Patience and Coping, Low

Woke up with Shigeru Umebayashi’s Vendetta March playing in my head; it’s on the Cain’s Wife soundtrack and that book is attempting to claw its way out with a vengeance. Things are escalating, next comes that world’s version of Paris and a train ride that goes terribly wrong. Or maybe I’ll put the train ride first, since the protagonist has to get to Paris. We’ll see.

I did mean to go to the grocer’s today, but so much has interfered with wordcount and I want this book done. Plus there’s the subscription drop and I really oughta get the newsletter sorted. But goddammit I would just like to be left alone to write. The amount of bullshit in the publishing industry right now1 is a distinct impediment to doing the work only I can do, the creation everything else downstream depends on.

You’d think I’d be treated with a modicum of respect by the industry that depends on me as the origin point of everything their own jobs and profit depends on, but that’s not how it is. Anyway.

This month’s reading pace has taken a hit (like last month’s), but I have finished McIntosh’s Beyond the North Wind and Robichaud’s Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return. The latter was far more useful for my purposes, though the former did bolster one or two points for the Viking werewolves. I especially appreciated Robichaud calling out some of the bullshit in the 70s pagan revival; it’s not often one finds such declarative statements and they are most welcome indeed.

My levels of patience and coping are at an all-time low. It might be because of tomorrow’s release day; book hangover (from the portal fantasy) mixed with the white-hot pace of the current work was holding off the worst of the nerves, but it seems that grace was short-term at best. Ah well, if I distract myself with work today I won’t have much time to get more nervous, right?

RIGHT?

The news cycle isn’t helping2 so it’s probably time to submerge until I get this zero draft done. I had a lot more I wanted to say, but it’s going to have to wait. I need to blow up a train and get this witch to Paris with the heist item safely in her luggage. Before that, Boxnoggin would very much like his walkies. I’m sure the corvids down the hill are wondering if I’m going to show with a pocket full o’peanuts today, too.

I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised, once I finish my coffee and get underway…

Soundtrack Monday: Goodnight, California

The Salt-Black Tree releases tomorrow, and I am very nervous. Release days are always difficult, and I like to have a heavy workload whenever one comes around. Focusing on something else is a good distraction.

Writing Nat’s story was almost an exorcism. I knew precisely where the ending scene was, and anticipated it feverishly as I drew near the end of the tale. As soon as Spring clambered onto the bus for the very final leg of her journey home only one song would do–Kathleen Edwards’s Goodnight, California, which I listened to on repeat while writing the conversation at the garden gate.

The song is a rarity in that it expresses two characters–the young Drozdova and Dima Konets. Sometimes it’s a conversation between them; most often it’s what’s left achingly unsaid. Both of them change through the duology, though it’s Nat who changes the most. Which means it’s her story, through and through.

I typed finis on the zero draft while the song played, and promptly burst into tears. The last line of Salt-Black had been living in my head for the better part of two years, and a lot of pandemic stress got poured into the writing of the whole arc. I slithered from my office chair and lay on the floor, listening to Edwards sing and the low moan of a harmonica, and the release of tension undid me. I don’t always end writing a book by sobbing on the floor, true.

But it happens more than one might suspect.

Anyway, I’m braced for tomorrow’s release. It’s weird because I’m already four books past this particular one, but somewhere in the umber-and-bloody thiefways an engine is still revving.

And somewhere, amid green hills with an unstained moon hanging in the sky, Spring is on her way.

Soundtrack Monday: Owner of a Lonely Heart

We’re coming up on the release of Salt-Black Tree, and I am increasingly nervous. Of course I always am when a release day looms; performance anxiety simply won’t let me rest. this is made even weirder by the fact that publishing is such a delayed-gratification game.

The soundtrack for Dead God’s Heart has a lot of classics on it. And how old am I now that Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart is also playing on the “classic rock” station?

(Don’t answer that.)

The song popped up during a morning walk while I was ruminating on what, precisely, Dima’s motivations were, and how they changed. Of course there are the ones he doesn’t mind telling all and sundry about, because he likes showing a little bit of his steel. But there are others hiding in his actions, and still more he doesn’t articulate even to himself. Gods, like the rest of us, sometimes prefer to leave things unsaid.

When I got home I realized I’d never seen the music video for this particular track, and of course I had to laugh when I saw the transitions and transformations in it. (And again, how old am I that I thought, “That was the eighties, I’ll bet there’s a crackin’ music viddy“?) Peculiarly apposite for the book, and I should thank synchronicity–one of the Muse’s favourite tools–for serving it up.

So, this is one of Dmitri Konets’s songs; it reliably got him talking inside my head. Especially during the cat-and-mouse game in the second book. I think there was a point where even he wasn’t certain how this would all play out, and what he’d eventually decide to do. Even a thief can surprise himself sometimes.

A week to go before this book hits. I’d best go find something to distract myself, as usual…

Soundtrack Monday: The Logical Song

It’s another Soundtrack Monday!

The playlist for Dead God’s Heart grew along with the books–or book, I should say. It’s one giant prose monster broken into two parts, which brought its own set of problems and challenges during writing, editing, and the production process. Plus it’s added a little friction to the release schedule, with a few people eager for the second book yelling at me because they’ve had to wait two whole months.

Ah well.

One of the very first bits of music to make it onto the playlist was Supertramp’s Logical Song. I wasn’t quite sure what Maria Drozdova’s plan was when the entire thing started, just that she had one and it involved relentlessly gaslighting her daughter. To be honest, a lot of abuse centers on effective gaslighting; once you can make a victim doubt their own perceptions, you have them nearly permanently trapped. This features in other stories that aren’t about personalised abuse, too–Picard screaming the number of lights, Winston Smith finally loving Big Brother. The Toxic Person Playbook is well-thumbed, but also extremely thin. Abusive asshats use the same strategies over and over because said strategies are effective, but also because of their own paucity of imagination. So in a very real way, one of the most effective defenses we have against toxic people is understanding their small, slight list of techniques.

Nat’s journey is physical in the book, a literal roadtrip. More important, though, is the internal voyage–learning to trust her own perceptions, having to adapt quickly as a young adult because she deliberately wasn’t given the tools and practice to learn certain skills as a child, finally admitting to herself that Maria doesn’t have her daughter’s best interests at heart. Nat also has to learn that the joy and wonder she saw in the world while growing up–the things she was gaslit into denying, mercilessly mocked for merely perceiving–do indeed exist. Which is something overlooked in many stories of healing; the re-enchantment of the world is just as beautifully necessary as therapy, and is treated as a side effect when it’s a powerful strategy in its own right.

Abusers of any stripe are overwhelmingly joyless. Like demons, they flee real laughter and honest amusement. Wonder and imagination are nuclear-grade weapons for striking back against those who would take our souls and place a boot on the human face forever.

Please tell me who I am, the song croons. Asking the question is a necessary stop on the road to finding out that one can imagine the answer–and a reminder that the power to do so is internal and endlessly available, despite all the various mechanisms of repression. Art helps us both question and answer; that’s why fascist dickwads hate it.

Go forth, my dear ones, and re-imagine the world.

Soundtrack Monday: Carnival

The release of Salt-Black Tree is inching closer, and things are so busy I’m almost escaping the usual nerves.

Almost.

The soundtrack for the duology skews heavily to classic rock, with a few lighter touches. And of course, since Nat is lost in a new world–her wonder and fear are the reader’s, to a certain degree and as usual–I had to dig up Natalie Merchant’s Carnival. It was a perfect song for the drive up 101 to the land of great dripping cedars, and also while she stands on a balcony in the French Quarter watching a fantastical procession wend its way past.

Have I been wrong to shut my eyes and play along? Any one of us might wonder as much, especially while watching the great pageant of humanity pass on a city street. There’s a certain feeling–not quite nostalgia, I should call it joy with a sharpened edge–that arises in such moments, especially if one’s been reading the Upanishads lately. (Guilty as charged, my friends.) The idea that we’re all playing roles, that we’re spending an amusement-park holiday on this rocky little planet, that even the pain and death and degradation is part of a pattern that will be made whole and comprehensible at some point, whether it’s when we shrug off individual flesh or when the universe finishes its expansion and begins to contract to a single point, waiting for another Big Bang…

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s felt that, far from. And the song seems to capture its nuances with near-perfection.

Well. Maybe I’m a little more nervous than I thought. At least I’m getting some indications now that the first book is getting to the readers who need it, and I can only hope the second one follows suit.

The show goes on, everywhere and nowhere at once. And so does the music.

Soundtrack Monday: These Dreams

Quite a few people have been asking about Moon’s Knight lately, so I’ve been thinking about the book’s soundtrack. There’s a lot on there, mostly floaty dreamlike tracks I crawled into when lockdown got to be Way Too Much.

I mean, all of 2020 was a bit much, but anyway.

The story came out of nowhere, burning a hole in me until I had to take time away from other stuff to just get it the fuck out of my head. I’ve always been fascinated by portal fantasies, and dream-imagery figures in a lot of my own work. So, naturally, I hit a point in writing this story–I think it was right before Jazian’s death–that I was possessed of the desire to look up Heart’s These Dreams. Which went on the soundtrack pronto, and not only because the video is so delightfully Salvador Dali.

I was accused of being “too dreamy” most of my life, but not many of my stories actually come from dreams. There’s Beast of Wonder, naturally, which is based on a recurring nightmare, and often when I’m working hot and fast on a specific story it will creep into my nighttime re-ordering of the world. After I folded and began writing this particular book I did often dream of the desert under an exhausted red sun, and I know exactly what the castle looks like because it infested my sleep-wanderings for weeks. But mostly I keep my own dreams private and let the characters’ sleep-movies do what they will.

There are some recurring images which worm their way into my work, but it’s difficult to tell which of them are from dreams and which are subconscious outcroppings in other areas. It’s a real chicken-or-egg situation.

Anyway, Heart has always been great and I’m sure the song–which I loved as a teenager and have hummed at various points over the years–had something to do with me responding to the stress of lockdown by writing a whole-ass book. Stories grow from multiple seeds, after all; maybe this one had a few outright bulbs. And no, I’m not going to talk about the Man in Black’s name, even though that title was partly a Johnny-Cash-plus-Hades reference…

Soundtrack Monday: Where the Streets Have No Name

It’s time for another Soundtrack Monday! And we’re a bare month away from the release of The Salt-Black Tree, so I’ve been thinking about the Dead God’s Heart soundtrack a lot.

U2’s Joshua Tree album is perfect road-trip music, and I’ve played it more than once while the highway stretches under tires and the thrumming of an engine fills the bones. Of all the tracks, though, Where the Streets Have No Name is the one that really lets me know I’m driving. The instant the beat drops it feels like flying, and of course the lyrics cry out for wide spaces, tumbleweeds, and a ribbon of road stretching to an infinitely receding point in the distance. Nat Drozdova spends significant time in the desert during the second book of the duology, so naturally I had to listen to the entire album while writing her trip to a certain grandmother’s round, cactus-cloaked adobe.

I haven’t been on a road-trip in a while. For one thing, while the kids were young I couldn’t afford it, and nowadays there’s that damn plague. But maybe someday in a few years I’ll be able to. Normally I dislike travel with a vengeance; still, I think at least once more before I shuffle off the mortal coil I’ll just…get in the car, and go. I’ll have to somewhat plan the spontaneity, but that’s no hardship.

Nat’s story is very American; we do love our car rides, the slipstream and the hum of tires. The highways, freeways, and entire network of pavement or dirt roads on the continent has always made me think of veins, the railroads as a network of humming arteries to match. The vast sweep from sea to sea is a creature with several drowsing hearts, and the new Drozdova finds a few of them as she searches for herself, the truth, and the gem her mother wants–it’s no wonder it took me several years to be ready to write this story.

I think I did okay. It’s nice to reach some kind of peace with the work. At least I know it’s getting to the people who need it, and that’s a blessing.

I wonder what’s over the next hill…