The working title for the trilogy is the Fallen Cycle, and some of the inspiration for it goes all the way back to when I started writing. It's taken me this long to build the chops to even hope to come close. As presently planned it comprises three books: Party At The World's End, Tales From When I Had A Face, and Center of the Spiral. Although the latter two include arcs written in sequential (comic) format, so they may wind up being broken up differently by the end. I continue to share snippets in progress at Tales From When I Had A Face.
So I have been pulling the projects I intend to reprise or slash from Amazon, and will continue working with all the energy I have to put together a series that lives up to my notes and plans, an urban fantasy / magical realism series that draws heavily on past myths but also has enough original symbol and 'meat' to hang on those bones.
This may take a while -- so bear with me. Pick up one of the nonfiction books if you're looking for something to sink your teeth into in the meantime. And if you're a publisher or agent that releases this kind of material, feel free to contact me before I begin the real submission process. That'd be a first, I know, but a writer can dream.
I'll leave you with a bit of rough draft from the Party At The World's End intro:
She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, one day she will rise again. On that day, there will is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.
She rubbed the skin off your headstone of a sternum and painted a sad picture of herself in your eyes.
I love you, they said, meaning nothing more than cricket song and the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we knew: no place no home no song. We heard her song and we followed.
I know what you were asking us, even if you don't. Lover, why must you deceive me with those eyes; lie with laughing; obfuscate the obvious—Everything is already written. You are you, I am I, unyieldingly ourselves, blindly certain only of ourselves, giving way to the inevitable: we two will die. Time is laid out before us, clean and bare, whole. It fools us into thinking we are free. Time, erotic in its blank submission, a body that needs you to fulfill its desires, and write your life story on its flesh. We must act, we must fight, we must scuttle in the dirt to appease that body. Life demands a performance. But we have foresight. Unlike those pill bugs you once told me of, your first memory—in the garden dirt to your knees and elbows, the insects squirming about you. The only difference between their struggle and our own: I've never seen a pill bug give up. So don't deceive me with those lips and hands, with that smile that hasn't changed since you were four because it always—always!—got you what you wanted. That is the great lie, that in losing ourselves in one another we are free.
They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say say loved them all, in the secret corner of their shallow sleep. Like her grave, all nameless, all loveless. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.
No comments:
Post a Comment