Poetry and Other Acts of Violence
It’s been over a month since King of the Hollow Dark came out, and it already feels like something that was written by someone else. A new year has begun, a new WiP is on the boil, and I’m (not)secretly committing poetry.
And I sold a new book.
Well, newish.
Cast Long Shadows has sold to Luna Press Publishing, and you can read more about it here. All things going well, you should see it in the wild in 2022.
But it actually started life in 2016 as a book called The Silver Bowl, then The Three Faces. It took me a while to settle on a name that worked, as you can see. In fact, I think its very first title was actually just Marjeta Book 1. As usual, I had no idea how it was going to shift and change as I wrote it. Another reason outlines are so useless to me; finding the shape of a book is a physical thing, pulling and pounding the raw words until it feels right.
My books take forever to ripen. And that’s okay. I’ve resigned myself to slow harvests. Even if I write the initial draft fast, getting them to work as a whole takes a lot of revision. And sometimes I’m not the right person at the time for the job. I need a few years to mature — more than the book does. That’s just how it works for me, and I’m used to it now.
The Shape of Monsters is slowly taking shape, and yes, it’s a monster. At over 90k I have finally found the tail end of a plot, so…this one’s going to need to be bashed around a bit before it is book shaped.
The other thing I’m doing is committing acts of poetry. Over a year ago (are you spotting the theme?) I began writing a poem. A poem with 25 stanzas (because I’m an idiot), told, mostly, in two first person PoV’s (because I’m an idiot), from a future where the youngest prince and his sister from The Wild Swans have run away to live in the mundane world, and are remembering their own mythology, splitting it down to the pith (because I’m an idiot.)
I gave up when I hit the thirteenth stanza. But now I’m prodding at it a little, remoulding it. I’m not a poet, but I can still play. And if it takes me another year to finish it, I’m good with waiting for the apples to fall.
In the now I wake alone, you have gone
And I cannot leave.
We chose this, you and I.
You with your scarred feet and hands
Flecked white with blisters that will not heal.
Me with my white wing, useless, flightless.
What bird could live like this, half
Spun in one world and half
In another. A transmutation
Frozen in place.
And so we hide, you and I.
You from the things you have done
And me from the things I have unbecome.