my heart is a glorious machine;

Bah. Have come to least favourite part of writing: when the gaps in the plot catch up with me. I've been writing wonderfully over the last week! Three pages two days in a row! Some of what came out was a bit awful, but it got the story where it needed to go and can always be helped later. And I've got three chapters written now, which is lovely. But alack alack, after five or six pages of Chapter IV, I no longer know what I am doing. Evy's dealt with post-traumatic stress, avoided the press, talked to the Ministry, had Mr Caruthers over for dinner, furtively admired his coat, bantered, had weird dreams, helped to repair things at the library, and now... I need MOAR PLOT. I need 1. Mr Caruthers to do something rather startlingly badass and hastily pass it off as, er, good reflexes? (um, can you kill a vampire with an umbrella? especially if that umbrella is tipped with oak or iron?), and 2. for the Ministry to come back and say, by the way, we want you now. Trouble is, so far she's only accidentally killed a lot of vampires with some sunlight, and while sunlight isn't exactly commonly conjured, I'm also not seeing anything that would scream to the Ministry "LOOK LOOK HERE IS A TOOL YOU CAN SHAPE". Also cos I don't really know what the vampires are up to and maybe it's not even the government that pulls Evy into all of this, it's the vampires themselves, because Something Is Going On, and all I know is that it probably involves the Germans?

WRITING A NOVEL IS HARD.

I'm also not exactly sure how the pre-WWI vampires-and-politics plotline ties in with the Tam-Lin plotline, except that Mr Caruthers is somehow in the middle of both of them. And has a coat. Of awesomeness.

An excerpt from the Novel, mostly for lady_moriel, who suggested -- nay, begged -- that I include it somehow.


(Currently writing my fifty-second page! \o/)

I have discovered a marvellous thing. It is called morning coffee.

(Picture here, if you will, my parents laughing uproariously at me, as they have been trying to get me to drink coffee most of my life, it seems.)

Somehow in the last few weeks it has gone from a bitter, unfriendly, if glorious-smelling, concoction to the epitome of deliciousness. I think I must have gone for it again out of sheer desperation on one of the mornings I was trying to turn back into a person who sleeps normally by not fumbling through sleeping and awake-but-dizzy until four in the afternoon or so, and dumped loads of milk and sugar in it, and lo! It was very nearly palatable. Very nearly. (On New Year's Day, when I downed a cup to get me through an afternoon of work at the deathly boring kiosk after staying up very very late with the usual lot, I spent the entire cup stalking through the house, gulping it down and shouting bleah!) And then I tried it again the next morning. Before I knew what had happened to my unsuspecting tastebuds, I was in love.

It helps that I have my own very pretty Art Nouveau mug in which to drink it every morning. But aside from the fetching mug, the flavour! It is so wonderful and cosy! The caffeine! It is so fantastic and day-starting and inspiration-bringing! 

I do not have a morning newspaper, and I prefer to read novels on my stomach, so what I am trying out now, after the ten minutes it usually takes me to read my email and all of the Twitter that happened during the night, is writing. By "trying", I mean "I've done it a couple of times this week", but it is working out rather all right. And the jump of caffeine has my brain all energised and ready to think of interesting things. I am on my forty-second page! It took me three months once to write a nine-page short story! I am improving! (Meanwhile, Catherynne M. Valente Twitters that she has finished writing her splendiferous online serial novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, which she started a mere couple of months ago. I flush emerald.) 

And my last gulp of coffee has gone cold, Evangeline needs to finish being unconscious, and a large black cat has made himself comfortable in my lap. It's a fey, misty morning -- you can smell Autumn coming, even when you don't hear it in the farewell calls of nightflying geese and the wuthering of the wind, or glimpse it in the brief glimmer of red and gold hidden in the furthest branches of the trees.

The most glorious mess of a thunderstorm just roared over the hills -- all blinding rain and howls of thunder and the thick scent of sweat and dust rising, expelled, from the earth. The sky's been green. I had to light all the candles I could and shrug into my white lace skirt (to go with, you know, my folkloretastic Vampires Beware t-shirt...), and now I feel rather compelled to share with you the music I was listening to when the brunt of the storm hit, which happens to be this crazy raucous Victorian street punkfolk, with lots of group shouting and singing saw and accordion and stuff. ♫ "Honey in the Hair" by Blackbird Raum. This is totally research for my novel. Totally. In, um, a frame-of-mind sort of way? I have to get into young Rue Caruthers*' mind somehow, yes? And this is exactly what he would have listened to. No really. (Also wondering, really, how close might street music have got to this back then? Research topic three hundred and nine: London musical culture, high and low, at the turn of the century.) Also, er, apparently Stuff Mr Caruthers Would Have Listened To As A Young Victorian Punk is my new musical kink (see also: Arcade Fire, Rose Kemp, Pale Young Gentlemen, Patrick Wolf, Dark Dark Dark... are you kidding, of course I'm making a mix).

On the subject of the ever-present Novel, I wrote this bit late last night, and upon waking it seemed awfully anachronistic. Thoughts?


Er, on the subject of music and also vampires... this is the first song that's properly mine that I've properly recorded. ♫ Black is the Colour of My True Love's Heart, in which, as usual, I hear a traditional ballad and just know there's an alternate version out there in which he's a vampire and she has to kill him what is wrong with me. Anyway, there's a flaily first attempt at music production in here, too, consisting of me making weird noises with my mother's African thumb piano and then manipulating and repeating them in two different ways. I don't even know if it works, I've been messing with this song for so long.

As I continue work on the Evangeline story, I realise how much I still need and want to learn about the era I'm writing in. It bothers me, for example, that all characters, major and minor, are automatically white in my head, because I don't have any real concept of racial diversity in 1912 England, but there has to have been a fair amount, because this is the British Empire that the sun never sets on, and inter-global travel is just becoming a real possibility with trains and steamships and everything. And if people from the further reaches of the Empire come to London, what roles do they play in society? I also don't really know what it would be like, really, to walk down a main street -- there are vendors, right? What sort of food and wares are they selling? What's the motorcar-to-horse-drawn-carriage ratio? What does everything smell like? What sort of music did people really listen to? (Props for finding popular songs that do not make me want to stab my eyes and ears out; I paged through a book of popular not-folk-songs from the early twentieth century and the lyric quality was atrocious. Clichés breeding like horny rabbits, nauseatingly sentimental concepts, incredibly lame wordplay... awful.) I've found a source for researching food, finally -- my grandmother gave me a cookbook of Yorkshire food, with historical notes and pictures and things, and the author has got a whole series of similar books, one of which is on London. Hurrah! Camilla does a lot of cooking, and the evening meal really is the heart of the Nox family day, and yet I'm still very unsure as to how experimental people got with food back then, how much the cultural exchange affected what people ate -- curries are popular in England now, but were they a hundred years ago? -- how much food cost, how likely desserts or snacks would be, what people ate for cold lunches and things.

As for the I-should-have-known-this-all-along Tam-Lin elements, Evangeline and Mr Caruthers fit pretty strongly into the Janet/Tam-Lin roles. Which reminds me, one of the reasons Tam-Lin is so awesome -- and why, I suspect, it attracts so much exploration in fiction -- is because Janet is one of the earliest kickass heroines of (Western?) fantasy. Janet saves her man. I love it. Also, I remind myself, just because you're exploring it here, doesn't mean you've used up all of your Tam-Lin credits and can't ever write another riff or adaptation -- Robin McKinley did two Beauty and the Beasts, remember? And Beauty and the Beast crops up again in Sunshine, in both obvious and subtle ways. And they're all awesome books. (Only... I am not Robin McKinley. She is way cooler than me, although she may be one of the few people I write faster than.) The vampire woman who coerces young Mr Caruthers into Some Vampire Nonsense is the Faerie Queen, I think, except I also think she's dead(...er) by the time Our Story begins. Maybe all of the vampires operate as the Faerie Queen, because there really are no vampire leaders, although there are probably a few especially powerful or charismatic vampires who are looked up to by the tribes at large.

The tithe... I think I'm getting closer and closer to understanding this bit. The woman on the library steps... I said that I realised she wasn't a warning but a ritual? I'm beginning to understand that she's only the first. I think people start turning up vampirely dead all over London, and this is primarily what Evangeline is recruited to stop -- probably because she was so good at accidentally destroying a whole room of vampires the time they tried to lay siege on the library (still trying to work out why any of that happened). It's something to do with the Industrial Revolution, or the war that maybe only they know is coming (also need so badly to read about the cultural climate that lead to the Great War), and they're trying to stop it happening? Stop it encroaching on their way of, erm, unlife? And Mr Caruthers, for one reason or another or perhaps a whole host of them, is the required -- wow, I was about to say Final Sacrifice, but, um. (Rowsdower Rowsdower Rowsa-rowsa-rowsdower!) And I've always liked the concept at the end of the ballad, where the Faerie Queen turns Tam-Lin into various things and Janet has to keep hold of him, and remember that he is the man she loves, and not to be decieved by the Faerie Queen's illusions, and I'm interested to see what I could do with that in this story, with Mr Caruthers (becoming various versions of himself, past, future, and purely speculative?).

Note: the element in which Janet is pregnant by Tam-Lin is not at all present in this story. In case you were wondering. :/ Also, I'm intrigued by the last line of the ballad, where the Faerie Queen says that if she'd known that all of this would have happened, she would have turned Tam-Lin into a tree -- in my 'verse, trees are sort of the antithesis of evil magic, which is why wooden stakes kill vampires. Trees equal life.

I've just been out on the lawn, basking in the sun like some sort of cat or reptile or what have you; I have never been so ravenous for sunlight. My skin grows impatient when the sun ducks behind a cloud for a few moments. (I am wearing this, which is very apt for daydreaming in the sun on a day full of breezes, not to mention listening to acres of New Weird America and freak folk. Speaking of which, Daddy got me Steeleye Span for my birthday, "for old times' sake". ♥) Lying in the sun gets the brain to wandering over all sorts of odd paths, and I have just realised several things about my poor messy Evangeline story, which I shall set down because a) for some reason some of you lot seem to miss hearing about it, and b) someone might even have an idea which I will gladly take for a test run.

Let me see -- when I was discussing the story with Kyra last month, she helped me to realise that the library is protected -- I've been running with the vampires-can't-cross-threshold-unless-invited myth and working out how the magics would work mechanically, so to speak, and you can't make them, they have to be -- a psychic barrier of lived-inness protects a house from undead intruders; a house that's just been moved into would be less protected, the older a house is the more difficult it is for vampires to get in, temporary lodgings might be susceptible; it is entirely possible that vampires could get into Mr Caruthers' rooms without much trouble as he is hardly ever there and has no attachment to the place, nor has he really lived there. Anyway, the library is loved and lived-in by so many people -- especially Evangeline and Mr Caruthers -- that it does have that threshold protection, but it becomes significantly weaker when Mr Caruthers is absent. I'm not quite certain why he is so strongly tied to the building; perhaps it has something to do with the reservoir-of-magic/ley lines/something important that is built into/under/around/something the library, and probably Mr Caruthers having mucked about with unpleasant and too-powerful magics in his youth. Because the library is so tied to Mr Caruthers, at this point Evangeline's strong attachment to it does not affect the barrier much. He goes off on some Mysterious Plot-Important Errand at the beginning of the story, vampires break in, plot happens, people die, yay.

And then! While lying in the sun I realised that the vampires were looking for Evangeline when they broke into the library: and they got Lottie instead, because of some sort of misinformation, I don't know. I don't want to make this obvious on the outset, either. (They may have been interested in Mr Caruthers as well, I don't know, but understood they couldn't breach the library if he was there -- and Evangeline has something that they Need.) I think what they want Evy for is her story-sensing -- there's some kind of unrest, quite possibly related to the slow-building unrest which will only need the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in less than two years to ignite the tinder for war, which may or may not involve governments trying to figure out how they can use vampires for things. (Rubbish, this is getting too complicated! I want a smaller story! Stoppit!) I am beginning to think that there is no useful future-seeing amongst the vampires because their unlife puts them out of time in a way -- so while some of them may get glimpses of the future it's not necessarily distinguishable from past or present or hallucination and is usually very random and unlikely to be at all connected to anything that the vampire could find useful -- since they absorb memories from the people they drink, they may be getting a glimpse of one of those lives, or perhaps the future of someone known by those people, and memories may tangle together as there is so much mixed blood. (There's a running idea of memory existing in the blood, and I must commend cherise for setting me on that path. ♥) Anyway, Evy has the ability to see storylines, or something like that, and the vampires either want to turn her or consume her with the idea that by one of them drawing all of her blood into themselves they will acquire her ability. I don't know, this is the first stage of that idea.

But then Mr Caruthers is also very very important and in some way key, and I'm beginning to understand that part of the end everything is leading to is the vampires wanting him or Mr Caruthers offering himself up as a tithe for some ritual/ceremony/use of magics -- a la Tam Lin. It is entirely possible that he would offer himself up out of sheer guilt -- he has this dangerous more-than-a-residue of the black magics that he toyed with irresponsibly as a youth and they could very well explode and do terrible things and he can't really control it, but willingly sacrficing himself in a situation in which a great explosion of magic would actually be a solution, well... And self-sacrifice would also cleanse the magics of their destructiveness. However, I have no plans nor desire to kill him, so that end will have to be worked through somehow.

There's also something about the trees of London coming to the aid of the city, in a way -- shadowempress suggested something having to with the essence of London that led to this idea. That fits with my idea that trees, as representations of life, are why stakes of wood can kill vampires, though I'd like a better understanding of why certain plants ward better than others (holly, for example, and, hey, garlic?). if wood is dangerous, imagine how well the trees could overcome the vampires. That's the germ of the germ of an idea, though.

Oh dear. 

Fairly often, when I am at my job and having to entertain myself by people-watching (which is not as interesting as it could be, in a town of this size and location and culture: nearly everyone looks the same, and sometimes their clothing is very depressing, what with the pyjama trousers and sweats and horrible horrible shoes), there is a an attractive young bloke wandering about looking resplendent in a long black leather duster. He has extremely nice hair. I mention this because he looks so very much like someone who ought to be in a story that I am trying to find one he goes to. The last time I saw him he had a dress shirt and tie under his black t-shirt. It was pleasing unto my sight. Of course someday I will find out that he has some horrible name like Ryan or Jared and can't carry on an intelligent conversation, and anyway I suspect that he is some sort of evil fey creature stalking about the mall looking for souls to eat, though he seems fairly amiable. (Despite this, the Phouka from War for the Oaks will insist on springing to mind although the coat bloke looks nothing like him except for the dark hair and eccentric dress sense.) 

Work has been absolutely as usual, though perhaps even slower, and the weather has been dismal: no, the weather is extremely pretty, and I would love it if I had a warmer house and didn't have to go out in it. Lately I have been driven to and from work, though, which is good, especially as supervisors and co-workers keep looking at me very concerned-like, and saying things like, "you didn't bicycle here, did you?" and "YOU ARE NOT BICYCLING HOME TONIGHT I MEAN IT." One of the girls quit (?! why would you quit with no notice when you only have a week and a half left anyway?), so shifts have been shifted around -- so to speak! -- and I have the evening shift on Friday, and the morning shift on Saturday; the latter in particular makes me happy, because that leaves most of the daylight hours free. You get up, do your work, and the rest of the day is ready to be used as you will.

Last night I did find my magic, almost by accident. I went upstairs and lit the candelabra on my desk and put on a new album -- Liam O Maonlai, To Be Tender, which I was attracted to because apparently Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova funded this album out of the proceeds from the last Swell Season tour (as if they didn't need another way to be awesome), and Mar sings on some of the tracks -- I think Glen sings on one, too? -- and anyway it was stunning. Otherworldly and heady with story -- story is the only word I can come up with for that feeling of being tangled up in some strange and wondrous tapestry of love and grief and joy, human experiences and textures and windows and street corners and the motions of hands. Vienna Teng does this to me; Over the Rhine; Patty Griffin; Sarah Slean; Lisa Hannigan; Richard Shindell. And sometimes I'd get a dizzying glimpse of Ireland in its ancientness and strangeness. And I wanted to do something while I listened, because I wasn't ready to go to sleep yet, and when I opened up the short story I am trying to write the mood was all wrong for the mood I was in and the music, so -- somehow I started re-writing the Evangeline story. I've got two pages into the first chapter, which is very satisfying now that I know most of the primary characters -- Lottie and Mr Caruthers are introduced straight off, and the library, and it actually feels like it's going in a direction, which a first chapter ought to do, and I think the vampire will come in very soon, as a sort of foreshadowing.

And then I played Crooked Still's new album, which I finally nicked out of Dad's office, and it is gloriousl. I had been dubious about them getting a fiddler in, because I loved that their particular flavour of newgrass was the low raw grinding moan of cello and upright bass, and fiddles are hit-and-miss with me, especially in roots music: often they are too shrill, or too -- they don't have enough huskiness. They sound too narrow. It's hard to describe because I can mostly only put it in synaesthetic terms, dear me. I love string instruments that creak and moan like ship's timbers. And Britanny Haas is fantastic and very raw and old-timey in her fiddling! And the new cellist is not a disappointment either! (He will probably not crowdsurf or dress as a pirate as Rushad Eggleston did when I saw the band at Grey Fox in 2007, but one cannot have everything. Anyway I love his name: Tristan Clarridge. Delicious. It sounds exactly like a name I would concoct.) And the album is so full of textures and going interesting places with melodies, and gorblimey, Aoife O'Donovan has a truly extraordinary voice.(She went to school for it, so it is good that it worked out, but wow.) It was all wrong for what I was writing -- very very American music (though very much part of the genre I like to think of as folkasmagoria) for a very very British story -- but it fit the mood and the candles and the late nightness.

Now I have cocoa with a stick of peppermint in, and the candles are on again, and somehow the internet has come back on on the laptop, which is very cheering. And the lovely Aoife's low lonesome sound is reminding me that I want very much to make up a sampler of my favourite female vocalists.

Yesterday began with me sitting about and feeling sorry for myself, because my iPod was refusing to work properly, and -- I am sure there was something else; I just remember being quite cross and listless. And then Sarah and Hannah and Victoria showed up at my door to kidnap me for the purpose of bringing Jonathan a spot of birthday cheer. (Here I felt terrifically guilty because I had thought his birthday wasn't for two more days.) So I grabbed some of the fresh cookies other people had been baking and we set off. We also decided to wear moustaches. Sarah and Hannah had just bought a package of stick-on ones, and it seemed like a good idea. I must say we looked most magnificent. Quite a lot of people stopped to look at us, which was vastly amusing -- the way they would walk past us, and then stop, turn round, and gape, thinking, I am sure, why on earth are a lot of attractive young ladies growing moustaches? Did I have my coffee this morning? Did I have all of my coffee this morning?

Anyway Jonathan was very surprised (especially because there were moustaches), and we were all very happy and cheerful therefore. Then we made fudge and played poker and set things on fire. (Only a few things.) It was the best day ever. Also, doing nice things for other people is rather comfortable and cheering, oddly enough. And the poker game gave me a lot of inspiration for the not-NaNo-anymore. Yes, I am one of those terrible people who views the entire world through what I happen to be writing at the time. But I had many interesting ideas about poker games played by a lot of disreputable Oxford boys and what sort of things might be put into the pot when there is magic involved. (Also someone -- Hannah? -- suggested that someone in dire straits bet their moustache. "Aha, you're out of money, Jenkins! Reckon you'll have to bet your shirt now!" "NO& I WON'T. I'VE STILL GOT SOMETHING LEFT." And he swiftly shaves off his moustache with his switchblade and throws it onto the table.) 

And I came home and cookies were being baked -- although I was beginning to have a bad sugar headache from too many cookies and fudge and Hockmans truffles and sampling dough -- and the house was very warm and lovely smelling, and the fairy lights on the mantle and the Christmas tree seemed brighter and warmer and there-er than before, and I curled up with the iPod and fell wildly in love with Merlin (thanks to the splendid such_heights), which is also cosy and fun even if Giles does wear leather gloves while eating his dinner (this is very impractical). (GIIIIILES! I LOVE YOU WHY ARE YOU WEARING A& SILLY CAPE. Everyone else I love you too! because you are all ridiculously adorable and British and have nice hair. Seriously, everybody has really great hair, from Gwen's cheery disarryed curls to Arthur's cultivately casual floppiness to Morganna's sleek black hair with the lovely wavy bits in front and Merlin's darling little fringe. Oh what, these things are important.) And I had cookies.

This all sounds very cheery because I was very cheery yesterday but I did not like today at all, for varying reasons, some of which do not belong in a breezy post such as this one is. Also I had to go to work and I was very cross -- except so busy that I forgot to be cross -- people kept asking me, "how are you today?", and I would answer truthfully, "I have no idea." But it was the Busiest Shopping Day Of The Year and I could tell. My leg got very sore and I forgot to eat lunch before I left and hadn't had any breakfast either, but when Hannah and Mrs Meholick dropped by, they had mercy on me and got me a soft pretzel. It was the most delicious of all pretzels that have been baked since the dawn of time. The good thing about being horridly busy was that my shift went by very very quickly. And then there was a mess with my drawer because there was hardly time to count it out, and it was horrible, and I got out very late (but bought Ghirardelli peppermint bark to cheer me, and it was fifty percent off, too).

Tomorrow will be cold and wet and I will have to go to work again. Bah.

I love how when I make a post saying "comment here and you get things from me!", everybody comments. (Give me another day or two and I'll send out the poor tattered NaNo for consideration.)

Work = better today. A steady stream of customers is always pleasing (though the Christmas muzak the mall's been playing since Thanksgiving ended is about to make me go spare), and four people complimented my hair. One of them was Santa. And, there was fresh, moist, and very luscious chocolate cake in the back room after work. Yay!

So, I have a problem. Since November ended, I haven't been able to write. At all. Like, I think about trying to write, and I start to feel a little sick. It is kind of worrisome. I did not realise that NaNo was going to take that much out of me. I planned to take a break from That Novel for a week or two, but I also planned to work on some other projects, you know? All that productivity -- don't want to lose it, you know? So here's what I'll do. You know the old ficwriter's meme: give me a character from a fandom I'm in, and I'll tell you three pieces of my personal canon about them. (Unless they're reallllly obscure characters. I have no personal canon about Ioreth of the Houses, for example, or that one vampire with the glasses that Spike had translating the text for Drusilla's cure. Although I do have a considerable amount of personal canon about the werewolf in Arthur Weasley's ward in St. Mungo's at Christmastime, so, you know.) It's like writing, except not. Little steps, yeah? 

Fandoms include: Jossverse (pretty much all of it), Tolkien, Harry Potter, Emily of New Moon, Doctor Who, Pushing Daisies, and ... um? Isn't there something else? There are a lot of things I love, but not all of these am I comfortable circumnavigating in a fandomy sort of way. Sunshine would totally be a fandom if McKinley's editor allowed fanfiction, so I suppose you could always throw that in, although me trying to guess anything about Con that we didn't get told in the first place would be about as simple as trying to guess what the moon's thinking, honestly.

Go!

I WOULD BE EXCITED MAYBE IF I WERE NOT A) NUMB AND B) REALLYREALLYREALLY EXHAUSTED.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!