Kid Me Not

Do I regret not having children?

Nope.

Lately, however, I’ve discovered that other people’s children—namely newborns—possess a perilous charm all their own. Cuddling my  five-week-old great-niece caused a brief pang of something close to remorse that probably coincided with another ovum popping out of contention. Same thing with the downstairs neighbours’ newbie back in February; she was two weeks old and out like a light when I cradled her, and what a sweet warm weight she was, too.

She has since grown into a wriggler. I happened on her last week and was invited to get reacquainted while her mum and I chatted. She’s three months old and able to sit in the crook of my arm, but man, she was a pedaling fury the whole time. Still sweet and warm, but … back to Mum you go, kiddo!

Would I have been a good mother?

Dunno. I like to think so, but only an adult child can say whether their mother was a good one, and it’s a credit to mine that all five of her kids adore her. Since I have no children, adult or otherwise, I can’t answer that question.

Am I a good aunt?

I love my nieces and nephews, but that’s about it. I’m not a hands-on auntie, and in truth, I relate better to the next generation now that they’re having kids of their own.

I don’t relate well to children.

Which doesn’t explain why I write about them so much. one of my favourite characters is twelve years old—and a real handful, to boot. Her best friend is one of a litter, and they run riot across the pages of whatever Fixed Fire story is in progress. And more are coming, as heroes and heroines fall in love. It seems that a babe is always pending, so what gives?

Novel Gazing

Progress on the rewrite is moving along nicely. It’s slowed a little, given my post-vacation status, but it was bound to get stickier anyway. The first eight chapters were pretty well fine as written; they only required minor tweaking and a couple of new scenes to help re-establish the focus. Now that I’ve crossed the line into where I went astray, it’s taking more time and even more thought and still even more “effort to resist what’s already been written”.

What was written before was all good material. I had simply lost my direction. Many of the scenes will feature in the rewrite, but I’ve encountered an unforeseen curiosity: I view those scenes as written in stone. My mind is trying to place them “as is” in a new location, and gets frustrated when the pieces don’t click into their imagined place.

Two scenes are about to become one. I’ve laid the mental groundwork, envisioning the setting and committing the dialogue to memory so I can blast it out when I’m done with this post. I was still struggling yesterday morning, labouring under the misconception that they had to appear in the same chapter yet remain independent of each other because, let’s face it, each one is effing brilliant, when a little voice quietly suggested, “Why not merge them?”

Uh … DUH!

From that one small instance, I realized that my logic processor is trying to control my creative process. It wants me to believe that what’s written cannot be altered to accommodate a new format, a better format, may I add, which further supports my argument that the ego, the mind, the intellect, is so freaked out over losing control that it will sabotage its own success.

Well, get thee behind me, micro-manager, I’m onto your neurotic game. As soon as I realized that two good scenes could become one better scene, you could almost hear the whoosh! as my imagination took flight. Suddenly, I saw how one location could support a longer conversation and add a new element at the same time. That element will lead into yet another (new) scene to keep the plot on course and voila! Another chapter finis!

Full Flight

The sport of kings may cost a royal ransom to play, but the plebs can watch it for free. Or, rather, the price of admission. Or the cost of cable. Nitpicking aside, I watched the Kentucky Derby for the first time in years this year. I didn’t pick a horse. Well, I kind of did, just because I wanted an upset, and I think my choice came in fourth—I don’t even remember now. It doesn’t matter, either, because I don’t bet on horse races.

Ter used to visit the track with her dad when she was a kid. He’d give her a couple of bucks and off she’d go to the wicket, but her clearest memory is of collecting the multi-coloured ticket stubs discarded by the losers. I think she was there for the love of horses, too.

My speed-freakishness probably started in another life, maybe when I was Charlie’s girl and he took me to Newmarket for the races in 16-whenever. The origin of my love for horses, however, remains a mystery. And since I’m currently on a bender about the beauty in nature, I have lately been reminded of the saying—though I don’t recall who said it—that the most beautiful sight in creation is that of a horse running at a full gallop.

Personally, I think that a horse grazing beneath an apple tree is just as beautiful, but for sheer robbery of breath, never mind a thundering herd. A single horse in full flight is one of the most beautiful things I can imagine. The sun on a burnished coat, the light in a dark eye, the flowing mane and rippling muscle, yikes, the dream interpreters claim that horses represent sexual power, but really? Can’t they just be beautiful for beauty’s sake?

I will admit that watching the Derby can get my pulse racing, but the best race I ever saw was the Belmont Stakes in 1973, when Secretariat put twenty-five, no, thirty-one record-setting lengths between himself and the second place finisher. That was a race won by a lone horse in full flight.

And it was beautiful.

Moss Rock

During my post-Station Eleven flânerie, I hiked up to Moss Rock Park, a scrubby expanse of rock and brush at the top of a hill overlooking Fairfield. From there I was able to see the entire neighbourhood and the ocean beyond it, not precisely a bird’s eye view, but a grand vista nonetheless. High-end houses rim the park’s perimeter, but the sense of isolation fit the mood of the post-apocalyptic novel I had finished reading hours earlier.

There is one scene in the book, where the heroine, Kirsten, is faced with imminent death. Refusing to let the face of the man holding the gun to her head be the last thing she sees on this earth, she lifts her gaze and watches a bird wheeling across the sky. She absorbs as much of the surrounding world as she can—the crickets chirping, the smell of the grass, the warmth of the sun on her skin. She remembers the people she loves, she feels how desperately she loves them, and she thinks, I am not afraid.

I knew someone who chose to die in this park. I was hardly close to her; I didn’t even like her that much—we worked in the same place for a time and didn’t get along that well. When her husband died, she couldn’t face life without him, so she disappeared and a few days later, the searchers found her at the top of the hill. It was sad news, to be sure. It’s the most personal decision anyone can make, whether or not to continue in this estate. Understanding may not be possible to those on the outside, but compassion certainly is.

This was my first visit to the park and, naturally, I couldn’t go there without thinking of her. I sat on the lone bench and watched the sunlight on the water. Birds wheeled across the sky. Insects buzzed over errant flowers, paintbrush drops of colour against the stone. The air was warm and silken, the breeze whispering through the dry grass, and I thought, I know why you came here. And I knew why Kirsten, while staring death in the eye, chose the open sky to be her final sight before the end. It’s what I would choose—what I will choose, assuming I have a say—to take with me when I go.

There is nothing more beautiful than the world we’ll leave behind.

Snowflakes

Don’t believe for a moment that you are not special. That you have nothing to give. That your life is inconsequential and it wouldn’t have made a difference if you were never born. I’m still figuring out what we’re all doing here, what we’re meant to be doing and why we’re buggering it up so badly (or are we?), but it’s coming clear as I go that every single one of us has a purpose. In general, it’s to express ourselves through our individual passions. Specifically, only the individual knows what that is. For some, it’s to provide contrast for others. I know quite a few of this type, and being grateful for them is harder than it is to forgive myself for how hard it is to be grateful for them. For others, it’s to bring joy through art and music and theatre, to serve with humour and compassion, to bring out the best in those around us by being the best we can be. The best friends, lovers, teachers, partners, parents, astronauts, doctors, cab drivers, garbage collectors, firemen, factory workers, you get the idea. We all have something we do well. Even screwing up takes talent. Some of my gaffes have been epic and they took no effort at all—and no, I regret none of them.

The great blues player BB King passed away recently. At the end of a video tribute on the news that day, there was a clip of him saying, and I’m paraphrasing, “There are lots of good players out there, many of them play better, but I’m the only one who’s me.”

I was glad of the reminder, because I frequently forget that no one else can write my stories. They might steal the plot or kidnap the characters, but nothing they produce will ring as if Ru wrote it. I’m the only one who’s me.

We are all snowflakes, constructed of the same chemical components. We are born from the same stormcloud of energy. We may share ideas and inspiration, we may share talents and skills and passions with others of our ilk, but no two of us will create identical versions of any one thing. On a crowded sidewalk, no two faces are alike. No two souls are alike. Each one of us has something special to contribute because no one else will bring what you bring to the party. You are yourself: singular, unique, one of a kind.

You’re the only one who’s you.

Bibliography VII

“Station Eleven” – Emily St. John Mandel

Once in a while a story comes along that alters my perception of the world. This is such a story.

Written in a similar-but-not-really style as The Night Circus, it, too, is a glass box of jewels. In this instance, however, the box is tinted. The jewels within are as luminous, as colourful, as rich and multi-faceted, but seen through darkened glass, the overall effect is somber. Glorious. Terrifying. Romantic. Despairing. Panicky. Violent. Tranquil. Remorseful. Wistful. Hopeful.

Brilliant.

Those who must label everything call it a sci-fi novel, but it’s really about people: people at the end of the world, people surviving the end of the world, people creating a new world. Humans are nothing if not resilient. We’re also fairly flexible; as one of the main characters observes, we can adapt to anything.

I admit, I resisted this one at first. A friend requested it for Christmas, and when I read the dust jacket I thought, oh, cheerful. A global pandemic takes out ninety-nine percent of the earth’s population practically overnight and the remaining one percent must figure out how to continue in a world where everything and everyone they’ve known no longer exists. It’s told in such a way that the horror is broken up by vignettes culled from the characters’ lives, both before and after the flu. One twist is a main character dying of a heart attack in the opening scene, yet through flashbacks and flash forwards, his life and the people in it become integral to the proceedings. In this way, the reader is spared the stress of a chronological buildup, given a breather from the spreading panic of passengers diverted to and eventually stranded at an airport, or a freaked-out city dweller hauling grocery carts of supplies through a snowstorm to his brother’s apartment. The world after the flu features a band of travelling players moving from settlement to settlement, performing Shakespeare for the locals “because survival is insufficient”. Incredibly, Ms. Mandel manages to tie all these threads together around the central theme and paints both worlds with a stark and desperate beauty.

Why did I pick it up at last? GRRM recommended it. Erin Morgenstern wrote a blurb for it. My waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world buddy loved it, though I’m unsure why at this point. I must discuss with her when I return her copy. She loaned it to me but, again like The Night Circus, I intend to read and re-read Station Eleven, ergo a copy of my own is imminent.

On the day I finished reading, I took a long walk through the neighbourhood and paid specific attention to the things around me: careless cars speeding along the road, the infernal joggers plugged into their iPods, gaggles of tourists juggling cameras and Starbucks cups. The convenience of my cell phone, of electric light and running water. Of lawn mowers and float planes and freighters loaded with shipping containers from across the Pacific Ocean. Then I looked at the gardens and imagined them overgrown, the flowers a haphazard tangle of colour instead of neatly trimmed and deliberately placed. Butterflies and hummingbirds flitting from bloom to bloom, crows pecking idly at the grass between the rocks. The wind whispering in my ear. I know this will end someday. Whether I end before, with or after it, I don’t know. Some things will endure. Natural things. The bugs and critters and plants and sky will continue as if we were never here. So will those of us who are left.

Will we create something better the next time? Or will we just want to go home?

“The Philosophical Vampire”

“I’ve been reading,” he tells me.

“In which language?”

I’m teasing, but he takes me seriously. “English, mostly, though some theories are better understood in the philosopher’s native tongue.”

“You’ve been reading philosophy?”

He nods, cheeks flushed and eyes animated as if he’s just fed—which he probably has, it being near midnight and past my bedtime. He’s usually very respectful of my schedule, but he also knows that I will put the world on hold for him. Whatever he’s been reading—and he has all the time in existence to do so—it’s excited him.

“I wish I had known these things when I was young,” he says. “I may not have done anything differently, but I would have suffered less.”

I want to laugh at him, he’s both earnest and contradictory. He’s about to pop with enthusiasm and it’s so unlike him that I’m rendered practically speechless. I can barely manage the simplest questions.

“What ‘things’?”

“Nothing in stone, obviously. It’s all conjecture except that a great deal of it makes sense. That’s why you accept so many of these concepts as truth, isn’t it?”

“Let’s leave my beliefs out of it,” I suggest. “What do you think?”

“It’s what I used to think that matters,” he replies. “I have always owned my soul. Even after I was transformed, I knew I was, at my core, unchanged. That was the great dilemma, reconciling my immortal essence with my immortal flesh.” He taps his chest for emphasis. “This is not meant to last forever. The appetites and impulses that sustained me in mortality were amplified a thousandfold when I was turned, binding me to the senses as surely as to the earth. The juxtaposition cost me dearly at the time. I believed myself condemned to wander this world, alone at best or among my own kind at worst. The desire to love and be loved unconditionally is mortal, the ability purely spiritual, and when one’s spirit is irrevocably tied to the physical, such love becomes impossible to obtain.”

He stops, I think, to collect his stampeding thoughts, then I realize he’s waiting for me to catch up.

I prompt him. “Except…?”

“I was going to say ‘except with a mortal’,” he admits. “It’s ridiculously easy to become attached to someone who will inevitably die. You believe their affection is infinite when in fact it is not and can never be, given the finite nature of the flesh. That’s why Génie and I could never endure for any length of time. Our capacity for love is limited by our physical state, so no matter how deeply we wish to love, that depth is always matched by the opposite. That’s what drives us apart.”

“Contrast,” I murmur.

“Indeed.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Of course I do. I loved Génie. That is why she made me immortal, and that was her mistake. At least I understood that much, else I’d have made the same error. Immortal flesh is paradoxically bound by the physical rules of mortality. But look—” He produces an e-reader and my hand shoots out before I can stop it.

“Are you kidding me? An e-reader?”

He looks exasperated. “Darling, if I had hard copies of every book I’ve read, entire city blocks would be stacked floor to ceiling. This is for convenience.” He pushes my hand back across the table and continues. “If you look at the documented evidence, stories and scientific discoveries et cetera, then this state is one of many.” He’s thumbing the e-reader as he talks, the screen scrolling titles in a dizzying blur. “Multiple dimensions, parallel dimensions, alternate universes, past lives, future lives, multi-sensory astral planes—there is a limitless number of conditions in which one’s consciousness can exist. My fate, however, is to live in this form indefinitely.”

This time, his pause is for breath.

“How does knowing this stuff change things for you?” I ask, bewildered by his fervor when he’s clearly stuck in time. “Why aren’t you enraged?”

“Because I like what I am,” he answers. “I like my life. I love this century, the light and speed and glamour of it all. I also know that I am not truly immortal in this form, that I must eventually perish, but my essence will continue. For that, I can wait. I never accepted that my soul is damned for actions taken to survive. Who blames a tiger for being a tiger? And I never truly accepted what they call the god made in man’s image. Heaven and hell are a state of mind, aren’t they, a willful reality created by one’s perception. No, this new ancient philosophy suits me well.”

He’s lost me. I understand what he’s been reading, but I don’t understand his enthusiasm for it when he’s trapped like a fly in the amber and anyone he loves will move on. Mind you, he’s always been a hedonist; the five-sense existence works for him, especially since he’s not tortured by religious beliefs. He’s also more adaptable than many of his fellows, embracing change rather than being driven to madness or despair by it.

“She will come again,” he says, brightly.

He means the one sure love of his life, the woman who begged him to make her immortal so they wouldn’t be parted. Agonizing as it was, he was savvy enough to refuse, to let her go.

To let her die.

“Eternal love isn’t possible in this state,” I say.

“Of course not, but I am not truly eternal in this state, either. None of us is.”

“Then the vampires who lament their tragic circumstance, or who believe redemption is possible by feeding solely on animals or immoral humans, are wasting their time.”

“They are certainly wasting their experience,” he asserts. “Tigers, as I say, and what tiger cares for the moral purity of his dinner? Not that I condone merciless slaughter, but please, cease to suffer so mightily when there is more to be gained in pleasure than in misery.”

“Listen to you, the philosophical vampire.”

He gives me a look of mystified affection, as if he still can’t fathom why he bothers. “I am simply saying that there is hope for me.”

I smile at him. “How endearingly human of you, Jules.”

He smiles back. “You needn’t be insulting.”

I wonder as he goes on his way if he might also be onto something. I have known Julian for half of my life and a fraction of his. He has trusted me with much of his history, but hardly all of it; there is always a story to tell if he feels so inclined and I sense that one is on the horizon. He’s going somewhere with all this and I think—I hope—that when he’s ready, he will invite me to go along with him.

“The Philosophical Vampire” – Preface

I happened on tomorrow’s post during a lunch break this week. Intending to raise my creativity from the grave in the midst of a hectic workday, I carried my exercise book to the library and flipped to what I thought was a blank page. Instead, I found the bulk of a conversation with Julian Scott-Tyler, a sort of preternatural episode of Philosophy Quest in which he smashes the myth of the brooding vampire to smithereenies. This is amusing because when I first met him, he was the quintessential brooding blood hunter, the conflicted hero prone to bouts of romantic drama, at war with what he was and the one who had made him. Great fun at the time. Nicole was writing a poetic cycle called Eros American and almost every poem within it reminded me of Jules—dark, glittering, savagely beautiful, crazy sexy, and absolutely ruthless in possession of his prey.

He still has those qualities. Perhaps his most admirable trait, however, is his flexibility. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating that he fits as easily into the modern world as he did in the Victorian age or seventeenth century Europe. This flexibility has saved his sanity in ways that elude many of his kind—and many of mine, too. I have also noticed that he looks over my shoulder when I’m reading Anne Rice, as if he’s comparing himself to Lestat and chuckling softly under his breath—at who, which or what, I am unsure and he is not saying.

Or he wasn’t.

This conversation resulted from the recent resurgence of the Rice vampires, most notably during Lestat’s ardent lamentation of what terrible fate must await his lost and aching soul. I’d be reading merrily along and suddenly Jules would cough or snort or sigh in my ear. Fed up, I finally dared him to tell me what the heck he was thinking because a major difference between Lestat and my Julian is that Julian thinks. He acts when he must, but he’s no James Bond. He reads and he ponders—and he’s come up with a fair argument for getting out of this estate with his soul intact.

Enjoy.

Bibliography VI

“Blood Canticle”—Anne Rice

I love Lestat. I love Anne Rice. I’m not too crazy about the Mayfair witches, especially Rowan and Mona, so having them show up in this volume of The Vampire Chronicles was going to be a challenge, but I was willing to give it a whirl.

Parts of it were dazzling. She will never lose her ability to mesmerize with written imagery. I think I even got the point of the story—Lestat longs to be a saint; he wants to do good though he believes he is eternally damned, so he sets out to solve a mystery for a pair of mortal witches—but the end result was more crazy quilt than polished brocade.

It helps to like the characters, and I don’t like the two Mayfairs who showed up here. I don’t get why Lestat insists on making a vampire of everyone he loves when a) he always ends up alone and b) their mortality is what attracts him in the first place. He does it over and over, and it always backfires on him. He’s young in vampire years, but really? I’m way younger than he is and I’ve figured it out. But why he felt so passionately for one mortal in this story absolutely escapes me, as I saw nothing remotely lovable about her and he didn’t explain it. He was simply, suddenly, obsessed and in love. That relationship didn’t fit within the story, either; it was more of a distraction, an annoying buzz that popped up during a lull in the action, and culminating in a final chapter that meant pretty well nothing so far as I could tell.

Then there’s the haunting—he’s plagued by the Mayfair patriarch’s ghost, who resents Lestat stealing the favoured daughter from the light, but again, that relationship didn’t work for me. It made too little sense. I couldn’t figure out how he appeased the spirit enough to make him go away, so it either wasn’t explained very well or I didn’t care enough to carry it with me when I wasn’t actually reading.

I like a story that stays with me between bouts.

It’s painful to admit. I didn’t get it, so I didn’t feel it, and that made me an indifferent reader. Whether a book is good or bad is completely subjective, that’s why I place little value on critical reviews. I will rave about a book that inspires me, however, and adhere—or try—to the adage about saying nothing if you can’t say something positive. I’ll wear the fact that I missed the author’s vision in this instance, but the greater angst lies in my having once understood and adored her work. Honestly, her earlier novels are magical. Her later ones harbour diamonds in the prose, but the stories are less coherent, more chaotic and peopled with characters in relationships that I find hard to swallow. Blood Canticle, unfortunately, almost choked me.

Lucius

The Leppard King, circa 1992 - the template for my hero

“Lucius!” I cried. “It’s about Lucius!”

It’s Reijo’s story, but it’s about Lucius. It’s always about Lucius. Always has been, always will be. Fixed Fire is his world, created for him, and while others occasionally take a lead role in the ongoing saga, he is the sun at the center of their galaxy and everyone—everything—revolves around him.

He needn’t even be present to own a scene. Be it a short story,  a novella, or a volumes in the series proper, my great Golden Savage figures prominently in the plot. I got confused with Reijo’s romance because Lucius isn’t a POV character, but I’ve lately been reminded that it doesn’t matter if he’s not the one telling the story. It’s still about him.

He’s a typical Leo male. “Pure-faced and roaring,” as Nicole once described him, putting her impression into a poem that said it all in that one powerful phrase. Love him, loathe him, fear or revere him, he is the driving force in his world.

I must admit, seeing the Leppard King again was a sharp reminder of where it all began. It took the universe eight years to engineer a royal return to Victoria, and in the course of one evening, it all came back. The birth of our hero in 2002, the writing of four fat novels in the following five years, the crazy coincidence of Leppard’s proximity to my creative consciousness. The King eventually fell off my radar but the story continued—albeit with less enthusiasm on my part, and even less understanding of why it was so. Seeing him in April compelled me to pull out the albums that had fuelled my passion for his fictional child, to revisit Treason and remind myself of who the General was when I first met him.

And then, the inner voice stating with crystal clarity that this part of the story, that Reijo’s romance, is also about Lucius. The hopelessly tangled knot suddenly unraveled and has run straight and smooth ever since. I’m rewriting scenes, adding new ones and reorganizing others, and haven’t want to write anything else for weeks.

Not even blog posts.

This is what happens when I am truly obsessed with a project. It becomes my sole focus, to the exclusion of all else—except maybe F***Book and my office gig. My thoughts are all with the story, reworking bits of dialogue, envisioning new scenes, typing so fast from the heart that my head can’t stop my momentum. It’s blazing and brilliant and precisely the point of my existence, to feel this alive in the creation of something wonderful.

So I haven’t been writing, but I have been writing—and it’s looking good.

How can it not, when it’s all about him?