It’s Book Day! To celebrate the launch of Household Lights, I’m running a special at the Smashwords outlet via their July Summer/Winter sale. For the month of July, Ryswyck will be available FREE in .mobi (Kindle), EPUB, and other formats. That’s right, if you’ve been hesitating, you can get the whole backstory for zero moneys this month at Smashwords. Meanwhile, if you’ve read Ryswyck, you can boost Household Lights by reviewing Ryswyck at Goodreads or wherever you hang out to discuss books. Help me with my marketing shenanigans, Obi-Wan Kenobi!
That’s right, it’s the proof copy of Household Lights! And it looks very spiffy indeed. I might be getting the hang of this book-construction thing; I only see two layout changes I want to make, and neither of them are critical. Come July 1, you can order one of these babies for yourself! Or you can hie yourself to your favorite store and preorder an ebook right now. And if you haven’t read Ryswyck yet, I’m plotting a summer special once I work out how to implement it across my distribution.
Thanks once again are due to the illustrious Beth Leggett for making me a beautiful cover with singing stars:
“Chuffed” isn’t the word. I’m working on getting the preorder links confirmed with Amazon and Smashwords, so expect further updates soon, but I plan to release Household Lights on July 1, 2020. Read full summary at the link!
The new leaves are out and making a deep susurrus when the wind gusts. Spring is no longer a matter of anticipation.
So this morning I took my elevenses out on my balcony, to get my share of the sunlight before the shadow of the roof sliced it off.
Clearing off my deck from the dormant dullness of the winter months gave me a pleasant little breath of normalcy, although I should long since have started this year’s garden. I’ve no idea what I’ll plant; every year I have to start over completely except for the spider plant and the snake plants which have lived up to their hardy reputation under my care.
Last week I did what I nearly always do sooner or later, and stepped out of chronology to write a scene further ahead in The Lantern Tower. I would complain about the pandemic eating up my spring creativity, but I’m much too grateful that those 1500 words were there for me to write. Small victories is the watchword of the day.
I’m mostly finished with edits to Household Lights; the rest is project management. I hope to have a release date nailed down soon.
Despite the fact that, if such a thing were possible, I am even less capable of sustained coherence than I was a month ago, I figured I had better post some proof of life. I mean, Facebook people are already getting cat pictures from the home office and reposted memes and the like, so I’m not terribly concerned that no one knows I’m alive if I don’t post here; but still.
Today in my Lenten meditation booklet (“Lent: It’s Not Rocket Science,” courtesy of Forward Movement a couple years back), Bishop McKnisely reflects on the hidden reality that atoms are largely composed of empty space, and concludes that he is very thankful for our sense of being jumbled up and close together, so that we can feel connected despite being so insignificant in the universe. Ha ha. Today makes three weeks since I have gone into pandemic seclusion, and never have I felt more atomic. I’m one of the lucky ones: I can work from home, I have plenty of toilet paper, and I have little need to go outdoors. Most of my relationships were already conducted in pixels, the only human touch I was likely to share week to week was passing the peace at church, and I already had a home office routine for days when I didn’t commute in. Nothing’s changed, right?
Wrong. It’s fuckin’ weird, is what it is. The space between me, the atom’s nucleus, and the electrons by which I contact the world is uncannily apparent: like when you have an inflamed organ in the gut — it doesn’t hurt exactly, but you’re not supposed to know it’s there. The whole is dispelled; everything is reduced to the sum of its parts.
More than once over a Zoom meetup, someone has remarked that it’s a balm to at least see everybody even if it’s just over a screen. But although I’m very glad of the chance to talk to people, I don’t know that it makes me feel more connected — or less, for that matter. For one thing, it’s even easier for my voice to get lost in the shuffle than it is in person; a couple of times I’ve just given up trying to say something and just let the interruptions roll on like a tide. Worse, I’ve had the dreadful experience of actually getting the virtual floor and then feeling my brain lock up in a full-on fit of aphasia. All in all…I’m not really a fan.
Nevertheless, I’m toying with the idea of conducting a Tenebrae service over Zoom (or whatever) next week; if there were any liturgy designed for this #MOOD, Tenebrae is it. The only real question in my mind is how public I should try to make it.
Meanwhile, on the writing front, I have achieved some edits on Household Lights, commissioned cover art, and hope to have it up for preorder soon. Household Lights, I find on my reread, is full of the kind of things we can’t have right now: cross-country train trips, in-person meetings, co-sleeping with friends, bonfire dances, maternal care in moments of pain and need, and Ryswyck’s daily morning silence with three hundred people all breathing together in the arena. I wasn’t expecting to market this book as an immediate and expedient salve of vicarious comforts, but here we are.
At the moment, though, it’s not vicarious comforts that are getting me through this time of awareness that every person I love in the whole world is someone I have to worry about. It’s more the little, funny things that address this absurd situation head-on that comfort me. So I leave you with one of them: Here is John Finnemore with a series of short videos as Arthur Shappey, his character from Cabin Pressure — “Cabin Fever.” This one is “Episode 1: Fitton”; closely followed by “Episode 2: Fitton,” “Episode 3: Fitton,” and so on. I think it’s probably still hilarious even if you don’t get all the Cabin Pressure references, but if you haven’t listened to the Cabin Pressure radio plays, well, you’re not going to get a better opportunity, are you?
It’s been rather busy chez moi, as my work has just concluded their fall conference here in town. A lot of rolling out of bed at Oh My God It’s Early, putting on actualfax makeup, and tooling downtown in my nice work clothes in the pre-dawn, then dragging back to trip over the kitty at sundown. It’s a lot of work, but it is fun to see our members at these things. One conference down, one more to go before the year’s end.
Meanwhile, I decided to move on from storyboarding to actual work on the sequel to Ryswyck, which I’m calling The Lantern Tower. I have the first chapter finished and the second chapter started. When I’m working on a project, there’s sort of a breathing rhythm between my efforts to nail down an outline of the plot with lists of scenes and sketches of dialogue, and points at which I have to just start writing to draw down the pressure and provoke more insight. I’ll probably write until I hit a sticking place, let it percolate, and turn back to editing Household Lights, which I hope to get out next spring. It’s not really multitasking; it’s sequence tasking. I loathe multitasking both as a concept and as a requirement: I mean, does anybody really thrive on doing five things at once with equal quality? Don’t tell me if you do.
Anyway, some things about The Lantern Tower. I’ll be introducing two new viewpoint characters and changing POVs on a couple of others. I’ve already got some scenes sketched, and have organized the movements into roughly five short acts. And boy am I glad I siphoned off the opening sequence for Household Lights — that first chapter was a hell of a lot easier to write without dragging that weight.
There’ll be fencing, both literal and metaphorical, court intrigue, spycraft, love, hate, kissing, fightin’ words, secrets, reluctant partnerships, a dash of hurt/comfort, and of course beloved enemies. I wouldn’t tell myself a story without that!
So that’s the state of the state. Now, I must sally forth to get some goodies for the concert my church is hosting. Carry on, as you were, &c.
Had a beta chat re: “Household Lights” today, which reminded me of this amusing incident tangentially involving one of my other beta readers….
One evening last month, I was at a friend’s house for dinner with the spouse of one of my betas, and as we were going to our cars and waving goodbye to one another, I stopped.
Me: I’ll have to come over next week and tell you and S all about the sex scene I just wrote. Him [ears congested from the weather]: Oh, yes, S would like to see you too, real soon! Me: No, I said I want to tell you about how I wrote a sex scene. Him: What? You wrote about seeing something? Me: NO. I WROTE A SEX SCENE. Him: What??
At this point K’s whole neighborhood knows I wrote a sex scene, and D still doesn’t. I go closer to him.
Me: Scene!! I wrote a scene! Him: Oh, a scene! Me: With sex in it. Him: OH! Well, that’ll sell.
When I told S about this little tableau later, she laughed fit to kill.
Fortunately for my reputation in K’s neighborhood, none of my betas have seen fit to ask me to revise said scene. Even if they had, though, I think I’ve learned my lesson about throwing out references to sex scenes in the driveways of friends’ houses.
It is done. “Household Lights” is finished and off to beta, at a hair over 50k words. Feels like it took forever, but I suppose start to finish it only took a couple of months. I’m rather pleased with it; or I would be if I wasn’t just ready to plotz right now.
I’ve taken advantage of the weather closures that have prevented the fencing club from meeting; if I don’t get to fence, at least I can use the time to write, eh? But I’m looking forward to fencing again, not to mention leaving my house.
That’s…pretty much it just at present. I’ll blog more when my brain isn’t a piece of cheese.
Well, I’m a bit pleasantly tipsy, and I’ll tell you why. I spent the day writing, and in celebration of the fact that I have but two sequences left of this story, and am recovering nicely from my illness, I walked down to the Blue Koi and sat myself down at the bar to eat pot stickers and read The Princess Bride (because after all, I’m leading the discussion at book club next week and I ought at least to have reread the book).
I also asked the bartender to make me a gin martini, and he made a doozy. It was good. It was big. It was big and good, and I drank every drop plus a large cup of jasmine tea for afters. And then I walked home in the damp and no-longer-so-fucking-frigid night.
Have I mentioned how I love my neighborhood? A block along in my journey home I passed two young men on the sidewalk in black hoodies. They had warm skin and facial hair and one had an affectionate arm thrown over the other’s shoulder. As I approached he smiled at me and said Hi silently, and held up his hand. I slapped it as I passed. And I walked on happily into the night and that is what my neighborhood is like.
And now, and now, I must go down and get my laundry out of the dryer in the basement if I want a clothed bed to sleep in, and I have written all but two sequences of this story, and drunk a very large and delicious gin martini and eaten a serving of pork dumplings, and tomorrow is another day, and this one was pretty damn good.
