Pinning down the Plot and Threads

 One of the things I do before I get into the final work of the novel is "going through my plot and making sure all my plot points are right, that I have unity, that I have characters properly placed in the narrative, that the threads are in the right places to cross and meet, that I have the right amount of tension vs the amount of interiority and character building."

 I really write character driven novels since I came out of the romance genre. I was one of the first historical romance writers to use a lot of fantasy and paranormal elements in my fiction. I love the fantasy genre but I tend to like writers like Patricia McKillip, Naomi Novik, Alix Harrow, Robin McKinley, Susanna Clarke, and Erin Morgenstern. Angela Carter is an influence. I really don't write trail rides anymore.

The challenge I faced with this story was how to write a big story, with characters that had huge backstories, and do it small. Why? Because this is a character driven story and I am not an epic fantasy writer. Plus I hate flashbacks. Just writing versions of this book and throwing them away taught me what I could not do. And maybe how to write the closest version to what I imagined in my mind. I had to let go of a lot of things and yes, people. I had to learn how to write differently than any other previous book I had written or worked on. 

It's been a wonderful challenge for me. When I start working really hard on it in a few weeks, I am going to be updating a little here and for the most part, disappearing. I don't know right now how to write this novel and the next one while doing social media. I just don't.

I've had to think about writing in ways I never thought about it throughout the years. I've had to read many novels and other books. I've had to do lots of research for this novel, too, because the heart of it is true to the setting, the legal laws, and much of the folklore and magic systems that make the foundation of my own mythology. It's full of literary allusions and that sort of thing, too.

Well, I finished the song list, which is also a plot list, but nobody knows how that works but me. But you can see how I manipulated Syd Fields. Laughing. Everything is really balanced out. I am sure to change things as I build the new parts but hey, it's got a strong set of bones to work with and I'm settled.

I am reading both Dracula and The Sound and the Fury now. I am going to try to do some Dracula and reading updates soon. I am still going through writing papers. I need to type in timelines, too, as well as finish my calendars. I have changed the year 3 times, and some of the things are historical. Time is an important element of this novel, so is memory. I can honestly say this is the best heroine I have ever written. I write boys and men well, but I have had weaker heroines. I believe this is due to my personal life. My best friend in high school was a bisexual boy. I gave birth to boys, I tutored mostly boys. And when I studied history, it was mostly about war and warriors and soldiers. It's crazy to think I was a feminist all my life and what some of my friends called radical. But I grew up in a very conservative place and I was very progressive so I did not really meet a lot of girls I liked or could identify with growing up. Only my mother. Laughing. Most of my research books and reading for the last ten years has been making up time with women. I read mostly women now. And have spent a lot of time on the law concerning women and then other gender studies. It has made me a better writer. I do have two sisters, but their world view and mine are not the same at all. My older sister is terribly sweet but we don't see the big picture the same or even read the same books anymore. Once upon a time we did. But I outgrew those authors long ago.

Time is real. You cannot stop time. You cannot defeat time. But you can step away and live with hope.

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

        — William Faulkner

             The Sound and the Fury

It's October and Halloween Time.

 

Today, I began my October reading journey. I have planned to read Dracula, three chapters a session a day, stop, reflect, and then write my thoughts in these small black, dotted paged notebooks. Before I began the book, I read some critical essays on the publication and history of Dracula. I suppose that makes my Dracula journey ten  sessions instead of nine. It's ideal to spend at least two weeks (14 days) on a book like this, instead of 14 hours. It gives the reader those spaces creatives like Shelley and Brian Molko talked about, time to reflect and think and experience the wonder of reading.

There were times in university when I did not have this privilege.

Recently I've been reading great writers' essays on writing, and many of those books speak to the privilege and necessity of reading. Some of these authors were very clear, in their own way of course, that you look to your time, your needs, and your personal pleasures when reading. So I asked myself, due the vision crisis I faced last year, what books were important to me and why. October seemed like the perfect time to read a couple of Gothic books, vampire books in specific, two books, written very differently, with two kinds of vampires, and essentially different themes, though both are definitely hallmarked Gothic fiction.

My children would be surprised that I did not choose The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, which is usually read every other year in the Halloween season. I believe The  Vampire Lestat is Anne Rice's finest piece of fiction, the story of the young, restless, and shallow French aristocratic boy who became a perfectly Romantic and soul-searching vampire after enduring a bad beginning. If you have not read the novel, you probably don't understand why I called Lestat a boy. Well, he was barely 20, emotionally about 12, could not read at first, had no occupation, was neglected by his family, and failed at every attempt to grow up. Then out of nowhere, he was made a vampire by someone who didn't even explain to him what was happening. Bad beginning. There was a streak of conduct disorder in this boy, resentment toward his father and brothers, toward his own personal failures and boredom. He loved his mother, who was not fit to breed children, much less one as sensitive and needy as Lestat. His childhood Anne Rice understood well, and this is what drove Lestat through several versions of himself. The need to understand the world, the drive to share, the hope to love. One of my favorite scenes in this novel is when Lestat literally has a panic attack when he realizes he can die, and if he dies, he won't even know it. It was dramatic irony and sort of funny. The Vampire Lestat is really a coming of age novel. The fact that no one who writes scripts for either TV or film understands this is bewildering to me. Also utterly disappointing.

So the second book I chose is The Quick by Lauren Owen, a book I love. It is a book steeped in the Gothic tradition of the late 19th century, a perfect companion to Dracula, the story of a young woman in search of her lost brother who has fallen in with a terrible lot of vampires. The novel really sizzles when the author takes it to the streets of London and the reader meets all sorts of characters who are now vampires. One of them is so inspiring, because it's my favorite idea, one I wrote years before I read the novel. A young girl who is a vampire. It is not Anne Rice's kind of child vampire at all, more like my idea of what it would be like for a child to be immortal, wild, free, determined, and hungry all the time.

Until next time....

It seems all my books are about Dragonslayers slaying TROPES!

 My big news for the end of September are exciting for me as a writer. 

First, and I say this with hope that I have few medical issues from this day on, is that I have finally settled on what the novel, Bee Fly Crow (working title of The Ambitious Fairy Project) is, meaning few changes will be made now except in word choice, not structural choice. This work should have been done last year but was not and it took me roughing things out, writing by long hand, putting scrapes on notebards, dictating, even making oral recording to get all this story down to where I could actually look at the whole and know what it is. I am so happy. That basic rough work is done. I suppose this is equivalent to a good rough draft for some writers, though my book is planned and I write with intent for theme, micro-clues, easter eggs, you name it. 

Second. I  have read more of my research books and now it's just cleaning up my notes. My big ambitious fairy novel took lots of reseach and at times, it was just overwhelming and I felt really vulnerable. I have never written a book with this much research, including long time lines and calendars and yes, loops of time. I can only imagine what this will do to copyeditors. Laughing. 

Third: I wrote some good drafts for short stories, including two very strong ones that are related to my novels and a third that is related to the novel, Dracula. BTW, I start reading Dracula tomorrow with notes as I go. Which leads me to my next big thing, I am writing a vampire novel and the working title is Dragonfly. It's a revised and yes, basically rewritten version of an old novel, so much so, that I hardly recognize it except for some basic plot events. Very excited I love historical novels set in the South. SO it's a favorite.

Fourth, I have picked all the books I am going to read until I finish my novel and send it off. Many have been read once or twice. But I will type up notes. I feel so accomplished. I feel good that I have a plan, not too rigid and some of it is fun, with art projects. 

FINALLY: Personal news.

Yard is mowed and edged, now weeded. Halloween decorations in house up, and, I have one stack of writing related papers to organize. I will have to type up timelines, loops, and diary entries as I write onward. But hey, I know what they are! That is over half the battle.

I will also be blogging, just for me, it seems, but who cares. I will not be on social media for at least two weeks and am gradually going to wean myself from daily social media all across the Internet. I just cannot do it anymore. It makes me ill.

Then the best for last:

People, I have subverted every trope I could squeeze into my work. It is beautiful to do such things at this point in my life. Subverting tropes is my new goal. To be honest, I am killing tropes. Killing them dead.

A Welsh Prince

 

Alan Lee from Pwyll Prince of Dyfed (The Mabinogion), Medieval Welsh Tales, 1982

Learning new things by error and failures

 I can't say the last two years have been the best years, but they have been my life. 2025 I had a blood clot in my retina and my vision went haywire and to a certain extent it is still haywire. Thanks to the technology of glasses, I have 4 pair of glasses to see perfectly. One is for just living regularly, such as walking, watching TV, going to the store or other places. It has corrected my vision in one eye to where I can read a chart like a pro. I have two pairs of glasses for using the computers and related gadgets. This is my desktop, my laptop, my iPad which is a very large one. I also use these glasses for personal writing in my journals, planners, etc. To READ a book, a Kindle normally, my mail, pay my bills, I have another pair of glasses. I am blind in my right eye. And in the next few years, I will face some kind of surgery which no doctor in Memphis will perform at this moment. There is always a small risk I could go blind following surgery, so these things move slowly. In 2025, I could not do much serious reading and very little writing but by hand.

So, the project I started in late Oct 2024 did not begin again (with exception to oral notes I recorded and some small hand notes) until 2026. I began reading slowly, allowed 20 pages at a time. I wrote what notes I could on my book and made all the changes in my head then dictated those. It was February of this year before my retina doctor told me to my face that I could resume my normal activity on reading and writing provided I rested my eye at intervals. I have been very obedient. Twice I have faced some issues which were just related to allergies and dry eye. But they scared me.

In dealing with all this, I now have time to think, to pause, to put spaces between me and the work, I began to develop good skills on how to improve my story, how to learn how to develop new skills at writing, and how I could write a novel much better than any version of my ambitious idea. I call it ambitious because it is a kind of book I have never written before in any genre. It is really a novel. But it is a fantasy. Time let me see how I could move from familiar tropes. I wrote a lot of my current project out of order and yes, by hand, which I really do like. There are pauses in writing by hand, more time. The awful expense for that is getting it from the paper to the computer screen. It is time consuming and a lot of extra work which I often end up sighing long sighs about because I am just not happy with that pace.

That said, I am resigned. This slower pace has let me think better, take more risk, learn new things, and realize that I am writing a good story. I just have to finish.

One of the things about writing a book set in history, even if it's a strange history, is research and getting everything straight and keeping it straight. I tried to hire a young assistant to help me but you would not believe the young people who cannot read cursive and all my notes, drafts, notecards, you name it, are all in cursive. That situation became more tangled than it was worth it.

I suppose it will all work out or it won't. But writing this novel is all I really think about these Days besides my artwork. That has suffered, too. And this summer I decided I had to make some changes in my daily habits to finish my work. I began to clean and organize my papers aka plots, notes, timelines, character notes, numerous drafts on paper, and so forth. I organized all my research books.  I found new and better ways to do this organization and create a unified system. I had time to paint and draw and work on other art projects. I actually had time to read books just for pleasure and one should always be able to read just for sheer pleasure. I slowly began to form new habits about my journaling and note taking.

I learned a lot more about writing too by studying good books and reading some great books on writing. I wrote some short fiction, something which gave me the greatest joy. I learned to deal with my perfectionism that I had developed with this project. I never had it this bad on any other writing in my life. But this is my novel, the big novel, the ambitious fairy project that I have had my mind set on for a long time and it has finally become a mature work, too, something it never was previously.

I never grew up wanting to be a writer, certainly not a commercial one. I just fell into writing by an odd set of circumstances. It was good. I learned a lot. I made money. I got a taste of what the other side of the publishing industry is truly like. I made friends. But now I want to do something really different than what I once planned when I first came to this project. What I thought of at the end of 2024 and am writing now is a new book. Nothing is the same but one thing. No names, no setting, no characters, no plot, no style. Laughing. So many errors and failures have led me here. So much strange outside circumstances.

I am, oddly, grateful.

P.S. This is a no edit version. I can't worry about that anymore.

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace-the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us." - George MacDonald

The Beginning

“You kissed his mouths of flame You made the horned god your own You stood behind him on his throne You called him by his secret name”

Oscar Wilde

Writing, Writing, writing...........

This year I have been writing a lot in long hand in a notebook which consisted of mostly new scenes that I envisioned and rewriting completely the beginning of the novel. At some point, I decided to write in first person present tense with more than one narrator. I had to decide if I could make that work, along with some other unusual forms, along with an intense close perspective that is almost stream of consciousness. So I wrote it out in long hand and then I spoke it aloud and made revisions. Now I am back to work on the laptop and not the Desktop where I do a lot of dictation and am attached to the Internet via social media.

The laptop has no email or social media. I never even installed Google Chrome, which is what I use on Desktop. I am one of those people who has to be at my desk, with all my things around me, dictionaries, my old Rodale Synonym Finder and my Chicago Manuel of Style, in order to write a novel. I have to be quiet and have lots of space to move and think. I read my work aloud a lot. I am writing and editing as I go, and it's pretty intense work. Highly focused work. Hard work.

This is where I am at. Everything else suffers for the art, I believe, at this moment. I know the book, the story. I have written drafts of this and that, I know what doesn't work and what I cannot do and it's not insane to say, what I am writing now is not what I started writing a couple of years ago in November of 2024. That is how my writing works. 

I missed a year of writing in 2025. That can't be helped or regretted or even thought about. Only now. I have done so much work on this book that is not drafting the narrative and all I can say I am happy to be working on the laptop finally, to be crafting narrative as well as word choice. It's happening. I am going to finish another book. Smiling.

P.S. Today is my #1 son's birthday. We are having a party this coming Saturday.He's a wonderful son.

Youth by Daughter

Sweet Child O' Mine Guns and Roses

Life

“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.” 

                     ― Nikos Kazantzaki

Alix Harrow Interview

Bed

What happened to my June Blogging.

 What happened to my usual June blogging> Because June is Jane and Jane is June and I love summer???

Well, the truth is I have been writing and working in the garden. And my aging body has revolted. I also walk a lot and it's been very humid here in the Deep South and I have suffered due to this. Laughing. So I did not blog. I am still planting plants I bought in May, which I have kept alive somehow.

June is my birthday month and I usually celebrate being alive but I barely went into celebration mode this year. I was too busy working in the garden, dealing with weather, and then I was dealing with my aching body and trying to write a few words.

I still renew my promise each June to the Reenchantment of Everyday Life. I still consider myself a wildflower determined to write a few books, paint a few paintings and get my garden going again even though both gravity and time are pressing down on me.

I still possess a sense of wonder about the world, about living, about loving. I still feel like I can make a difference.

SO I am going to renew my efforts to bring this blog to life and write a little about myself again. I am on X/TWITTER, and I am there every day. I just started using FB again and I have plans for IG and even TIKTOK. 

At the moment I am organizing myself and my work. 

Realms of Imagintion

Boots on the Ground

Tom's Midnight Garden

 

“Nothing stands still, except in our memory.” ― Philippa Pearce

I am a reader.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."

 

                                  —Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

P.S. Happy March, 2026!

I read a lot.

 Nose in a Book

(unknown author)