It's nearly time...

Today, like thousands of others, I sat with my cursor on the 'refresh' symbol, waiting for the NaNoWriMo site to relaunch.

Although I'm still in love with the thought of "The Twelfth Princess Dances", I've decided that finishing "The Roadkeeper's Daughter" comes first. 50,000 words will see it finished and ready for editing, so I'm going to blitz it and enjoy the feeling of having completed an entire novel again! I'll either work on "12th" in December/January while I'm letting "Roadkeeper's" settle, or I'll do it for NaNo next year.

I'm now all set up on the NaNo site, complete with a sleek new cover mock-up design. Feel free to add me as a writing buddy! Ready, set...

Cover design CSF 2015 using GIMP.
Image purchased from Dreamstime.com;
fonts are "Ringbearer" and "Beyond Wonderland".

Brace Yourself... November is Coming

Okay, okay, I know. November is still more than two months away. But it's coming nonetheless, and across NaNoWriMoLand can be heard the NaNoWarrior's cry: "I have an idea!".

Well, I have an idea, anyway.

I'm still plugging away at "The Roadkeeper's Daughter", but haven't made much progress numbers-wise; much of what I've done has been a substantial reframing of the first few chapters. I felt that the initial event and character motivation were under-developed, so I've gone back and fixed that. It continues, and I've set myself the goal of writing four new chapters before NaNoWriMo begins.

"The Roadkeeper's Daughter" is set in a warm, dry place, with a wholly POC cast, eucalyptus trees on the hilltops and blue sky overhead, and a somewhat Arabic-inspired styling. My NaNo work for this year is a substantial shift, from the hot winds of Lynnar to the misty, cool Yorkshire Moors, or at least a fantasy version thereof. Echoes of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Deira in the late 500s/early 600s infuse this YA adventure.

Tentatively titled "The Fourth Princess Dances", it riffs off the fairy tale "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", although naturally it is an elven princess, not prince, who is sought across the underground lake. Sixteen-year-old protagonist Cyna (/k/-/igh/-/n/-/ə/) is largely sidelined in her parents' royal hall, due to her weak and unpredictable limbs and dislike of strong sunlight. Bored and lonely, she finds a passage into a cave beneath the fort, but what starts as a harmless adventure with the bewitching elf Melis soon turns dangerous. As both humans and elves arm themselves against the gathering threat from the north, will Cyna and Melis be able to broker peace between their people, or will their unsanctioned romance cause a war that neither side can afford to lose?

... I hate writing blurbs/teasers. That's one off the top of my head, but I'll no doubt tweak it as time goes on. Too many commas, as usual!

The inspiration for the location comes from two events I attended at Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. Although the castle itself is nearly a thousand years too young for this story, its position on the edge of the moors is perfect, and some of my experiences there have cast it in a somewhat mythical light. I first saw it before dawn, stepping out of a taxi from Darlington having taken the overnight coach from London; and as no one was awake to let me in, I spent the following two hours standing on the gravel outside, watching the sun gradually rise over the hills and valleys below. That event was cold and damp, going down in SCA history as "never again". The second event there, on a sunny June weekend, was much more pleasant; I spent much of it working down in the kitchen or drifting in solitude around the castle. In the evening most of us went to the villas down the road to relax; my friend S and I decided to walk back to the castle where we were staying at 1am. We didn't even have a torch, got lost in one field because we forgot which field we were in, got scratched by prickles, and frightened by sheep. Although this event was sunny, between the kitchens and the midnight walk my impression of Bolton Castle is overwhelmingly one of darkness, and it is from there that "The Fourth Princess Dances" begins.

I'll leave you now with a picture of something else entirely. This year I attended the entire SCA Ffair Rhaglen, at Raglan Castle in Wales. 10 nights under canvas, with a grass floor, is an adventure even in summer, but how irresistible does it look nonetheless?

If you can blazon my arms, you deserve to be able to
work out my SCA name. Have fun! Photo: CSF 2015

Friday Update 30.1.2015

Well, it's been a week of lurgy in our house, with no member save the cat escaping unscathed, and very little writing has been achieved. But I did finish Chapter 5 and delete the shadow chapter, so there's that.

I'm about to embark on a sequence of chapters detailing how Tamsen is drawn ever more deeply and dangerously into the power struggle that lies beneath the calm waters of the palace. Writing it is rather like creating a French plait...drawing ever more strands of hair into the plait as it gets thicker and thicker.

I've never mastered the French plait, despite an orphanage's-worth of dolls and one fairly willing little sister*. I hope these chapters are less slippery than hair!


*She turns 19 on Monday. HALP.

Friday Update 23.1.2015

I'd been intending to get in another post this week, but it hasn't happened...damn day job! Hopefully something waffly with photos over the weekend.

"The Roadkeeper's Daughter" is at 52,335 words tonight, and Chapter 5 is three quarters done. As before, the word count is due to drop when I delete the shadow chapter, but oh well! Chapter 5 closes off what I guess you could call the opening act of the book. Tamsen finds herself where she thought she was going: she thinks her temporary state of adventure is over and "normal life" has started. Of course, she soon learns that in the palace there is no normal.

This week I've been writing with a re-watch of "Orange in the New Black" in the background. Quite apart from the eye-candy (*cough*Alex*cough*), I love how the different stories interweave, and the dropping of details and hints is masterful. One could write a hundred books from a couple of episodes. It's somewhat distracting for background noise, but it does keep the imagination firing.

My big piece of news this week is a side project I've just started with a friend. We were chatting the other night about the lack of Regency lesbian romances in our lives, and the difficulty of discovering what may be out there in the genre. (Dear Amazon, not being able to filter the LGBT section for M/M vs F/F is really quite stupid.) I actually started writing one a few years ago, in the style of Georgette Heyer, but it fizzled out. We started throwing some plot ideas around and came up with a plan for a collaborative novel in which we're going to write one protagonist each, alternating between the two girls in "close 3rd" POV (similar to how Barbara Ann Wright does it in her delightful "Pyramid Waltz" series). The plot is only in the roughest outline stage, but there's love, blackmail, Class Issues and comedy already abounding. It should be fun to write and I'm very pleased to be working with a dear friend as well as a fellow Crazy Writer™ on such a joyful project.

Since we're alternating chapters and writing around our other ongoing projects, this is going to be a long-term thing. We're both trying to make sure that we give it enough attention without treating it like a Shiny Thing distracting us from our more complete work. We also need to make a few trips to Bath and Birmingham. For research, obviously. Not for any other reason. At all.

Maybe Winchester too. Because of reasons.

On Beginnings

Me, aged 13.

It is perhaps fitting that 2015 is the year when I will finish the book, as it is the year that it, like my main character Tamsen, comes of age at 21. What is now "The Roadkeeper's Daughter" began in 1994, and it began with a piece of red fabric.

It was a mere strip, really, perhaps a metre long and twenty centimetres wide. Some sort of polyester gauze, medium weight, with stripes and a floral pattern woven into it. It felt silky. The fabric had been in our dressing up box for as long as I could remember - a remnant of Mum's early 80s dressmaking - and as I emerged into teenaged attempts to be fashionable, I took to wearing it in my hair as a headband.

It was here that my imagination took over. From then onwards, from time to time, my inner narrative would turn to shaping this story about the young girl and the red scarf tied into her long brown hair. Few elements of it remain the same, and the protagonist is both older and smarter, not to mention named differently several times over. But it still begins with an inn, and still involves the protagonist leaving with a group of horseback law-enforcers, identified by the red scarves or bandannas that they wore on their person. Thus, the red sashes worn by the Roadkeepers. Thus, the iris on the arms of the Kingdom of Lynnar.

While scrap of fabric is long gone, and the story has blossomed into something quite different to the imagined tale of rebellion and young love that helped me while away the lonely hours of 1994, the threads remain... woven into a new cloth of words.

CSF xx