Wednesday, May 18, 2011

May 18th

I know what I have to do in my story now. I don't like it; I don't want to write it. (Which is why I'm distracting myself with blogging, at the moment.) I keep distracting myself with additional games of spider solitaire. I've brought my win percentage up from the low forties to eighty six.

Still, I manage to keep chipping away at the story, line by line. Phillipa is pregnant. And Ceallach, true to form, will not wait. Not even with the strategy I thought up earlier, to keep him put. He left for Tir na nOg alone, without telling Phillipa. It was the only way it worked.

He can't tell her, because what she knows, Duana knows, since the sorceress found out Phillipa's true name (which is why sometimes my main character is called Grace and sometimes Phillipa. She's called by her middle name in Tir na nOg. But to no avail. Her real name was in her text book.)

It's not as if a sorceress can raise much defense against an ironsmith, since the iron negates her power. Ceallach is like a walking, living dead zone for magic. But she can make things difficult, and he wants things easy, so he can return as soon as possible, since there is no way to know how much time will pass in the human world while a person is in the other realm. The less time he spends there, the better.

And he doesn't want to talk about it, because he has to kill a woman, a thing he finds incredibly distasteful, even if she is an adversary. And anyway, he feels complicit, since he did lead her to believe, ages ago, that he would marry her. His deep seated conscientiousness is frequently his greatest weakness.

And since Phillipa is telling the story, the reader will never see that plot line develop. I went to extraordinary lengths to force Ceallach into taking her with him when he was hunting down his undead grandfather, so that story could be told. (And it turned out very lucky for him that he did.) But he won't be fooled again. I have no more tricks up my sleeve.

So there you have it. I'm trapped by the complexities of my own story. So much for trying to keep it simple.

I should never have made fun of those authors who complained about their characters taking control. It's like saying you will never wipe your child's nose with your hand, or clean their face with your spit, because next thing you know, five years later, there you are, in the isle at Target, furtively wiping some mysterious, sticky substance off your child's face with spit and the palm of your hand.

My characters don't just have control, they are driving me around with sticks, as though I were their personal beast of burden.

Fortunately Ishi no Torii, being in the beginning chapters, provides me with that illusion of freedom that is so pleasurable at that early point. I can still pretend to be in control of that one.