One of the unexpected side effects of the last few months’ unintentional hiatus and my generally lower writing output has been the return of an old idea I’ve never quite figured out how to bring to fruition. If any of you have wandered over to my Projects page [link] you may remember my blurb for Runner, a werewolf story I’ve been fiddling with since 2010 and, despite using it for two NaNo projects, getting nowhere with. Mostly because I can’t (couldn’t?!?!) figure out the conflict.
Maybe I just needed to let it sit.
It’s way too early to tell, and is still going to require the same buttload of work any novel takes, but it feels like the logjam that’s been holding it back has shifted. Plotbeavers, perhaps. Or maybe I’ve gotten a little more of the life experience I’ve needed to tell the story I want to tell.
The last few months have been nuts. Life stuff, work stuff, everything in between. Lots of really good stuff. Some kinda difficult stuff. And whole scads of stuff on both sides of that fence that took priority over writing in general and this blog in particular.
But kinda like that stray cat you’re sure has run through her allotted number of lives, I’m baaaaack.
Not a whole lot to say other than that! I’ve been reading, been writing (weird scraps here and there more than anything else), been switching jobs (yaaaaay!). And now I’m really looking forward to buckling down on keeping this site going again.
I notice it most in the mornings, I think, when the light is still golden and gentle. You can tell even then how hot the day is going to be, whether the temperature will simply coax and encourage a population already drawn to the outdoors to spend as little time between four walls as possible or if it will edge into something more heavy and oppressive. At least, until the afternoon.
Those who have lived here longer say this isn’t how the summers usually go, with storms rolling in and claiming an hour or two in the late afternoon for impressive shows of rain and thunder and lightning. It’s not every day, but some weeks it seems like it happens more often than not. Familiarity doesn’t make them any less stunning. Not when you feel the thunder as much as you hear it. Not when it shakes the walls of the house that seemed so thick a moment before.
The hills and plains are still so green. Full of tall, thick grass, feathered at the top and almost silvered. It moves in waves with the frequent breezes. Here and there some other plant has turned a dark and brownish red, painting contrast through the fields. And the sunflowers! And the columbine! The one standing in long ranks here and there, all tall and yellow. The other scattered and blue along this hillside or the other.
The summers here are beautiful. I’m so glad I’m here.
If I were to say that I don’t like change (something that is absolutely true), I suspect it would be something that most people reading this blog would relate to. Sure, some handle it better than others, either by nature or by merit of having put in the work to do so, but that doesn’t change (ha) the fact that it’s intrinsically unsettling. Even when the former state of affairs was less than ideal.
Sometimes– usually? it’s just easier to deal with the devil we know. Sometimes, stability just feels more important. Sometimes, that’s okay.
But there’s a reason we tell so many stories about people who make the leap. There’s a reason stories, with vanishingly few exceptions, require change to move the plot forward. It’s how you know there’s a story there to tell. Because it’s what forces the characters to grow. It’s what forces us to grow. Even when it’s terrifying. Especially when it’s terrifying.
It’s a fun exercise, occasionally, to imagine what our lives would look like to someone or something that didn’t have the lifelong context that we do to make certain things seem normal.
Take cats, for example. We have invited these small, fuzzy creatures into our homes, where we love them and care for them and they repay us (hopefully) by loving us in return in their own small, fuzzy way. Usually by way of lots of purring, headbutts, and falling asleep on your legs in ridiculous positions.
Or pouncing on your ankles when you’re least expecting it. It’s a toss-up.
Now imagine you’re from some distant planet or an alternate reality where it is not common practice to share your home with miniature predators who can boast that five out of their six ends are pointy. It might seem… questionable. Now imagine learning that not only do we allow them into our homes, we allow them onto our beds. While we’re sleeping and vulnerable. And, in fact, that some of us actively encourage them to do so. And that, far from trying to discourage their vicious prey drives, we simulate small creatures for them to attack by way of toys and laser pointers.
So many questions. So very many questions.
Of course, from our perspective, it makes perfect sense. Sure, cuddling with cats might come with its own risks, but most of the cats I hang out with are pretty good at not causing intentional harm. And the purring is pretty cute. And the security of knowing that they’ll at least try to kill any spiders they notice in the house is… well, maybe it’s just the thought that counts.
All this to say, cats might not be someone’s first choice to include when trying to worldbuild their own setting for some new writing project. There’s no way one of the most common pets would be something so potentially dangerous, you might say.
I’ll just make this a quick update this time around, partly because there’s not a lot to talk about, partly because it’s late and I want to go to bed. (And now you know for sure, I absolutely do not have a buffer of posts written up for each week. If only.)
Last month saw me reading and writing as usual, though still more slowly than I’d like. Real life is busy, y’all. In fact, checking on Goodreads, it looks like I only finished one book. Fortunately, it was a very long book, and I’ve read varying amounts of at least four or five others, so, eh?
Writing… well, writing… I need to find a dedicated spot in my schedule to write, or I’m going to keep piddling along as I have been. Even so, it felt good to finish one story and to work on several others. Plus, I’ve started the process of structuring the Correspond stories I’ve been working on so that I can turn them into a novella for NaNoWriMo this year. Since the darn thing just kept expanding in my head and all.
Anyway. Seems like it’s just small victories for me this year, but I’ll take them. Happy halfway through 2023!
She returns to Kir Kanara, a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Her body is tired and battered. Her armor dented, bloody. And her eyes—her eyes are cold. She is alone.
It’s been years since she last was here. Years since she rode down from the gates at the head of a battalion of Greystone Knights with orders to find the princeling and put an end to his rebellion with as much violence as was necessary.
How she wishes they hadn’t succeeded.
She returns to Kir Kanara, a weight of years and death on her shoulders, flanked by the ghosts of a hundred dead companions and all the innocents they couldn’t save. Perhaps if she had listened, perhaps if the princeling had thought his words could reach her… but perhaps can’t bring a single soul back from the world hereafter, and it can’t unmake the destruction that has reduced all this once beautiful land to ash and rubble.
She can’t remember when it happened, when the last bit of hope that remained to her finally withered and died. She wishes she did. Hope is too precious a thing to lose with so little fanfare. But lost it is, and it’s left nothing in its wake but this angry, broken woman who realized too late how many lies she had been told.
There is no one left for her to save. No one in need of her protection. She’d looked. For months she’d looked, only to find them too late or not at all. She’s not looking anymore. An expression, complicated with rage and grief, cuts across her face; if it’s innocents she wanted she would not find them here. Not in Kir Kanara.
But she is too late once again, even for her other, bloodier purpose. She doesn’t know what she expected. The whole land is ruined, why should the seat of trouble be any different? It’s justice, of a sort. It should be cathartic to know that those who damned them all brought hellfire down on their own heads as well. Yet all she feels is wicked, rotting disappointment that she wasn’t the one to mete it out.
She returns to Kir Kanara, a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. But there is no one left for her to fight and nothing left for her to burn, and all that drives her vanishes like so much smoke.
She wanders, aimless. Her feet take her through the fallen castle, so long destroyed that weeds grow over its burned out corpse. She thinks of lying down, of letting her story end where it began. It would be easy. It would be, perhaps, what she deserved for believing all the lies, for trusting that this place, this once-beautiful place was all that it said it was, that it held all the ideals it said it did.
That it wasn’t just a wretched facade.
The thought comes to her quiet, so subtle she hardly realizes. Her ideals have not changed. They are bruised, wounded like she is. But they are there, a foundation. And little more than a foundation remains of Kir Kanara.
There are so many reasons it shouldn’t work. If anyone else has survived the destruction, Kir Kanara would be the last place they should trust. If the castle is a symbol, wisdom might argue that it was so corrupt it could not, should not be salvaged. If all was lost then maybe she should just leave, too, and find a way to nurse her wounded ideals back to life.
But she cannot shake the thought.
It takes time for her to realize what it is. Hope. Hope for redemption. For herself. For Kir Kanara. Hope that there’s a way to make the castle what it should have always been. A refuge. A haven.
So she stays at Kir Kanara, a hammer in one hand and hope in the other.
A while back, in an attempt to get myself to just fold the danged load of laundry that I had been transferring back and forth between my bed and the floor for the better part of a week, I grabbed my headphones and, instead of going to bed and getting a reasonable amount of sleep, turned on my music and bumped the volume and just… folded my clothes. Simple, right? Right.
Except, I wasn’t expecting how much more relaxed I’d be after I did it. Sure, some of it was the fact that my space was suddenly more ordered. And some of it was the feeling that I’d accomplished something. But even before I was done, when the room still looked a bit messy and chaotic, I could feel myself relaxing. I’ve got ideas as to why, of course. Some are probably right. Some are probably wrong. In the end, I don’t really need to know. What I do know is that I’m actually looking forward to folding my laundry now. It’s… kinda weird. But I’ll take it.
There’s a silly part of me that wants to try to connect this to writing characters, how the best ones have silly quirks and might find peace in the strangest places. And while that’s true and something I would certainly like to channel more intentionally as I continue writing, I’d feel a little disingenuous shoe-horning it in like that.
So, instead, I’ll just leave it at this: the weird little character that is me has found that she finds an unexpected level of peace and catharsis when she folds her clothes after every one else has gone to bed, music playing through her headphones more loudly than she might usually let it.
It’s humbling to face a storm. To encounter something that big, that untamed. That untameable. It’s easy to forget sometimes, how small we really are. With heat and cold most of us are fortunate enough to be able to escape inside where it’s shaded, air-conditioned, or heated. With a little wind, a little rain, or any of the other, quieter weathers, it’s possible to ignore them entirely once we’ve got a roof over our heads.
But a storm? A real storm?
One that sends lightning across the sky in ceaseless flashes? One that dumps inches of hail on the ground in a matter of minutes, ignoring the fact that the “official” start of summer is mere days away? One that comes with cracks of thunder so loud it shakes the very walls we hide behind?
That’s when you remember. You are small. We are small. And that’s alright.
At the risk of making my age (or the lack thereof) blatantly obvious, I’ve been struck lately by the frustrating realization that I don’t have time to learn everything, to explore and study and experience everything that I want to. Not in the sense that I don’t have time right now because life is too busy (well, that too), but more in the sense that I recognize that I have a limited time on this planet and more things to fill it with than minutes in the day.
There are going to be– have already been– things that I can do and would like to do that I will choose not to, because something else takes priority. That’s nothing particularly profound. That’s just… life.
And I think there’s a way to view that as a gift. Or at least to recognize the benefit of having to make those choices. It can provide a certain focus. The fact that our time is limited is what gives it such great value. So spend it well.
F.A. Hakimian 