Sunday, October 31, 2010

Samhain

Today marks Samhain, the ancient Celtic New Year.  It is a time when the Veil between the Worlds is thin, or in some cases non-existent.  Spirits of the ancestors walk among their descendants, offering wisdom and wise counsel, if we are ourselves wise enough to listen.

This is the background against which the first volume of The Glastonbury Chronicles was written. UNEASY LIES THE HEAD opens with Stephen Windsor celebrating his 25th birthday on 31 October 2065.  It is also the 25th anniversary of his father Richard's death.  It is a magical time, when the forces of the ancient Celtic Gods interact with mankind and anything can happen, and in this case, does, setting the scene for all manner of interesting revelations and complications in history, both past and future

The second volume in the series, THE SWORD OF THE KING went to press last week   It is available for pre-order from Pendraig Publishing and should be up on Amazon.com within a few days.

May you all have a Blessed Samhain.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

CHAPTER ONE

It really wasn't so hard to write those terrifying words: CHAPTER ONE.

After nearly two weeks of post-partum depression  following the completion of THE BLOOD OF KINGS and frantic editing of Volume II of The Glastonbury Chronicles: THE SWORD OF THE KING for release in about two weeks from now, I needed to start a new project, or rather to resurrect an old one.

SON OF AIR AND DARKNESS was itself Volume I of another series, Tales of the Dearg-Sidhe, and Dubhghall has been awaiting his turn to have his second tale told.  I had originally begin to write it several books ago, but The Lads as I call them, the heroes of The Glastonbury Chronicles had taken my Muse hostage and demanded their stories be told first.  Dubhghall retaliated, by showing up here and there in the background until by the last linear novel* in that series he had become a major character.  He has since wooed both me and the Muse back into his semi-historical world and I found the original first chapter of his second volume THE GREAT QUEEN'S HOUND languishing in an all but forgotten folder on my computer, but it wasn't really a chapter, considering what I knew he would experience in his far future.  It was a Prologue.  And Prologues lead to writing, in their own right, things called CHAPTER ONE.

It is done.  I'm hooked.  Dubhghall has his teeth in my neck and is draining every word from my mind as he rides me off into his next adventure, a long way through time and space from where he mounted the white mare at the end of his last adventure, but then, as he explains it, he does not always tell his stories in the order in which they happened, merely in the order in which he remembers them.

What a ride!

*last linear novel:  There will be more Glastonbury Chronicles...journals, stories of others related to the original characters, but  not following the time line in a linear manner as the first 5 books do

Friday, October 1, 2010

Aftermath

I finished THE BLOOD OF KINGS at 6:30 this morning.  I had gone to bed at 2AM, not comfortable with what I had written.  It was blah.  It was dreary.  It was meandering, losing the force behind the words.  I was exhausted.

At 5:30 the Muse woke me again and ordered me to sit at the keyboard and not get up again until I got it right, and I obeyed.

I shaved off 2 pages of rubbish which didn't belong, added one or two things that should have been there, and sat back to read the words.

The biggest problem was that I always knew how it would end, at least the basic shape of it.  For the last couple of weeks I have been absent from my blog because I have been racing toward that ending, the one I felt every minute of every day, saw, tasted, smelled, heard, every word they said together, every ripple of every muscle in Kevin's upper arms, every beat of Stephen's heart, every sanguine drop of it, and yet as I held it in my mind I knew no matter how badly I wanted to write it if I did so then I would never go back and write the chapters which led up to it and made it all work.

And so I held off, surprising myself along the way with hairpin turns of the plot I had not seen, characters I had not known existed, all important, all leading up to the final moments.

Perhaps it was my reluctance to let go that stayed my hand from the last few pages when the time was right to set them down.  Perhaps it was because I knew what finding those last few words to wrap it up would mean,:  I had lost them, this time perhaps forever.  Three months this time...who knows how many in the books before...and this was what I had been racing toward all along, never knowing it until the last, until the last few words were finally set down, and when they were, and when they sounded right it was as if the sword had found my heart and emptied it.

I cried.

I was alone, hollow, no voices in my head.  And in the aftermath...

The rest is silence.