The Iron Lily: Part 25 – Lord Stone and Elwis

Elwis trotted up to Freystein from the far side of the battlefield. As the dog did so, his red ears drooped and his tail wasn't wagging. If Halthor was correct, the elf-stock dog was afraid of something. Freystein leaned down low. Elwis gave a pained sounding yip. Freystein said nothing but looked at the dog in confusion. Elwis did so again, looking back towards their track through the forest. "THEY ARE THREE DAYS BEHIND US," Freystein said firmly, "IT IS NOT POSSIBLE THAT THEIR OUTRIDERS ARE AT OUR HEELS." Elwis made the same sound again, turning around in a circle. "I TELL YOU, DOG," the mountain troll said in an irritated tone "THE SEARCHERS ARE NOT THERE."

Halthor looked back at the wide path that they had left through the forest. Despite Freystein's efforts, they were still a mountain troll and moving through the lowland forest was difficult to do with out breaking some branches along the way. Up on the hill behind them, Halthor could see a gap in the treeline. Something was moving along that gap. Something large and fast was moving along their trail. Halthor felt the hair at the back of his neck go up as the wind shifted and a foetid scent blew faintly down to them.

"Freystein," Halthor said, reaching over and slapping the mountain troll's arm, "There is something coming. And it's moving quickly." Freystein huffed with annoyance and turned to look. Their craggy features first fashioned themselves into a squint and then into a look of shocked dismay.

"OH, THIS IS NOT GOOD. THIS IS NOT GOOD AT ALL," Freystein said, "HOW DID THEY FIND US?" Halthor bit back the droll comment that came to mind and looked at the mountain troll. "YOU MUST LEAD YOUNG HALTHOR TO OLERAND, ELWIS," Freystein said, "I SHALL DEAL WITH THESE TRAITORS. I TOLD MY CLAN TO KEEP TO THE MOUNTAIN BUT THESE GREEDY FOOLS SEEK MAN-FLESH UPON THE PROMISE IT WILL GIVE THEM POWERS. I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT THEY LEFT THE BLUE LADY ALONE."

"I thought mountain trolls were solitary," Halthor said. Freystein turned to him. Their expression was solemn.

"I AM NOT LORD STONE ONLY IN NAME. THESE YOUNG TROLLS ARE SEEKING BEYOND THEIR REACH. SOME ONE TOLD THEM HUNTING YOU WOULD BRING THEM GREAT POWER. GO BEFORE THEY ARRIVE, HURRY. YOU ARE SMALL, THEY WILL OVER LOOK YOUR PASSING." Halthor readied his hammer and brought the shield up to gaurd himself as he faced the coming mountain trolls. Freystein bellowed, "RUN, YOU FOOL. THEY'RE COMING TO KILL US BOTH."

Elwis nudged Halthor in the back of his left knee just hard enough to make it buckle unexpectedly. Halthor dropped to the ground as the first mountain troll burst through the trees. They were not as big as Freystein. Nor, decided Halthor, as human in apperance. Laying at Freystein's feet, Halthor was hidden by the jumble of skeletons that had been destroyed during the battle. Elwis hunkered down beside Halthor and Freystein stepped forward, putting themself bodily between their coming opponent.

Hidden behind the mountain troll, the builder from Starhaven had little choice but hope that he wouldn't be stepped on in the conflict. Olerand's shield covered much of his body. As he listened, Halthor wondered what Elwis was thinking. As he was questioning this, he slipped his hammer from the loop and quietly prayed to the Storm Lord for their safety. "HU-MAN LOVER," the young mountain troll called out, "WE COME FOR YOUR MAN." Freystein glared ferociously at the mountain troll the color of old granite and flint. They barely had a sapling's sprig to them. And that sprig of a tree was broken before it had met its prime. This was a sign to Freystein that the younger mountain troll was careless. Trees were a sign of prestige and maturity among moutain trolls. Only the youthful were reckless enough to fail to care for their trees.

"RETURN TO YOUR BROOD, SEEDLING," Freystein roared, deafening Halthor for a moment with his fury, "RETURN AND NEVER COME AMONG MEN AGAIN. THE LIES OF THE SHADOWS ARE LIES. NONE OF US HAVE GAINED POWER FROM KILLING MEN." The other mountain troll bristled at being called little more than a newborn by the elder troll. "WHAT OF YOUR SIBLING, DO THEY COME TO JOIN YOU IN YOUR FOLLY, AGAIN, SEEDLING?" Halthor wondered at the mention of the word 'again'. No sooner than mentioned, the other mountain troll youth came forward.

"WE WOULD HAVE THE MAN YOU GAURD AS YOUR OWN. YOU WILL NOT KEEP THE POWER FROM US," the second mountain troll called. Halthor looked at them and realized that they were twins. As the twins came forward, Elwis nudged Halthor hard in the back. Halthor knelt and sheltered himself and the dog behind the shield behind Freystein. The mountain trolls roared and ran at each other. As they clashed, the very earth beneath their feet shook. Halthor watched the fight with horror. Freystein threw one of the younger mountain trolls off of himself. The creature landed not far from Halthor. As they sat up, they looked around for something to use as a weapon.

They grasped at the shield only to have Halthor's hammer shatter their hand. Halthor couldn't tell what sound was worse, the deafening thunder or the sound of stone exploding all around him. The shield kept the brunt of the debris off of him and Elwis but a few shards cut his upper arm. The wounded mountain troll screamed in an awful sound. They brought their arm down to crush Halthor. The shield held against the blow though Halthor was driven off of his feet. Laying on his back, Halthor stared up at the young moutain troll reaching to grasp him with their good hand. Halthor simply threw his hammer in desperation. He wasn't sure if he'd strike anything or if he'd be crushed to death by the falling mountain troll.

The hammer whistled through the air and struck the troll in the face. They staggered back from the blow as lightning struck. For a moment, the world went white and Halthor was rendered deaf. Only the pain of his injuries told him he was still alive. The hammer landed in his hand and Halthor forced himself up to his feet. As he did so, he looked at his opponent. Where there had once been a mountain troll there was now a hillock of granite and flint with only the vaguest suggestions of possible humaniod features in the debris.

Halthor turned and saw Freystein locked in desperate battle with the remaining twin. "Oi!" Halthor shouted at the moutain trolls, "Looking for me?!" Freystein looked over their shoulder. As they did so, the younger mountain troll took advantage of it and struck a hard blow across Freystein's face. Freystein dropped to the ground unconscious. The younger mountain troll roared and began to run for him. Halthor gauged the rapidly closing distance and aimed. He threw his hammer with all of his strength.

The hammer struck the young mountain troll in the face. Their head whipped back and then came the thunderbolt. As the lightning slammed into them, every small crack that had been created with the blow of the magical hammer lit with light. And then they collapsed to the ground in a heap of pieces. The hammer flew back to Halthor's hand as Freystein stared in horror. Halthor caught the hammer and put it into the carrying loop at his side. He shifted the shield from his left arm to his right and walked up to the dazed mountain troll. Halthor knelt beside Freystein.

"Now they can't hurt anyone," Halthor said.

"THEY WERE CHILDREN," Freystein answered.

"They were monsters wearing the guise of children," Halthor answered, "I knew boys like that who burned the tails of cats for fun and grew into men who beat their wives and children."

"AND I?"

"You are my friend. I'd help you up, if I were strong enough," Halthor replied, "But I think our paths part here. You must check on the Blue Lady and then go to your people before some other older upstart tries to challenge you again." Freystein slowly sat up and looked at the remains of the two moutain trolls on the field.

"THIS IS A CURSED PLACE," Freystein said sadly, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT HOPE THERE IS FOR YOU, YOUNG HALTHOR. MAY IT BE THAT THE GOOD GODS FAVOR YOU."

AW: (Late) Morning blog post No. 21

I am not sure what to write. I just finished doing my therapy writing. All of my fractured parts of my psyche are telling me that I'm making progress and I shouldn't give up. I guess this is a good thing. I'm still not sure how to describe the inside of my head. It's a jumble of things and often it is like trying to get things done with a cat attempting to assassinate you on a regular basis. (That's what they're doing when they do stuff like weave between your feet, lay on the stairs, and zoom at rocket speed across the room to trip you up. Cats are furry, cute little serial killers who are indiscriminate in their targets. And I like cats.)

I'm not sure if I am going to bring the laptop with me to the park to work on the blurb for book four. I told myself that I had to get everything for it done by the end of the week. I just need to bite the bullet and push through my feelings that everything I've done with this project is garbage. I will likely be writing that blurb up in my Writer's Notebook. I have been putting off finding a therapist because I don't want them to put down the work I'm doing with these morning pages/morning blog posts. That really pissed me off when one of my past therapists said "This is a bad idea. You're going to trigger your PTSD doing it." and all but demanded I stop.

My PTSD gets triggered every day the front door to the apartment building we live in slams. My PTSD gets triggered when I am washing dishes or cleaning the bathroom. On some level, I am constantly getting my panic button pushed by just daily tasks. These morning pages give me a space where I can explore what the hell is pushing that damn button and possibly process it. They're as important as the therapy journal work that I've been doing for the last year. (Different therapist said that I should try keeping a journal where the different parts of my psyche talk to each other/me. It's gotten weird but I'm having less incidents where I'm losing time in a given week.)

I suppose I was really insulted by this other therapist thinking that she knew what was best for me and telling me that I was doing this wrong. I've gone through about eight therapists over the last twenty years. All of them, except for that one, encouraged me to write about the trauma and the weirdness in my head. I'm reluctant to go looking for another therapist because I don't want to deal with them saying "Well, I am the expert and you should do as I say." They're my assistant in dealing with all of this bullshit. They're my expert consultant on how to handle my trauma and brain weirdness. They don't live in my head. They don't experience what I do. I am the expert on what's going on inside my head and they just have to deal with that.

Also, fuck EMDR. Most useless form of therapy I have ever encountered. Drop me into a light trance and then ask me 'What do you get?" is really ineffective. Sorry, I can do deep trance work and still not breech the wall between my trauma memories and the rest of my brain. Maybe hypnosis could be helpful, but that's only because it's a guided trick around the blocks that you put up in your brain. That's why it helps people quit smoking and shit. Not that I've researched the shit out of hypnosis because I'm a witch and I use it on myself regularly.

Seriously, I've got some anger issues on how that therapist handled my case and the way that clinic treated me. I'm still working my way through them. I know that the problem was them and not me when I switched psychiatrists and I haven't been hospitalized due to medication changes in three years. Before that, it was just about every year they decided they were going to change my medications. Right after that, I was in the hospital because of side effects. Mind you, when they mentioned the medication they wanted me to take, I said "I don't think this is a good idea. I have bipolar. Those medications can cause suicidal thoughts and severe depression in people with bipolar." They just scoffed and said, "You'll just experience mild flu like symptoms and then be fine in a week." And what happened, I had the response to the medication that I was concerned I was going to and they treated me as if it was my fault the medication didn't do what they thought it was supposed to. That was the reason why I left that clinic. The time that I got the beginnings of seritonin syndrome, I said "Fuck this noise, these motherfuckers are going to kill me with their bullshit."

Eh, I guess I had some shit to get out of my system. And this is me censoring myself for the sake of keeping names out of the public sphere so no one gets on my ass and tries to sue me. It gets hard to do that when I am angry like this. Gold star for me not blowing the whistle too loudly.

AW: Morning (somewhere) post No. 20

I've been depressed. As a result I have been not writing. I have spotty work in my Morning Pages notebook. I have spotty work in my therapy notebooks and my daily journal is something of a joke. I'm still depressed but I am attempting to do these things anyway. As an author I follow on Twitter says, 90% of writing is showing up and writing. I feel like everything I write is garbage. As such, I avoid it and I avoid posting it.

I recognize now, after having a realization last night while I was journaling, this is all old patterns coming into play again. When I was younger, I was discouraged from sharing when I was having a hard time with something. I was discouraged from writing about the things that were making life challenging. And gods forbid if I wrote anything that could have been interpreted as signs of mental illness. I was regularly threatened with being locked away in an institution as an attempt to make me comply with the things people wanted to happen. On top of that, when I was depressed, I was subjected to even more verbal abuse and told things like 'you have working arms and legs, now get up and get to work.' and sent off to do chores that included stuff like cutting wood. I did not have it that great as a kid. Some people have described my stories of my childhood as Little House On the Prairie on crack. That may be accurate.

I came to a realization last night as I was writing a letter that is never meant to be sent (my Writer's Notebook has several of them in it addressed to people living and dead). I realized that I can write about my struggle with depression and not be ashamed of it. It isn't attention seeking or being a drama whore. I'm not a hypochondriac as people attempted to gaslight me into thinking. I was so twisted up that I thought appendicitis was bad gas up until the point I needed surgery due to the psychological abuse I endured as I was a child. I really sat with this thought last night and said to myself that I don't need to keep to these skewed rules that were put down when I was a kid.

I'm forty years old. I don't live with those people anymore. I am free to live my life as I choose. It is liberating to realize that I don't have to stick with those stupid, repressive, repulsive rules anymore. I can wear what I want. I can have what ever food I want (within reason, because I do have diabetes now). I can write, paint, create, or listen to whatever I want. Hell, I can take up music again if I want and reteach myself how to sing and write music. (I wrote a small song when I was learning to play piano before I got deep sixed by a 'supporter' who then insisted I had to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata. I was eight and could barely read music. I proceeded to quit piano lessons after they kept pressuring me.)

But I don't have those crazy makers in my life anymore. I'm free.

Flora & Fauna: Bear Root pic FINALLY finished.

Dear Reader,

After countless reworking on that root ball which is supposed to resemble a bear's paw, I can call this sketch done.

Bear Root is directly inspired by the cattails that grow wild in my neck of the woods. It is used in the same fashion, as a food source. The root ball is edible. The pollen makes a flour substitute that is similar to Arrowroot. 

Bear Root was the first of the imaginary plants I dreamed of when I started thinking about what the Foresters would be eating if they didn't have access to flour like the villagers.

I haven't written any scenes yet with them harvesting and using it yet. But that will be happening in one of the books. 

Craft of Writing: Writer's Notebook

Pictured to the right is my writing work space. On the desk is the workhorse of it all, my trusty laptop. One of my writing mascots is there in a crochet tea cup - Odin the Elephant. There is the calculator for crunching word count numbers (and if necessary calculating the trajectory for throwing the whole damn project out the window, we haven't hit that point yet, however). The black and white notebook with the assortment of different typefont samples on it is my Writer's Notebook. Piled on top of it is my weekly planner and my writing bullet journal.

The bullet journal will get it's own special post at another time. Today, I want to talk about my Writer's Notebook. In this thing I have a wide array of project ideas, poems, short stories, letters never meant to be sent, and some of my morning pages. It is a catch all for ideas and plot bunnies. This notebook is not dedicated to the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar series or any other book series that I'm working on. It is just for random stuff that my brain comes up with over time.

I started keeping a Writer's Notebook as part of a literature class in college. It was at first a thing that looked like a daily journal until I realized that I could let my hair down and really write anything I wanted in my Writer's Notebook. It doesn't get daily use right now because I've a couple of big projects I'm working on. That said, when I'm not actively working on something like a novel or major therapy writing, I am adding to that notebook on a regular basis. Some of the things that I have in previous volumes of my Writer's Notebook (yes, you did read that correctly, I said volume, this is number ten) have been incorporated into my novels. Other things I just try to forget they exist because of how atrociously bad they are.

Now, I've been keeping a Writer's Notebook since the late 90s. The only reason why I have only ten is because there is a lot of overlap between my Writer's Notebook and my daily journal. In one of my journals, I wrote out a small novella of fan fiction that probably should have gone into my Writer's Notebook. Life was stressful and hard, at that time, however, so I was writing fan fiction in my daily journal to escape the things that were difficult. In the end, my Writer's Notebook is a really useful tool. It is an archive of ideas and snippets of things like plot devices that I can sneak into a book. It is a record of my growth as an author and gives something of a picture of how my life was during that book's period of time.

My Writer's Notebook from college looks completely different from my Writer's Notebook during the era that I was unemployed and living in the middle of nowhere. That, in turn, looks completely different from the volumes from when I got married and had my children, up to present day. The Writer's Notebook can be what ever you choose to make it. Some writers keep snippets of news articles that interest them, records of research findings, and interesting quotes in theirs. (I have a commonplace book for quotes.) All of these things are useful and helpful to the writing process.

Stumbling and struggling forward.

Dear Reader,

I have been mild to moderately depressed over the last little while. It's made it hard to write. I've been afraid that all of my writings will be used to harm myself or my family. I've been convinced that none of my work is actually any good. And it ranges between the two extremes at any given moment. I've been forcing myself to do my therapy writing. I don't know if it is helping any. I'm reshuffling my daily schedule to try to get things back in order so that I have dedicated writing time again for things like blogging and working on novels.

Book four is hellish to me right now because I can't figure out how to condense the four plot lines running through it into two paragraphs. I have found cover art that I like. The best part is it is free and I'm giving the photographer credit in the fore piece of the book, which means, I hope, that will drive more work to them and they can get more for their work than exposure.

It is finished.

April's Camp NaNoWriMo project is complete. It came in at 62218 words. I wrote all of them by
hand averaging 13 words per line. At twenty four lines of text per page, I wrote 199.5 pages in this notebook. It was a Norcom wide ruled composition notebook that I had kicking around from when we bought school supplies last year.

This was an exhausting project for a number of reasons. I honestly was quite tempted to just pitch it a number of times. Some of it was due to writer's block. Most of it was due to the emotionally painful nature of the eventual content.

I sat down initially to write something fun. It turned into something completely different that I doubt I will ever publish. It goes along the same lines as the NaNoWriMo project from a few years back that I wrote out by hand. I didn't bother with keeping track of word count because I went way past the deadline before I was even half finished with it. It was painful writing on the emotional front but on the physical front if I paced myself well, I completed my day's writing with some degree of comfort.

The reason why this took three months to complete was because there were quite a few interruptions. When I had the opportunity to write uninterrupted, I averaged three pages a day on a good day. This meant that on a good day, I was writing a bit over 900 words. It's lower than what my wpm is typing, but not by as much as I thought it was going to be.

This makes now three books I have written out by hand. The NaNoWriMo 2016 project I did keep a wordcount on it, though it took longer than a month to write it, and it came in pretty close to what I got on this one. I don't have that manuscript on hand to reference because it was given away as a gift to a dear friend of mine. Having completed three novel length manuscripts by hand, I'm not sure if I am going to do this again. It took a very big bite out of my day and made keeping up with my other writing commitments harder, a lot harder to be honest.

I know that I would have fared better if I wasn't writing my way through a depressive episode. I know that I would have made better time if I wasn't interrupted with things like spring break and familial obligations. These, however, are things that can not be avoided. I am, however, going to avoid the silliness of attempting to write a novel for this July's Camp NaNoWriMo. Things are busy around here with the kids on break for the summer and summer school starting up tomorrow morning.

I think I'm going to spend Camp NaNoWriMo working on preparations for November. I am also going to bust through this block and a half that I have regarding writing the final blurb for book four of the Umbrel Chronicles and get that up on Amazon.