Above the shit and the piss...

I'm currently working on something which is set in a small city, has time-traveling witches, ghosts, vampires and mediums... You would think I wouldn't have time to miss some of the characters from the first novel and a half I wrote. But I do and so I indulged in writing a scene which I probably won't come back to for at least a year...

Lucielle and Raven almost have a thing. They are both magic users and are part of a dysfunctional magical society in a city which is pretty much London. Lucielle's only living relative, Henri, is a powerful witch, impatient and frustrated aunt and has a terminal diagnosis. Go scene...

* * * * *

Raven took the hospital stairs three at a time and wasn't even breathing hard when he reached the roof. The emergency fire exit had been propped open with a lump of concrete and he kicked it out of the way as he stepped onto the flat cigarette-butt strewn asphalt, hearing the door slam shut behind him.

She was standing on the low wall surrounding the roof, her feet bare, her dark hair drifting in the wind and half-hiding her face from the city. Beyond her the sky was bruised with storm clouds, making the street lights glow like fireflies far below them. Raven stopped, clenching and unclenching his fists, mentally calculating the distance between he and Lucielle, between the edge of the roof and the pavement. The maths were not good. He took a deep breath and took a step towards her.

“Lucielle... Get back onto the fucking roof.”

She tilted her face towards his voice, her eyes shut behind her hair.

“Fuck, Raven. I thought you'd be faster, I could have stepped off this edge a hundred times already.”

He clenched his teeth, taking a step towards her.

“So why haven't you?”

Lucielle laughed but the sound felt brittle. “I'm fairly certain that's not the kind of question you're meant to ask.”

She raised a half-empty bottle to her lips, the label frayed and torn where she'd been picking at it. Raven frowned. The alcohol complicated things, it always did with Lucielle.

“Get back onto the roof and we can talk about this.”

Lucielle turned towards him, her body stiffening, her face tight as she grimaced.

“Who said I wanted to talk? And even if I did, why the fuck would I talk to you? Christ, Raven. You could have at least sent Sophie...”

“Sophie’s in the ward. With Henri.”

The words landed like blows and for one moment Raven thought she would fall, just topple backwards like a windswept leaf and drift out of sight. Lucielle sagged and stepped forward onto the roof, her legs crumpling beneath her as she sat on the wall. The wind lifted her hair from her face and Raven could see the smudges of make up streaked down her cheeks, see the grey pain around her eyes.

“Lucielle, she needs you...”

Lucielle shook her head, distracted and then determined, the bottle returning to her lips.

“What good am I right now? How exactly can I help? It’s not like I can cure her, or even help... All I ever do is fuck up and make things harder. If I’m around she’ll just worry about me rather than actually looking after herself. This is MY FUCKING FAULT!”

She threw the bottle at Raven as she shouted. It flew wide and smashed on the tarmac near the door. Her arms dropped limply to her sides, her fingers brushing against the loose chips of gravel and bird crap. Raven took a step towards her and sank to his knees, his eyes searching for hers.

“Luce... It’s not your fault. How could this be your fault?”

The tears were running openly down her face, dripping onto her bare arms and feet. She lifted her hands to cover her face.

“If I hadn’t been fucking up, if she’d not been freaking out about Chase and Sophie... She’d have realised that there was something wrong. She’d have been...operable...”

Raven could feel his throat tightening and he tried to swallow, tried to find his voice. A growl of thunder dragged itself across the city and he waited for it to pass but Lucielle spoke before he could.

“Did you see her face, Raven? When she asked what the treatment was and the doctor, he just looked right at her and said there was no course of treatment. She looked so scared, it was like her face had slid aside to reveal her soul... I saw her, I really saw her and she was lost. I saw her hope wither, her strength crushed... She was like a child, like a lost child...”

“Luce...”

“I did that, Raven. I stopped her from realising she was ill... and now, now the Conclave are already hounding her, demanding I leave the city... What good have I been? With everything that has happened... My parents, Sophie, the fucking knife, Chase... What good am I? I just make people die. Where’s the grand fucking scheme in that?”

She stood quickly and turned back to the wall, lifting one pale foot to rest on the smooth grey concrete. The first drops of rain began to darken the stone around her foot in big coin-sized circles.

“Lucielle?” Raven asked, his voice flat and hard like the pavement way, way below.

She stepped up onto the wall and turned away from him, raising her voice so he could hear her.

“So what I really want to know is, if I’m meant to be so fucking special, from such an esteemed bloodline; if destiny and fate are bending over backwards for me to fuck them up the arse, then surely I can’t just step off this fucking wall and stop being such a total fucking fuck-up...”

Raven took a step towards her already knowing in his gut that he was too far away from her, that he wasn’t going to be fast enough. He called her name but his voice came out strangled by fear, buried beneath another rumble of thunder.

She didn’t look back, she just took a step forward into the rain and dropped out of sight like a stone.

Raven screamed her name as lightning scorched the air and for a moment he thought he’d been struck. His breath was knocked from him as he rolled across the roof, feeling the stone chips embedding themselves into his jaw and one cheek. He pushed himself to his hands and knees, feeling his heart pounding against his ribs like a punch, his whole body shaking and all the time unable to tear his eyes away from the last spot he had seen her in. That rain drenched roof edge, with the city lights beyond.

As he shuddered, his brain numb and his eyes stinging from the rain, he became aware of a sound, a buffeting of wind, like the slowed down whomp of helicopter rotors. Raven glanced around, seeing only the rain and buildings jutting up into the tomb dark sky and then movement caught his eye.

It was a flicker of black, peaking over the edge of the roof. It appeared again after a second, the sound of pushing air accompanying it and then Lucielle’s face appeared above the concrete.

She rose majestically, lifted by a pair of ebony wings which seemed larger than her small frame. Raven scrambled to his feet and approached the edge of the roof as her feet reached for the wall. She landed awkwardly, the wind tugging at her wings before she could fold them and Raven reached out to grab her hand, holding on tightly, anchoring her to the rooftop with an iron grip.

“What. The. Fuck...”

Lucielle glanced over her shoulder at the folded feathers and then met Raven’s gaze and there was steel there. Strength and conviction and what-ever else came to mind when you looked at someone who had just discovered they had the power to change the world. Lucielle squeezed Raven’s hand.

“I didn’t know I could do that...”

Raven stared at her wings. “I don’t think many people can... Probably not that fast either...”

“You know what this means?”

Raven’s eyes dropped to their clasped hands for a moment. “Destiny, fate... It seems you are fucking special after all... Maybe you have a chance of helping Henri?”

Lucielle smiled softly. Behind her the rain was easing off and shards of pink and golden light were spearing through the grey and licking at the city.

“First things first; it means we have a way off this rooftop after you kicked the door closed.”

Raven looked over the side of the building, his eyes widening.

“You can’t mean...”

Lucielle unfolded her wings with a shiver, wrapping both hands around Raven’s. Her wings dipped, the lift pulling her up onto her tiptoes. She grinned at Raven and pulled him towards her, his arm just wrapping her waist as her wings thrust down again.

“Oh hell yeah...”

If words are weapons, writers are assassins...

"Every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged"
Max Barry, Lexicon

We all know the power of words, that a rousing speech can raise the rebellion or give the hero time enough to foil the evil villain... We all know that words can take us to worlds which don't exist, create lovers and friends that we will never meet but we'll adore for the rest of our lives... We all know that words can wound. That hearts can be broken with just a sentence and that a well placed word will create scars that will never leave us...

So is it so hard to believe that there are words out there that can cut through all of our rational defenses, all the social programming, to our very cores? That there are words which make us totally vulnerable to suggestion, instruction and command?

You know that flutter in your stomach when you answer the phone and the line is silent but you know that someone is about to speak... There's your answer. We intuitively know that words have power and we also know there's not a damn thing we can do about it. We are so easy to Derren Brown.

Max Barry knows this and that's why Lexicon is so good.

Lexicon, (isbn 9781444764659), was published in June this year and I've been meaning to write a review for it ever since I raced through the proof copy a few months back. But something kept holding me back...the fact that it was so damn good.

Set in a world where a secret agency has harnessed the essence of language, identified the key personality types and the specific sounds that can hack each of our brains, this is a novel like nothing I've ever read. From the start it throws you in at the deep end and by the time you realise which way is up, you're already well out of your depth. And it's an immersive, obsessive read. I ate it greedily, spending an entire day off reading in bed with a near constant supply of tea and chocolate biscuits and there aren't many books which grip me like that - I think the last one before this was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and if you read this blog regularly, you'll know exactly how I feel about that book :)

But Lexicon is something different.

It is a great read, it has a compelling plot, fully fleshed characters, ingenuity and cleverness by the bucket but there's also something else...

You know that moment when you could almost believe that the X-files is an authorised government leak? That the truth is just a scrape of the surface below the unbelievable... That there's an element of truth in the horror stories which scare us...

With Lexicon there is always an undercurrent that Barry is pulling back the curtain and giving us a glimpse, not of the wizard, but of our programming. Of the way our minds perceive and comprehend language and sound, from the unspoken command of someone saying our name, the instinctual reaction of a mother to her baby's cry, to the way the hairs on the back of our neck stand up when we hear a scream in the middle of the night. A glimpse of how words and sound manipulate...

That sounds could cut through all the bullshit in our heads and leave us vulnerable...

But Lexicon takes it one step even further... What if there were a word, a phrase that could hack everyone? That there was no defense against. What if this wasn't a new word, but a forgotten word, a word that had been with us since the beginning of us grunting and gesturing at the rock, the cave, the fire... What if this word wasn't ours, what if it had come from before... What does that mean? Where does that leave us?

This is a well crafted, incredibly easy-to-read tale that behind the romp and adventure, exotic locations and death toll, behind the curtain are a lot of Big Thoughts. Note the capitals. This is linguistic philosophy masquerading as mainstream fiction. This is subtle, compelling and essentially, this is fucking clever. And not a literary fiction, big-words-and-podium clever. This is a book which knows it's readers can be smart and still like a damn good read. A book that knows you can like Kafka and Iron Man with the same brain.

This is the kind of book that every writer wishes they could write. I know I do. In an industry where some books bludgeon heavy handedly, this is a showman with an assassins blade, this is misdirection and mass entertainment. This is Derren Brown as fiction.

Now, I might be loving Lexicon too much. I might be reading too much into it... I might be selling too hard and showing you the inside of the empty top hat...

But the best thing... The thing that's really going to bake your noodle... The only way you're going to really know whether this book is everything that I say it is... The only way you can decide for yourself is to read Lexicon.

Consider yourself Derren Browned.

Three brothers...

Somewhere on the Devon coast line, near two villages divided by a river, above a bay containing many coves and one crumbling church, there is a cluster of three pine trees. These trees are gnarled by wind and sea spray, baked and bitter from the seasons and within their roots lie the ashes of two generations of my family. And it's not the windy dark days that make me think of those trees and the remains which brush against their feathered roots. It's the days like today when the sky is clear and bleached by the sun, when every other breath almost tastes of the sea from desire and imagination, regardless of where you are. In the middle of London I could turn a corner and step into an unexpected but adored breeze which suddenly seems salty and thick with the scent of seaweed.

The summer makes me think of the bay, the trees and the sea because that was where so many of my childhood summers were spent, with my family, staying at my grandfather's caravan in the private farm/campsite called Stoke Beach. We would head down to Devon within a week of the end of the summer term and stay with my grandmother in Plymouth for a few weeks and then at Stoke Beach for anything between a week and four. I and my brother would spend weeks clambering around cliffs, swimming, turning over rocks, climbing trees and grumbling any time our parents wanted to take us away to towns or National Trust properties. We spent our summers getting roasted brown and developing the ability to walk across the gravel car park without flinching. These are some of my strongest memories of my childhood and almost my only memories of my grandfather.

He was weathered and strong, a pipe always in his mouth and we rarely saw him when he wasn't at Stoke. Between March and November he lived at the caravan, only heading back to the house he shared with my grandma once a fortnight when they met to go to the library. And before you start thinking he was an odd sort and that this was a strange way to live; my grandma had a caravan of her own, further inland, set in wooded shade beside a river on the edge of Dartmoor. And so they would spend their years, apart for most of the warm seasons and cramped together near the gas fire during the cold.

Stoke Beach had begun as an evacuation camp for children from the cities during the second world war. Both my grandparents had volunteered there, bringing along their three sons to play with the evacuees, enjoying the weather and the sea, attempting to ignore reality and the looming fear. After the war many of the children and parents had become attached to Stoke Beach and the farmer established firstly a campsite and then a caravan site in this sheltered wood enclosed cove. My father, his twin brother and his elder brother spent their summers doing exactly what I and my brother had done, making memories and friends, slowly making the sand and soil of that place as much of their genetic make up as their eye colour. It was only when the three brothers left home and found their own adventures that my grandparents sought separate caravans, my gran opting for the dappled serenity of a riverside rather than the sun bleached power of the sea.

When my grandfather died, suddenly, within a week of the doctors discovering his lungs and liver were riddled with a cancer that he had never complained about or sought attention for, my grandma took over his caravan, knowing how much her many grandchildren adored Stoke Beach. It was only as her own health failed her and she had to give up driving that she gave up the caravan, a decision that we all understood, but that caused an unexpected ache in many of us. It was the end of an era. The end of a stream of generations who found solace and peace on that ragged coast.

My grandfather was the first to have his ashes scattered beneath the three pine trees overlooking the bay above Stoke Beach. I can remember that no matter where you were in that bay, unless you were squeezing through the few strange pock marked natural tunnels cut into the cliffs by the sea, where ever you were you could see those trees. Like calm sentinels on the horizon, or three weather beaten old men, sticks in hands and pipes in mouths, standing in silence and enjoying the view.

My father's twin brother died suddenly at 55 and he joined his father on that horizon, followed by my grandmother and then my father, who died five years and two days ago. I and my husband took my father's ashes to the trees on a bright November morning, scattering them beside his parents and his brother, the breeze snatching at his remains almost as if it were trying to shake his hand and welcome him home.

Stoke Beach was in our family's blood and it always seemed fitting that they should sink into that soil at the end of their adventures.

On summer days like this I think of that cliff top and I can see them standing there together in the shade of the trees, looking out over the bay at the grey blue sea, foam kissed waves drifting lazily towards the sand. I know they mostly stand in silence, admiring the view, my father and grandfather occasionally pointing out a bird or a boat and passing the binoculars to each other, pushing their glasses up on their foreheads, their faces wrinkling with squinting concentration.

The third brother passed at the start of this year and at some point I'll be taking his ashes to that cliff top and returning him to his brothers. Three trees, three brothers. It was almost as if nature always know that this was going to be home for them and left a mark so that they could find it.

As the sun sets tonight, I'll be thinking of how the stars always looked so bright at Stoke Beach. How without street lights and civilisation the sky was so clear you could see the milky way and watch the satellites skipping across the curve of the heavens. I'll be thinking of three brothers reunited and enjoying the view.

"And miles to go before I sleep..."

The door slammed behind me as I walked away, deliberately not running. People notice running, you run from a burning building or a body. Walking implies normalcy, purpose, perhaps even a plan.

My hands curled into fists and I tried to shake the thinking out of my head. Digging around in my pockets I dragged my MP3 player out and plugged the headphones in, hitting shuffle and turning the volume up to ear ringing levels.

As I walked the buildings fell away unnoticed behind me, my eyes were on the floor, chasing concrete to the beat of the noise in my head. My feet found one of the long tracks out of the city and the grey turned to a flattened gravel track edged with green, the shadows of trees and tall nettles dappling the path.

I could feel the twitch of thoughts tugging for attention, buzzing like wasps behind the noise and I closed my eyes for a few steps, walking the straight path listening only to the music, feeling the rhythm of my muscles stretching, the thud of the ground jarring up through my feet and into my body.

I walked like this for hours, eyes closed for a few seconds, then open to the sunlight through the leaves, closed and just feeling the sensation of movement and sound. My eyes were closed as the first patter of rain hit my skin and opening them it felt like I had been walking blind for hours, the sky had turned from blue to grey, the air cooler against my skin.

I quickened my step as the rain became heavier, turning a corner and finding an overpass looming over the path. The bridge was dense and stubborn, standing squat and astride a gathering darkness. I kept my rhythm as I approached, goosebumps skittering across my skin as I walked into the shadows and approached the other side, slowing to a reluctant stop. Above me the heavens rumbled and standing still, watching the rain batter the leaves and bounce from the path, my legs trembled from the sudden immobility. I began to pace, crossing back and forth the width of the shadow, slowly becoming aware that my face was wet from tears and not the rain. Feeling something in my chest clenching with the fear of thought, the fear of self.

The scream came someone I didn't recognise, a person composed from anger and fear, their voice ripping through the shadows and echoing until my throat felt raw. Shouting, raving at the voices in my head, screaming out at no one and everyone, alone in the darkness and hoping for more than an echo in reply. The screams finally fell into silence.

On bloody knees beneath the overpass, beyond my panting breath, I could hear the rain slow and the distant tinny chimes coming from the headphones lying on the floor. In that pocket between the weather and the world, there was an unexpected stillness. A silence between thoughts. A clean ache in my head and heart.

I had outdistanced thought. Somehow I had placed enough distance between me and my brain, that it had become lost in the storm, followed the wrong path and slipped in the mud.

I took a deep shuddering breath and in the silence of not thinking knew I had to run, to put miles between me and it, leave a false trail for it to follow, no breadcrumbs for a safe return to the hollow of my head. And so I ran, from burning building, from body, from truth and pain and loss, out into the woods and across fields, doubling back and onto streets, hoping to lose myself, my thoughts forever in a frantic flee.

I finally slowed, gasping, clutching at the stitch in my side, and I found I recognised a corner, a building here and there. There were the same shops that sold me bread and salt, the faces I did not recognise which seemed so familiar. The life that I lived and yet felt divided from.

There was my home, my haven.

My duplicitous feet had found their own way. Even without direction here I was. What hope had I of out distancing my mind, when my body knew where I would be?

I pulled the keys from my pocket and opened the door, letting it creak shut behind me, shutting out car and road, life and lies. As I stood in the cool darkness I could feel the world catching up with me. My memories and thoughts rushing towards me like a tide, like I was a black hole within terraced suburbia.

I had come home, to all that I was and would ever be.

I steeled myself against the sensation, like preparing to be punched in the gut. Stomach tensed and body hunched, expecting the blow. I had come home and nothing had changed. I was still me.

I was still me. 

Unedited and cliched, but it is what it is... A bad day, in a bad week and a walk helped me not think and I considered the idea of actually outdistancing self... However, ultimately you always have to come home, hopefully stronger. I wrote this to clear the air in the empty space between my ears and I've posted it unedited because it fulfilled its function in creation.

We all have miles to go before we sleep, all we can hope for is company along the way, a gentle breeze at our back and something which feels like home in the end.

Stop whining and write...

So, everyone who has ever read this blog knows that the reason it exists is to motivate me to keep writing and that's been working less well of late...

I could make excuses and I'm sure everyone would be very understanding and say soothing kind words of encouragement, when what you really need to say to me is "Stop whining you lazy bitch and pick up a pen, for God's sake!"... And even then there's no guarantee that it would get me writing any more than I am...

Sometimes the motivation has to come from within... And sometimes it needs to be a strange inspiring mix of both external encouragement and internal drive/guilt/obsession etc.

In the last week I have realised just how talented and driven some of my friends are. Their creations aren't going to cure cancer or feed the starving but they will change the world in small ways, intimate nudges of reality which entertain and inspire. They create because they want to and it makes them happy and one of them reminded me this week that it's okay to create things just for yourself...

A lot of what I write I write for my own entertainment and mental health. Sometimes stories or ideas become almost obsessions, like a hermit crab has crawled into your skull and starts trying to take your brain shell where it wants to go all of the time. And once that idea is there, the only way you're going to get anything else done is to scoop the f***er out and boil it onto a page.

I have a whole world of stories like that.

I realised during last NaNoWriMo that almost everything I write is in the same universe. I realised this when in a totally unrelated story, one of my other significant characters turned up, totally out of the blue. I hadn't expected it or planned it and suddenly there he was, drunk on the doorstep and really screwing up the plotline.

And suddenly a lot of things made sense. I haven't just been telling stories, I've been subconsciously creating a world. And it really has gone past the point where I should be writing this world. Sharing this world. It's gone past the point where I have to leave behind the notion that I could stop writing and it wouldn't change who I am and I need to accept that there's a world inside my head that needs to be let out to howl at the moon.

I need to stop seeing writing as a hobby and knuckle down and accept that it is part of who I am and that if I'm not writing, the world doesn't seem right.

So, forgive me for this brain fart on a screen - it's just me processing and cornering my creative self so that I have no option than to write. Because it's fun. Because it's want I really want to be doing. Because I'm letting myself down if I don't.

So, thanks have to go to Damian for making me give him this blog address and spurring me into doing something with it! Damian is incredibly talented - check out Beached Rockets Issue 0, in quality comic shops around the UK. And thanks to Frankie, John, Pip and Rowan who write and remind me I should be doing the same.

And because I should, here's something I wrote last week, raw, unedited and chronologically almost the first wordage for the world inside my head... Forgive the lack of formatting, technical errors are occurring...

* * * * *

He'd heard rumours of course. Drunken words over spilt beer, a collector, books trapping the spirits of the dead. And when she died... Died by her own hand, the book on the bedside table, pages open and drifting as if in a breeze when the only thing breezing in the room was his ragged breath as he sobbed and screamed, clinging to her, his fingers deep in her blood, in her cooling flesh.
He heard the rumours and remembered. He remembered her funeral and the way her family looked at him as he stood there in black leather, sunglasses and hair covering the red scratches around his eyes, the lines freshly dug into his skin by screaming and crying and ranting. He remembered standing outside her home as her relatives cleared it all into a removals truck, bin bags and cardboard boxes.
He remembered the book lying on top of a collection of novels with pink covers and happy fuzzy endings. He remembered the book disappearing behind the closed door of a small white van bearing the logo of a national charity on the side.
He remembered all of those things in the midst of overlapping shouted conversations in the Angel in Highgate, the air thick with released frustration and sweat, in the moment when Buxton said, "Christ, I didn't tell you that I met him last week? The book guy, the one who used to do that stage stuff, the one with the, you know, the books.."
Raven stopped staring into his drink and watched Buxton's hands flailing through the air.
"What?"
"The book guy! Whatsisname...the one with all the ghost books, Harry summit..." He rolled his fingers through the air, trying to stir up the information from beneath the booze and years of hardly paying attention to anything other than Top Gear. He snapped his fingers and pointed right into Raven's face.
"Harry Parker Prentis! The man with the ghost library! He came into the Glass Jaw last week, big suitcase rolling along behind him, man looked like shit, I can tell you, face was all haggard and he looked like he hadn't slept for a year... Jeez, I always thought it was bullshit, y'know, myth, but there he was, real as you. Man didn't look like a legend, I can tell you..."
Raven watched Buxton's lips moving but his words had blurred into the background, a low whine smothering everything, his heart and mind caught at the edge of static, the energy building in his fingertips. He pulled his hand from around the pint but not quickly enough. A thrum of energy slipped from his fingertips and onto the glass and it popped like a lightbulb, spilling beer across the already sticky table and onto the floor.
A rumble of laughter and hooting trickled through the pub almost covering the chime of glass as it bounced to the floor. But beneath the laughter there were pockets of silence and Raven felt eyes upon him. He looked around the crowd, ignoring the grinning faces, the flushed cheeks and the friday night glamour and found three, no four, intense expressions. Wariness poised over empty hands, waiting for the attack.
He raised his own hands slowly, palms outward, empty and relaxed, waiting for the jeering to die down and the crowd to return to their conversations and alcohol. Raven felt the gazes slip from him and sighed lowering his hands. Buxton glanced wide-eyed around the pub and leaned in towards Raven conspiratorially.
"You pissing off the wrong people? What happened man? You seem...off?"
Raven flicked broken glass onto the floor and kicked it under the table with a boot.
"You saw him? Parker Prentis? The medium with the library of trapped spirits?"
Buxton looked offended. "What? You think I'm lying? Have I ever lied to you? Have I?"
Raven looked at Buxton, his eyes cold, memories flittering across their gleam. Buxton shrugged.
"Okay, so there was that one time, or maybe twice, but I had your back anyway, so what does it matter...but this Parker guy...he was right there. He's real Raven. The fucker is as large as life..."
Raven stared at Buxton in silence, chewing over the man's words and adding the pinch of salt required due to his reputation. He sighed, leaning forward and resting the edges of his hands on the table, fingers intermeshed.
"Tell me everything you know."

The season of the twistedwitch...

Hello 2013...

Well, the Mayan calendar turned out to be just a means of calculating the passage of time after all and a little like the millennium bug, a bit of a damp squib... But still, the end of 2012 may still have ushered in a new spiritual age of enlightenment and to be fair, 2013 isn't a bad year to start and there's lots of reason's why I consider this year to be the season of the Twistedwitch...

The superstition surrounding the number thirteen may have come from many sources; at the last supper thirteen sat at the table, twelve disciples and Jesus... On Friday 13th October 1307, the King of France, Philip IV ordered the arrest of the Knights Templar... There are thirteen turns in the knot on a hangman's noose and apparently any fewer and the knot would fail to offer a quick death... Many considered thirteen to be unlucky as witches covens were thought to traditionally have twelve members with the devil being the thirteenth...

But anyone interested in modern Wicca will tell you that a coven can be any size and that witchcraft has nothing to do with the devil. The number thirteen does tie in with the number of menstrual cycles which can occur in a calendar year and one in every three or four years has thirteen full moons, leading to the association of the number thirteen with female mysteries, the magical and the mystical.

So, any female readers and anyone interested in modern witchcraft should consider 2013 to be positively auspicious :)

And as for the Twistedwitch? Well, with two successful NaNoWriMo's beneath my belt, but one of them currently unfinished and a third novel stuck in editing limbo... I figured 2013 should really be the year that I knuckle down and put my money where my mouth is.

This year I'm going to finish The Bones Of The North Witch, the 2012 NaNo novel which still needs 20,000 - 30,000 words... I'll then edit/re-write From The Library Of Parker Prentis and do a final edit of Black Clothes, Blue Fire... And best of all... I'll finally get rid of this cold/flu that has been bugging me for the last two to three weeks.

I'm hoping to get back into daily writing practice and blog more often... With actual fiction... And actually post it so it can be *gulp* read by people...

So 2013 is going to be the season of the Twistedwitch... I expect you to kick my ass if you think I'm slacking...

What am I letting myself in for?

Happy New Year everyone, may it be productive, prosperous and magical.