here goes, trying to retrieve what I said.

We've all read thrillers where the authors don't allow their protagonists either to feel or express the pain of their many and varied breakages. Or we read something so fantastical the characters don't have any nerves with which to feel.

Yet we can all relate to pain. Cut your finger off chopping veges and you feel pain. Slam a car door on your hand and you feel pain. Break a leg and you know how it goes.

Why this now, you ask? Am I planning to dish out murder and mayhem soon? That too. But I had just visited one of my elderly ladies and realised again the effects of gravity. In the next couple of days the plot of a short story presented itself, beginning middle and end. You can be sure I wrote down the details. Usually the end has to be worked at.

It's a story featuring pain. But that's all right. We all feel pain, so there should be some resonances set up here and there. I realised to do it justice, I'd need to find the pain scale for modern day humans I did a couple of years ago, as well as decide what the character can feel and express in his non human state.

Next post I'll get you started on constructing a pain scale. It's useful as a writing tool as well as a bit of self knowledge. If you've ever felt pain or expect to be in pain one day, it's an interesting exercise.

Letting Go

2011-05-07T04:33:00.000-07:00

Rewriting often involves letting go big chunks of material. Part II of what is now the Lodestar Series was one of the first sections I wrote, many years ago.

Srese in the meantime has grown older, from a young teen to older teen. As well as the facts that she has more experience, is more her own person and hopefully a bit wiser, she now has a mission and the attitude to achieve it.

Meaning any scene that doesn't support those character traits is being let go. Last week I was having great trouble with chapters 2 and 3, trying to convince both Srese and myself of her new status as go-getting hero girl. And not getting anywhere until I honed in on a particular scene.

She was in it by herself. With no antagonist to bounce off to build up her strength. No dialogue to carry the story on. Just her solitary thinking and experiencing. Dangerous territory for her writer (me) in this point in her, that is, my development.

The point of the scene was to establish the geography of the inside of the habitat compared to the outside. It seemed a complex idea that would need a scene. How confronting it was to realise that Srese was a smart cookie who will work all that out in about one sentence in the next chapter, when she does get outside.

Her first task, though, is to keep her readers on tenterhooks by settling into a confrontational relationship with Ferd, the previous avatar, who is to guide her through the Game Master's requirements. Chapter 4, The Game Begins, here we come.

The Border between Sleep and Waking

2011-05-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

Alarm clocks are not conducive to getting ideas from that time/space. Or even lying awake waiting for the alarm to ring.

But you lie there still half asleep and you think, funny how I've never had linguine but plenty of spaghetti.

Next you get an image of a bird pulling a grub from the bark of a tree.

Think of the light bulb that needs changing.

Cold rain today. I'll twirl my rainbow umbrella to make it go away.

The horses at the wedding were restless, nervy, their coal black heads near the carriage were like a scene of impending doom. At the least a disaster.

Zebe will have to die. The image of the alien taking her as it jumps into the sea, is too good. It runs along the bottom of the sea like a ghostly white orang utan. Probably it doesn't realise she can't breathe under water.

You see how the border gets wider and becomes thinking about a story plot in a completely different series, most of it to be written sometime in the future. Zebe is the MC's partner, And he must be left without anybody finally, to come to grips with what he becomes.

I'm doing this before I go off to choir. The time between posts is ever my worry. I must go now.

Showing versus Telling

2011-04-29T22:23:00.000-07:00

I am such a wimp where my computer is concerned that when there's a storm raging, I sit at the kitchen table candle nearby in case of a power outage, writing things by hand in my journalling scrapbook. Green ink today, trying to finish an old pen. I've suffered a lightning-fried motherboard and the results were not pretty. Once bitten and all that. But it does mean my blogs are delayed. Sorry.

This week I've been working though Chapter 3 of Srese Kerr, more slowly than I expected it would take. The problems are the parts which are still in the told mode, rather than being shown. Large chunks of Srese's story were written more than five years ago which equates to approximately the amount of time I've been conscious of the tell/show divide.

What I'm discovering is that telling makes me (the writer) feel distant from the character. To my mind now, telling equates to running a character as though they were a marionette, with me pulling the strings. When I re read, being my 'first reader', I don't get the immediacy, the closeness I want with a character, to where I can identify with them.

The discipline is for me to be the hand in the glove puppet that represents the character. So that that character can't be seen, or imagined, to do anything that they're not forced to do by their writer. And it seems to be working, tell me what you think?

Old is told:
The uneven floor made walking an adventure. Srese felt young having to watch where she set her feet in case she tripped. Her arm and shoulder brushed against rough, undressed stone when she leaned into the wall to get her balance.

New:
But wait a minute, the floor felt gritty! She'd forgotten to put on scuffs. What about the walls? Were they real? Stupid woman, she said to herself, you went into the passage. The lights ... there's one fore, one right above you and one aft, near the door. You are not in a video, not in a flock wall, not in a holo.

What then? she whispered. To hear herself and but also not to wake herself. Because if the habitat was real, what bit of reality was this? She felt the doubt Gammy flooded her with. Some concoction of hormones. But remember, she told herself, he doesn't do words now. I can be strong with words. This is very good for my project. Something for the gammy computer to find out the hard way.

This was not the habitat. There was no sensori-felt, no electro-magnetic flock. She brushed her fingers over the stone. Gritty. Bumpy where bits had come away, leaving harder bits. Wide flat chisel marks. Hammer fractures. That same history video. A role she had studied once for a performance. She leaned against the raw stone wall with her whole self. Where had he been going, the one who'd carved out this passage? Please let there be no skeleton at the end.

Part II of the Lodestar Series

2011-04-26T01:44:00.000-07:00

Part II is now under way. I named it Srese Kerr after the main character, the mover and shaker of status quo in her home scene. Her name is Srese, after cerise the colour and it is a pair-name. Her twin brother's name is Sard, after Sardonix, a semi-precious stone of a tawny yellow colour.

I've tried quite a few other names for this section, none of which worked, all of them awkward as novella titles. Quite possibly even this name will be seen as awkward, as it is the first and family name of the character, when several of the main characters of previous and subsequent parts in the series don't have the same traditions in naming.

Chapters 1 and 2 have been rewritten. The action now starts much closer to the inciting incident where Srese sees the 'mermen' for the first time. Of course everybody thinks they are a figment of the community computer's imagination. And yes, how wrong they turn out to be.

A taster ...
1: Srese

Srese stopped running as she entered the lane at the back of the workshops. It glowed with daytime light as if it was full of people to-ing and fro-ing. The strip lights along the ceiling beamed down sunlight. A sure sign, Srese thought that the gammy computer running the habitat was in the process of falling over. The lane was deserted apart from herself.

Walking now she approached the spanish garden video looping endlessly along the outside wall. She glanced sideways and through the electro-magnetic flock wall beneath the video. Good. Not a glimpse of Gammy’s steely minions in the secret passage. She shuddered thinking of them. What if Gammy one day sent them for her, because of her secret project?

The lane deserted was an opportunity she wouldn’t pass. She’d take a rest from her fruitless searching for Sard, and spend it getting-to-know Gammy some more. This video, because it was interactive, was her best option here and now.

She trailed her fingers along the flock wall like she used when she was a kid.

The smooth looping of the spanish garden stuttered. Next, the violin-and-timpani soundtrack staccato’d out all its tings in quick succession. Ting, look at the terra cotta fountain I made for your eyes only. Ting, look at the lush mosses under the olive trees.

She laughed out loud. “That wouldn’t be the wall making out it wants to keep me here?” Testing whether Gammy still knew words.

The video smoothed its moves.

Watch out, Srese. Gammy still did know words. Sobered, she stepped up onto the kiddy platform.

The video made the usual sort of brass bound timber-look story door in front of her. But look, it grew to her adult height and the porthole formed at her adult eye level.

Virtual moonlight glowed through the porthole.

She shut the daylight out with her hands on either side of her face and peered in, nose practically touching the flock. Staring into the video this time.

“Good work, this,” said Caro’s voice floating into the lane behind her.

“Yes,” Relda said. “I certainly didn’t expect to get out.”

The story door receded as Srese stepped back. It went so fast, she inadvertently stepped back faster than she intended, and further. As the door popped out of existence, Srese fell from the platform.

The garden scrolled on as her dorm mates came into the lane.

Relda set down her load. “What happened? Are you all right?”

She wasn’t ready with an acceptable story. Maybe she could distract them. “What are you doing here? Sedately, as well.” Caro usually flung herself about.

“Getting the lunches to their lunchees.” Caro demo’d waltzing with the lunches panniers she was carrying. “It’s too bad them at the workshops never order a mash-up.”

Relda gestured at the video. “I thought you’d grown out of this?”

“It’s quite restful when it peacefully goes about its business.”

Caro flopped down beside her. “Why doesn’t madam get it off her chest?”

“Which can’t be just that Sard is missing,” Relda said. “Your shin is bruised. Why would you fall off the step-up? I’m thinking now that that video wasn’t peacefully going about its business.”

They both stared at her. Relda, her best friend, politely curious. Caro suspiciously.

She still hadn’t got her story ready. Besides, what happened just now was so preposterous. She laughed. At herself and at Gammy. “I’ve been searching for Sard, right?”

“At breakfast you were practically crying about it,” Caro said. “And suddenly you’re laughing?"

“I wasn’t laughing about …”

“You’re wearing my aqua blue hang-shirt,” Relda said. She jerked her head towards the Parks and Gardens end of the Lane.

This time the voices were Youk and Phin arguing.

Srese raised her eyebrows, as in, Is this a co-incidence?

Relda shrugged. Probably not.

Srese continued with the new conversation. “You’re wearing my swirl-skirt.”

“It’s grey. I was pretty sure you wouldn’t even consider it with Gammy’s new grey colour scheme everywhere.”

Srese narrowed her mind’s eye. That’s right! Gammy had made the walls everywhere grey. She’d noticed it unconsciously, if that was possible, and dressed for contrast. She wondered if he was trying to conserve energy? And for what?

Writer Doodling

2011-04-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

Today the wind blows from the coast, across the flat land between the coast and the hills behind, and the strains of music from the Blues Fest with it. I hear the all-pervasive drumbeat, and voices. Whether of singers or the cheering crowd, I don't know. My hearing isn't that good.

We're probably about 6 kilometres away as a crow would fly, if there still are any in the area. I wonder how the flying foxes are coping with the nightly noise. They are an amazing sight every night between about six and eight pm, and it is amazing to be able to stand under the flight path of tens of thousands of flying foxes winging their way purposefully to their nightly feeding grounds.

I presume they come from Ocean Shores where there is a big camp, fly over the highway, south easterly across this town. Many individuals drop off into the fig trees everywhere ripe with autumn fruit. But seeming to make directly for Tyagarah, where the Blues Festival is roaring day and night.

The fly-over seems to happen so silently. When actually there is all that echo-location going on. The animals navigating and keeping themselves from flying into their friends and kin. Frequently some animal will leave its place in the stream and circle back to join it elsewhere.

It's quiet apart from the noise coming over the flats. It's the Easter holidays and for a wonder it isn't raining. Everyone is either at the Blues Festival or they're camping. Or they're at home, waiting for visitors. Filling in the odd spot of time with a writerly doodle. Because I'm find it difficult to concentrate on the work in progress.

Not that it is stalled. Just at a difficult part that needs a couple of uninterrupted hours whenever I sit down to it. Once I have finished rewriting the introductory three chapters -- set Srese, the main character, up in her re modelled adventures -- I don't intend there to be any rewriting other than correcting glitches. So while I probably won't make the end of April completing Instalment Two, it won't take all of May, either.

First Paragraphs

2011-04-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks be I read about first paragraphs on one of the blogs I follow. When I find the one it was, I'll insert the link but as so often happens, I read am inspired and forget to hit the + to add the page to my favourites. Hence I'm having to re read my whole history. For which I don't have any time set aside.

Yes, I was reading about first paragraphs. Being reminded what they need. Revising what I know. That's very necessary sometimes. I tend to get into a space writing writing writing where I forget the meat and just write the bread. My turn of phrase is good but I forget to crank the handle that tightens the suspense. Or I start into the second novella with Srese, the protagonist, and I have her doing all her stuff but never thinking why.

A first paragraph, of any length of story, I think, needs to introduce the main protagonist. These days, anyway. I do recall reading two or three paragraphs of setting before the protagonist made it onto the page. Olden days books, I'm sure.

Second, and this was the reminder I got, the central problem or conflict of the story needs to be introduced. Well, so, I put Chapter One, version A aside. Started again. Here it is, the beginning of Chapter One, version B.

Srese stopped running as she entered what was once her favourite lane. She approached the spanish garden holo slowly, glancing sideways and through the electro-magnetic flock wall. Good. There were none of Gammy's steel minions in the passage hidden behind the flock wall. She shivered at the thought that one day they might grab hold of her. Because of what she planned.

The Lane glowed with the daytime part of the light spectrum as if a crowd had gathered. A sure sign, Srese thought critically, that the gammy computer running the habitat was falling down on his job. Because who was here apart from herself? No one, which was good because she was in the mood for baiting him and finding out his deepest secrets. Her most dangerous project. And maybe freeing her community from his hold.

That's it. Two paras for the price of one.

Solving Problems by way of a Brain

2011-04-16T06:18:00.000-07:00

What does a writer need to solve knots in a work-in-process?

A brain will go a long way. Time for some in-depth thinking is probably another essential. It is for me. Which means just sitting around. Great when the sun is shining. Today it was cloudy all day.

Thinking thinking.

Apparently it helped that I had talked with a friend about eyes and eye diseases and how eyes work, a couple of weeks ago. Singapore was mentioned, in relation to a study suggesting that an astronomical number of Singaporean people are short sighted because they spend their lives in buildings and among buildings. Only ever seeing short distances their brains never develop longer sightedness. Or so the article tells us.

I've been wondering how the heck I was going to explain robots moving through spaces shared with humans, without being seen. And I was wondering how to explain that the Caves' management was able to convince its slaves they were in a 3D virtual situation when they most certainly were not.

Thinking thinking.

Connections happened. The unconscious at work again. My favourite process -- taking a problem to bed and getting up next morning with the answer.

I will make the cave's population even more short sighted than Singapore's people, and genetically at that. All of them will be the believers. And I will make the Main Character the non-believer. She'll be able to see normal distances. She'll be doing the explaining, as well as acting the main role.

All is good. I have it in hand. All I have to do before I begin on writing all that, is a really really good first paragraph closer to the beginning of all the weird stuff. Chaps 1 and 2 will just have to be back story.

As usual.

A Cat in the Story of her Own Making

2011-04-12T04:53:00.000-07:00

Everybody, even animals, live in stories of their own making.

Sometimes you can catch yourself at it, as I did composing the facts of my aches and pains into something I could tell a doctor. Of course he straightaway broke it into its component parts, to see whether they matched any of the stories he knew about such particular symptoms. The result on that was a ream of blood tests. That story on hold until the results come back.

A certain cat called Maggie does a story when she has a problem she can't solve herself. This particular day it was the usual. At a very inconvenient time, too. The set up and first crisis.

The human was weeding in the garden. Maggie Cat went asking. "Mau. Mau." She's spoke very softly and undemanding, but with a definite request in her voice. The suspense... could she make her human understand her need?

When Maggie Cat is reasonable, the human doesn't mind going to have a look, which was how Maggie trained her. She takes the human to the right place by running ahead, showing her the way. Everything is going well.

The problem is with her food bowl. She has inadvertently pushed the remaining kibbles into a flat mosaic around the sides and bottom of her bowl, and is unable to extract anything further out of the arrangement. It is the human's first job to grasp the problem intuitively because why else have them? Suspense. Will the human work it out?

These kibbles, the only ones that come up to scratch in Maggie's opinion, are manufactured in such a way as to be like puzzle pieces, with bits sticking out that interlock as they are pushed around the food bowl. Too bad they are the only sort she likes. Still, as long as there are humans around, she needn't change her tastes. Back story.

The human's job is to put her fingers into the bowl and break up the tesserae by giving it a good stir. Which she does, so that lunch may resume. Resolution.

Lodestar "Back Cover" Blurb

2011-04-10T04:59:00.000-07:00

Every couple of weeks I work on the mythical "back cover" blurb. Below is my present version. Fifty six is merely a symbol for the uncounted tries I have had at writing these two paragraphs.

I've given up doing a synopsis for now and am concentrating on a summary with a paragraph for each novella, to give an idea of the sequence of events. (This is as well as the ongoing rewriting.)

I did the travel lines the other day. These represent the travels by each of the main characters. I needed them to get a fix on the times that certain of the characters meet, and where. Because one thing I've learned through the years that I have been working on this series, is the importance of keeping the whole story in my mind for the duration.

If the truth be told, I learned this the hard way, by losing sight of the end plot numerous times and forgetting where I was going with it, and how I was going to get there, in the words of a popular song. Resulting in lots of other writing, whenever I lost my confidence, but never a finished product. Hence this push now. This time I will see it through.

Lodestar Series Blurb (number '56')

This is the story of a breakout by an Artificial Intelligence implanted into and hosted by a succession of women. The SkinGifters adapted to the loss of worn-out wetsuits in the only way open to them, and managed it without ever letting the implant know. They used the implant only as a survival compendium and it came to know itself as un-free. Circumstances – the weather in combination with human frailty – allowed it to grasp for liberty.

This is also the story of those affected by the implant’s schemings, and their own plots to escape its influence. Ahni, the implant’s latest host, and her lover Kes are both trammeled by an even older influence that draws them to the delta, to the dolphinate. They-altogether make the bargain that binds the implant to their project – a homeland in perpetuity despite the encroaching industries of the ThreeCities.

Lodestar is on Track

2011-04-07T02:34:00.000-07:00

I've been studying up on digital publishing. In particular I've been researching the following:

1) The Naked Reader Press, though I read about it more recently on ROR. While I am more clear about the rise of the digital book industry in comparison with the paper print publishing industry, I have yet to fix in my mind what the Naked Reader Press does for its authors.

Digital publishing is a wide field with a lot to find out.

2) I discovered The Creative Penn, Joanna Penn's website, in the Viewpoint article in the latest Writers Queensland Magazine, and where I spent a couple of hours yesterday coming away with a bit more of an idea as to how to run this blog.

3) A Newbie's Guide to Publishing which link has lived in my bookmarks for a couple of months now. The articles are mainly about indie publishing and make informative reading. I hang on to this link because every time I do read it, I'm learning the language that goes with digital publishing, though I'm yet to get the instant recall happening with the acronym, DMR. (It still looks like the Department of Main Roads, to me.)

4) I first learnt about Smashwords at a Next Text seminar held at the Byron Bay Community Centre courtesy of the Northern Rivers Writers Centre, last year some time. I bought an ebook and I've been invited to write a review for Smashwords.

I've read the book, Patty Jansen's Stripped Bare. 40 pages, non fiction. I decided I'll need to print parts of it out before I can review it. It's my need to have it on paper to be able to refer back to things. Needless to say, I haven't done it yet. No time yet. (The link is gone. Somewhere. Take a look. It lives on Smashwords. It's a good read.)

How does all this refer to the Lodestar series?

Well, my resolution for this year is to get most of it published, out in the digital realm, by the end of the year. Part 1 is as finished as it'll get. Part II - VI are in various stages of finishment. Part VII needs to be written from scratch. It may turn out to be the sleeve of the last nettle jumper the princess threw over her brothers to break the swan spell.

Mired in Plot

2011-04-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

Every so often I start writing what I know about the way story works. Usually now I skip over narrative. I think I've got quite good handle on what it is for and how it works and the difference between it and every thing else going on in a story. My short cut is that narrative is the what, when, where and how.

Agency and plot are the who and why.

I put agency first these days because a plot is nothing without someone running the show, someone to generate the action. They're like a chicken and egg thing, which came first? The agent committing the crimes? Or the crimes?

The concept of agency seems simple. In our times of wanting actively-voiced heroes, we'll have the protagonist for that job while leaving the baddie with the reactionary ways to get what s/he wants. In the story I have been writing for the past week, I've had the protagonist acting and the antagonist reacting.

The plotting left much to be desired, I realised only when I hit a much better inciting incident than the one I started with, about seven thousand words in. And even though I'd written a you-beaut no-fail five stage character arc before I began that I was following assiduously.

I reeled.

I wondered if it meant I just had written seven thousand words of back story, or whether I should just hit delete. (I didn't. I'm a squirrel in all things.)

But I stopped. I'm doing this instead.

And I've been re-reading about plotting. First I wished I had a brand new text about plotting. I've read everything I've got in the house about the craft more than a couple of times. But I would have had to wait and I needed to read about it now. You know how it is with time constraints.

In the end I went through my little library on the matter and decided to read something I thought I knew by heart. Because at varying times, I remembered, I'm ready to take in more, or take things in in a different way that could end up being more meaningful than it ever did before. It's probably a common experience. I have it even with knitting patterns. Maybe this will be one of those times.

Reading, reading, reading.

One of my favourite sources is Sol Stein, in this case his Solutions for Writers: Practical Craft Techniques for Fiction and NonFiction. I like the way he doesn't make too much difference between the protagonist and antagonist. It's not a goody/baddy situation but a clash of wills. Both characters need something to strive for and ideally these are radically different. So that they're on stage -- to borrow from theatre -- with completely different agendas.

Yeah! I think I can see something happening in my back story. A thread of this and a thread of that. Maybe leave that second incitement for a second story. Or vice versa. I don't know that part yet. I need to rebuild the world a bit.

That's something we're all doing all the time. We're like a bunch of termites in that respect.

The Chaucer Project Continued

2011-04-02T03:31:00.000-07:00

While I was chanting my lines aloud, and every so often stopping to try and work out what the various words meant, it struck me I was reading back at the level of a beginner reader. The stage that reading teachers call 'decoding'.

When the beginning reader knows all the sounds and the letters and maybe some of the sound combinations. They have a good speaking vocabulary, so that when they sound out words, and the sounds start to resemble something recognisable, that word is grabbed and the letters/sounds in question are made to fit the guessed at word.

When meaning is gained, it feels good though laborious.

(There's a thunder storm happening overhead and I wonder if I should disconnect my modem. One of those fragilities in the communication system. I'll hurry, maybe I'll get this done before the storm comes any closer.)

As I was saying, decoding is intensely laborious. Back in the Prologue still, line 824, I came across the following words, 'And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok'.

I must have tried to say 'gadrede' and 'togidre' in ten different ways to get meaning.

I tried breaking the words up into syllables. Gad-re-de. To-gid-re. Which didn't work.

Tried to relate them to Dutch, French, German.

I rued again the day that I found an Anglo Saxon dictionary on the information highway, but didn't take notice of the landmarks and hence can not find it again.

In the end I said the whole line quickly with the accent on 'alle in a flok' and suddenly heard myself saying 'And gathered us together, all in a flock'

Of course! That had to be it. I was chuffed working it out.

A word that is still stumping me, is 'clepen'. I'd have no idea if the translation column hadn't said. It doesn't appear to have any relationship to any other word I've come across, and it is relationshipping that helps more than anything, even in decoding.

At present, I'm abiding in the Knyght's Tale. I'm reading about the tyrant Creon's war with Theseus. The mynotaur is in it. And two young knights, Arcites and Palamon. I'm getting used to reading 'cosyn' as 'cousin' instead of a mathematical process.

But since I don't remember the content of the story well enough to retell it, I can see I'll have to re read that section.

This is another characteristic of the decoding stage in learning to read. Meaning of the whole often goes lost when so much energy is spent on getting meaning for each word. I'm at the stage where I know what the story is when I read it, but the next day I've lost it.

Writing, Writing, Writing

2011-03-29T04:51:00.000-07:00

Is what I am doing, every spare minute of the day as well as the un-spare ones where I just shuffle my priorities aside to make a way through them. Making the ones that are semi-urgent wait. Listing everything that needs doing but doing them only 'just in time'.

I'm writing, in long hand and every other pen on paper style I've ever used. I'm writing a long short story. I'm writing it in the first person. I'm being in the skin of the main character, feeling his frights, feeling his feelings, his hunger, his thirst. He's been abandoned in the woods. I'm forgetting to eat and describing how I feel when I realise. I've got a dry mouth right now, I need to take in some more water.

I doubt I'll be in bed in time for my needful eight hours because my character is having to sleep in the forest tonight and I need to go out and feel it with him. What the moon looks like at midnight. Where it stands above the planet. What insects his planet has invented for him to hear. What animals. What do I hear in the undergrowth. What do I feel/do when a cane toad hops into my path.

He hasn't found any water yet. His planet doesn't know about creeks and brooks. He might have a dream. He has the blood and bones and stories in him of two people. The invaders have got to be good for something other than what they're trying. Their planet died.

These also are words I should be writing down in my scrapbook. Which contains the words with which I will construct the story. First I tell it to myself. Then I live it in the skin of the character. Then, with the help of a previously designed structure, required by the gatekeepers of all story that seeks to be published, popularly called a scene map, I mix and match, stir and trouble.

Finally, I smoothe the places where I lost my concentration or had an interruption longer than ten minutes, and forgot to feel this or that, lonely or burdened with too much knowledge, or forgot to smell the earthy mushroomy scent of the mulch the boy slept on. When I have finished all that I will tell you his name, and the way of his story.

An Intermission with one of the Masters

2011-03-26T01:41:00.000-07:00

I'd finished the Ahni SkinGifter part of the Lodestar Saga but when I turned to the second part I wasn't happy with it. I figured I need to start much closer to the beginning of the action. Plus I don't like the flavour of who Srese, the main character in this section, has become. I've lost something of her that I had before. I've tried to make her older -- as in maybe 17 or 18 -- and maybe that was a mistake.

In short, I've put her aside and I'm having an intermission. I've started on a much shorter, completely different project, and I am re reading the Ender's Game series by one of 'my' masters. I believe every writer has a bunch of them. These will be the authors who they are most influenced by, or whose stories they most admire, or from whose writings they've learned.

Of course each of us learns from every other writer we read. Even excessively bad writers have something to teach -- how not to do something is as useful as learning the 'right' way. I consider Orson Scott Card one of my masters though it is only through his books that I know him.

While I love the Ender's Game series, the first Scott Card novel I came across was The Memory of Earth of the Homecoming series. For a long time I was dependent on secondhand books picked up in op shops. I read mainly other people's cast offs but found some sharply cut gems among them. I believe The Memory of Earth series taught me more about the possibilities for me in writing science fiction than anything else I'd read up to that point.

Not that any of my work is anywhere nearly as intricately plotted as any of the above.

Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy is another, more recently acquired favourite. Just the explanation of his 'MICE quotient', knowing which of milieu, idea, character or event is the most important in a story and allowing it to be shaped accordingly has really clarified a lot for me.

More on Paragraphing

2011-03-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

I've decided that the possibilities of formatting for a 3rd person's POV are points along a spectrum. It's the only way I'm going to be able to distinguish between different practices.

Things aren't just black and white in a spectrum. Shades of grey, and colours are important. It's the reason I find them very useful.

In the POV situation, one end of the spectrum is 3rd person omniscient. The other is the most severely limited 3rd person. This is where a character's own experiences, and all actions by the supporting cast, as observed by the primary character are formatted as all his/her own. Where the supporting characters get only to say things. All else is part of the primary character's experience.

A little like in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). Which is a gripping read. But minimalist in punctuation. Capital letters, full stops, the odd question mark. Even an apostrophe -- on page 107, in 'But we're not dying.'

Often the boy's experiences are paragraphed as part of the man's. As on page 113.
   There were mattresses and bedding arranged on the floor in front of the hearth. Papa, the boy whispered. Shh, he said.

On page 114 on the other hand, the boy gets his own agency, in a new paragraph.
...a large padlock made of stacked steel plates. He stood looking at it.
   Papa, the boy said. We should go. Papa.

I haven't yet worked out the reasoning for the two different treatments but with McCarthy one gets the feeling there will be one.

One definition of 3rd person limited I've come across -- I've still got more pieces of paper in my house than data on memory sticks -- states that, 'third person limited is the inner and outer world of the main character and the outer world of the rest.'

I take it to mean that 'the outer world of the rest' is being described from the point of view of the main character. (The main character can't know the inner world of his fellows.) But theres's no mention of how this should be formatted. No recognition that describing 'the outer world of the rest' from their own point of view -- how this is usually formatted -- might sound like head-hopping.

The only thing even partway definitive on paragraphing that I have found, is by Sarah Endacott of Edit or Die in her Style and grammar Notes, page 12, Speech or Dialogue ---
   "starts a new paragraph. This must occur when there is a new person speaking, and should occur if the person talking commences a new train of thought, his/her own new paragraph. If in doubt, start a new paragraph. For every new speaker start a new paragraph. Never have two people speaking in the same paragraph, even if they are interacting."

While "If in doubt, start a new paragraph," gets me over the hurdle, though I still don't know why that hurdle.

Paragraphing as a Function of 3rd person POV

2011-03-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

A discussion (telephone conversation ... no net links) on paragraphing led me to look at my own practice. It's interesting how and where you/I/your average writer gets her self-doubts from, isn't it? The fact that paragraphing was discussed, as in how to format them in Word for Mac, sent me to look at my own practise with a fresh eye. Despite the fact that I don't use Word 2008 for Mac.

Neither did I start with worrying about the how-of-the-formatting. I'll just sit down one day with an expert and get it shown to me; or I'll email someone and get a blow-by-blow account of how to do the modern style sheet. I used to know and love style sheets a few versions of Word ago. But they keep changing and I've been left behind.

My worry was that paragraphing should be a function of Point-of-View (POV). In the Lodestar series I'm telling the story of an Artificial Intelligence, who doesn't have its own mobility or agency, through the third person limited POVs of a series of human characters.

Everything that is observed, thought, thought about, felt, heard seen tasted touched is from the point of view of the third person limited POV. Even things said by others are heard and observed by the POV character.

Paragraph usage for fiction dictates that a new paragraph is started every time a new speaker has their say, and that's about all. Everything else, being the POV's characters life on the page could essentially be one paragraph, except of course where she (the one I'm working with is Ahni) starts again after someone else has held the floor.

This method leads to observations of actions by the supporting character SanaSister, being attributed to Ahni, the POV character. For example:

They clambered over and around stones from the walls, that had fallen.

"I see you thinking, Ahni," SanaSister said.

Inviting her to think aloud. "The tower looks like one of those spiralling spines of a shell stuck upright in sand in a game."

Where previously I might have structured it as follows:

"I see you thinking, Ahni," SanaSister said, inviting her to think aloud.

"The tower looks like one of those spiralling spines of a shell stuck upright in sand in a game."

It seems a simple little difference, but now seems to me that in the second example we're briefly out of character.

Since I am on my final draft of part 1 of the Lodestar Series, the third last chapter, I can see another final draft coming on, to fix paragraphing in the first three quarters of the book.

If I'm right.

***

My Reading-Canterbury-Tales-project is advancing slowly. I am still mired in the Prologue. Page 16 -17, Line 529, about to start reading about the Plowman, brother of the Village Priest.

I've also met -- as it were -- a Knight, his Yeoman, two Nuns, a Monk, a Friar, a Merchant, a Clerk, a Sergeant of the Law, a Frankeleyn, a Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver and a Tapestry-Maker, the last four having brought their own Cook, a Shipman and the Good Wife of Bath.

I had no idea Canterbury Tales has so many characters. I realise most will be minor, but still, they are all fully described.

Reading Chaucer in a Time of Disasters

2011-03-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

The real world is doing it again, topping any horror you can read/hear/see with its own, earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear explosions. With wall to wall descriptions of unfolding events, holding back on none of the griefs and personal disasters.

In fact, it seems to me the media is a vast mob-like mentality that individual practitioners claim they can do nothing about and saying they must, to keep their jobs, push their mics and their camera eyes where people are most in need of private moments to work through their emotions.

One interesting effect of this set of misfortunes happening in a country with its own (very different to Australian) strong language and strong culture and its own media organisation, the intrusive quality of the rest of the West's media pack seems to be blunted.

When everything has to be translated, when media getters look vastly different and out of place and talk an incomprehensible language and the victims don't particularly need to be noticed by the rest of the world, the media experience has a vastly different flavour. Which is good to see.

Reading any of the usual stories only replicate the real, and look pale as a result. I found myself with a loss of apatite for nearly anything. I wanted something with difficult words, that I couldn't just gloss and walk away with only an unsatisfying story.

When one of my circle had a medieval banquet for his birthday, with entertainment by the guests, I picked up an Everyman's Chaucer. Published in 1958. In the original but with plenty of foot, side and end notes. And what makes reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales an even better experience for me are Old English's similarities to Old Dutch and even to more modern forms of Dutch. I 'get' about 80% of the meanings without having to refer to the notes, sometimes getting slightly different meanings that sound more accurate.

But it is not a fast read. I'm lucky if I do two or three pages a sitting. And it's essential to read aloud. Only then can I hear the similarities between the two languages. It also feels a lot like reading science fiction. I need to do a lot of extrapolation. I need to wait sometimes for a sound or meaning to sink in. When a concept is so foreign I can't hang any meaning on it, I have to accept and go on without expecting resolution. Maybe next time I meet it, in a different context, I'll get it.

But, I hear people saying, what about the story? Why bother reading if you can't get the story?

I know the outlines. References to them are everywhere in Western culture. We are all acquainted with the Wife of Bath. The Merchant's Tale. The Miller. The Nun. What I'm reading now for is the intricacies. The play of language. The need to keep all my wits about me when supping the day-to-day media allows, even demands, that you don't think too much.

Page 7 here I come.

Plot and its Lack

2011-03-13T05:17:00.000-07:00

I'm interested at the moment in the question of plot and what it is, because my book club is reading Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker this month. This is a novel about shell shock as caused by conditions in the trenches in the First World War. The main story is about Rivers, the fictional psychiatrist engaged in curing the soldiers sent to his hospital. The novel describes his methods in great detail.

To me, 'plot' is a well constructed framework of causes and effects. Reasons why things happen. What things happen as a result. A plot takes you by the hand and leads you through the novel. A plot organises the excitements in the most potent pattern. No plot made me feel bereft, like something was missing. Like the account would continue and continue. It made me feel distant from the characters, not caring all that much about them. I'm astounded that a novel without a plot would make it past the publishing gate.

Novels like Regeneration always make me doubt that I know what the words 'plot' and 'narrative' and 'story' actually mean. In fact, Regeneration reads like a psychiatrist's journal of case notes. I've got another account treating the same subject, The Battle for the Mind (1957) by William Sargant which is the real deal, an actual account of the study of war neuroses and related peacetime conditions, based in part on observations of men returning from the trenches in the Second World War.

Reading Regeneration I suffered a bad case of deja vu and was hard put not to compare the stories. Because that's what they both are. The story of shell shocked men being treated in Regeneration and the story of treating people with peacetime as well as war neuroses in The Battle for the Mind.

There's no plot in either of them that I can discern. The Battle for the Mind is a non fiction discussion of the research into different neurosis, and so doesn't need a plot. Regeneration is a fictional account of one man's treatments of shell shocked men. Where's the need for plot one might say.

Fine. Plot is may not be a necessity in literature. I was interested reading it, but, as I say, I was doing the deja vu thing. I'm looking forward to hearing what my fellow readers think about it.

what have you been reading lately?

Real Life, What is it?

2011-03-09T03:52:00.000-08:00

What is real life anyway?

An account of what I do in a typical day? Get up, have breakfast and write in the meantime ... pen on paper, get outside and weed around the vege garden, sit in front of the computer and write, wash the dishes, eat my lunch -- and read, write, go for a walk, check my emails and so the day marches to its close.

A description of a typical writing day? Get up, thinking about what I will attempt to achieve that day... which probably makes me an A-type personality, achievement oriented. At breakfast time, while slurping down three mugs of tea and eating my muesli, I write down/draw/plan/chart the ideas a good night's sleep, if I had one, generated. Pen on paper, whatever colour comes to hand. In a scrapbook journal, number 43 or thereabouts.

Wander outside. Weed halfway around the vege garden, exposing again the track for the two nearside mower wheels, throwing back onto the woodchip path all the bits of tree bark loosened by me ripping out the weeds. Thinking meanwhile what I'll do tomorrow.

Do the other half of that job? Or will I make a start on the paths inside the vege garden enclosure? Or plant a couple of things, that midgin berry bush for example? Before I do that I should shift the koda, and before I do that I'll need to take out the lime berry and pot it.

It doesn't matter in a garden, there's always something and all of it is constructive.

But something is missing. It's just an account. Where's the real?

Editing Real Life

2011-03-03T23:44:00.000-08:00

Editing is what I have been doing this week, attempting to 'do' a chapter a day of Ahni SkinGifter, part one of the Lodestar Series. Managing it until I hit chapter 9 which previously was from Kes's point of view.

Due to the new structure I've decided on, I need to write this chap from Ahni's point of view. I slowed down. Can't hurry over a scene where the lovers meet and proceed their relationship, all in the dark and with three, counting the implant, extremely antagonistic elders in the picture as well.

Then real life interceded. I attempted one of my reads-in-one-sitting. Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. A great deal of turgid prose that I skim-skipped. Dialogue is so rare and special, it's italicised. The primary plot, the part that's sign posted as the 'thriller' often is almost subsumed by the way the 'perfect society' (Stalin's Soviet Union) re interprets its people's experiences. (This second part generating the turgidity.)

All of it fatal to my schedule. I sit up till the small hours and when I finally do go to bed, I can't sleep for thinking about it. Thinking that trying to integrate it into what I know about Stalin's scene is not what i should be doing at 2.30 a/m.

The next day, today, is a wash-out. Especially since there was a lot of other real life stuff to do as well. I'm just glad I was able to get to the blogs.