There’s a narrow strip of concrete between the back door and the farthest fence. Veer two feet to the left, and you’re in the bush, veer two feet right and you end up in the pool. On the bad days over the past three weeks when there’s no one else out back, I’ve been using this little track of cement to pace out the things that don’t filter through the whispered, fervent conversation of shared secrets and the cavalier laughter flavoured by one too many pints.
When it’s all said and done and there’s no other recourse, and you’ve made your best efforts and you really behaved yourself this time — Didn’t lie. Didn’t cheat. Might’ve flirted very lightly with someone else that one time but that was harmless, right? Nothing to it. In the end it’s the end and you make your tearful goodbyes. Agree that this guy who’s been your best friend for the past two years isn’t the right fit and it’s time to move on anyway, and promise yourself that when you can handle it in a couple of months, you will go out for pints at the pub that you used to go to together all the time and laugh a bit after you spend just enough time dwelling on those good moments that you couldn’t rekindle.
When my grandfather died two years ago, I didn’t have a big moment. There was no reckoning amidst the mourning. No instant that demanded I face down and consider what his death meant beyond the immediate loss, and worry for my grandmother who survived him, and my mother who cared for him in his last days while I struggled to get home from a business trip to New York while they admitted him to the hospital. Stuck in a hotel room, unable to get an early flight out, you’re there. That’s it. There are no more chances. You’re just done.
I’ve lived two lives. There’s a time before, and a time after, and the designation between one and the other is marked off by a shift in perspective brought about by the death of two family members, an extended period of mourning that resulted in severe writer’s block, and the abandonment of fandom for two years. That’s a tough way to start off any blog post, so I want you to understand this right off the bat: if you’re coming from fandom, welcome. You and I have a distant relationship.
The My Writing Process Blog Tour is a blog hop – writing’s a solitary craft for the most part, unless you’re willfully workshopping and offering up your book baby for autopsy, for the most part we seclude ourselves and get busy in solitude. The Blog Tour encourages writers to post about their process, reach out to others in the field, and share their tools of the trade, their habits, and foster a sense of community. Read all the way to the end to see how you can participate.
With a year’s work of haunts, necromancy, alchemy, vampires, and ghouls backing my fiction, I’m looking forward to a vacation from paranormal as much as I am looking forward to taking a vacation from working on a horror novel. Don’t get me wrong, I love/hate getting scared, but I’ve been handling darkness for twelve months, and consequently, the longer I live in a fictitious world where the good guys don’t always win because that is the single most important takeaway of the genre, I need a break.
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve landed myself in the final scenes of Wake the Dead. Since a lot of the story takes place at Highgate Cemetery West, I’ve been gingerly poking around my archives to find new inspiration for the setting to avoid getting stale. In the process, I managed to unearth a bunch of photos from my last trip to London in 2012 — many which I’d totally forgotten about. I tend to shove everything into iPhoto and sort things “for later,” then that’s it. “Later” I totally forget about the images and end up googling anyway.
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