SeaHeart

I keep saying it to myself, so I wanted to put it down here for posterity's sake. I've been working on one version or another of Bite, the first book in my magnum opus series, "The Red Quill," since I was fifteen. There are SO MANY VERSIONS OF THIS BOOK, and each time, I stopped writing it for one reason or another. The most common reason was that, each time, I was getting it wrong. This was--of course--for an even bigger reason...

I could not possibly have written Bite ten years ago. Oh, I could have. But it would have sucked (no pun intended ;D). In my original story, there is so much stark black and white. The Red (vampires) are evil, and this set list of characters are good, and good must triumph over evil, or--whoopsie--evil sort of triumphed, but good ends up winning out in the grander scheme of things. In the original version, everyone who is evil is like...the most evil thing in the planet. Everyone who is good is tortured and emo. It was a fifteen year old's book, to be certain...and while it had merit, it was so far from the complete story that if I had written it, and if I had gotten it published, to this day, it would be my biggest disappointment in life.

Now...here...everything is shades of gray. The despicable, hardened, and utterly psychotically evil Red Countess from the first version of the book is a sad, frightened teenager who hides behind a thin veneer of cruelty that is a joke to the other Red, meanwhile showing kindness to those she should destroy. She's gray. Brutus--in the original, an evil sadistic bastard--is now protective and strong armed into doing something that he does have the inevitable choice in...and that's what it really comes down to. Everyone in this book has a choice to be a certain way. There experiences and their stories are based on those choices...and choices in myth, as we all know, are never black and white. Only gray.

I write twist endings. Or...I do now. In my own teenaged years, my endings were pretty straight forward. You could see the epilogue miiiiiiiiiiles away, and you wanted it, but it was pretty predictable stuff. Now, in the past five years, I'd say, I've honed myself into being able to tell a pretty good twist ending. I love challenges, I love being able to sculpt and create the story into something that intrigues and captivates you. And, hopefully, you never see it coming. My writing is such a sweet, soft art...until it bites you.

Twixt is one huge mystery, which I never really intended, but there you go. What are these creatures? Why is everyone so afraid? What is hunting them? The ending shocks, and when I wrote it, I felt chills through me...I knew that in the rough draft itself, it had not been sloppy, but it could have been so much better. So now, I'm tightening everything up, I'm making it as flawless as possible...and when the ending comes, hopefully your heart will thunder as you turn that page, as it all falls into place, perfect puzzle pieces to a whole.

Everything is ending. Slowly, but surely. Twixt is getting there, that final cut, and Bite is getting there, that first cut. I've found the balance that makes it all work (I would never have thought that writing a book while editing one was a good idea, but it keeps my mind working, and I never feel pressured to work on one project if another is more insistent...in writing, as in life, I follow my intuition, and it constantly serves me~).

Two nights ago, I dreamed another novel. "Really?" I said, upon waking, looking towards the ceiling. "How fast do you think I get these things written...?"

The crystal Ganesh on my bedside seemed to twinkle.

I swear, the Gods find this almost as amusing as I do.