The Iron Lily, Part 16: Daughter of the Wood

Halthor marched along the rough path that resembled a road towards the next arm of the forest. Davian's guide markers were fairly clear. The boulder at the fork in the road stood up as a white and grey lump a good distance ahead of him. The pony nodded as it walked behind him. The dog with the red ears seemed to bound happily. On the right hand side of the fork was the road to Weck-in-Wood. On the left hand side of the fork was the road to some town he couldn't remember the name of. Hyle, Wynrode, Wye, and Starhaven. Halthor supposed he had accidentally become a well traveled man in but a week. He wished he hadn't left Starhaven and stayed with Alaric. He wished that Alaric had told him that he truly was his father. He wished many things. Halthor, mostly wished it was spring so that he didn't have to trudge through the snow.

Halthor began to move off of the road and walk along the treeline west. He soon came to the end of the large meadow. "South it is," he muttered. Halthor's red hair escaped his hood to fall into his eyes as he started walking into the trees. As he moved forward, something crunched beneath his feet, muffled by the snow. Halthor looked down and realized that a very small brook had frozen over. Deciding that it was but dumb luck that he found the third trail marker, Halthor began to follow the narrow dip in the snow beneath the trees southward. The ground began to rise and Halthor found his footing getting uneven. He glanced over at the pony that was following blithely on its lead. The pony was moving as though the ground was even and the rise was far more gentle. "This is a stupid idea," he muttered to himself, but he mounted the pony.

"Go on with yeh," he said and found it was truly a better idea than he worried it was. The pony navigated a path that was beside the stream and buried in the snow. He marveled at how surefooted the creature was. He still was amazed that the pony could bear him with as much ease as a creature twice its size. The dog merrily bounded up the hill, almost but never quite getting underfoot of the pony as it steadily made its way. They had nearly reached the top of the hill when a figure came forward out of the trees.

The dog immediately ran to them, tail wagging happily. With joyful yips and yelps, the dog practically danced around the person waiting ahead of Halthor. A woman dressed in clothes better suited for summer stood before him. Her kirtle was sky blue with flowers embroidered in bands about the breast and the guards on the lower hem. The gown beneath was a darker blue. The woman's hair fell in golden ringlets about her face and a mass of longer waves down her back. A light shone in her eyes though she stood within the shadows of the trees. Halthor was uncomfortable with her lack of proper winter gear. Given his recent experiences, he wondered if this was one of the hungry shades that Ewen and Davion had told him about. He reined in the pony a good distance from the woman who had stooped to pat the dog on the head. As the dog bounded back to him in a clearly delighted fashion, the woman spoke.

"There is a better road for you to follow that your enemies can not pursue you upon. It will take you deeper into the wood but to the traveler's rest beyond Weck-in-Wood and Weck forest." Her voice sounded like the musical burble of water. Some hint of joyfulness hidden in her bluntly factual words, as though she held some happy secret about the place she wanted to lead him.

"You're talking about two days travel through deep wood with at least one of them where I build my own shelter, if the weather lets me," Halthor answered, not bothering to keep the suspicion out of his voice.

"You wear Alyrin's sign and carry a shard of the world that should have been. You can see truly through what ever glamour I would cast about me. As you would through the glamour that the dark ones would use. My sister's gift means that you may follow our roads through the forest to safety. I can guide you to the northern woods of Memmin. You may even find what is lost along the way. A shield was lost in the woods of Memmin during the last great battle. Count Olerand's great-grandsire dropped it in the heat of battle and none have been able to find it or the glade of slaughter where it happened. Perhaps you may find the vale of bones. You bear Alyrin's children who call out for each other. I am sure they will guide you."

"Who are you?" Halthor asked. The woman smiled. She gestured towards the stream. "You're the water spirit?" She laughed.

"I am a child of the forest. I gaurd the streams and waters of it. My name would be unpronounceable to you. Call me the Blue Lady as the villagers do. Just as I guide them to safety, so shall I guide you. For we must not tarry here longer because danger comes even into the shadows of my wood."

This is a two part post. Look for the second half next week. :)

World Building from the ground up.

Photo courtesy of Pexels.com

Writing is hard. It could be described like gardening. First, you have to prepare the ground. It is not as simple as scrape a hole in the ground and toss a seed in there. It involves breaking up the earth down to a certain depth so that you can get all the rocks and weeds out. It involves planting the seeds down at the correct depth and then thinning out the tender shoots as they come up so that you have healthy plants.

And as you are dealing with those shoots of young growth, you need to pull weeds. You find yourself pulling weeds just about every day during the growing season. And then there's the buckets of water you get to haul. SO MANY BUCKETS OF WATER. If you're lucky, you get plenty of rain when you need it and just enough sun. Because in addition to all of the work you put in, you've got fickle luck to deal with as well.

In world building, you find yourself asking questions that are hard to answer. You start considering things like how do cultures work and what exactly is religion? Or you find yourself way in over your head trying to figure out what in the name of the outer darkness is a biome and if they're contagious. All because you wanted to have dragons that looked cool on the cover but made sense in the story, you find yourself learning more than you ever wanted to know (wishing for mental bleach to get some of the details out) about lizard anatomy and life cycles. (PRO TIP: Lizard anatomy isn't half as messed up as ducks. Seriously, lizards make more sense.)

Asking all those questions and doing your research is breaking earth and chucking rocks out of the way. Sorting out the knowledge is pulling weeds. You've already got the seeds going as soon as you get that little baby idea of 'Hey, let's put a dragon on the cover of the book! But it's gotta make sense.' The maintenance work of sorting information as you gather it is half of the job of world building. The other half is taking your new found facts and putting your own spin on how they fit together. That is a lot of background effort for writing a book. Some people let that stuff happen willy-nilly. If you get lucky, that works out pretty well.

Now, you can put in a whole heap of background effort for the project to go flat before you even get out the bicycle pump to start blowing up the blimp. That's where you set all that hard work carefully aside and come back to it at another time. Because sometimes the seeds are not ready when you think you're ready to harvest them. Sometimes you can write a book in two weeks. Sometimes it takes three years. Either way, you're still sitting on some really good potatoes that will be making an amazing dish eventually.

Craft of Writing: I need more spoons and pencils STAT!

Dear Reader,

I've rediscovered manuscripts that I have incomplete. My pencil supply is running low, I may have to steal some from the wee heathens. But, this means that I have manuscripts to complete and I don't have to create things whole cloth. This helps me a good deal. I think, however, I need to get my schedule sorted out because one kid in middle school and one kid in elementary school has completely messed up my writing schedule. Hence my posting this when I should be getting ready for bed (read: laying out everything for tomorrow morning).

Chronic illness be damned, I'm going to get those books done. They may not be the same subject matter as what I up on this blog, but I'll be posting some tidbits about them soon. Some of you may find them interesting.

I'll try to write more tomorrow. This is my mantra.

It's all coming back to me now.

Dear Reader,

Over the last week, I'm finding myself able to write more. It's like a log jam breaking up. I am still not thrilled with the morning pages blathering. It am, however, delighted to have written two more pages on my 7th installment of the Umbrel Chronicles series. I'm in the midst of resuming edit work on book four. I'm still deciding if I am going to add more to it or if I am going to leave it novella length.

I have some ideas for how to move forward the serial stories regarding the misadventures of Halthor and the saga of Dacia's war. I'm going to make a few more installments available on the blog. Then I'm going to try out making some of them available for purchase. If you purchase the story, you get all of the previous installments in addition to the newest one, this way you can read the whole story at once.

I am slowly working on getting all of my ducks into a row for the 'book bible' for this series. I forgot just how many different notebooks I had material in. 15 minutes of work every so often adds up to serious progress, however, so I am working on it.

In the meantime, here's a poem that I wrote a little while back completely unrelated to anything:

W-Questions

Weary of work
Worn with care
Weeping tears of grief
Why must we suffer so
What good does it serve
Where is the mercy in the hour of need

Craft of Writing: Free writing or just journaling?

Dear Reader,

Some days, when I am working on my morning pages, it is really difficult to tell the difference between doing any manner of writing exercise or just complaining about things in a journal. A good deal of my morning pages of late tend to follow a theme:

Opening: I really should switch to a different sized notebook. Writing in this one takes forever. And I need a better pencil. (Continue for a paragraph of complaints.)

Middle: Angry ranting about whatever topic has annoyed me in the past 24 hours.

Closing: Why am I even bothering with this when it has absolutely nothing to do with my writing?

My husband made a really good point the other day when I was getting frustrated with all of this. I was still at least writing something. And it was more than just a grocery shopping list. So, if you hit a day where all you can manage is angry ranting about the things in life that are annoying you, it still counts as a win. Just keep trying. Somewhere buried in that angry ranting is a kernel of inspiration just waiting to grow in the fertile soil of your subconscious mind.

Alternate option, you can just burn the notebook when you have filled it up and it is nothing but angry, bitter rants. Fire can cure a lot of things and a notebook is almost enough eat to toast a few marshmallows.

8 Reasons Not to Write Click Bait

Gentle Reader,

I have identified what part of my problem writing has been.

Social Media.

I had given it a great deal of thought and realized that my problem was I was attempting to write click bait style content. That's not my bag. In fact, click bait is not helpful to getting quality writing done. You're just writing for the next series of clicks and like notifications, not for the content quality or cause/story itself. I humbly submit to you eight reasons not to write this style of literature.

1. Click Bait doesn't go past the first few lines. If you are lucky, you get a paragraph read by your audience. I'd like to congratulate the person who made it past my opening paragraph to get this far. There's more gems ahead, I assure you.
   
   
2. Click Bait is not focused on content. It is focused on headlines. Let me reiterate that point. Click Bait is focused on headlines over content. They want your initial attention. They then try to carry that attention farther with more salacious headlines. Don't believe me, just follow a few click bait threads farther than three clicks, how much advertising are you seeing versus content?
   
   
3. Click Bait is selling YOUR TIME. Just to carry forward the point I made above, click bait is selling your time to advertisers. Every click bait item you find will bring you to pages laden with advertising and additional click bait. Their goal is to waste enough of your time to get you to possibly click on and advertiser's link and/or gain enough information about you through your click bait history to target advertising to you.
   
   
4. Click Bait is not building your audience. I have been attempting to do some research into marketing. I learned something about click bait that made me angry. Click bait is presented as a possible way to generate quick audience. The problem is most of those click bait visitors are single clicks, not return ones. This is bad for business. It is the equivalent of having a single advertisement in a magazine. People will look at the ad but they're not going to follow up because they satisfied their curiosity with that initial glance.
   
   
5. Click Bait is not building your morale. Writing for clicks is grueling work. It is also something that can suck the life out of any author who is left wondering why they're doing the equivalent of data entry when they could be writing. When you get not feedback, no signs of an actual audience, or anything that indicated that something other than a spambot looked at your site, you start to want to throw in the towel on this writing business and take up underwater basket weaving. At least with that one, it has interesting challenges and you get to have something in the end.
   
   
6. Click Bait is selling YOUR TIME!! I can't stress the importance of this one. The time you spend on click bait, be it the writing or the consumption of it, is time lost for working on that novel, screenplay, or essay that you have your heart set on. The purveyors of click bait are getting you coming and going on this one. They're not just data mining on the people who are coming to click on material, they are often exploiting their writers for 'exposure' or something similarly non-committal. The number of sites that pay for click bait writing are lower than the number of sites that pay for ghost writers of blog entries. (I did some investigation into this at one point considering ghost writing.)
   
   
7. Click Bait is stealing your creative energy. Writing takes energy. Grinding out click bait articles drains your energy for the projects that you truly have passion for. Write for yourself and your passion, not the clicks. You'll find it more rewarding and more sustainable.
   
   
8. Click Bait sets unrealistic standards for your writing goals. One article going viral or becoming the talk of a specific group is a rare event. Click bait claims to make this a sustainable thing as long as you keep the clicks coming. The goal is not single visitors but a steady stream of repeat readers. Click bait also frames the argument that any real discussion must happen in soundbites and condensed into a few words. I promise you, Whitman's Leaves of Grass can not be condensed down into a few lines but it is worth the read.

If you made it this far, get yourself your favorite beverage and a cookies. Thanks for sticking with my rant and random posts thus far. I'm going to try to post more actual content not that the kids are in school.

Ideas go incognito.

Dear Reader,

I am seriously considering carrying a pocket notebook. I have ideas for things to write while I'm doing the dishes or something else that keeps me occupied. Then, when I sit down at the computer, I'm in the morass of despair that I can't write a damn word. Right now, I'm very frustrated. I have six novels finished. I have two novels partly finished. I have a book on being psychic two thirds of the way complete. I have a dream interpretation book that just needs typed up and edited.

And yet, here I am, spending day after day struggling to find the words for a sentence. Because when I sit down to write, I am filled with this crushing sense that I am never going to be good enough. I am terrified that my writing is going to bring down the wrath of the nine worlds upon me and my family. (That one comes out of some screwed up life experiences and pretty much can be summarized with the letters PTSD.) So, I manage to grind out this rant before I go plug in this contraption and wonder why I don't have a typewriter instead.

On the flip side, I'm getting a lot of work done on my therapy writing. So much writing about feeling depressed. Really, it is not therapeutic at all but I suppose it gets some of the noise out of my head. Now to plug in the laptop and grab a notebook.