Here We Go Again

The June 21 release of Volume II of Tales of the Dearg-Sidhe, THE GREAT QUEEN'S HOUND (aka Dubhghall 2)  has been edited and is on its way to the publisher. 

I had promised myself at least a weekend off before I started anything new.  I was going to go to archery practice today, to work it all our with the feeling of the bow in my hand and the hand-eye coordination it takes to hit the target with that all-fulfilling sound of arrow piercing paper.

But the Gods had other ideas.  Last night it started to rain. OK, granted it was wet at Agincourt, but that was Agincourt.  We who live in Southern California have forgotten what rain is, for the most part, even if we have come from wetter climes and our appreciation of historical precedent does not factor into the desire to avoid mud and the craziness of drivers who have no idea what cars do in the rain.

So last night I stayed up way past the hour I would have stayed up till had I really supposed I was going to be on the range this morning, and The Muse bent my shell-like ear and said those magic words "What if" again, and I, resolute as I can be, said "NO!", but not before I had, in fact, typed the dread words "Chapter One" into the electron stream which has become my life.

And then I erased it, determined to go to bed.

She was not finished with me yet, however.

Somewhere, in the deep dark recesses of my brain there lurked a memory of a novel  had started some 16 years ago, a mystery novel entitled "AROUND IN CIRCLES" and The Muse guided my hand to the file, somehow preserved and transmitted to this computer, several generations newer then the one upon which this had been written, and I opened it and read the first chapter and saw that it was good.

The words "CHAPTER ONE" were already there, in caps, and about 10 pages of text which needed a few changes to bring them into this century, but I was hooked and my publisher was hooked when I sent him the chapter this morning, and...

...and I face this with a smidge of trepidation on many fronts.  First, I have never written a real mystery before, though I have had mysteries surface in the course of my other novels.  Second, the style of writing is very noir, something not my usual style at all.  Third, I am taking on the persona of Yank detective, based in Los Angeles., which means I have to change my spell check to U. S.  English and hope for the best.

Sigh.

At least I'm a Gemini.

Birthing A Book

For some reason this one went easier than the last.  No more 4 AM feedings of the Muse, no more  coming to bed at the crack of dawn with the words "Finished another chapter" on my lips.  This one left my keyboard yesterday afternoon, with no sense of post-partum depression, only the sense that I had taken another step along the journey as my characters took theirs.

"THE GREAT QUEEN'S HOUND" is the second installment in the saga of Dubhghall mac Cu, "Tales of the Dearg-Sidhe", who finds himself in the midst of the 12th Century  anarchy between Stephen of Blois and Empress Mathilda, both claiming the right to rule England after the death of Henry I, but there are darker forces at work than mere politics, forces which have been lurking for centuries, forces which Dubhghall first encountered during Boudicca's rebellion against Rome.  With the fall of the Roman Empire being succeeded by the new Holy Roman Empire in which the Old Faith has gone underground, will The Morrigan, the Great Queen of Battle and Sovereignty and Her foster-son Dubhghall be able to protect Britain against this old evil which threatens annihilation of all that stands in its way, or will the Dark Ages return in an even darker, even more sinister fashion?

Find out June 21, when "THE GREAT QUEEN'S HOUND" is released by Pendraig Publishing.

Into The Electronic Age

It takes some getting used to, just as writing on an electric typewriter and using a copy machine replaced slogging away on a  manual typewriter with carbon paper, and just as that gave way to electronic word processing and the ever-easier use of the computer and word processing programmes with discs and CDs for back-up, just as the  thought process made the transition between writing everything out first in black ink in a lined yellow pad to being able to actually compose on a keyboard...now I have to get used to reading my own books on not just the computer screen, but...oh the incredibility of it...on my iPhone.

Yesterday "Uneasy Lies The Head", Volume I of the Glastonbury Chronicles went up on Kindle on Amazon.com and I am told "The Sword of The King", Volume II of the Glastonbury Chronicles and "Son of Air and Darkness" (although it is not advertised as such, Volume I of Tales of the Dearg-Sidhe) are not far behind.  Books, months of writing and editing, all available on that tiny little screen of my cell phone as well as on my computer or a Kindle reading device.  What once was printed on hundreds of sheets of paper, now electronically sent to my phone and computer and now truly the size that can fit into my pocket or purse.

What would the great authors I grew up reading have thought?  William Shakespeare? Mark Twain?  Charles Dickens?  Even Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov?  J. R. R. Tolkien?  Would they have been amazed at this new frontier of publication?  Would it have been considered wizardry or witchcraft?  For that matter , how would Mr. Shakespeare have felt about motion picture versions of his plays?  Or Mr. Dickens about audiobooks? 

Oh brave new world that hath such contraptions in it!

And now this brand new e-Author  has to go find her book...it's ringing in the background.

SEQUELS

THE SWORD OF THE KING is the second installment of The Glastonbury Chronicles.  It was a joy to write, as the main characters are not only identical twins, they were conjoined at birth...difficult enough, though the physical separation was fairly easy (the 22nd Century has marvellous medical procedures) but in this case extremely important, for it makes both of  them the first-born son of the King and Queen of England, therefore both first in line for the throne.  It doesn't make matters easier that they have not only the special communication twins are famous for having; these two, Kieran and Neil, are totally telepathic.  Possibly this comes from the fact that in a prior life they had died together, Stephen and Kevin, King and King-slayer, and the bloodlines of both had merged when Stephen had married a descendant of Walter Tyrell and Kevin, a Watson of the Tyrell line, had married Stephen's sister Stacy.

The situation of course gets more complicated when they both fall in love with the same woman and mysterious deaths begin plaguing the royal families of both England and Scotland, and both brothers realise where their destinies lie: one must become the King, the other must eventually kill him...but which is which?

I was not even sure of the final outcome until about 5 pages before I wrote it. 

Reading it is one thing; writing it is another, entirely.

When you finish reading a book you can put it down and go on with your life.  When you finish writing a book you are left wondering what about the lives you have created in the book...what happens to them next?

When I finished UNEASY LIES THE HEAD I thought it was over.  That was it.  There was not going to be a sequel.  I had effectively done everything in my power to clean up all the loose ends so there would not, could not, be a sequel. 

Or so I thought. 

The Lads, as I have come to call them, had different ideas.  They began pestering me at all hours, wanting to come out and play again. I even started writing another novel, a book about Dubhghall.  Somehow they worked themselves into it.  And still they wanted more.  Finally I gave in, and there was another book.  A journal of Kevin Watson, called THE SWORD BENEATH THE ROSE (which is scheduled to be published at the end of the series)  And that one was going to be the last.  But no:  There were more stories, and they wanted to tell them.  THE SWORD OF THE KING is the second chronological story in the series.  So far there are five books plus the journals, plus whatever else they cook up.  (Did I mention the Tarot cards?)

The Lads are still nattering at me in the background as I try to put together the second volume of Tales of  the Dearg-Sidhe, THE GREAT QUEEN'S HOUND.  Poor Dubhghall is having a hard time getting a word in edgewise, but he will prevail.  They have to sleep sometime.  He doesn't sleep.

Neither, it seems, do I.

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.

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

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.