Something New

Winter has done it's best to knock me on my writerly butt, but alas, I'm back up and pounding the keyboard.  When I'm not getting sucked into my new favorite hobby of embroidery.  Just give me my old lady badge already, okay?  I forfeit youth.

Anyway, lots of stories in the pipeline.  The one that doesn't spill oil in your prettiest puddle.  First up is another faerie story set in, you guessed it, New Berlin!  Matthew Goode is a third (or fourth or fifth, he's really not sure) generation fey descendant who's having some trouble with his personal life. Which is to say he doesn't have one.  What he does have is a crappy job keeping the books for an ungrateful employer, and a crush on his employer's rough-and-tumble errand boy, McCarthy.  Of course Matthew knows he'd never have a chance with a man like that.  He's a nice shy boy, maybe a little on the boring side.  He understands most men aren't attracted to the quiet, dull type.  Which is why he's never tried too hard to find one.  What the hay.  He's got a pet parakeet named Delilah and she could shit all over any human man.

And then Delilah dies.  Matthew goes off the deep end.  Demands a raise, gets turned down for a raise, steals a gemstone worth millions of dollars, and tries to run away to start a new life in England, where boring men like him meet each other over cups of Earl Grey every day.

What Matthew doesn't know:  His employer is a powerful witch not know for being merciful.  His crush, McCarthy, is actually one of the dark fey, a changeling adopted by the witch a hundred years ago and serving as his enforcer ever since.  And then gemstone he stole?  It's a magical talisman beyond any price tag, and the witch wants it back.  Now.

Who better to send after an errant fey than one of the dark fey?  Unless that dark fey has a soft spot for nervous reclusive bookkeepers harboring secret dirty fantasies.

If revisions go well, Iron & Bone will be publishing with a real cover in late spring/early summer of this year.  In the meantime, you can check out the in progress second draft at either FictionPress https://www.fictionpress.com/u/384634/LFBlake or Wattpad https://www.wattpad.com/user/lfblake.

Happy Valentine's Day

Life goes on.  People live, in a manner of speaking that other people might not call living at all.  And caretakers, I have a new respect for caretakers.  It is a job that can ruin you, husk you out like rotten corn until the good parts of yourself are dust and only hard crunchy bits of cob remain.  Not everyone can do it, and when you come to terms with the fact you can no longer care, you're haunted by the possibility of being a terrible person.

I refuse to descend into depression on a manufactured holiday which I would likely feel more charitable toward if I were not spending it alone, fighting off a cold, and waiting to be called at any moment into my mother's bedroom to empty her catheter bag.  I resent these impositions.  I am a terrible person.

So... Sylvia Plath on Valentine's Day.  That's all I have the energy for.  The poetry and anger of Otep got me through depression in my early twenties, kicked my ass out of apathy, into righteous fury.  But today is not a day for rage.  It's a day for tulips.

...

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them   

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.   

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe   

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.   

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,   

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,   

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.   

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,   

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow   

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,   

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.   

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.   

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river   

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.   

They concentrate my attention, that was happy   

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;   

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,   

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

~Tulips (abbreviated), Sylvia Plath