Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Another week flies by. The Killer and the Dead is now on sale: if this book belongs to any month, it’s October! (In lands that make note of Hallowe’en, or have October as the prelude to Day of the Dead at the start of November.)

This week I received the first draft of my new book cover, and I am very excited about it! I have sent back my first notes, and will get a revision back this week. James at Bookfly is excellent to work with and really pays attention to author input, so I am confident I’ll get the cover I’m looking for, and it will seamlessly fit in with the two existing covers.  Not long before a cover reveal, hahaha!

More ideas continue to percolate for the next book – details coming to me: understated character traits and how to bring them out in action without ever mentioning them explicitly. Creating a living environment around my protagonist that the reader can see informs who he is: both the people and the community he grows up in, and how the land and the work he does shapes him, the influence of distant events and how they impact the rhythm of life even in distant villages and towns. The role of faith and what happens to a community when an ancient accepted orthodoxy is challenged, then forbidden. Today I realized something that everyone in his village will notice, and recognize and be grateful for, but no-one will mention, because everyone will understand what was done and why.

In one style of book it would all be explained, via interior monologue, or discussion with others, or by some form of omniscient (can you really be partially omniscient? I know, I know.) narrator, and be used as a key to character. I’m almost certain I’m going to go another way and present events and let the reader decide how to interpret them. At least initially. Once the story moves forward and my protagonist becomes two, then three, then many, there will be a certain inevitable amount of character interaction, and the characters actions and opinions will be unavoidable, so many events, actions, motivations will have at least one superficial gloss or reason given to them, but I rather think I will let them be wrong, mis- or under-informed, and give the reader a chance to see everything from a different perspective. Not terribly original, I absolutely acknowledge, as old as the hills in fact, but new for me to execute in concentrated form.  

This will be a little different for me in terms of technique from the first three books, especially The Killer and The Dead which is a first person telling of a tale by an unreliable and manipulated narrator. In The Gardener and The Goddess my heroine wears her angst and her desires on her sleeve, the novel very much about her inner conflicts and how external events contribute to and exacerbate her struggle to be worthy of her Goddess. So, not a narrative in which it is easy to leave events uninterrogated in the same way I wish to do in the next book.

All this from a thought about a scar from childhood, and how years after we see it earned it is misinterpreted, and the character bearing the scar does not even think to correct the misapprehension, because that is not the way he or his people would act.

It’s an idea, anyway. Scottish folklore is also pawing at the edges of the page, wanting to be let in, but I’m not sure it is quite the right setting. Once I’ve gorged myself on more of the tales of the old country we’ll see what distills. More stories I may not have time to write, but there is pleasure in the conceiving of them. I am dreaming of gruagach though, in their many forms, and their wild eyes and unruly hair are coming slowly into focus. There is a great world there to be uncovered, to be sure.

Until next week, my friends, keep dreaming. But not of underwater tombs you accidentally seal yourself into. I did that this week, and it was not pleasant.  

This blog brought to you by Animal Magnetism and Blackout by the Scorpions.