I love getting up in the morning and seeing my computer sitting quietly vacant. I get a little thrill of excitement, thinking of the scenes I had finished the day before, and the scenes that I will draw out that day. Though, when I think the latter, I must continually push aside the lingering thought that I cannot do it.
I can. I do it each day, scene by scene.
No more purposeful dilly dallying for my little crew. Gilly has humanized Tenshio and Tenshio is now the firm security that Gilly must be able to stand on. The final member of the party has appeared: they must now descend.
Gilly's nightmares are becoming worse and worse. Already, the unsettling virtues of the spirit realm are loosening the barriers that have kept her mind from the truth. She vacillates between acting like a much younger child and acting older than her years, as the unwanted ballast inside her swings from side to side.
Her nightmares are mine exactly as I have dreamed them. I have found that it is a very difficult task to make up dreams and still have the pretend dreams carry the truly bizarre and urgent and fragmented quality of real dreams.
So, here is the plan for them. They go down into the Kagamihara and onto the ice wastes of the south pole. They travel to the edge of the ice by dog sled. They will be talking dogs, of course; big, magnificent and playful huskies with rippling grey white ruffs of fur. There will be some kind of wooden, rickety port city at the edge of the ice.
At that point, I cannot decide if they go by ship through the Indian ocean or if they fly over it. Tenshio can fly, though this is not known to Gilly or even the reader at this point. He is capable of calling down and riding the west wind, as he has been sealed to the Sacred Realm in the service of that wind.
But this is absolutely no casual way of getting around and it would be very difficult to control the wind in the chaotic and swirling atmosphere over the mirrored plains. Not to mention, exhausting trying to bring along a passenger or two. So it's not practical.
If they go by ship, it will be by a wooden sailing vessel, a large one, with two or three masts. I'm pretty sure. Or something pulled by massive underwater beasts. Narwhals, maybe, or a humpback whale.
If they fly, it might be by something like a blimp, some crazy antiquated Victorian piece of technology. Or they will be carried by something. T'ien-lung, the celestial dragon, could carry all of them easily and that would reintroduce him into the story.
However they go, they will not head into any great difficulty until they land on the Asian continent and make their way up through India, toward the Himalayas. I have no idea about those scenes; all I know is, flashbacks will occur and the materialization of her abuse will be tracking her down at that point, having sensed her presence as soon as she stepped onto the plains.
I'll tell you a secret: I hide messages in the names of my characters. Tenshi, in Japanese, means all of the following: heavenly gift, imperial gift, nature, natural elements, angel, and the emperor. Ten is the kanji for heaven (among other meanings). Kanji is one of the three Japanese alphabets, the one that they borrowed from the Chinese. The character itself looks like a torii gate.
When Tenshio refers to the archangel that guards the sacred gate, he calls him Eiheisama, which literally means master (or lord) palace guard.
Touzainanboku means all four directions of the compass, and is the name of the encircling mountains. Kagami is a mirror and hara is a plain. Daitoku means honorable priest. Nishi is west.
Sometimes, in the politest version of the Japanese language, the prefix "O" is added, usually to the verb. I have taken that concept and used it in my own way, adding it to nishi to indicate that this not just the west (wind), but the Honorable West (wind).
So Tenshio's full job description and/or title would be Onishikaze Daitoku. (I add the hyphen in my story because I think it's cool looking.) If a person who was actually fluent in Japanese read my manuscript, they would think it hilarious, I'm sure.
I did much the same thing in my first story. Ceallach means "war, strife and bright headed" which indicates his job description, his fate and his hair. It can also be argued to mean recluse or hermit, which is his tendency. His older brother who summons him back to Tir na nOg for battle is named Fionghuine, which means "kin slayer."
And so on and so forth. None of these things do I ever explain in the stories themselves. The meanings are something only I know, something that links me to my characters.
The notable exception are my main characters, my girls. Their names are never chosen by meaning. They are chosen from the gut, not for any reason I can explain. They come with their names already attached, you might say, and it is one of the first things I ever know about them.
