i'm...

baaaack. I'm operating on too little sleep, caffeine, and lots of writing mojo, so this may come out a little crazy. Not sure.

I wrote for something like twelve hours yesterday, in the company of three published authors. One was writing her 37th book or something. Wow. Just wow. All the little clickety-clacks of the laptop keys were so inspiring, especially since all the passes were closed still on Friday morning and we didn't know if we were going to get to go until lunchtime.

Other than writing we ate wonderful food, drank gallons of tea, talked over beers and wine, and I read four hours last night after I went to bed, which is why I'm so sleepy today. My bad.

I started a new book this weekend, just having fun drafting and discovering. No rules, just some bad writing and authorial discovery. I think it's going to be called The Silver Scar. It's probably one of my mostly densely theme-packed concepts to date, so I may come to point where I need to focus, but so far we're looking at a repressed gay protag, a religious war, accepting and embracing differences, orphans and parenthood (always a theme in my books--and people say I don't write about being a mommy!), lucid dreaming and how dreams relate to life, God (in all His various incarnations), witchcraft, global warming and futurism, as well as highly developed relationships between plot and setting (to the point of using place names for characters). Too ambitious? Maybe. Fun? No doubt!

I won't plague you with these, but here's the a scene from the first chapter:

Their boot-falls rang out in the school atrium, and they blinked in the thin sunlight warming the room. The bells rang in the square battlement tower opposite the churchyard, abruptly loud as Wolf opened the glass-paned door. Trinidad drew in a breath of stinging wind. Last evening’s storm had pushed most of the ash and smog eastward. Winter days, when cold gusts hit like a wall and cut through even his warmest cloak, made it hard to believe in global warming. He wished for his regular coat of down and chil-tek, but the congregants liked symbolism and tradition. Today he must wear crusader’s garb.

He cast his gaze around the busy, flag-stoned churchyard. Adults lingered out of the wind beneath the cloisters, talking in small knots. Bent flowers, their colors frozen away, held limp reign in the necropolis. Two teenaged boarding students, coats flapping and hair flying, stared at him as they hurried toward the church. He did not smile because he did not know their names, but he nodded at them politely.


Despite the cold, children lingered outdoors on the churchyard labyrinth, giggling along its twists and turns.

“Sir Trinidad!” called a boy, stopping traffic in the labyrinth as he noticed the new arrivals to the churchyard.

“Colin,” Trinidad answered. “Have you coin for our Lord?”

“No, sir,” Colin replied, taking a knee and grinning because he was the first to spy Trinidad, godsman of St. Aidan’s Parish.

Trinidad searched one pocket and then another, and rolled a shrug. "Guess I forgot."

“Sir Trin!” protested the children.

He dug deeper and came out with a dollar coin wrought in gold. Warmed from his pocket, it glistened in the white light of the winter morning as he flipped it to Colin. The boy tried to catch it neatly, but it fumbled from his mittened hands. The children scrambled toward it.

“No, wait!” Trinidad called, striding toward the rolling coin.

They retreated before his booted feet and watched as the coin rolled along a grey cement path toward one of the memorial bricks laid at the edge of the labyrinth. It caught on the sandy edge of the brick, spun neatly, and tripped flat, covering part of the name.

Every eye went to Trinidad’s face. Only Wolf dared speak, softly at his shoulder, “Sir Trinidad. Father is waiting. Service starts.”

Trinidad caught the salty scent of incense that called his soul to God’s house. The bells had ceased. Still he stood, staring down at his brother’s memorial brick. Israel, he thought, taking a tentative taste of the name and expecting bitterness. No spark of pain at the thought. Israel was well and truly dead, then.

New blog alert: Carol Berg. (If you haven't read her books then go get them!)

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