Lane Robins

General silliness

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:40:50 GMT

Finally, the insomnia broke! Yay! I was beginning to think there were flying squirrels in my house. But I crashed last night and slept for 14 hours straight through. Slept through the cats tearing down the bedroom curtains, slept through them overturning the kibble bin and feeding themselves, and through the neighbors hammering off their windows. The dog deciding to howl in my ear, however, did the trick.

Lots of sleep tends to make me a little silly though, takes me back to high school and earlier where I had "pretend" days. At the youngest, it was, today I am a mermaid and will not get out of the pool unless it's absolutely necessary and will only eat fish and drink water and sit on the edge of the pool and sing songs to drown people.

For household chores, I dragged out poor beleaguered Sara Crewe. And that urge to play dress up? It never really seems to go away. So today, wide awake with nowhere to be, the question was: who do I want to be today.

Emily Prentiss, BAU agent from Criminal Minds. Yay, Emily! And thank you for having an easy to follow dress sense! Black slacks, fitted sweater, suit coat jacket, heeled boots that are nonetheless easy to move in. Red lipstick. Black eyeliner.

Sadly, my hair did not magically tint itself black. I always wanted black hair. But genetics works against me there. I think the best my gene pool could have managed was reddish-brown with lots of wave. Still, now that "Emily" is in place, what's to do? Well, investigate.

Investigate what?

Bookstores, naturally.

Get my crime fix craving dealt with and see what new has come in. Interrogate poor shop clerks about what they're reading, what they're selling, what they hate.

The Haul--AKA, Why I am not allowed to set foot in bookstores for another two months.

From Half Price Books
Tana French:THE LIKENESS. This is the third time I've bought this book. I keep giving it away before I have a chance to read it.
Kay Hooper: BLOOD TIES. Guilty pleasure. I crave her crazy psychic federal agent books like I crave chocolate drizzled kettle corn. Which is to say, most of the time it will be "off" a little and a little unsatisfying but every now and then it'll be just what I wanted. When the books have more to do with the mystery, the books are great. When the romance aspect takes over? Not as much. Still, can't stop buying them, so at least I found this one used.
Felix Gilman: THUNDERER & GEARS OF THE CITY. High Fantasy author. With gorgeous covers and an interesting sounding plot. Skimming through the books in the store let me see that I liked his writing style.
James Swaim: MIDNIGHT RAMBLER. Serial Killer in So. Florida. Okay. I'm sold.
Vicki Stiefel: THE DEAD STONE. Murder mystery with the protagonist a grief counselor attached to the ME's office.
Jim Hines: THE STEPSISTER SCHEME. Looks like fun.

From The Raven Bookstore:
(One of the best things about genre specific bookstores is the ability to go in and throw yourself on their mercy for recommendations. The Raven staff is particularly awesome at reading the books they stock.)
Cody McFadyen: THE FACE OF DEATH. Which okay, the title reminds me unfavorably of the horrible movie-thing, and it's written in 1st person, present tense, but the set-up sort of made me think of Criminal Minds, and well. . . . it went with "Emily".
Karen Olson: THE MISSING INK. Looks like a light-hearted modern mystery with a tattoo artist filling in the amateur detective slot. Cutesy cover that stood out on the shelf. (What's the American version of the "cozy"? There must be something this sub-genre is called.)
Jaqueline Winspear: MAISIE DOBBS. Post WW1 mystery with a war-time nurse turned PI as the heroine.

From Borders.
I went in specifically for two books, came out with three.
Rob Thurman: ROADKILL. More Leandros brothers. A must buy. The reason I went shopping in the first place.
Mark del Franco: UNPERFECT SOULS. Connor Grey novel #4. I'm addicted. But I wish his titles were more memorable. I got there and had to check blurbs and copyright dates to make sure I got the right one.
The unexpected happy book. Diana Rowland: BLOOD OF THE DEMON. I really liked Mark of the Demon, but the last time I looked the sequel was some distant time away.

So, the plan for the afternoon? Put all these books on the shelf and finish chapter six of TGS (AKA work in progress #3). Then? Book-reading!!!!!!

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:41:42 GMT

Ghosts and Echoes release date is creeping up. (April 27--I'm excited!) Which is so me. I get excited about things WAY in advance and the on the actual day. . . I tend to forget. This is why my mother declared a moratorium on planning Halloween costumes any further ahead than two days--longer than that and I'd make a costume, try it on a gazillion times, and then. . . get sick of it and want a new one on the day.

Anyway, for those of you who like teasers,

Chapter One, Ghosts & Echoes

Random post on TV

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:57:58 GMT

I long ago got rid of cable, but there are still shows I'm addicted to. With that in mind, I downloaded the latest Criminal Minds. I watched it right away, and now I wish I hadn't. It was a great episode, but it left me cold and horrified. Which, I suppose, is the way a show built primarily around the exploration of serial killer psyches should leave you.

The thing is this particular episode dragged me right back to 1991 when for god only knows what reason, I decided to go to the movies by myself, late at night. When I decided that hey, cheesy horror sounded just about right. So I settled in to watch People Under the Stairs.

I don't remember a whole lot about that movie except the cauld grue it left behind. The thing about horror movies for me is that most of the time I watch them with slight contempt--that scornful, "Oh you're not really going to all split up in the haunted house, now, are you? oh you are?" take on it. Plus the characters are usually so rampantly hysterical about events that it becomes caricature instead of character--Blair Witch, I'm looking at you.

It's one of the reasons I love Criminal Minds so much. A group of people face off against real-world (TV style) horrors with intelligence, common sense, compassion, and usually calm behaviour. And hey, they win.

But People Under the Stairs mixed it up for me. It made the children the only rational ones on the screen, put them in peril, made them use their heads, and still. . . . they were out-powered by the utterly crazy-pants adults, trapped in their utterly irrational world. So it hit two of my true horror moments--people in radically unfair power differentials, and sane people at the mercy of dangerously insane people. And then it gave me people eeling through the walls.

People squirming around in the walls are just No.

I've never watched the movie since. Don't really have a desire to. Don't really need to. The horrific parts stuck. And tonight, after watching Criminal Minds, they all popped right back up. Sigh.

It's sad when two of the three tv shows I watch leave me with free-floating anxiety and a shudder. Can't wait for Castle to come back.

certain things will always be funny

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:20:10 GMT

Little dog plus bathtime = doggy parkour. She goes over the cat, under the bed, onto the bed, down the stairs, over the chair, through the cat (whoops! HISS), back up the stairs, off the wall, under the bed, over the cat, under the desk, onto the chair. And all of it in an attempt to escape the towel.

Whew.

Surprisingly, she's utterly docile about the bath itself. Just hunches and looks morose.

I'd try to record her rampaging, but I laugh too hard, and she moves too fast. I'm going to start calling her Daisy-Belle.

She is now damp, but smells much better. The first warm day with sunlight, and we went for a really long walk whereupon she found many disgusting things to roll in, including, but not limited to: a dead bird and a very old bag full of squish. The ground was so muddy that I, in my sneakers, skidded on level ground. Like grass layered over grease. And if I stopped moving, I could hear the most unsettling sound as microscopic air bubbles worked their way free of the sodden ground. It sounded oddly like chewing. Very unpleasant sound. If I'd been walking through a cemetery, I think I would have been imagining corpses working their way upward. Eerie. But hey, it's the closest thing we've had to spring yet. I'll take it.

Currently reading: In the House of Secret Enemies by George C Chesbro. A collection of Mongo stories.

technology fail and & morning miscellany

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:21:58 GMT

So, I finally caved to the voices (outside my head voices, mind you!) that told me if I liked coffee, I should buy a grinder and grind my own beans. I'm not really opposed to this, except for the extra step it puts between me and my caffeine, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Bought an inexpensive Mr Coffee grinder.

It's got a fancy box. Unfortunately, that's about the nicest thing I can say about it. Starting off--the cord (retractable for tidy storage!!!!) is approximately 11 inches long. This doesn't seem too bad until you factor in the usual height of outlets above counter splashguards and the depth of the usual counter, and cabinet overhang. It ended up about one inch from the wall, which made using it an exercise in ducking my head while still trying to read the lights. Also, their timed grind? Yeah, no such animal. Press the button they say. Hold it down until the timer stops. About 15 seconds. It didn't stop.

As for choosing your grind? No. It made my beans superfine, sticky on the bottom, huge chunks on top. No, I didn't overfill. It just doesn't seem to mix layers as it grinds. So fail all around. The ultimate example of stupidity? On the outside of the box it suggests cheerily, great for coffee and spices! The instruction manual on the inside of the box? For best results, do not grind spices.

I'm back to my cheap cuban pre-ground, which hey, is the smell of my childhood. The grinder will get donated elsewhere.

Other than that, it's an act of will to go outside. Cold, randomly snowing (without accumulating, thankfully). There are not enough layers in the world and I have permanent static hair from the otherwise wonderful hat. (Thanks madmockery!) But I'm not in the Northeast!

It's day three of insomnia-land. Oh the fun. Tired tired tired until. . . the magic moment when I turn out the lights. Tonight I will skip the shutting off of the lights part--at least if the light over my bed is on, I'll have to squint, and that often leads to sleepiness. On the other hand, I rolled over last night at 2 after giving up and wrote 1500 words of novel, so there are compensations.

Reading/read: Finished Purple & Black by KJ Parker. Great read. Now I want to pick up her Engineers trilogy, but I'll wait until I get the TBR pile down a little more. Finished Doppelgangster by Laura Resnick. Funny urban fantasy whodunit. Still slogging through Darkest Instinct. It's a frustrating book. Interesting plot, strange execution. Way too slow a pace and a weird twitch where all the different POVs use the same metaphor repeatedly.

January

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:23:56 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

So, it's the end of the first month of the new year and what have I accomplished? Cue me ranting about my own writing. Feel free to skip below where I tell you what I've been READING. That's the fun stuff.

New writing. Two new books to work on. That's exciting! About 35K written between the two, and I'm enjoying playing with new characters. Love laconic Max, love sociopathic Black Ned, love determined Cachita. And of course, I love letting Sylvie loose to wreak more havoc.

Old writing: Revising the Beasts. STILL. Technically, I started revising this book LAST SUMMER, but you know what? The Beasts book is a Beast. A mean, slavering, mis-shapen hairy monster that refuses to be prettified. I will beat it down, but it's going to be ugly. There will be scars. Thing is, underneath it all, I really love this book. So it may be best served by me setting it aside for a time when I can dedicate all my attention to battling with it. If the two newer books go smoothly, maybe I can dedicate a summer month to it. I'm planning on attending the CSSF writer's retreat and that seems like a perfect time to work through a difficult project.

Plan for next month? More of the same. Sylvie and Max. Moving them forward.

January Reading: My TBR shelf is so out of control I have locked down the book buying. This makes me sad. There are new books out that I want NOW NOW NOW. (Laura Resnick's Doppelgangster for one.) But the books have spilled off the TBR shelf and moved onto the dining room table and that's just bad for everyone.
So this month, I focused on reading Urban Fantasy, a little more ruthlessly than I would normally. I had three DNF books that I gave up on and four that I got through.

Deadtown by Nancy Holzner. Fun to read, with a bratty zombie sidekick. Can she really be considered a sidekick when she hampers more than she helps? I enjoyed it overall, though I had some plot questions when I was done.

Magic Burns by Ilona Andrews. This has been sitting on my shelf forever! And I don't know why. It was a great read. I liked the first book in the series, with some reservations, but this one was a pure pleasure.

Thicker than Water by Mike Carey. Mmmm. One of my favorite series going at the moment, and this book's a game changer. Loved it.

Skin Deep by Mark del Franco. Another one that's been sitting on my shelf for a while for some unaccountable reason. A spin-off from his Connor Grey series with a main character I really liked, no matter what name she used.

Slipped out of the urban fantasy to read the three Criminal Minds novelizations. (Don't judge me! I was having show withdrawal!) Variable in style and strength, but ultimately they gave me what I wanted: let me feel like I'd watched an episode (or three).

I'm still working my way through The Criminal History of Mankind. It's interesting, but I keep making angry notes in the margins where the science--especially the zoology--is just not right. Fascinating anyway.

I've still got three more urban fantasies to read, but they'll have to wait. Next month's reading is going to be SF, which is stacking up pretty fast in the TBR pile.

when advertising fails

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:15:18 GMT

So, being in the midwest, I get tons of advertisements for churches. This is fine. I sort of like them. However, the other day I got a flyer that made me sit up and yell what the hell were they thinking? It's like they don't even begin to understand the basics of advertising and yet they paid to have a double-sided, glossy, full color flyer made up and distributed.

The first image you see is a man grimacing and holding his head in what looks like extreme pain. Beside it, their selling points for their church: New church. Loud music.

Apparently, given the man's expression, the music is far too loud. Mix that image/word combo up with the rest of the front of the flyer which promises a casual atmosphere, no perfect people allowed, short services and fun for kids, with, beneath that, "Ten things I hate about church" and you have an entire horrifying failure to entice. There is an arrow dangling off of the h in church--so I turn it over and oh, THERE'S the list of things that you're supposed to hate about church--the front stuff is what you're supposed to like!

But again, we have failure. There's a list that doesn't follow any bullet point system known to man, and it reads Church is Out of Touch, Intolerant, and a Waste of Time beneath a date. After that, another date, and the sentence that reads Church people are Political, Impersonal, Hypocrites and uneducated. Apparently that sentence covers hated things #4-7 as well as mangles sentence structure. Then it's another date and the glib sentence that says Church is all about Guilt, Rules and Money. Okay, then. Where's this church's rebuttal? Oh wait, it's on the front: loud music and a wincing man.

Um. Just no.

Currently trying to work my way through the urban fantasies on my shelf. I have gotten through Magic Burns, Deadtown, and Three Days to Dead. Still to go? Key to Conflict, The Naming of Beasts, Thicker than Water, The Demon & the City, Skin Deep, Magic to the Bone, and Halfway to the Grave.

Favorite books read in 2009

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:13:50 GMT

So, for whatever reason, this wasn't a huge reading year for me. The TBR pile stayed at about 80 books, and I got through about the same number which tells you something about my buying habits.

I mostly read in SF/F this year, didn't get nearly as much read in nonfiction as I had meant to (though I kept BUYING nonfiction).

So out of that fairly limited pool of read books, these were my favorites. They were all read this year, but publishing dates may be earlier. As always, these are just books that spoke to me in some fashion, made me reluctant to put them down, and once I did, stuck with me long after.

FLORA'S DARE - Ysabeau Wilce. YA fantasy, sequel to FLORA SEGUNDA. I liked Flora Segunda a lot, but it felt a little uneven in places, the world a little rocky. Whether it's due to a growing familiarity with her world, or whether Wilce has tightened things up, I adored Flora's Dare. Flora's growing up fast in a grim and fantastic city that is literally falling apart around them, being wracked by mysterious earthquakes. Flora takes it upon herself to discover the cause. I zoomed through this, read some scenes aloud for the sheer pleasure of the dialogue, and when I was done, started trying to push it off onto my friends. Plus, I've said it before, and I'll say it again. How can you NOT love a book that gives you a character named Tiny Doom?

DEATHWISH - Rob Thurman. 4th in the urban fantasy series about the brothers Leandros. In this book, Niko and his half-human brother, Cal, have a chance to get rid of their lifelong supernatural enemies. Just a great fun read. The first book in the series is Nightlife. I love books with mouthy, tough-as-nails family members who'd do anything for each other and Cal & Niko definitely fit that to a T.

LIVING WITH GHOSTS - Kari Sperring. One of the things I didn't read a lot of this year was classic high fantasy. I'm a little burned out perhaps and leery of five plus book sagas. But the blurb for this book looked intriguing and hit some of my "keywords", so I took it home. Glad I did. The characters sold me on this novel. It's a large cast, and each of them feel like they have a real claim to your sympathy. I kept getting thrilled with small things in this book: the elegance of the characters' names, the interactions that steered just to the right side of melodrama, even the title! The title is remarkably appropriate. The first couple chapters were a little slow to get through, but the effort is definitely worth it.

THE ORPHAN'S TALES: IN THE NIGHT GARDEN - Catherynne Valente. I really wanted to read Palimpsest this year, captivated by the book trailer and the premise of a viral city. But! Border's foiled me when I wanted to buy it. However, they had The Orphan's Tales, and since I hate to leave bookstores empty-handed, I picked it up instead. I'm glad I did. This is an elegant tangle of a book that mostly reminded me that so many of us fantasy writers came to fantasy via fairy tales. This book reminded me exactly why fairy tales and folklore can have such power over us. I'm hoping to get to the sequel and yes, to Palimpsest, in 2010.

THE CITY & THE CITY - China Mieville. Okay, this is my favorite book of the year. Which is a little odd for me. I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Mieville's books, where I could admire them, enjoy the writing, but couldn't love love love them. The City & The City intrigued me from the premise--fantasy police procedural--and I whined at my super-nice editor at Del Rey until she sent me a copy. Then I devoured it, went out, bought myself a second copy and started forcing it on people. This book is clever as all hell, beautifully written, and has as much fantasy magic in it as Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint--which is to say, none. No witches, spells, no impossible creatures, or inhuman landscapes. But it's magic all right.

THE WOMEN OF NELL GWYNNE'S - Kage Baker. A sweet read of a steampunkish book. Short and perfect. Just enough adventure with just enough grit, and centered around a brothel that's definitely more than it seems. I'm utterly unfamiliar with the Company books, and had no trouble with this one.

IN THE WOODS - Tana French. This novel was recommended to me when I was whining on LJ about not having any new mysteries to read. This is a beautifully written police procedural that revolves around two mysteries--two separate sets of children, distanced by years, who disappeared in the same woods. The narrator is the only survivor from the first batch of missing children, and it's a joy to watch French maneuver him through a crime that wakes all sorts of dark memories in himself. Elegantly written with a bit of a fantasy feel.

CHILD OF FIRE - Harry Connolly. An urban fantasy that I picked up on the strength of its fast-paced and original first chapter. Found out later that my agent represents Connolly also, which made me all the more eager to read it. And its first chapter is definitely not misleading. This is a rocket-paced urban fantasy with a great lead character, an ex-con who's gotten hold of a little bit of personal magic and has been drafted into working for a dangerous magical society. I loved the magic here, thought it felt really fresh. And I definitely would like my own ghost knife.

THE DEMON'S LEXICON - Sarah Rees Brennan. YA Fantasy about um, well, mouthy, tough-as-nails family members who'd do anything for each other. Hey, I know what I like! The magic here is nicely done; while bits of the story weren't that surprising to me, the voice of the main character, Nick, was absolutely memorable. The reader might understand before he does why he struggles so, but that doesn't make his struggle any less powerful.

THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ - Jacques Chessex, translated by Donald Wilson. I rarely read translated literature; I'm always convinced I'm missing key elements. This one popped up on my radar though and sounded interesting. It's a very short crime novella, though a case could definitely be made for horror. The plot of it is less memorable--necrophiliac killer in a small Swiss town--but the end effect of it was powerful. When I was done with the book, I felt like something grotesque and dangerous had passed close by. A lucky find.

Heart of Justice pt 2 of 2

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:01:38 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

“Nine people die of sudden heart attacks downtown and you didn’t think anything of it?” Kevin asked Michaels, the officer investigating James’s case.

“You know how it is, Dunne. If all of them had crossed my desk, yeah, maybe. But I got one. Sikowski got one, Delaney got one, and cops I don’t even know got the others. Besides, nine people is not a statistically large number for everyone who works downtown.”

“I know,” Kevin said, “but still--one a day--doesn’t it feel wrong to you?” It twanged in his head, resonating throughout his bones. Whispering.

“It’s been hot. The victims have all been overweight. Subway stairs are steep. Prime candidates, prime situations for heart failures.”

“Subway,” Kevin said.

“Yeah,” Michaels said. “James came to town by train. So did Delaney’s vic. I asked her this morning, since I knew you were coming in. I could find Sikowski for you and ask.”
“Thanks,” Kevin said. “I’d appreciate that.” Appreciated it, was also a little unnerved by it. Professional courtesy to a man who’d paid his dues was one thing; dropping everything was another. This wasn’t the world as he knew it. Crazy, or other. He was going to have to pick one, soon.

“I still think you’re chasing ghosts. Guess it’s boring out there in the real world.” Michaels laughed, slapped Kevin’s shoulder and said. “I’ll call you.”

Kevin nodded, headed downstairs into the basement. Despite familiarity, the morgue still raised the hairs on the back of his neck, made him feel like he was stepping into a grave, maybe the one he’d avoided. Somehow. He tapped on the glass of the observation window. The coroner, Charlotte Evans, waved him in. “You’re the ex-cop, right, the one Michaels said might be coming by. The one who thinks I missed something.”

“Nine heart attacks in eleven days didn’t strike you as odd?” Kevin said.

“These people were obese. They abused their hearts until they gave out. And more and more people are obese, so the number goes up. It’s a simple story really. Mrs. James set you on?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said.

“She probably fed him bacon every morning, and steak every night. Cheesecake for dessert. Some people just don’t take care of themselves.” Evans drummed her pencil in a tattoo on her desk.

“You’re what? Five-ten? One-twenty-five?” Kevin said.

“Don’t tell me I’m unfair. I’ve heard that before. That kind of PC thinking leads to suing McDonald’s for making them fat.” Evans leaned back to glare up at him.

“Actually, I was thinking with your stress level, you might be a candidate for heart problems yourself,” Kevin said. “Do you have any of the bodies still?”

“No,” she said. “We knew who they were, how they died. They got claimed.”

“I'd like to see your records," Kevin said. She scowled at him, umbrage in every line of her body, and he wished he could make her understand that it might be important.

She slammed a file drawer open, started hauling out envelopes full of photographs, recordings, notes. “I don’t know why I’m bothering. I stand by my findings. Cardiac arrest followed by death. They didn’t need to be autopsied to find that out either.”

“Attacks can be induced,” Kevin said.

Evans yelped; he turned around. The sisters tapped the glass, grinning at him. The eldest mouthed, “Found you.”

Today they were all in grown-up Goth mode, wearing enough black leather to clothe a herd of angus cattle.

“They with you?” Evans asked, lips turning down, her face still flushed with shock. “Figures.”

Kevin gestured them in. They came in and spread out, studying the room, the steel drawers, the empty tables. “Lots of work to be done here,” Magdala said.

“It’s police work. We’re not here to interfere,” Kevin said.

“Photographs,” Evans said, slapping them up against his chest. She hesitated. “A heart attack?”

“Stress,” he said. “High blood pressure. Arterial deposits. Not just fat.”

“Huh,” she said, settled into her seat. Kevin spread the photos out along the autopsy table, peered over them.

Still nothing in their faces, nothing of that hurt awareness that someone else wanted them dead. He leaned closer, reached up to bring the lamp closer. A shadow on the woman’s side. Just over her hip. A splotch. A shadow from slack, overhanging skin? A bruise?
“What’s this?” he asked. Evans pushed the girls aside, squinted.

“Bruising,” she said. “She fell against a bench. Heart attacks aren’t the most peaceful way to go.”

Kevin flipped through the others. “Here’s another bruise. Almost the same spot.”

“Two out of nine, only. It’s consistent with staggering into objects and eventual collapse. There are bruises on their shins too, why not pick on those? You’re reaching. I did my job.”

Kevin looked at her. He’d always been good at reading the things people didn’t want to say, but of late, he’d gotten even better. Right now, her entire body pleaded, please no. I couldn’t have missed something. Denial, laced with apprehension. Awareness that these victims were heavy enough that only extremely detailed viewing would pick up a mark hidden by folds of skin.

“Uh-oh,” the youngest sister said. “Someone’s not sure anymore. Someone didn’t do her job.”

“I don’t have to take that crap from a Wednesday Addams wanna-be,” Evans said. “Get out of my lab.”

“She serves herself, not Justice,” Magdala said. “We should--”

“No. Go outside. Wait for me,” Kevin said.

“But--” the eldest said, her hand slipping into her pocket.

“Out,” Kevin said. Why had he hired these three? Had he hired them? They’d just been there when he walked in to an agency he didn’t remember starting.

“Nice associates you have,” Evans said. They stared at her through the glass, at Kevin, waiting.

“Just as a speculation,” Kevin said. “Could that bruising be caused by an injection?”

“You don’t quit, do you?” Evans said. “If they’d been stuck by a needle, don’t you think they’d have complained?”

“On the subway? They’d have to realize that it was more than a sudden pinch or poke, to figure out who jostled them, and who to complain to. They wouldn’t believe they’d been murdered for all intents and purposes. It’s doable.” Kevin sighed. Doable and hard to trace. Damn near impossible. For the police. His cell phone burred. He picked it up.
“Dunne? Found out Sikowski’s vic came off the subway too. North line. Same as Delaney’s vic, and as James. Maybe you’ve got something after all. But then, a quarter of the city rides that line.”

“Thanks,” Kevin said, disconnected. “Do me a favor,” he said to Evans. “If you get another one--call me?”

“So you can point out what I’m doing wrong?” she said. “I’m the one who did medical school, while you were off gallivanting through psych.”

“Yeah, but you forgot one thing. That the easy answer isn’t always the right one,” Kevin said. He hesitated, his words felt pointed at himself as well. “Call me.”

She nodded, reluctantly, almost against her will. He paused in the doorway to thank her. Politeness was important, now more than ever, when it seemed to him that people did as he commanded, whether they wanted to or not. Delusional, he told himself. The easy answer.

“Subway?” the eldest sister asked as he joined them. He looked at his watch. Nearly end of day for the vast majority of workers. They could ride the five-fifteen northline back, get a feel for the crowd.

“Good thought,” Kevin said. She smirked at her sisters, walked by his side. They picked up the line at the innermost station and Kevin watched the other passengers, tried to put a face and motive to a person who struck every morning. The sisters roamed the car and passengers turned their heads from the weight of their eyes. Looking for murderers, Kevin thought. For secrets. Twice the eldest sister’s hands strayed towards her sleeve and the stiletto. Finally he snapped, “Come.”

They responded at once, as one, returning to his side. The eldest crouched beside him. “So much work for you in this city.”

“So much wrong,” Magdala said.

“So much to make right,” the youngest said.

Kevin said, “I know.”

His eyes were drawn to three young men, rough-housing with each other, each move laced with real aggression, real potential for violence. His breath left him. Boys so much like this had mugged them. Kevin remembered the shock of unfairness, that after his years on the force, it was going to be three punks in an alley, shooting him with shaking fingers. He’d pushed Bran back, trying to get him away, get him safe, and the rare anger lighting Bran’s face as he fought Kevin, fought the boys.

Then the gunshots roaring out.

Absently, Kevin felt for the non-existent bullet scar. The flower petals between his teeth, bitterness, thin sap seeping into his throat, bubbling up from his chest. The wound reversing, the bullet shining in Bran’s fingers. And then the hall, white pillars against a blue sky. Nothing but the hall and the sky, no matter the direction he’d looked. White and blue, and golden nimbuses around the people.

“Who are you,” the voice said. “What are you that makes you worthy of this Hall.” Kevin met the wild-bearded man’s gaze without flinching, unconcerned with the lightning arcing around his thick arms. It was only a dream after all. What could happen to him, here?

“He’s mine,” Bran said, laying a hand on Kevin’s arm.

“You’ve returned to us?” the wild-bearded man said, his face softening.

Bran shrugged, that peculiarly liquid thing he did when pinned down to a question he preferred not to answer.

“Who are you,” the man asked a third time. Kevin had an answer by then, with dog-Magdala pressing up against his leg, her dog-sisters crouched before him. An impossible answer.

His eyes flew open on the train. He jerked back. All three sisters were staring at him from mere inches. That strange vibrating resonance shook his bones again. The easy answer wasn’t always right. But in his case--the easy answer was the only one. Delusion. A break-down.

“Back off,” he said.

They all sighed. “So close,” the eldest said. “You’re so slow at this.”

“Shh,” Magdala said. “You know what. . . Bran . . . said.”

Kevin turned his attention back to the commuters. The three young men got off at the first stop in the city, shouting and shoving their way from the car. Kevin rose to his feet and started walking car to car, at first trying to lose the sisters’ scrutiny, then searching, his entire body tuning to a frequency he didn’t understand. In the third car from the end, the static, confused feeling shifted, resolved into a warmth that buzzed against his skin, whispered to his heart and bones.

He leaned up against the door and watched, slowly narrowing his focus to a thin young man who shied away from contact.

Dressed in a mixture of suit and casual, white shirt, tie, jeans and boots, he held a coat, and a tattered briefcase. Plenty of space for a syringe, Kevin noted. The young man slumped in his seat, arms crossed over his chest, legs stretched out, glaring at any who approached. In the crowded car, he managed to have a pair of seats to himself.

At the final city stop, the train paused to let a few last minute commuters got on. They looked around for seats. Sighing, three of them grabbed poles and straps, resigned to waiting the train out. A heavy-set woman with swollen ankles over her sensible heels bee-lined in on the empty seat. The young man jumped up as if stung, and moved away, slapping her with his coat as he did so. Kevin stiffened, but the woman made no sound of complaint.

“Alekta,” Kevin said, inclined his head in the boy's direction.

The eldest sister slid over to the young man’s side. “Hey,” she said. “My sisters and I want to know what you do for a living.” Her voice, sweet and raspy, dropped to a whisper. Kevin could hear it across the car and could hear the man’s response. When he focused. The thrumming of his bones continued unabated, transmitting meaning. His mind started to clear.

“Advertising,” the young man said, looking away. “I sit on the phone and call people.”

“Oh, that’s not what we thought at all. . . .”

“So sorry,” he said, stepping away from her as she leaned in.

“We thought you killed fat people.”

Shock blurred his face. She snapped her teeth near his nose and grinned. He recoiled, slapping his back against the side of the car. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“Alekta,” Kevin said. He didn’t say it loudly, barely murmured it in his throat, but she turned at once and came back to him.

“I can smell it on him. And fouler things too,” she said, her voice rasping more, growing less sweet.

“We wait. We observe.” Kevin said. “We serve justice.”

“We serve Justice,” she said, glaring at him.

Kevin frowned. The hard answer. He shivered all over, badly wanting the mindless comfort of Bran’s arms around him. He settled for Bran memory, wrapped himself in it like a cashmere blanket.

“Love me?” Bran’s voice a whisper. “Trust me? I’m more than you know. Will you choose me? Over your poor, pinned god? Kevin, please. . . .”

“Yes.” One word, pushed out through tight-locked teeth, on a faltering breath. The soft petal pressed inward, pulping as his saliva touched it, changing things in its path.

“He’s getting off,” the youngest said, nudging him. She shimmied in place like an eager cat.

“Easy, Erinya, we’ll follow. But not so close we spook him more than we have,” Kevin said. “Not so close we cause comment.” Or witnesses. The thought made him shudder again. But the warm certainty and clarity was growing, like sunlight in his mind.

He made the sisters wait until the last moment, until the train doors were actually closing and had to jerk open to let them through, letting them out into a emptying terminal.
Kevin listened for the young man’s footsteps, each beat a pulsing chord in his heart, his mind, found them, and headed after the man into the dark streets outside. They kept back, ghosted after him. Kevin knew with a strange, impossible certainty that the man could never elude him. Not now that he'd laid his eyes on him.

Halfway down the block, a black and white cruised by, slowing at the sight of the three sisters. Kevin met the cop’s eyes; the cop nodded and drove on. Down the street, a door opened and closed with the snap of a drawn bolt, the sound echoing in the darkening sky.
“Here,” Erinya said, stopping at a narrow row house with a tiny, weed-choked yard. Lights flickered on in the main windows, traveled back through the house.

Alekta climbed the stoop, laid her hand on the latch. The door opened, ushering them inside.

A beaten-down living room greeted them, overwhelmed with sagging furniture. Kevin touched the broken springs in the flattened couch, took a photograph off an end table. A heavyset woman with bad color in her face smiled back from the photo.

“His mother,” Erinya said.

“Dead,” Magdala said.

“Matricide,” Alekta growled.

Kevin touched the woman’s image, the blue-grey lips pronounced. “A bad heart,” he said. “She must have had medicine for it.”

The young man came out of the kitchen, a sandwich in hand. It dropped when he saw them, hit the floor with a soft squelch. A frozen moment. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Let’s talk about you,” Kevin said, his skin warming. The room grew lighter, and the young man squinted. “You killed those people on the subway. Seven men, two women.” Kevin thought he might be glowing. At any rate, the shadows in the room leaned away from him.

“Three women, his mother,” Erinya whispered. “Her blood cries out to us.”

The young man’s face shifted, settled into lines of defiance and aggression. “You can’t prove anything. The cops couldn’t prove anything then. You won’t now. I didn’t do anything.”

“She had a bad heart. Did you use her medicine on them, to influence heart attacks? Withhold hers to give it to them?”

“Prove it,” the young man said. “You can’t. There’s nothing here to prove any of it. No one even thinks they’re murders. No one wants to.”

“We know. We care. We punish the unpunished.” The sisters spoke as one. The young man flinched.

“If there’s no evidence,” Kevin said. “If it’s unpunishable in the hands of the law, then it’s up to us.” Certainty rose in him, dwarfed what he thought of as his self, expanded it, stoked him with heat and awareness. The shadows in the room arched away, grew thin with the rising light emanating from his skin.

“Who are you,” the young man said, his hand flying up to shield his eyes.

“I hold the reins of Retribution,” Kevin said. “I am Justice.”

Get out,” the young man screamed. “I’m calling the police.” He dove for the phone.
Kevin held up his hand.

“Stop,” he said. The killer halted in his steps, his face contorted with strain.

“Sometimes my job is simpler than others,” Kevin said, still hearing himself from a distance. “Sometimes, to do my job, all I have to do is let go the reins.”

He raised his hands. “Sisters.”

Their heads swung round as one being, waiting for the words.

“He’s yours. Let Justice be done.”

They lunged forward, with garrote and knife, with claws and teeth, with strength of arm and hatred. They saved his heart for last.

When they were done, Kevin closed the door behind themselves, heard the latch flip over at Erinya’s touch. The sisters, sated, walked silently behind him, not playing games, not impatient now that they knew their master was able to act as needed.

The subways were silent. Silent because Kevin didn’t want to hear the chatter of voices, the tinny intrusion of iPods and radios. The people sat like marionettes, staring ahead. The sisters curled together like puppies and dozed on the seats. He left them there at his stop. They’d find him again. He was their master.

The door to the apartment swung ajar as he approached. Bran waited by it.
Kevin stumbled toward him, knelt, and pressed his face to Bran’s belly. “It’s not a dream. Or madness. You changed me. Eros.”

“I did," Bran said.

With Bran’s agreement, Kevin knew he’d had this realization before, had this moment of impossible lucidity after he acted as Justice. Forgot again, under the weight of his own disbelief.

“It’s always been at our discretion--the making of new gods,” Bran said, stroking Kevin’s hair back from his brow. “And the consent of the human. But it hasn’t been done for so long. It’s so hard now, to take a mortal. Back then, when we were everywhere, the mysteries were greater and more accepted. Your minds are closed now. They can break instead of opening. But you’re strong enough to accept it, I know you are.”

“Maybe,” Kevin said. “When I’m with you, it doesn’t seem to matter whether I know or not.”

“You’ll adapt, I’m sure you will,” Bran said, drawing Kevin to his feet. “We’ll live in the world until you do. We have time.” A smile curled his lips, not his usual sweet smile, but something more darkly amused. “It’s funny. All these years and we’ve not had a god of Justice. The sisters, yes, revenge and counter-vengeance. We’ve never had a policeman. It’s going to be interesting when you decide to turn your sights from the mortal realms to ours.”

If he could remember, Kevin thought. Even now the surety that had filled him was slipping away, leaving him stumbling for landmarks in a strange terrain. Dispensing Justice, he knew himself. And when he was with Bran, he didn’t care. But a man couldn’t live like that, careening from implacable Justice to enveloping Love, with only confusion between. A man couldn’t, Kevin thought, on a last clear moment.

But maybe a god could.

Heart of Justice

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 07:33:27 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

This is a story in two parts that's set in the Sylvie landscape, though it's about Kevin Dunne. It's spoilerific for certain plot info in Sins & Shadows.

In the minimalist store front he used as his office, Kevin Dunne bent over his desk, leafing through the book of flowers, trying to remember. Had it been six-petaled or seven? The whisper of the glossy pages was the only sound besides his steady breathing. And theirs. No matter how silent they were, they were always with him. The three sisters were watching him, their dark eyes unblinking, their expressions not so much passive as abeyant.

The eldest, an elegant blonde, flipped a stiletto as delicate as a nail file into the air, caught it between her teeth, drew it out. “We should be working.”

“Don’t do that,” Kevin said. He’d seen blood enough in his lifetime. Too much of it his.
The memory washed over him. Lying in the alley, running feet muffled by the echo of the gunshots, his chest, his back soaked in blood. Bran, holding a perfect flower, leaning over him, eyes wild, his voice as distant as one down a well. “Do you love me? Do you trust me? Forever?” And the bittersweet taste of the fleshy petals pushed past his bloody lips.

It had been a dream, Kevin knew. One of those dreams that seemed so real that the dreamer lived a lifetime in REM seconds.

A dream. Except.

He’d been shot before, a graze on his shoulder. A stab wound in his side. A brick to his temple. He knew the flavor of violence and pain. The shot in the alley had been all too real. Except.

There was no scar. Not from the alley, not from any of his wounds, ever. Even his childhood appendix scar had disappeared. He remembered running his hands over it for years after the surgery, a kid amazed that someone had reached inside him and taken a piece of him out.

It couldn’t have been a dream. Time had passed. A month, then two, in this uneasy state of faulty memories and delusional images of flowers and blood. A breakdown, he thought.

Across the room, the youngest of the sisters, a Goth queen with pink and black streaked hair, sighed ostentatiously, but said nothing. She made a perfect cat’s cradle pattern out of narrow wire, an elaborate weave of a flower, smiled at him over it. His breath caught. That was it. The shape he’d been trying to recall. Her fingers worked and the flower morphed into a perfectly centered heart.

The middle sister looked up, pinned him with her dark gaze and said, “Door,” just as the chimes sounded.

A client. Kevin forced a smile away. His clients distrusted smiles. But this part of his life, real or delusion, made sense. Homicide detective, and now, private investigations. He’d always served in the cause of justice.

A middle-aged woman dressed with the prim serenity of a bank teller came in and dropped a packet of photographs on his desk. He raised an eyebrow. Usually they wanted him to take the photos. The sisters, nosy as always, clustered behind him, peering over his shoulders.

Crime scene pictures--he wondered how she’d gotten them. An obese dead man lay on the pavement, eyes bulged, tongue blue. “My husband,” she said. “Gerald. The police say he died of natural causes. He was murdered and I want you to find out who did it.”

“What did they cite as cause of death?” Kevin asked. He knew what the police would have thought when they’d seen the blood-engorged face, the size of the man.

“Heart attack,” she said. “Gerald was fat. I know that. God knows I know that. But he was doing something about it. Eating better, exercising regularly. His doctor did a full physical, said his heart was sound. Gerald jogged a mile a day. Slowly, but a mile. But he dies just walking downtown? All the cops see is a dead fat man and a self-inflicted coronary.”

The youngest sister reached over and picked up a photo, looking at it with eager eyes. The client paused.

“My assistants,” Kevin said. “They help me with legwork, with undercover work.”

At the magic word undercover, her doubtful face cleared. Undercover explained so much. Goth girl, blond assassin chic, and the little librarian look of the middle sister. The middle sister, better than the others at people skills, stuck her hand out. “Magdala Eumenides.”
The client shook it, winced at the girl’s strength, and turned her attention back to him.
“Mrs. James, we’ll need to go over the basics. Enemies, rivals, some personal stuff.”

She interrupted him. “I didn’t give you my name.”

Kevin dropped his gaze. “It’s on the photos,” he said. “Gerald James.”

“On the back, which you haven’t seen,” she said. “Did the police tell you all about me, tell you I was a deluded old lady? They asked me who I was going to see.”

“Mrs. James,” Kevin said, keeping his voice low as hers rose. “The police don’t play that kind of game. No one’s called me. They asked who probably to make sure you didn’t end up in some con artist’s hands. I’ll look into your case. I don’t make promises though. Will that do?”

“You’ll look hard,” she said.

“Yes,” Kevin said and she settled back into her seat.

At the end of the day, he grabbed his coat, her file, and headed home the short way, walking through narrow alleys that stretched upward toward the sky, overhung with metal fire-escapes and iron-spiked balconets. The girls traveled with him, flaunting their agility, leaping and clinging to dangling ladders, jutting brick, crumbling ledges, falling in controlled tumbles that landed them back at his feet with a speed and precision that freerunners would envy.

Kevin had met the sisters during one of his particularly vivid hallucinations. There had been a bright hall, brighter than any hospital and open to the sky, so bright his eyes had streamed. Then, the sisters had been creatures, not women--built like greyhounds, scaled to giant size, and with human faces. Their forelegs had been feathered, and they had dived from the sky to twine 'round his feet. Magdala had snuffled him as he sat there, numb, dazzled in the bright hall, and whispered, “He’s one of us.”

When he reached his apartment, they stepped back, waiting, let him go inside alone. Looking out through the glass inset, he saw them lingering on the stoop for long minutes before they, as one, lost patience, and ran off into the night.

At home, Kevin spread the photos across the table, pored over the police report faxed to him from a friend. Other PIs claimed to have trouble with the police, but Kevin found them reliably amenable to his wishes.

Of course they are, a voice in his head said. You know why. Just admit it. They’re yours. All of them.

Kevin distracted himself by looking at Bran, reading across the room, tucked into the oversized chair, red-gold head bent over the pages.

Feeling Kevin’s eyes on him, Bran looked up from his book and smiled. He made no move to come over, ever wary of the blood and guts of Kevin’s job.

The moment lingered. Kevin watched the light in those pale honey-colored eyes, wondered what would happen if he asked, did you feed me a flower?

Bran’s answer could shatter the uncertainty once and for all, could tell him whether it was fact or delusion, breakdown or break in reality. Couldn’t it?

“It’s not working this way, is it?” Memory Bran asked someone out of sight. “Too much, too fast. I’m taking him home.” Ambiguous words, suitable for medical therapy or sudden godhood.

Kevin flushed, even as the thought came to him. It was ridiculous. An Irish-Catholic had no business thinking like that. An Irish-Catholic fag went to hell, not Olympus, no matter who his lover was.

No matter how loved.

“You hungry?” Bran asked, standing. “I’m starved.”

“Sure,” Kevin said, unsure. Hungry? Would an immortal need food? Bran sat on the arm of his chair, kissed his mouth; Kevin’s heartbeat increased. He could feel it pounding steadily against his ribs.

“What’s that?” Bran asked, wincing away from the photographs.

Kevin flipped them over. “Dead man. Murdered, maybe. Wife says so.”

Bran shrugged. “Wives can be wrong. What’s your instinct say?”

Kevin hesitated. Sense said natural death, his doctor missed something: Some heart problems came out of the blue. But the blood in his veins whispered “murder, deliberate and malicious, and what are you going to do about it?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Kevin said. “The police--”

“You’re better at this than they are,” Bran said. “You know it’s true, if you’d only trust yourself, your instincts.”

I can’t even trust my memory, Kevin thought. Bran rose from the chair, disappeared into the kitchen. Kevin flipped the photographs back over, studied them, wanted to see something other than shock and physical pain in the man’s face, looking for some awareness of murder. A hundred years ago, he’d have been studying the pupils to see the murderer’s reflection. It felt that childish, but he’d seen the look on so many corpses.
He reached for the phone. If it were murder, and the wife were right and James had no enemies, two big ifs; there might be more dead men. An impersonal murderer had another name as well. Serial killer.

He spoke to another friend, a file clerk at the coroner’s office. There had been a spate of recent heart attacks. One a day, each morning. With days off for the weekend. Seven men and two women. All overweight. Kevin hung up, more convinced than ever. Modern medicine could prevent a heart attack. Modern medicine could also induce one.

A dark, savory smell reached him. Vaguely, he was aware of Bran closing the front door.
“Put those away, dinner’s here.” He laid out the plates as Kevin tidied the photos and the files.

Steak with blue cheese butter, cream-laced potatoes, artichoke hearts dripping with hollandaise sauce appeared, all on nicer china than they owned. “I ordered in. From Pierre and Yvette’s,” Bran said, smiling.

Pierre and Yvette’s didn’t deliver. Unless you were Bran. People would do anything for Bran. Even the three sisters, temperamental and prone to offense, were all smiles around Bran.

Kevin studied the food with a mixture of anticipation and disquiet. High fat, high cholesterol, rare red meat. The kind of meal he hadn’t eaten for years.

But he supposed if he were a god, fat didn’t matter. The Flower? The words rose to his lips, but he let them fall back. The meal was too good, the moment too pleasant to disturb with psychosis.

In the darkness of their bedroom, Kevin sprawled, resting his head on Bran’s smooth hip. In the dark, he remembered light--Bran’s skin radiant under a glittering blue-gold sky, lounging in each other’s arms while a small goat-creature with silver hooves played shining pipes for them.

“I’m so crazy,” Kevin said, voice muffled by doubt.

“Hm?” Bran said.

“About you,” Kevin tacked on. He should just ask.

“Crazy,” Bran said sleepily. “Two types of crazy. Flawed people who can’t handle the stresses of the normal world, who dream up their own. Normal people who find themselves in an impossible situation and fight it. One needs medication, the other--acceptance. Oh, and artists--but they’re just wacked.”

Kevin raised his head but Bran’s eyes drifted shut, his lovely mouth slackening, leaving Kevin with the question. . . . which one was he?

Music & other temporary obsessions

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:53:00 GMT

It's that time of year again. I'm sick of all of the music I own and want to hear something new, something wonderful, something AWESOME. But since I no longer listen to the radio, I'm out of the loop. It's cold and grey and quiet outside. I want something that makes some noise. I want something with just enough of an edge to cut through the gloom. I want something with a beat that breaks through the urge to hibernate.

Any recommendations?

Music I have loved in the past year or so: Corvus Corax, Abney Park, Johnny Hollow, Kidneythieves, Shivaree, Eisbrecher, Bitter:Sweet.
Music I always love: Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, Leslie Fish.
The only music I don't like: jazz with brass. Piano by itself. (yes, this from a woman who once played the piano seriously.)

I will listen to anything at least once. :)

Other than that, I've been pushing back the cold (though to be fair, we haven't had much of it yet) by obsessing over Supernatural. This is such a weird show for me. I watched the first season all those years ago, and walked away all "meh". I liked the actors who played the brothers. I liked the style and the freaky hotels. I liked the world. Hated the end of the first season: thought it was unearned melodrama. But, I was living with a tivo and it faithfully kept recording it. So I kept watching it. And the second season made me sit up and go "oooh", with far more good episodes than awkward ones.

Season 3 had an interesting arc--would they really kill off one of the main characters?--but also an enormous amount of misogyny. Then, when the end of the season neared, I had a really odd realization that I didn't want to watch it. I was terrified that the one character would die, and I didn't want to see that. That was also the moment that I realized that hey, the writers were doing something right: I was utterly invested in a fictional person, and I couldn't bear to see him killed. Season 4 brought in a new character, and somehow cemented the obsession. From what I hear, season 5 is continuing on pretty well. I am endeavoring to be patient.

The thing that keeps me fascinated is this is a series where the characters routinely win the battles--and yet, they're losing the war. Badly. That's amazing; I can't wait to see where this road trip ends.

cat with opinions

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:28:39 GMT

The elderly kitty has taken up editing, randomly rolling his paws around on the edge of my keyboard. Today, his biggest complaint is with a description.

His contribution? Asking me if I REALLY REALLY want to use this descriptor.

all false O""""""""""""""""""""???????????????????????????????????????????????????phelias

You know, at least other critiquers wait for me to give them the pages first!

Chipping away

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:27:01 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

Oh, the pet project. . . . I've decided I want to do something with it. So it's time for revision. The problem is: the pet project was fun to write but it's a monster to revise. A lot of the things I let slide in a pet project are just no good at all in a real novel. Chapter two, I'm looking at you and your nested flashback. Long flashbacks are tricky at the best of times. A nested flashback? Is an abomination. I'm pretty sure they take away your writing license for committing it, unless you're doing it with exquisite artistry. This nested flashback? No artistry.

So it has to go, the information has to be broken up, summed up, rearranged, or just plain discarded. I keep coming at it from various angles and nothing's changing. There is no right answer coming to mind. No moment of epiphany that if I do THIS then everything will be fine.

This novel is a sf-styled romantic thriller. This is where I run into the difficulties: Z, my main character, has to believe things that are factually wrong, but he also has to avoid being the character named too stupid to live, which means I need to give him good reasons to believe what he does. And the reasons are separated in time from the current plot. Hence the flashback(s). The novel can't begin any sooner than it already does, but the past events are important also. . . . So I go around and around and around and around, taking random stabs at it. I think really the only thing to do is yank the whole mass and rewrite the chapter entirely without looking at the old. The stuff that makes it back in will be the important stuff. Theoretically. Thrillers are a nightmares of small bits of information that pay off hugely later on. Urgh. Round and round and round I go.

Lesson learned here? Even if it's a pet project, a writing for fun exercise, don't allow myself to do something that I wouldn't do in a "pro" book. I'm pretty sure this would not be such an ugly battle if I'd fought it sooner, hadn't balanced the weight of the book on this chapter's information.

Currently reading: Frankenstein. Still. I am wondering how I ever got through this book in the first place. It's amazing how much styles and tastes change.

A miscellany

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:05:18 GMT

Nearly the end of October and I'm just realizing I never posted a recap of September. That could be simply because September was kind of a null for writing-related progress. I finished revising Ghosts & Echoes, did a lot of maintenance writing--outlining, plotting, organizing, all the boring stuff that somehow I have to do to get my headspace clear to concentrate. I didn't even get a chance to read anything! One and a half books in September. That's pretty dreadful.

October's been all about new starts, playing with book beginnings, testing the waters, seeing if this is the right place to start, or how about this, or what if I skip all of that backstory entirely? What if I shift the story left of center and go for a more romantic feel? All the fun stuff.

Fall's kicking in with a vengeance--and that's a source of some worry. When I was a kid, I was always envious of those lucky people who had real seasons. After nearly twenty years with seasons? I hate winter. I hate the dark and the cold and I have to do constant mental maintenance to keep myself from going into hibernation mode--if it's good enough for bears, it seems like it should be good enough for me. This year I may try to squeeze in a trip south and soak up sunlight. If I weren't terrified of skin cancer, I would hit sunbeds. And yes, I understand the idiocy of fearing tanning beds, and yet planning a trip south. Though in actual sunlight, I would slather on the sunscreen. It's mostly about visual light, anyway. And oh yeah, the warmth.

Fall also brings gorgeous leaves, crazy squirrels digging all over the yard, and, as of two nights ago, the first mouse slaughter. It's just not fall until some mouse decides to poke its whiskers in out of the cold and doesn't live to regret it. This is, after all, the house of four cats, three of which are sharp-clawed.

The puppy still continues well: she and the siamese mix have bonded over their desire to eat the squirrels, and the conviction that they can actually catch one. Considering that today the puppy managed to chase a squirrel with such energy that she actually managed to leap into the first crook of the tree which is about four feet off the ground--they may actually manage it.

Reading: I just finished Child of Fire, which I adored. I'm about to start a re-read of Frankenstein for calico_reaction 's online group read.

Starting the new book

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 03:41:01 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

Starting a new book always intimidates and thrills me in equal portions. There's so much work to be done before the prose ever starts. I'm a bit of a clockwork writer--things have to go in a certain order before the book begins, and at this point, I don't know if that process is necessary or just my way of winding my brain up.

So, in the past couple weeks I have: synopsized the book, written a fake blurb to encapsulate the general feel of the book to be referred to as needed, made an outline in five parts by drawing a giant W and marking the major plot points, created a list of places and things I would need to research and when I should research them, and then wrote up a chapter outline for the first 5 chapters. Sometimes I sketch out 8 chapters, but never more than that--things change so quickly as I write that more is counterproductive. I end up trying to force myself along a narrow path that no longer really matches up with what came before. I have even, randomly, pondered titles, but my brain shied away each and every time with a terrified whimper.

Today I sat down, looked at the blank page--I'm sorry, does that EVER stop being scary?--looked at the big picture outline, the chapter outline, and abruptly decided the story would begin in chapter 4, with everything that comes before either summed up, left out, or in a single flashback. I said "what?" to my brain and it said "just trust me."

All right, brain. Here's hoping you know what you're doing. And here's to chapter four rising in the ranks to become chapter one.

If it doesn't work? Well, it may be the first book in a very long while to have me ADD things to the beginning instead of lopping them off.

Crossed fingers. Here I go.

Currently reading: Mighty Unclean

Lyn Benedict: Ghosts & Echoes Cover Art

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:46:27 GMT

So the cover art for Ghosts & Echoes, book 2 of the Sylvie series is here! How much do I love it? Tons and tons and tons. I've been insanely fortunate with the cover art for my books--from the gorgeous and lush Maledicte/Kings & Assassins, to the much grittier toned Sylvie books.

Who knew pastels could be so moody or threatening?

Reading: Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert.

Puppy! & Pets in general.

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:30:21 GMT

The puppy, after some delays--spay issues, etc--has finally made it to my house. I was worried the cats were going to be annoyed. I figured Siggy (the large black siamese mix) would be happy--she has an unaccountable fondness for dogs. Rikki (little old man cat) would be resigned. But Chibi and Merlin? I figured at best, Merlin would be under the bed for a week, and Chibi would turn into the hiss-monster.

Oddly, this has not occurred. Siggy is pleased, Rikki is resigned, and Chibi is utterly unbothered. In fact, she is chasing the puppy's leash around and around. (I tend to keep new dogs leashed for easier training.) And Merlin, Mr OH GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING at every change in his routine, is wandering around the puppy growling softly, but not freaking out.

The puppy has been very good so far--not chasing the cats, testing out her blanket, investigating. And oh yes, when I took her into the yard, she pounced and killed a leaf. It's really something to see a dog who, in the shelter, was calm and friendly but reserved and tense, just take a breath and relax. She's doing the happy panting face thing and her tail is wagging non-stop.

So far the biggest frustration in her life is that I won't let her go upstairs--it's carpeted, and I don't know how housetrained she is/isn't.

Happy puppy day to me!

Psyke's Very Bad Day pt 3

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:49:50 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

Psyke woke, thick-headed and cold, from dreams of breathlessness and terror. The tisane Olympia had fed her, a poisonously sweet concoction of Petal, bitter chocolate, boiled milk, and sugar syrup had done its work most thoroughly. Time seemed clouded, her head mazed, and her body as lethargic as river silt.

Her world was darkness streaked with grainy light, and the faint sour smell of her breath was directed back at her, captured by cloth.

Her fingers fumbled, only distantly obedient, and plucked the veil from 'round her face. Was she sleeping in her costume? Home from the Dark Solstice Masque so late that Olympia allowed her to seek her bed without even changing her dress for a nightrail?

Psyke rolled her head; the veil, crumpled now, was black silk--her costume veil had been silver and green and embroidered with forget-me-nots of an improbable blue. The dark veil was something else. A lingering remnant of old superstition of a dead god, and hardly the only one.

When Psyke was younger, and her father vanished under the tides of the Xipos War, her mother had wrapped her tight in a false shroud lest the Admiral come back for his favorite daughter. Pyske, stubborn, had thrown her shroud aside and tried to lure him home, calling Papa, Papa, calling on Haith, begging him to bring her father back, until Olympia, woken and cross with it, told her that not only was her father dead, but so too was Haith and there was none to answer her prayers.

"Papa," she murmured now, then shaking some of the fog from her mind, "Olympia," she said. No reply.

"Mother?"

The house gave back no answer, not even the rustle of one of her many sisters' skirts. She brought a hand to her face, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and memory blossomed along with the bruising around her wrists, reddish purple, swollen where Maledicte had touched her.

The Solstice Ball, Psyke remembered with a sudden rushing influx of horror. Harriet falling, her eyes glassy, Lucy's pallid legs bared by her collapse, skin so blanched with death that her freckles stood out like cinders. Psyke heard herself whimpering in the back of her throat, an animal sound, and forced herself to stop. She had done that last night, too. Cried quietly, afraid to let the sound out as her peers died, and she stood alive but chilled to the bone, waiting for Haith to catch her up also.

Instead, there had been tisanes and cozening, the comforting clutch of her sisters and mother drowning her fear and shock with their own. Psyke had tumbled into stupor, fallen gratefully, dreaming of Haith's heavy steps scratching the floor, overlaying the distant sound of screaming. Her ears still rang with them, echoes from the ball; the skin of her face felt tight and pulled as if she had been crying in her sleep.

Psyke folded back her heavy, feather-filled counterpane with hands that felt as stiff as a crone's. Her breath plumed in the cold, silent air of her bedchamber, a wispy cloud. She shivered.

"Don't you worry, pet," Olympia had said, stroking Psyke's hair. "Just sleep and we'll see that no one, and nothing disturbs you, not even in your dreams."

Psyke fumbled her feet toward the distant carpet; the bedsteps had been taken away and tucked against the wall, inviting a spill had she risen carelessly. Her youngest sister and most vain, Gwena, still petulant that Psyke had had such an adventure, acting out in her usual petty fashion, no doubt. Psyke had a quick uncharitable wish that Gwena had come face to face with Mirabile and her poisons. Perhaps it would shake her out of her self-absorption. Nothing else ever had. Even last night, while Psyke recounted the murders of her friends, Gwena had inserted scornful remarks on how she would have been braver, have coaxed the men into capturing Mirabile, would have been smarter and seen Mirabile at her deadly work and prevented it all: the poisonings, the deaths, and Mirabile's escape. It had taken Olympia in a rare temper and a hard slap to silence Gwena.

The floor, reached safely, her nightrail tangling at her ankles, proved chill and damp; her fireplace showed no glimmer of heat. Further irritation touched her, a lingering gift of the Old Laudable, the main ingredient of Petal. It was one thing to keep her room still and quiet, another thing entirely to let the fire go ashy and cold.

Psyke tugged the bellpull, heard the clangor of it rising faintly from the kitchen board two floors below, and collected her wrap from her dressing table. A long moment passed, and Psyke's nerves, still sensitive to danger, sent dire warnings. Her heart, slowed by the tisane, began to beat faster.

That jangling bell was the only sound in the house. A lifetime of habit, and Psyke knew the bustle and drift of the maids' skirts rising to answer her summons like the sound of her mother's voice.

Listening with the caution of a wild creature, of a soldier's favorite daughter fed on war tales, Psyke heard a scratchy mouse-scrabble of sound that was followed by a sussurant weight sliding over thick rugs.

"Haith," she murmured, "walking." Falling into dreams again. Dragging his tail behind him, his crested brow scraping the walls as he passed.

A more homely sound reached her, comforted her. The quiet click and chime of the bottles on her mother's dressing table being shifted. Relief blossomed. It was only that it was early still, too early for her to be awake after such a dose, but perhaps it had been not one night of sleep but two, and this the second morning.

Psyke pulled back the curtains in her room, found a chill dawn waiting her, a thin rime crazing her windows, and shuddered again with cold and nerves. She passed through the weak daylight, and padded barefoot into the dim hallway. Her mother would fret when she saw it, mutter about savages and street-urchins, and no wonder Psyke remained unwed at such advanced age if her manners were so lamentable, but if Gwena had played her such a trick with her bedsteps, her slippers were likely full of thistle-down or slugs. Gwena was vain and self-important, but also very thorough.

Five steps into the hallway, into the twilight of its windowless passage, feet silent on the thick rugs, Psyke stepped into something chill that squelched wetly up between her toes, licked at her instep. Like poison, it weakened her instantly--such an anomalous mess in the well-run Bellane household; she dropped to an unsteady crouch, let her hands explore what her heart knew. When she raised her fingers into the thin, filtered light, they were stained the same red-brown as Mirabile's mad eyes, and made all comforting thoughts impossible. Her breath quickened, a sharp wheeze in her throat.

The chink of glass against glass stopped. From her mother's room, a voice called, "Is that you, my cherub? Woken finally?"

The dulcet tone halted her breath; that arch sweetness of pitch was not her mother's, not any of her younger sisters, not even Olympia tidying in her mother's room.

Psyke backed away on hands and knees, awkward, her hair tumbling in her face, sticking on the silent tears that had started falling the moment she'd seen the blood, identified that voice. A rasp of skirts warned her and she tried to shelter behind a small table, a hopeless task even for one as slightly built as she. Mirabile ghosted into the hall, her white-feathered gown stained at the breast, the sleeves, and the fluttering hem. "Surely you didn't think I, having gone to such trouble to remove those annoying debutantes, would spare you, when you were the worst offender of them all? Dancing with Maledicte as if you were his equal."

"Spare me?" Psyke breathed. Surely this was Petal dreaming still, nightmares that would dissolve with the dawn, leaving her well-rested and these horrors only forgotten phantoms.

"You were sleeping so sweetly when I came, and beyond my ability to waken you, though I tried." Mirabile's carmined lips turned downward, a caricature of cruelty like the masks stage villains at the Trieste wore. "I could have smothered you then, but where's the triumph in that? To win over the feeble struggle of a stunned bird."

Psyke thought of her breathless dreams and wondered sickly how close she had come to never waking at all. Mirabile's eyes, reddish even in the dim light, glittered at her, fervid, pleased. Psyke scuttled backward; her bare foot, questing ahead of her, touched the cooler air rising through the stairwell, and she turned, scrambled down the stairs as fast as her tangling skirts would allow.

Behind her Mirabile sighed, a gust of breath with a smile beneath it, as if she relished the chase.

The house was dark as Psyke ran through it, the drapes drawn tight though the sun crept through and left tiny dagger-shapes on the carpets and flocked walls. Daylight coming into full power, and if Psyke could reach the street, surely Mirabile would have to flee like a shade at dawn; though from the measured tread of Mirabile's feet on the stairs, it seemed hard to imagine her fleeing anything.

The hallway opened up to drawing room, to dining room, to the foyer and the main door beyond that. Mirabile's steps seemed to touch her shadow; a frisson wound its way up her spine, and Psyke whirled into the darker recesses of the dining room, veering toward the kitchen. Daylight outside, and if the hour was as early as it seemed, the tinge of a new day in the air, she was more like to find help in the delivery boys making their rounds than trusting to the front stoop and her fellow nobles.

In the darkness of the dining room, the scent hit her like a blow, fetid, thick, and horribly sweet for all of that. Psyke trembled, her body reacting instinctively, understanding that this was death before her mind could even begin to express it. Her breath seized and sobbed; she flattened a hand over her mouth trying to silence herself, while her eyes adjusted, inexorably, unwanted, to a scene better suited to the waxwork museum of horrors. The dining table and the dead set down to dine, silverware clutched in greying fingers. Her mother, her sisters, all dead and with their dinner course spread out before them. Darkness launched itself from the table with a hoarse caw and rattle and a broom-whisking of sharp-edged feathers, aiming directly at her, the pale lure of her nightgown.

Psyke shrieked and once started couldn't manage to stop. She ducked, flailed at the crow, stumbled to her knees, hands flying out to stop her fall, and her fingers caught, pulled on a silk skirt. Gwena slid down in the chair and seemed to glare, all protruberant eyes and swollen tongue, at her least favorite sister.

Wish Gwena had met Mirabile, Psyke had thought earlier. But she hadn't meant it, not like this, Haith give her back, not like this.

As if recognizing Gwena had been the key, loved faces leaped out of death's distorted masks. The blood-streaked rictus with the squeezed shut eyes--her mother. That fetally coiled body beneath the table, face upward with empty eyesockets and gaping mouth, no doubt courtesy of the crow, was her ten-year old niece, the woman reaching down to provide a comfort that never arrived was her widowed sister, Helena. Around the table so it went, Elsa, her favorite lace shawl draggled with blood; Olympia's chin wet with blood, her teeth reddened; Arisane, the youngest of them all, named for Aris when her birth coincided with his ascension, lay back in her chair, her hands locked on the edge of the table as if she had tried to push herself away from this deadly feast.

Psyke's throat was raw with screaming; her eyes felt equally raw as she saw only death where life should be.

A cold hand slapped her, followed by the sting of sharpened nails, and she jolted and fell silent.

"A little less of that appalling noise. A lady of your age should at least try for dignity," Mirabile said, moving past Psyke's huddled form. She pushed Elsa's corpse out of a chair, and after checking the seat for fluids, settled herself with a dowager's finicky grace, fluffing her feathered skirts, smoothing that blood-stained bodice.

"All of them?" Psyke said, her attention fixed firmly on her clenching hands. "All of my family given to death?"

"You wouldn't wake," Mirabile said. "Was I supposed to bear boredom, mewed up with you in your bedroom? It's not my nature to sit idle. So I came downstairs, but their endless chatter was entirely too wearying. One can only listen to gossip about oneself for so long without feeling the need to poison the speakers' soup."

Psyke gasped at the reasonableness of Mirabile's tone, the one that invited commiseration. "All of--" She trailed off, counted shadowed bodies in the room, counted again and again as if the number would change. Her mother, her sisters, all gone while she slept.

"Yes, Lady Psyke. All of them. And the maids, and the cook, and the butler, the tweeny, the stablehands. Might we move on to something more rewarding than revisiting schoolroom addition?"

The crow launched itself from the doorframe to land, wings flaring, claws scrabbling for balance, in Mirabile's lap. The fine silk of her dress tore beneath its talons; her white thigh bled and healed and bled again but she only stroked its matted feathers absently.

"No, I am rarely idle, but even I must admit, it was pleasant to sit by your bedside awhile. It's been quite a busy time for me," Mirabile said. "First the ball, then Westfall, and your family. Even Ani's been hard-pressed to keep up with my appetites, though Her gifts have been useful. Would you believe one of Westfall's servants so forgot himself as to flail away at me with his master's sword? A servant using his master's blade to strike at a noble? Westfall's egalitarian ways--"

Psyke lost the thread of Mirabile's rambling, her mind greying out in horror. Her fingers twitched in the carpet, scrabbling for safety like a rabbit trying to burrow. Ani, she thought. If it were true, if Ani, the god of love and vengeance had returned, and Mirabile's tally of the dead argued for it, the way her skin healed, the uses of poison. . . . If Ani had returned, then--Psyke closed her eyes, bent her head, and whispered a thread of a prayer to the only god her father had ever knelt to, the battlefield god: Haith, the god of death and victory. Strike me down now, she thought, numb with pain, paralysed with fear, and let me find victory in depriving Mirabile of my murder.

"--wring your neck, I think," Mirabile said, standing, and setting the crow into startled wingbeats again. "I grow bored with poison, and crave blood beneath my nails."

The crow circled the room, and Psyke opened her eyes when it made another call that cut off suddenly. It fell from the air, thrashed, and died on the carpet.

Its fault for feasting on poisoned bodies, Psyke thought, wildly. Mirabile prodded at the bird with an impatient foot, focusing her febrile attention in its clotted feathers. Psyke rose up, hands grasping, fumbling, found her grip closing cold and tight on the silver serving tray, and she threw it--porcelain cups and tea pot falling, crashing--with all the strength she had ever possessed. Mirabile staggered back, her reflection distorted and horrible in the silver surface, and stumbled over the crow's corpse with a wet crunch.

A wise sailor flees when the wind is wrong, her father had said, and the jolt of his voice, lovingly remembered, sent her moving before she had even truly registered the words. Flee now, pushing past Mirabile, her clawing nails, the snarl on her face, not looking back, but skittering on hands and knees, then to unsteady feet, as ungainly as a newborn foal, scrambling through the kitchen and into the road, nearly beneath the wheels of the flour cart.

Mirabile was gone by the time Echo's Particulars arrived; Psyke sat in their belled wagon, wrapped in a cheap, brown cloak, watching green-faced young men vomiting in her mother's herb garden with a certain detachment. Dominick Isley, Lord Echo, sitting beside her, seemed struck as numb as she, his face tired and set in grim lines. His questions were perfunctory; his mind elsewhere. After all, the murder of a mostly impoverished noble family was of no account when it was only one of many deaths. "Mirabile, you say."

At her nod, he sighed, "And you've no other family?"

"None," Psyke said. The enormity of it struck her again, and she was drowned in it. A gentle hand on her arm roused her, and she found Nicholas Rue of the Kingsguard staring in at her with a look of such pity that it made her turn from his gaze.

"Take her to the palace," Echo said. "Until the witch is caught, it is the safest place."

Rue nodded once and Psyke giggled, drawing both men's scandalized attention. Safe, when death walked the streets and made itself welcome in her home? There was no safety now.

###

Psyke's Very Bad Day pt 2

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:35:36 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

When Psyke returned to the ballroom, arms prickling, bare with cold and vulnerability, a man's shadow crossed her path, too close to be a servant. Maledicte, she thought, and her fairly trapped. But a glance up and further up still reassured her of that even as her breath caught. This wasn't Maledicte at all, but Maledicte's lover: Janus Ixion, Lord Last, the bastard nephew of the king.

Her smile never faltered, even as Ixion bowed silently, and without a word, or even truly a glance at her, offered a hand.

His eyes were on King Aris, and Psyke, taking advantage of her veil, stared likewise, trying to see what drew his attention. Aris, despite his somber mien and mourning clothes, gifted his nephew with the hint of a smile and the barest drop of a chin. Approval for his choice.

As the dance began, Ixion's attention turned to her, as was only proper, his blue eyes bright behind his simple mask. Psyke dropped her gaze beneath the weight of things unsaid around them: her mother's matrimonial plans and Aris's tacit acknowledgement of such. She flushed as his hand slid warmly around her waist, nestled over the small of her back, and curved around the top of her hip.

Dancing with her sisters was never like this. Even her two fiances had never touched her with such surety, such assumed intimacy. His composure and experience--for surely he must be talented to keep Maledicte so content--seemed far older than his years, made her forget that she was the elder, made her feel as awkward as her first come-out.

"How fares the search for your father?" she asked, when the first long pattern of Gathering Lilies swept them back into each others' arms.

Only after his hands around hers twitched, did she think that it might have been a terrible question to ask. Smile, she reminded herself. Don't speak. If you can, simper.

His grip eased, though it had never come near to discomfort. "Well enough," he said. "They've not found him or his body. With Echo's Particulars scouring the streets, though, it's only a matter of time."

The dance whirled them apart from each other, leaving Psyke with too much time to think on his answer. It had sounded almost as if he were glad Last were lost, regretful that this state of unknowing must end. She darted a glance at the King once more, and found his gaze somber. A tiny shiver touched her. Ixion was Maledicte's lover after all, and if Maledicte was one quarter the villain rumor held him to be, perhaps Ixion's phrasing only represented the most common gossip: Ixion knew his father was dead because his lover had done it, and feared Maledicte's guilt being uncovered.

The refrain came back around and he took her into his arms again, smiling gently. "Aris seems pleased to see you at my side," he said.

"My father served with him during the Xipos war," she said. "An admiral on his fleet. He died on the sea."

"Ah," Janus said. "I know of him then. Admiral Send'em Down. I studied his deeds in Itarus. They do not love him there. His ship killed four of the Itarusine princesses."

"I loved him, what care I for their sentiments?" Psyke said. "And it was only because the Itarusines chose to use noblewomen as shields on their own ships. He had no choice."

"I agree with you," Janus said. "It was war, and he was a soldier at heart. But it does make me wonder--his ship went down in a battle after Aris sued for peace."

Old outrage thickened in her breast, but she had heard all the variants of the rumors before. That Admiral Bellane outright defied the King and sought to prolong the war, that Admiral Bellane had pushed the fight, preferring to die in battle as a soldier than linger on in peace, that an Itarusine captain had chosen to take out the worst of their Antyrrian enemies and never mind the truce, even the rumour that Admiral Bellane had chosen to die asea rather than be ransomed or killed. His papers, so useful to her in other ways, were silent on that last charge, and that lack chafed her.

Hot words flew to her lips, but the bright eyes on hers were empty of malice. His steps in the dance were tight and curbed, holding himself to her pace, so that she seemed possessed of grace for once, instead of a galloping awkwardness. Small kindnesses, she thought, and swallowed the words back.

"Communication on the battlefield is difficult enough," Psyke said instead. "Communication across stormy seas is another magnitude of problem, a matter of flagships and spyglasses and men peering through the storms. Of trained birds that falter in the sharp sea air. My father never knew the war was over."

"I see," Janus said. He released her then, for her elaborate final steps, the swoop and trailing of her gloved fingers above the ground, the little dip that gave the dance its name.

He bowed to her, and she dropped a curtsey, oddly pleased with herself. Olympia would be pleased. Maledicte danced often with Psyke but was unacceptable for marriage. Janus Ixion, though a bastard, was entirely possible. And were Psyke honest with herself, she was not so averse to the idea. Janus was royalty, after all, noble on both sides, even if the birth had been unsanctioned; more, he was gentle in nature and possessed of a calm certainty she envied.

Still thinking of possibilities and looking after him, she was in position to see his face change from blank politeness to white anger and concern. He pushed aside the servant that had spoken to him and disappeared toward a balconet in some haste.

Curiosity, her friend and one-time fiance Dionyses said, was no sin, but a boon. Curiosity and a sense of inquiry raised men above beasts.

Psyke made her quiet way over to the balconet. Clasped in its shadows, overhung by eaves green with winterberries, Maledicte folded into Janus's arms, and kissed him without discretion or restraint.

Psyke's cheeks burned behind her veil. Maledicte's pale hands, more delicate than one would expect from a duellist, tightened on Janus's broad shoulders, clawed into his hair, and when Janus pulled away, Maledicte let out a hoarse moan of frustration and want. His lips were bruised dark, and his mask hung, loosely caged in Janus's fingers.

Tracing the smooth lines of her own lips, Psyke felt a flicker of something that might be envy, or might be fear. Dionyses had kissed her cheeks, her temple, but never more, always so chaste with her. Rue had once kissed her mouth, a sweet mingling of breath, and sworn his devotion.

Psyke fled the balconet doors and discovery. She ducked behind one of the slow, swinging mirrors when Janus entered almost on her heels. His hair had been sleeked back into place, and only a faint ruddy tinge to his lips betrayed his activities.

Her skin prickled and she turned, dropping a tiny curtsey to the man approaching her.

Of course it was Maledicte, and Maledicte in a visible temper, dark eyes narrowed behind the beaked mask, mouth twisting.

"Lady," he said, that uncanny rasp stirring the delicate hairs on the back of her nape. "Give me this dance."

Psyke cast a quick glance back, hoping to see Olympia's attention on her, to see that tiny head shake that denoted disapproval and a reason to say no. No such relief offered though, and so she took Maledicte's hands, allowing him to take her into the waltz.

One silent circuit of the room, and Psyke spotted Olympia and a reason for her chaperone's inattentiveness. The chaperones, clustered together, were watching Mirabile instead, watching with all the wariness of shepherds who found a wolf lounging in their fold. Mirabile leaned close to the debutantes, whispering scandal; a moment later, Lucy's shocked shout of laughter rang out, and was immediately stifled.

"If you hate me so much that you can't be bothered to look at me, I wonder why you agreed to dance at all. Surely no one would fault you for turning me away," Maledicte said and Psyke sighed.

Vanity, she thought. He couldn't bear that she ignored him, though he had no opinion of her whatsoever. As if that were not vice enough, he added impatience to his account.

"Can't you answer me? Or were you never trained to talk and keep count of your steps at the same time?"

"I have younger sisters waiting for me to wed," Psyke admitted. "Mother's considering all options."

His steps faltered a pace. "She can't think to attach me? With my reputation, I thought to be safe from matchmaking mamas at least."

"Oh no, not you," Psyke said, and bit her lips behind the veil. Tact. Maledicte might not want to wed her, but no man liked being dismissed so abruptly.

"Be brave, then. Tell me who your mother would have you marry. She's had all year to pick and choose." Left unsaid, but present in his voice, were all the years that had already passed.

A sudden upwelling of sympathy touched her and she spoke honestly. "She intends me to wed Lord Last." Better for him to know now; Janus would have to marry at some point, and after seeing the way they clutched each other, Psyke couldn't imagine marriage being anything but bitter gall to him. Best to accustom himself to the taste now.

Maledicte's mouth thinned to a line; his voice, already a rasp, narrowed to a venomous whisper. "And she thinks to use Janus's lover to meet him. Does she want me to tell you what pleases him? What makes him sweat and cry out? What his skin feels like under my lips? What he says to me while we're abed?"

Heat washed Psyke, a full choking flush as if she had stepped unawares into a fire. Maledicte's hands screwed tight on her wrists and fingers, and embarrassment gave way to a blaze of pain. Her eyes watered; she whimpered under her breath, a tiny, scared sound that reminded her of mice cradled in cats' paws. Surely he couldn't hurt her here? Not in sight of everyone? But there were no cries of outrage rising, no signs that anyone noticed, or more likely, cared enough to intervene and risk Maledicte's sword turned in their direction. She struggled uselessly in his grip.

He spoke, more venomous whispers that she didn't hear, lost in the rushing waves of pain. Her fingers were numb; her bones ground together and she went limp against him.

His grip eased and shifted; the surcease of pain made her head swim. He spun her in the waltz and she counted measures in her head, trying to estimate how much longer this could go on. Her wrists throbbed; the blood pounded in her head and the room took on the aspect of nightmare.

Finally, the musicians stopped, and Psyke tried to slip away. Maledicte pinned her with a vivid and malevolent gaze and she stopped immediately, taught obedience in that moment of pain.

His grip left her wrist, slid up her forearms, scaldingly intimate on skin unused to touch, and herded her to a quiet cul-de-sac created of hanging mirrors.

He drew her close, put his lips by her ear. "Your mother may want Janus for you. Aris may want the same. But if you take Janus from me--" His breath hissed out at the very thought. "If you take him, I'll kill you. Are we understood?"

Then, only then, did he release his grip on her entirely. She stumbled to her feet, stumbled forward, banging her arm on the edge of the glass and wincing. Olympia's dark skirts showed in her vision and Psyke floundered toward them, wanting to be held, warm and safe against them, as she had as a child.

She wept in Olympia's lap, her veil gone, aware she was making a spectacle of herself but unable to stop. Perhaps it was that awareness that allowed her to see Harriet totter and fall. Perhaps it was simply that Psyke was the only one unmasked in the ballroom at the moment, and her vision was unimpaired.

Harriet, so quiet, even in distress, would never have thought to complain that she was feeling ill, or breathless in her too-tight corset. Psyke scrubbed at the tears on her face, and said, "Olympia--"

The deep tolling of the palace's death bell rang out over her voice, and in its echoes, she thought she heard the distant sound of Haith's steed, riding up from the land of the dead.

Her tears stopped, traded for shock, when the young lady Sweet, on her way to Harriet's side, fell also. No graceful faint, but a headlong sprawl and strange, choked cry. Her slippers drummed the floor for a moment, as if she meant to dance to a tune only she heard, and then ceased.

Chryses DeGuerre's lessons in the schoolroom came back and Psyke knew that the blueness of her lips would never fade, and that the fixed rigidity in Harriet's face, her bulging tongue augured not sickness but sudden death.

As Psyke looked on, her face wet with tears, the other debutantes tottered and fell to the accompaniment of rising panic among the court.

Psyke's Very Bad Day pt 1

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:26:05 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

Psyke's Very Bad Day, pt 1/3

These are a few (longish) scenes that never made it into Kings & Assassins.

Why this didn't make the book?: It was a prologue that references a whole lot of people who would be irrelevant to the plot of Kings. Plus, the nervous debutante was just the wrong feel for the rest of the book. Those of you who've read Kings will find certain phrases or parts familiar--they were cannibalized for use later. Still, I have a fondness for these scenes; they gave me my first look at the kind of woman Psyke Bellane might be.

Spoilers? Only for Maledicte. A chapter told from a differing viewpoint.

1.
At the heart of the spider-webbed streets of Murne, on the darkest night of the year, the great ballroom near the palace blazed like a solitary ember in a cooling fire. The rest of the city hunkered dark and quiet, the confounding tangles of the streets made worse by the extinguished street lamps. Small, shy sparks of gaslight glimmered here and there behind shuttered windows, and red glows seeped out beneath lintels, hinting at hearth fires lit against the cold.

It was the Dark Solstice, and in its wealth of long night, the boundary between the living and the dead turned fragile, when Haith, the horned god of Death and Victory, allowed his charges their chance to plunder the living world. Superstition only, but superstition with generations of force behind it.

What did it matter that the gods were dead when the city remembered Haith's presence in a thousand hearthside tales? No one could be faulted for caution, not when the stories claimed one Solstice, generations ago, at the entreaty of the man who would be the Cold King, Haith had brought his dead up into the streets, fed them well on the breath of the living, so that when dawn broke, the city broke open with it, and the Cold King walked in and claimed the throne.

So the city doused its lights and hunkered down, as silent and still as a fox watching the hounds sweep by. All silent and still save the court who feared nothing so much as their own boredom. The gods were gone after all, and while in some houses there was debate that this only allowed the dead greater freedoms, theology was far less interesting than the opportunity for gossip and scandal.

On the north side of the city, the streets showed shadowed movement, as carriage after darkened carriage left the aristocratic estates and town houses, making their disjointed ways to the palace and the Dark Solstice Ball.

Lady Psyke Bellane, veiled and costumed, had slipped out of one such carriage, her chaperone two paces behind. Before her, grey-clad palace servants opened the wide double doors to the ballroom, revealing an enormous room with its size gone deceptive and vague in the spinning wake of hanging mirrors scattered throughout. If the winter night outside was the greediest of nights, a night that swallowed an all too short day, then here, within the court's ballroom, were the missing hours. Half the circular ballroom was painted in rose and gold, with pale streaks of sun-touched blue; the gas lamp sconces there burned ruddy and warm with the addition of colored oils to tint the flames. The other side was shades of dust and twilight, edged with silver draped balconies and the gas-lamps were filtered through nacre to give off the proper pearly light.

Lingering on the edge of the room, Psyke studied it all, the musicians, the courtiers, the richness of clothes and food and accent and laughter, and thought this time, this season, she must end it wed. That determination tasted bitter, not inexplicably so for a woman of six and twenty, whose past years had been spent trapped as a child in her mother's home, yielding and compromising in a house far too crowded with adult women. Her two widowed sisters laid claim to her time as a chaperone and tutor to their young daughters; her mother gently overrode Psyke's wishes on the management of the staff and household funds even while seeking her advice, and her younger sister, Gwena, as trapped as Psyke, had a temperament that took every thwarted desire as a deliberate affront. At nineteen, Gwena's talents, which should have been dancing and flirting, lay in her ability to keep her spite fresh, and her revenges as numerous as they were petty.

Psyke dreamed of a husband, not with a young girl's hopes of great romance, but a no less fervent desire for a house of her own, with hours turned to her own purposes.

At her age, she was far too old to be a debutante; her come-out had been ten years prior. To ape the debutante now, to return to pale, demure gowns better suited to girls with unformed personalities galled but nothing else declared her intent to be wed so clearly.

Any other year, and her grasping for debutante status would have been savagely ridiculed, but this year--this year was so steeped in scandal and suprises that Psyke's presence was a mere footnote in the annals of gossip.

Psyke would have traded this uneven acceptance for another peaceful month compiling her father's memoirs on the Xipos War. Perhaps it was too much reading, as her mother said, but the court held little appeal for one so immersed in the somber politics of the war years. Perhaps it was only that she had garnered only disappointment and pain from prior seasons. Her first, a heady delight of splendor and excess, ended abruptly when her betrothal to Dionyses DeGuerre collapsed in scandal. Her second, a more sedate affair, ended with her betrothal to Nicholas Rue, a second son of a minor baronet. His ambition, however, was the end of that betrothal; he stepped into the position of second-captaincy in the kingsguard, a position granted solely to bachelors.

Two betrothals, broken one so soon after the other, had an effect, not only on her heart, but on the whispers of the court. Two betrothals broken off, and spite began to whisper that perhaps it was Psyke at fault, some peculiarity of hers that made Rue prefer a career to her as wife, and Dionyses--well, perhaps Psyke had a hand in his ruin also.

When Psyke looked over the court now, she saw wagging tongues and spiteful eyes. She frowned, realizing her impressions were, at least partially, false. Yes, there was spite aplenty, but there was a greater emotion in the air. Fear, she identified it. Fear, in the debutantes who huddled together too closely for mere gossip. Fear, in the young noblemen whose gambling took on a frantic note, desperate to distract themselves. Fear, in the way the grey-clad servants of the king seemed more attuned to the doors than to the guests they were meant to be serving. Fear, even in the way the king's dais was thickly decked with guards, the boy prince surrounded by his dogs, and Aris's pale eyes watching everything with the wariness of a wounded man.

Some level of unease was expected; after all, hadn't the earl of Last simply disappeared? And he, not only the brother of the king, but a notable swordsman. If he could disappear, and with no blame to be laid, then who might be next? It granted an edge of superstition to the Dark Solstice not seen in decades.

Her chaperone, a widowed friend of her mother's who lodged with them, pinched her lightly at the intersection of glove and arm.

"Best be smiling, young miss," Olympia said. "Your mother--"

Psyke raised the sheer edge of her veil, revealing her obedience. A dark glitter caught her eye, a man's elaborate costume of feathers and jet, a beaked mask; Psyke ushered Olympia to the seating for chaperones, losing herself in the woman's sheltering bulk, in the froth of elegant costumes the other debutantes wore and the courtier Maledicte passed by, unseeing. Psyke let out a shallow breath in relief, before greeting Selena, Harriet, and a shrilly giggling Lucy with a smile rather more real than her earlier one. These girls might be debutantes, but they were sweet natured, rarely making Psyke feel the cuckoo in their midst.

Even so, their innocent speculations as to who they would dance with tonight, and who they might allow liberties with, secure in their masked status, palled quickly and Psyke's attention wandered.

Behind his black mask, Maledicte paused to look at the King's dais, his servant one step behind him. The manservant leaned close and Maledicte tilted his head up to receive words.

"Seeking Ixion," Lucy said, a discreet whisper in her ear, the rough brocade of her mask making a tiny snag in Psyke's veil. "Do you think he will dance with you tonight?"

"It seems impolite to wish otherwise," Psyke said. Lucy giggled again, and Psyke kept her smile with practice. Lucy no doubt thought Psyke's wit dry, rather than her tongue truthful.

"I would give my eyeteeth to dance with him," Harriet said fervently.

"You're too tall," Psyke said.

Harriet flushed, sensitive to her extra inches, but Lucy laughed in quick comprehension. "You mean to say it's only for vanity that Maledicte seeks you out? I own he is not overtall. . . ."

"Not overtall," Psyke agreed. "But decidedly over-vain. And I am the shortest debutante this year."

"And for several others," Harriet said, a tiny slap for Psyke's comment on her height.

Psyke let the comment on her age slide by, thinking it deserved. She had been accidentally cruel, wounded a friend for no reason except that Maledicte made her uneasy and caused her tongue to grow as carelessly abrupt as his own.

Were it not for Maledicte's attentions, Olympia was fond of saying, Psyke might have stayed unnoticed for the entire season. Psyke would have preferred that to the eyes that lingered on her now, waiting to see if Maledicte would seek her hand again. Even the King's eye had been drawn to her, the dancing partner of his favorite courtier.

In the beginning of the year, Psyke had rather admired Maledicte, a creature maddeningly lovely and daring as well. Traits she wished she possessed herself, being cautious in manner and only pretty in the common sort of way--fine, regular features, and fashionably pale hair and eyes.

As the year progressed, and Psyke was thrown into company with him at nearly every turn, her appreciation turned sour. What good was daring when it was bent to malignant doing? When his cunning was used to manipulate or wound? Even his beauty failed to appease in the end, yoked as it was, irretrievably to vanity.

Lost in thought, she allowed herself to drift away from the edge of the ballroom. The first she realized of it was when Lady Mirabile brushed past her, setting Psyke aside with, a hand tight on her sleeve, and a hissed accusation through a curved, scarlet mouth.

"He's mine."

Psyke shivered, stepping back toward the shelter of the chaperones. Olympia stopped nattering with the young Lady Sweet's chaperone, and rose to Psyke's side. "All right, dear?" she asked, with the cultivated awareness only a long-term family retainer possessed.

Psyke nodded. The lady Mirabile was unpleasant to be sure; the young debutantes compared stories of her set-downs and cuts direct, grown increasingly more brutal as the years passed. But it was her eyes that had chilled Psyke: behind the white, feathered mask, they had gleamed nearly as red as her lips.

"But oh--my dear--however did you do it?" Olympia's smooth brow wrinkled beneath the thin layer of white clay maquillage she favored, years out of style. "I made sure of the stitching before we left, since your sister was fussing so and the gods know her temper can not be trusted."

Psyke followed her gaze to her own sleeve. "I think we can not blame this one on Gwena's tantrums. Not when Lady Mirabile thinks so poorly of me," she said. The tiny rents in the thin green silk discoloured as she watched, tiny brown edges forming in small circles, as if the silk had come too close to a candle flame.

"Did she reach your skin? Should we go home?"

Psyke shook her head, denying herself the reprieve. Did she leave, her mother would fuss and fret for weeks about chances gone to waste. Better by far to endure the evening. "The silk is stronger than it appears. Her nails never got so far as flesh."

Olympia's lips thinned, outrage hovering in the air, but Olympia preferred to lead by example and so, as Psyke expected, said nothing at all regarding Mirabile's conduct. Wise of her, Psyke thought. Mirabile's treatment of the debutantes was notoriously rough; her treatment of those she considered beneath her in rank could be considered criminal--had such victims any recourses to law. The nobility protected its own, be they innocent or monster.

Instead, Olympia turned Psyke this way and that, comparing the two sleeves, and finally sighed. "There is no help for it. The sleeves must come off and what your mother will say. . . ."

"We all have limbs," Psyke said. "I know it to be a fact; Chryses DeGuerre illustrated it for me before we left the schoolroom. In truth, there seems to be little substantive difference between our limbs and those of other creatures; those little monkeys brought back from the Explorations, for instance, show--"

"Smile, my lady, and don't speak," Olympia murmured.

Psyke sighed and said, "Natural studies aside, I think Mother can not complain if I bare my arms--not tonight, any road."

Olympia surveyed the decorative, provocative crowd. women clad in costumes more designed to reveal than mask. Even young Lucy revealed legs as freckled as her cheeks, her gauzy Kyrdic skirt nearly raised to her knees. "I concur, but you must recall--you cannot be masked so neatly as others."

She ushered Psyke into an alcove behind a mirror and a hanging drape, lit softly by a single gas-lamp, and began snipping the delicate threads that bound the sleeves to her chemise. Psyke, peering through the space between the drape and silver-backed mirror, was treated to the edifying sight of Mirabile dancing with Maledicte, white-feathered mask to black-feathered mask, no aid in hiding their identities. But then, such scandalous creatures prided themselves on notoriety. For them, anonymity was a greater sin.

Mirabile leaned close, her head of a height with Maledicte, which could not please him, no matter what words she uttered. Like twin sides of a mirror, she thought them, laughing at their own malign cleverness.

Olympia clucked disapproval at Psyke's shudder, and Psyke let the drape fall all the way closed. What two such wild spirits as Maledicte and Mirabile got up to could affect her in no way.
#

yay filk music!

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:28:06 GMT

I'm not particularly big on nostalgia, and most of the music I listened to in high school (cassette tapes! records!), I have long since removed from my life and memory. That said, in my last year of high school, I stumbled across Firebird Arts and their selection of filk music and a woman named Leslie Fish.

I ordered, on a whim, a copy of Chickasaw Mountain. I had to reorder the tape again, when I'd played it into the dirt. And even that cassette has been dead for many years. The songs in my brain, however, are not.

Last night, after finding myself singing Mount Tam under my breath while revising, decided to look her up online. It was late, I was easily discouraged, and I gave up all hope of finding another copy of Chickasaw. I am no good at downloading or finding mp3s, so I just resigned myself to having the songs only in my memory.

Sometimes, if you ask, the universe provides.

Received an email today from Prometheus music saying they're planning to put Mount Tam on CD.
Go universe!

That's a nice way to start a too-early Saturday morning.

Currently reading: my own mangled prose.

the surreal world

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:33:36 GMT

Sometimes the world just BEGS you to write a story.

Coming back from my lunch break, I noticed that many of the sidewalk sculptures have been removed to make way for the new batch. I noticed this by stepping on a patch of sidewalk that was smoother, looked down, realized I was standing where a sculpture had been, my boot heel on the brass plaque. When I stepped away, it said Time Marker, or some such combination of words. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it.

Then next block, a young man on the bench, holding up a sign. "TEMPORALLY HOMELESS. PLEASE HELP."

Add 1 + 1 and hey presto.

Story.
And obviously not a happy one, given his situation.

But still, the world wants us to tell each other stories. Our brains are hardwired to find patterns, or to create them out of nothing. And that, as always, amazes me.

August

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:03:36 GMT

Last month I was behind and the month before was a disaster, so this time I'm accounting for the month a little on the early side. But really, not much is going to change in the next two days.

Writing wise:
A lot of fits and starts. I did a lot of what my brain considers not-quite-writing, but is still utterly essential. In other words, I wrote up more synopses for books I wanted to sell to various people. It's amazing how you can agonize over every word in things like that. Then I got back to attempt to revise the Beasts and ran into the dreaded chapter three (again) which consisted of (oh dear god, what was I thinking!?) three nested flashbacks. By the time I forced myself through that and crept up on chapter 4 which ended with an all caps reproach to myself, I had to take a break or watch my head explode. I decided I needed a new scene and have sketched that interim scene out, which allows the action scene to be well, action! instead of shoot people, stop & talk, shoot people some more.
I also started the revisions for Sylvie 2: Ghosts and Echoes. Thankfully, that is going much better than the Beasts. I think it's all in the name. Why should I be surprised when the Beasts are Beastly?

Other than that, trying to work my way through the to be read shelf.

This month I plowed through
The Women of Nell Gwynne's - Kage Baker
Vanished - Kat Richardson
The Becoming - Jeanne C Stein
Night Huntress - Yasmine Galenorn
Salt & Silver - Anna Katherine
Finger Lickin' Fifteen - Janet Evanovich
Julian Comstock - Robert Charles Wilson
Shelf Discovery - Lizzie Skurnick
In the Woods - Tana French

I really enjoyed The Women of Nell Gwynne, devoured Vanished, and was highly amused by Salt & Silver. But the standout has to be In the Woods. Thanks for the rec, juushika , it was awesome and I am cursing myself for finishing it after all the local bookstores have closed.

A belated thanks to rogue_psion for the recommendation of Mark of the Demon which I read and enjoyed last month.

Misc

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:43:27 GMT

Things to do when faced with an unexpected Napoleon?

Buy it, eat it, call it lunch, and ride out the sugar rush all day long.

Mmmm.

Currently reading: The Purple & the Black

Fighting the television instinct

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:17:52 GMT

Originally published at LaneRobins.com. You can comment here or there.

So, I've been revising the Beasts, filling in all the blanks--*cough* setting *cough*-- adding those things that make a novel work better--you know, things like character conflict, like foreshadowing, like PLOT--and I've gotten up to chapter five.

Chapter five involved the first firefight for my heroes, a real kick-in the walls raid that got complicated by them finding more resistance than they expected. But chapter five also involved me trying and failing this scene several times until I just gave up. When it came time to revise it, the ms abruptly trails off into all caps that read: BLEAH THIS SCENE IS ALL CRAP AND NEEDS TO BE REDONE COMPLETELY!!!!!

I do so love it when I leave those little notes for myself. :P

So, here I am, reworking chapter five, and realizing that a) there's no setting and b) what setting there is comes directly from a million television episodes. A warehouse! Behind a chainlink fence! Off by itself! With random security guards! Whee!!! That'll be exciting! Not.

The thing is, TV's conditioned me in a lot of tiny ways. I'm not going to beat myself up for this--it's a first draft scene that's incomplete. It's allowed to suck. But, I am going to remind myself again: DON'T MAKE THINGS EASY FOR MY HEROES. Television has a good reason for so many of its showdowns happening in warehouses. They provide space; they provide an easily secured area; they allow for explosive stunts. And those are exactly the reasons I'm resetting this scene.

We can do more with writing.

A heavily-armed team of soldiers? Let's put them in the 24hr business district. Let's have them deal with the bank doing business next door, the hotel across the street, the restaurant tower with its open-air dining levels. Let's put the secret lab in the bottom of a busy IT building. And let's do it on a Monday, just as people are getting off work.

They want to sneak up on the bad guys? They want to catch them meeting all unawares? It's going to take effort, and if it goes wrong? It's going to get messy, unless my heroes are very, very good. It also gives me another chance to decide how important the stolen tech they're after is. Is it worth spraying the area with bullets? Or do they let it go, and hope they get another chance at it?

I'm not sure of the answer, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Reading: my own prose with red pen to hand.