The Current Project

Seek the Monster is finished.

Now I’m struggling with a new book.  Only a few scenes have been written, enough that came fast enough to make me hit a wall.  The setting was not just a problem.  Being some of the foundation for the premise, it was a big wall.  Hitting it hurt. 

Part of the idea came from reading Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Romance.  It is a wonderful book.  It is not his fault that I could not finish.  Like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it inspired so much thinking that I could not go on till I was finished thinking about things.  I’ve been doing so much thinking about Kant, that I’ve written five books because of it.  Who knows what I’ll do with Wizardry and Romance.  There was a line in his book that said, “They took the internal landscape of the mind and gave them external form.”

It had me thinking how the magic in my book, the fantasy, was rarely high magic. Sure, demi-gods walk around, and at least one spell did remarkable harm—but it wasn’t considered a spell by most.  The results were far more important, and no one considered a counter spell as an option.  (That would be the potion and speech of the Kuenyinsen in Fate of the Red Queen.)  I let the idea trouble me, and then saw an episode of CSI: New York, and then disaster struck for some of my friends.  I asked myself the question, “Isn’t love enough.”  And the first scene came. 

I didn’t want to write it.  For a week I avoided it.  And then I wrote and wrote and wrote… and the scenery made me hit a wall.  I balked.  I hated the story as it was.  It was too painful.  I was creating relationships where it looked as if love wasn’t enough.  (Don’t worry, it’s sort of an anti-romance.  I’m not romantic.  I never was).  And the landscape was lifting its desert island head and asking rather tough questions.  It was pointing an emphatic finger at the Moorcock quote, and just dangling all the other books in my face.  It was saying, “It’s not going to work.”

So I backed off and started to do research. 

I looked at Petra, meandered onto other rock cut temples, and stumbled upon the Lalibela rock cut church in Ethiopia.  It wasn’t what I had intended to look at, but it was… astonishing. 

But that wasn’t the only place I stumbled upon.  It suddenly occurs to me that “research” is the wrong word for what I do.  In no way is it a studious effort.  It’s not focused on a hypothesis or looking for any particular result.  Because I found the words on Martha Blake’s site, “Dualism: life and death, light and dark, spirit and soul, good and evil,[liii] divine and human, angels and jinn, truth and lie. Lunar calendar. Feeling of confinement in cave-like world, expressed in domed architecture.”  And then saw a TED talk on why Light needs Darkness.   All that happened in no particular order.  I think I saw the “domed architecture” and then saw the clip on hulu about light.  I’d been at that church, and then saw the curved light over the dancer, and went, “Wow!”  It was some time after that I saw the panorama tour of the rock cut church in Lalibela. 

Some Complted Projects

As for Seek the Monster. In case you are curious, some of the scenes started when I was in high school in the early '80's. Around that same time I wrote the short story, She Fades with the Firebirds. Somehere along the way "She Fades with the Firebirds" was melded into the original Steeds for the initial concept, which was some sort of black furry swan that glowed blue. Somewhere along the way the story overtook the Firebirds, stomped through archeology, and ended up with demons and werewolves. Vargulfs to be a little more exact.

The Bone Reader is the novel that got me back into writing when I thought I'd give up. Here is a deleted scene from The Bone Reader. There was a lot of revisioning of the novel. I cut the first 20 pages, made the story start with what had been a prologue, and moved the pertinent action further up. That scene, however, just gets a passing mention, but I thought it funny. It isn't polished, but I thought it would be fun to put in a deleted scene the way they do with DVDs.