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Blast my poor foresight in not naming everything identically right from the start.  I blame it on my blog virginity.

As presumptuous as it sounds to ask this, please change your bookmarks.

Nick

I read somewhere that if you want to achieve your life goals, you should write them down.  I read somewhere else that you should write them down a hundred times each.  I can only guess that by writing them down that many times, it forces you to pare out the less important goals (because who really wants to write down “I’m going to stay on top of that fuzz that keeps growing up on the back of my neck that my wife finds really repulsive when I wear a crew-neck shirt” a hundred times over?).  Somehow, through mystical powers or blunt-force trauma to the brain, you will be able to achieve these goals.

I don’t think I have time to write out this goal a hundred times.  I’m counting on the magic inherent in post-its, the same magic that allows them to effortlessly be applied, then reapplied, to any surface without failure or residue, to somehow make this goal come true today.  Emily Rose is counting on it.

Note:  The post-it note just fell off my computer screen.  Should I be worried?

I knew from the first concept sketch I drew for this novel that the main character would be a girl.  (My wife laughs at this assertion; she can’t imagine me making a male protagonist since I am so “in touch with my feminine side.”)  And I knew that she would be named Emily.  Some names are classic enough that you can use them just about anywhere.

But she wasn’t just “Emily” in my mind.  She needed to be a girl that had become obsessed with plants in a society that had mostly forgotten about their existence.  As she grew older she would change from just “Emily” to “Emily Rose.”

And boy isn’t that a great sounding name!

Well, my wife pointed out to me that she had heard that name before.  Sure enough, she was right.  IMDB Emily Rose and you will see that she was the titular character in a 2005 movie about exorcism.  Great.  She’s also an actress that most recently starred in the second “Drake’s Fortune” video game.  And if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see that she is also the name of a character played by Abigail Breslin in 2006.

“Smooth move,” I said to myself.

Well, screw it.  I’m calling my character Emily Rose no matter how many associations with satanic possession, cookie cutter 3rd person action games, or “Little Miss Sunshine” it conjures up in people.  More than that, I’m naming the whole bloody book after her.

How does “Emily Rose and the Half Blood Princess” sound to you?

It's all about things meshing together.

While I was looking for a clipart picture of a gear, I came across a website (here it is) that gave detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to draw one for technical blueprints.  You would think that it would be a straightforward process (draw circle, draw another circle, stick bits around it so it looks like a happy little sun from a kindergarten finger painting).  But you would be wrong!

Drawing one gear had twenty two steps to it.  Some of those steps require advanced degrees in geometry, and I think you need to draw stuff into the 4th dimension for the spurs to line up correctly.  I have a new found respect for anyone that can draw the design documents for a Spirograph set.

Morris Tapp is a gear toother.  He works at one of the factories that keep the great city-state known as the District humming along.  He should have been an artist.  He has a way, however, of looking at his job as fitting into something much larger than himself, even if it isn’t where he imagined he would be.

I keep wondering where my place will end up being.  I thought I knew.   But, like Morris, I sometimes think that I’m being fitted into something for which I am not quite prepared.

“When I got my oneses,” her da told her, “I felt much like you did, Love.  I wanted nothing more than to be a painter, making fine pieces to hang in rich houses or in the churches, I dearly wanted that, I did.  But my da, your grandfather, who you never met I’m sad to say, he chose for me that very profession I work in now.  He saw in me a strength and attention that would serve me well as a gear-toother, which is a fine and proud position, for the factories cannot run without meshing gears.  But at the time, with only eleven short years behind me, I thought it was the dullest thing a boy could do, and I thought my da was fiercely mean to wish me to do it.

“I was apprenticed to a man named Mr. Bettleman, a small man made of wires and gristle and bone.  He knew his trade as a man knows the palms of his own hands.  He was not kind to me, Love, no he was not, but he did teach me well.  He taught me how to measure, and how to cut, how to file and how to grind, how to judge the angles of a cog with nothing more than a glance.  He taught me what I needed to be like one of those many gears in this fine District of ours, for without a trade or a purpose a man cannot be anything to his world, and he fits in no way to the rest of the great machine.”

An adult male roan with a size comparison to a human.

I always liked the idea of giant birds.  I find ostriches fascinating, and the pictures I see of prehistoric moa make me think wistfully of the days when megafauna roamed the earth,  unmolested by hunters and tourists.  I would have loved to have seen some of these species (which included woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and smilodon), but then I remember that they would all be enormously dangerous animals (that would have trampled, mauled, and eaten me, respectively).

I needed an animal for the semi-nomadic peregrini to follow, and for some reason I did not like the idea of it being just another mammal.  Bison and elephants are too mundane, so barring the likelihood of there being a species of giant migratory mudskippers (that’s a kind of walking fish, for you non-ichthyologists) , I figured they could easily be hunting giant birds.  I called them “roan” and sent them trampling about the imaginary landscape.

And yes, in my mind, roan taste like chicken.

Maybe this can restore some majesty to the avians.  I heard somewhere that modern day turkeys have been bred and engineered to the point that they are so fat they are no longer physically able to have sex.  That is a depressing thought for the species.  I also heard that they have to be artificially inseminated in order to create new turkeys.  That then makes you think about who gets that job at the turkey farm (ranch?).

Do they use a turkey baster to do it?

While that thought gobbles and squawks its way across your brain, another excerpt.  Emily is riding with the peregrini hunters as they chase after the giant herd of roan.

She could see other hunters making their kills as well.  Bolas whirled to tangle up the legs of animals, just as the Aged had described, and the roan crashed to the ground, unable to rise again.

One of the riders was knocked from his horse as a massive bird rammed into the side of his pony.  He struck the ground, rolling end over end and slamming against a crumbling rock wall.  He lay against it, clutching his arm and in obvious pain.  The roan barked at him, kicking at the riderless pony and sending it bolting away from the herd.  It then turned on the fallen peregrini.

“Trust,” Emily yelled over the noise of the moving herd.  She pointed at the fallen hunter.  “Look there!”

“I see him,” he said, spurring his horse forward toward the advancing roan.  The hunter had struggled to his feet, but his spear was some twenty feet away, knocked out his hand as he fell.  He drew his heavy chopping blade with his uninjured arm, but he held it awkwardly.  Emily realized that he was using his left hand.

The roan towered over him, alternately kicking with its massive legs and swinging down with its horned beak.  The hunter had to move quickly to dodge the attacks, but he was backing into a wall, and he had little room to manoeuvre.

Trust urged his pony forward, but they were still too far away to help.  Emily watched in horror as the hunter’s back hit the wall, and he realized that he had nowhere else to go.

The next moments seemed to pass in slow motion.  The bird picked up one leg and smashed it forward into the peregrini hunter’s chest, crushing him against the wall.  When the foot was withdrawn, the hunter collapsed to the ground, his blade clattering to the stone.

Emily did not remember drawing her slingshot or loading a stone from her belt pouch.  Suddenly she was aiming down the stretched bands, leaning out wide around Trust and trying to steady herself against the bouncing of the horse, her breath held.  They were only a few dozen paces away now.  The roan was standing over the unmoving body of the hunter, one leg raised again to deliver a final crushing stomp.  When Emily loosed the stone it flew straight and true, striking the bird in its eye and drawing from it a long keening wail.  It stumbled backward, shaking its head violently from side to side.

On reflection, however, it isn’t the best way to start the story.  There needed to be something “present” for the reader first, something immediate and jarring.

I’m still not convinced that this scene is what I need it to be.  I think it will change heavily in revision, but I can’t start thinking about editing just yet.

Here it is, a piece of the story currently being dragged kicking and screaming from some part of my brain that doesn’t seem to like me very much.

Emily lay on top of the round tower, exhausted and aching from the chase.  She had not seen many structures like this tall, domed cylinder, its insides devoid of floors or structures.  She could only imagine that it was some sort of storage device, something left over from when the District extended this far to the north.  There was a flat spot on the top, just big enough for her to lie out comfortably, with a raised edge to hide her from view from anything not airborne.  The ladder up was on the far side of the building, away from the view of any of the hunters that might have kept up with her.  She felt sure that none had kept her pace, and any that tried to reach her here would have to climb the ladder, and would be treated to a slingshot stone between the eyes.

But only when they get high enough to have a nasty fall.

Her arm throbbed where the bullet had grazed her.  Not for the first time, she cursed her stupidity for moving so carelessly after speaking to the Mayor.  She should have known that he would do something like this; it was entirely in character, now that he had lost control of it all.

It was a cold thought.  Emily wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself, rolled to her side, and fell into a restless sleep.

She dreamt of being a young child again.  She walked the old streets of her youth, too young to know the depth of what was happening around her.  Her ma and her da were there, their smiles tired but happy, as they often were.  She smelled bacon frying in the old cast iron pan, felt the crunch of the gravel spread below the back stoop.  She visited the Pale Witch’s store, saw the two old ladies in the square, working at their needlepoint and laughing at jokes she never understood.  In her dreams, she felt happy again.

I found myself sharing the main character’s frustration and distress when he died.  It was sudden, and I felt that he had not had enough time in his little imaginary world, that he had somehow been cheated of at least a few more months of realizing the talents within himself.

Now his brains are scattered over the factory floor he crossed every days of his adult life.

I almost liked him better than my protagonist.  I wish that I could somehow make a story out of his life before this novel.  Maybe he could solve crimes with a spunky sidekick, like a talking animal.  You think that I’m joking, but if I could get away with it with a shred of legitimacy still attached, I would.

I wish that it would.  It tends to leave me lying awake at the very smallest hours of the morning, whirring away with ideas that (for the most part) should be dismissed, then burned, then stomped upon, then scattered to a very violent and unforgiving wind.  It keeps me from pleasantly enjoying peaceful stillness, from being able to eat alone without a book in front of me, from watching any but the most visually stimulating movie without a pencil and pad of paper in my hand.

I was never identified with ADD as a child.  In fact, I was a very focused and studious student for the most part, a teacher’s dream.  Now my wife is convinced I should be on medication.

This constant mental action is now trying to get out as a novel.  Apparently, my brain has been hashing out a plot-line about which I am being given only the barest outline.  It then forces me to sit for long hours in front of a computer screen, hijacking my hands and conscious reasoning, and pours out something that I can only call my own in the way a gardener might lay claim to having produced a carrot.

My brain, however, is not sated.  It has demanded another outlet.  And this is it.  I think.

We’ll see what it decides I will be doing for it next.