Illustrating ElvenSword, DemonThrong and AngelFire

I saw this image in my Twitter feed by artist William Kenney.  I liked it so much I asked him whether he'd like to illustrate my Tapestry of Life trilogy when it's published.  And he said he might do it.

Now I just have to get my trilogy published!  I've written nearly 60,000 words of AngelFire, the third volume in the trilogy. I'm about halfway through.  I had hopes that I would have finished it by now, but I've had a few spells of writer's block.  I'm working on it again now.  And I have completely revised and rewritten DemonThrong and ElvenSword, so they're ready to go as soon as AngelFire is finished.

You can follow William on Twitter, here, and on Instagram, here.

AngelFire snippet

A snippet from my new novel, AngelFire.

He looked up into the sky, gray satin prickled with the ice sparkle of countless stars.  One moon, small Razil, was a thin fingernail of silver about the western horizon against the fading translucence of the setting sun, while bigger Razila followed her consort higher in the sky, yellower and rounder, womanly next to Razil's boyish slenderness.  His eyes still on the heavens, he made a wish to the Great Spirit, a wish he knew was unwise.  He wished he could seize Zillan as Razila once seized Razil, and merge their flesh in love and pleasure.  But he knew in his heart that the time was not ready.  Perhaps in a few months, when both moons were full in the eastern sky, warm and loving, he too would take Zillan in his arms.  Angry at his foolish thoughts, he shook his head and his mouth set in a grim line.  His job was to look after Zillan.  His reward?  Perhaps nothing.  Who knew what the Weavers had woven into the Tapestry of Life?  Would his black and silver thread be woven next to Zillan's gold?  He suspected not.

He slept badly that night, dreaming of immense stone halls, filled with a nameless horror, his own path through the vast forest of stone columns which supported a distant roof always just ahead of a pursuit which tramped on his heels.  He woke before dawn, the air cool and renewed, though he was tired and depressed.  He rose abruptly from their bed of leaves and straw.  His lean and lithe panther form was beautiful, had he but known it.  He stretched like a cat, his back arched, his deadly paws extended, and yawned.  For a moment he looked down at the man who was still sleeping deeply, and the love in his heart was strong.  Such a dangerous task!  And so vital!  It might be his last job before the Goddess took him to her bosom in the Havens, but he would do it to the best of his ability, and if he found that Zillan loved him in return, he would take joy from their love while it lasted.  If not – well, loneliness was a familiar companion.

AngelFire

I've been on a writing jag.  In the last few days I've rewritten ElvenSword and DemonThrong, and now I am working on the sequel, AngelFire.  I thought you might like this brief extract from AngelFire: 

There was a rustle in the undergrowth under the great trees.  The forest was usually silent, all noise swallowed up by the thick carpet of slender tan and sepia leaves underneath the giant falcs, except for the shrill calls of brightly coloured parrots, the occasional cry of an animal under the claws and teeth of a predator, the grunt of bush-pigs or baboons.  He already knew enough to know that, and the noise intrigued, though it did not alarm him.  He turned his eyes — a clear grey with a touch of blue — towards the noise, and waited.  There was again a stillness, the windless silence of a vast forest, broken only by the chatter of a family of scarlet parakeets.  He watched the place where the noise had come from for many heartbeats and his lips curved in a smile of sheer pleasure.  Everything was so beautiful.  He had never seen such exquisite loveliness before.  He was filled with joy at the magnificence of the forest, at the layer of brown leaves on the ground, and the flaking bark of the trees, each peeling of the brown outer layer revealing a different green layer underneath.  He walked forward, towards the bushes the noise had come from.  They were covered with berries, some black and glossy, others a dark red, and still others a thin translucent pink.  He quickly found that the black berries were sweet with a delicious tart after-taste, but that the others were too sour to be eaten with pleasure.  He ate until he was full.  He hadn’t known he was hungry.  He hadn’t even known the word, or what it meant, but as he ate, it came into his head.  Hungry.

He felt himself observed and looked up.  From within the bushes, a pair of perfect pale gold eyes with vertical slits of ebony were watching him, eyes set in a face covered in short glossy black fur.  He laughed in pleasure, and reached out his hand towards the face and it was abruptly gone.  The smile left his eyes, and for an instant there was fear, perhaps, or sorrow, but that too vanished.  He started striding over the soft carpet underfoot, with every appearance of knowing exactly where he was heading, though he could not have explained where, or even the concept, if you had asked him.

He came upon a stream in the crook of a valley, crystalline water dripping over dark branches and twigs, and cupping his hands he drank his fill.  He noticed paw prints almost as large as his hand in the mud, one filling with seeping water as he watched, and again he smiled, his eyes shining with happiness.  All was new.  All perfect.

He kept walking, sometimes loping through the airy halls of the falc forest, at other times, stopping to eat more fruit, or mushrooms he found growing underneath the giant trees on fallen branches or the rotting trunks of some forest monarch brought down by a storm.  He seemed to know which fungi were edible and safe, and which were to be avoided.  His path took him ever northwards, towards a goal he couldn’t name, a place and people he didn’t know.  He did not follow an undeviating line, though, turning often aside to avoid steep cliffs or thickets of thorn bushes covered with sweet-scented white flowers.  From time to time, he was aware of being watched, but he had no fear, only a fine patience that this too would become clear in time.  All was new and wonderful.  He trusted because he had not been taught otherwise.

My Writing

Source

I've been writing a lot over the last couple of weeks, although I haven't yet achieved my target of 1000 words a day, which equals 3 novels a year of  roughly 120,000 words each.  Although I have high hopes of reaching that target soon, as I settle down to retirement.  Even what I have written does mean that I have been able to post a new Majorca Flats episode almost every day.  It's gratifying to see my readers returning.  You've been very patient.  Thank you.

I've almost reached the end of Majorca Flats.  Perhaps another 20 episodes, and then we will have the climax that I've been planning since quite early on.  Not that there aren't several strands to the story--my characters insisted--but this was an important thread.  A gay serial killer, driven to his crimes by internalised homophobia and rape as a boy, entering, and never really leaving the lives of my people.  I wanted to write a story where even those who suffered most from life have hope and find someone to love.  And I wanted it to be convincing.  Happy-ever-after stories need to have the angst and sorrow and suffering but they also need to have convincing pathways out of these situations.  I don't know whether I've done that.  I suspect I will change a lot when I rewrite it.

It will be very strange finishing the tale of these friends and their families in and around a late 19th century Melbourne Victorian Terrace.  When I write, the characters in my novel become my friends, my acquaintances.  I know them.  They tell me in no uncertain terms, no, I'd never do that, or are you crazy? or c'mon, give me a break!  So I shall miss them.

I might go back to do a second volume, but not yet.  I have so many other stories, some requiring rewriting and some requiring just writing--the first draft isn't even done!  I think I will start with ElvenSword.  That was the first novel I wrote, and they say you should write your first novel and then throw it away, because it's with your first novel that you learn the basics of your craft.  I didn't throw it away and perhaps I should have.  Anyway, it needs intensive rewriting, more than any other of my novels.

Here is a list of my novels, some completed, some unfinished, and some needing rewriting:

ElvenSword
DemonThrong
AngelFire
I Get No Kick From Champagne
Footy
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart
Majorca Flats
The Music Of Love
Dragon's Gift

Nine altogether.  I had no idea I'd written so much, even without counting the short stories.

As I redo each chapter of ElvenSword and DemonThrong, and as I finish AngelFire, I will post the new or rewritten chapter to my website (the WordPress one).  I'll let y'all know here on this blog, and on my website, and on my groups when I do post a new chapter.

One thing I've worried about is whether I have too much sex in my stories.  To be honest, sex scenes are hard to write, at least for me. The pathway between being turned on and finding it silly or risible or just dull is narrow.  However,  sex is a central part of our lives.  Not writing about it is to accept the religious narrative that it is somehow wrong or dirty, and it most emphatically is not.  It's OK to write about murder (Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh, for example) but not about sex.  Yet we all have sex, often (well I hope we all do!) but none of us has murdered any one.  Sex and sexual attraction is a central part of our lives.

I knew that my sex scenes, especially the gay ones or threesomes would consign my books to one small shelf in the bookshop, even the virtual one, but I felt it would go against my principles not to write them.  Yet recently I read C S Pacat's trilogy--Captive Prince, Prince Rising, King's Gambit--which received rave reviews and were satisfying reads.  The sex in this trilogy is explicit and gay, and she's been published by Penguin, no less.  She's also a Melbourne writer like me.  So I've decided that my sex scenes will be fine.  Things have changed a lot since I began writing, fourteen or fifteen years ago.  The little niche I inhabited hasn't quite expanded to a cavern.  But it's surely bigger than it was.  Even so, I shall probably write less explicit sex scenes in future if only because they take much longer than anything else.

Anyway: there you are.  I'm writing, and I will be writing more.  Thank you all for being so patient over the last five years.

Happy Endings

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course,
on where you stop your story.
-- Orson Welles

[From The Slab, I think]

I'm just finishing the rewriting of The Wolf, a romantic story set in Cappor, the world of my novels ElvenSword, DemonThrong, AngelFire and The Torc, and I'm struggling to end it properly.  I'll let you all know as soon as it's published: it'll be in the next issue of Wilde Oats.

Books I'm working on.

This charming graphic from hyperboleandahalf

I've written, half written and 10% written these novels:

Footy  -- about a straight footy player who meets a bloke who becomes his best friend.  Only the bloke he meets and grows to love is gay.
ElvenSword -- the great city of Cappor and its empire is decaying.  The task of those who would save it:  to find Vordath, the Bearer of the Sword of Fanuiloth, out of the millions who make up the empire's population.
DemonThrong  -- the sequel to Elvensword. 
I get no Kick from Champagne -- a laddish troubled boy takes on the armies of evil and becomes a man, in the process finding the love of his life.
Majorca Flats  --- a novel in progress, about the inhabitants of a Victorian terrace in Melbourne.
The Torc  -- a partly written novel set in the ElvenSword world
AngelFire  -- the partly written sequel to DemonThrong
Gift of Dragons  -- SF.  Why did the Urdani's civilization collapse?  Who or what is the living God?  And who's been surreptitiously buying up tactical nuclear weapons on Earth, and why?  About 1/3 written.
The Music of Love  -- a het romance with a gay character, partly written.
Zing went the Strings of my Heart  -- a secret group within Melbourne's police department is fighting a serial killer, whose victims are drawn from the city's non-human population.
The Musketeers --  four guys share a house.  One of them is gay, the other straight.  Well, straight-ish.
The Café Budapest -- a story about a café in a small country town, its owner and the people who come to visit.
Parringo Road -- a man goes back to the country town he grew up in and the boy, now man, he was in love with.
Heaven is a Pair of Wooden Wings -- a stranger turns up at Jake Fribourg's farm, a stranger with a deadly secret.   And Jake loses his heart and finds out too late he shouldn't have.

Plus there's my lady's thriller, Black and Deep Desires.


I'll be posting a chapter from one, or two, or even three of these every week.  I've been too busy to do this over the last couple of weeks, but I hope to start again soon.  I also intend to submit some of them for publication.  Watch this space!

Oh, and my short story set in Cappor, The Wolf, has been accepted for the August issue of Wilde Oats.

Writing

Yesterday I managed 960 words on Majorca Flats.  Now, for me, that's a world land-speed record!  At say, 160 words per episode, that's 6 episodes (as it happens in fact, fewer, because two consisted of 300 plus words as they were a letter and an email response)  So far, just under 20,000 words and 92 episodes written (79 published) !  All this has given me confidence to believe that I can start doing AngelFire again, and this morning I wrote just under 300 words and on the train on the way home from work, I'll be able to do another 400, which would give me together with what I've already written a (shortish) chapter.  So from now on, I'll be writing MF one day and AngelFire the next.

It's wonderful feeling the flow of creativity again, to not feel stymied by all my writer's blocks.  Writing makes me happ/y, -ier, and it helps marvellously with the blahs.

So ... holding thumbs (which of course prevents typing!!!!), I shall have a new chapter of AF up by Sunday.

When I've finished AngelFire, I'm going to go back to The Torc.  This will make 4 Tapestry of Life novels completed, and of course, there are also lots of short stories and a novella set in this world.

Onwards & Upwards

[This amazing image is from this website]

AngelFire, chapter 3

I've just posted it to my groups. I'm wondering, should I post it here? It's LONG. :-)

Do you guys read my long posts? Lemme know.