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Finally, here's Ty's story-- this one is the oldest of the bunch, written a very long time ago and fiddled with in the meantime. I think this version is about as old as my oldest kid, which means...ugh, old enough to vote next year.

 
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Goodbye, Goddess Open in new Window. (18+)
A hired sword must decide if he wants to lose a duel.
#2338202 by Raven Author IconMail Icon


I still like Ty Blackbird. He's a complicated person, and he makes a lot of mistakes, but he's doing his best. And that's all any of us can do.
Another old story (at least a decade, I think more) this one is about Simon, a character I always wished I could figure out how to write more about. (I almost didn't post this one, because it could be read as bearing on current events, but I promise that this is the unchanged text of a very, very old piece. You ought to be able to tell by the clunky prose.)

 
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Patron Saint Open in new Window. (13+)
Simon asks the Weeping Saint for a miracle. Does he get one?
#2338200 by Raven Author IconMail Icon


I think this is a story about grief, and conscience.
Tonight I've been unearthing more old stories. This one is the story where I first met Corcoran Gray. He eventually became a much more rounded character and starred in my two published novels--but here he is in his very earliest form:

 
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Moon and Bone Open in new Window. (13+)
A murder, a wizard, and so many bones...
#2338201 by Raven Author IconMail Icon


Even in this story, about 13 years old now, you can get the essence of Gray's character; he gets very attached to his friends, he's a good person but doesn't like to admit that he is, and he's always trying to be the kind of man his grandfather would approve of.

Also, he's an impulsive idiot.

Enjoy.
So I am very bad at noticing when I'm feeling stressed. (I know, bear with me, it's really stupid.) For various childhood type reasons, my default setting is to pretty much not notice my mortal frame, this meat mecha I am piloting--until it's *shrieking* at me. It's been a process, the last few years of my adulthood, learning to actually pay attention so I can, for example, take a tyelenol *before* I am knocked completely down with a headache. But! I have found a pretty flawless metric for "is Raven stressed?" and that's "can Raven write when she sits down to try??"

This is different than "I sit down but don't want to write" or "I sit down but don't *know* what to write". This is "I sit down and want to write and know what I should write but brain goes splat and says no". (Note: this is also not burnout. I did that too, in 2022-23, this is a different thing.) The way you can tell when stress is inhibiting the muse is that when the stress relieves--say, when the financing is finalized for your new house and it's way better than you thought it would be--all of a sudden the story ROARS back and you're writing as fast as you can type.

I guess I am telling you this in case you're feeling bad because you can't write while, IDK, a family member is sick or you're waiting on results or (God forbid) you've been looking at the stock market. It's ok. It's just that your brain won't spare extra energy for creativity while it's (it thinks) protecting you from all the man-eating tigers that are waiting in the woods. You can sit with me until your stress abates. We'll hold hands and eat Klondike bars, it'll be fine.
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Phantom Reviewer Author Icon - Luckily this time it was only a couple of weeks, while I was so distracted I couldn't even dink around with chapters. Tonight, with some big question marks about our move answered, I'm happily moving sentences around and restructuring the thing. The stories are always *there*, just sometimes my brain is on too much Tiger Patrol to let me get at them. (Silly brain.)
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This would explain why I've not written any fiction since January 20.
Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈 Author Icon - a lot of that going around...
I just found out my realtor is reading one of my published books and you guys, this is *weird*.

(She likes it! But this is weird!)
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Of course she likes it. You're awesome.
In other news, it is deeply annoying that books have to 1) have titles and 2) have titles that have not already been the titles of other books. I have been--between scrubbing out cupboards and trying to give away old couches-- brainstorming titles for days that are not the working title ("Rain Novel") that I gave this book and they all somehow sound worse in my head than "Rain Novel".
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Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈 Author Icon - I love your suggestions. What's nice about most titles is that they can hold the place until the right one comes along. I rarely leave anything untitled because I've written too much and I don't want to just number them.
Purple Rain? Rain of Terror?
Ben Langhinrichs Author Icon - I have legit been mulling "Rain/Fall" and then yanking myself back from the ledge with two hands. I have a terrible feeling it's going to my agent titled "RAIN NOVEL" and I will wail "YOU TITLE IT THEN IF YOU'RE SO SMART"
March came in like a lion and is leaving like...a slightly smaller lion, in that it's raining instead of snowing. But we took one load of Stuff to the dump, and I am thiiiiiis close to having the house ready for the movers.

It is indubitably easier when The Company moves you-- they hire professionals and their army of boxes/packers/loaders to walk through your house, look distainfully at all your stuff, and then heft it all into a semi to be transported state to state. But the professionals won't move a lot of things, mostly flammable things. So, for example, I have to get rid of cleaning products, candles, batteries, nail polish, hairspray. They'll move some food (oatmeal) but not other food (canned beans). They won't move houseplants for obvious reasons, but every time they ask me if we're moving the garden shed. (We are never moving the garden shed.) They DID pack up a trash can with trash in it last move, though, so you can see why I get confused.

However, every move I knock myself out trying to remove all this stuff before the movers get here. Why? Because I 1) own a piano and 2) last move there were 42 cartons of books. I know we have acquired MORE books since last move. I am betting we are over 50 cartons of books this time, and the movers made sad dolphin noises every time they opened a cupboard and found... MORE BOOKS. So I try to make it easy on them, and get rid of my nail polishes in advance. And believe it or not, I *have* culled the books! This isn't as many book as it could have been! things could always be worse!
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Even with professional movers, you've still got to UNpack. My experience is that they just dump stuff in random boxes. It took us weeks to unpack after our last move. In fact, Gene's still got a bunch of boxes in the garage he never unpacked from our move eight years ago.
I've been hoping that March would depart like a chicken --- leaving a few eggs behind. Those little oval objects have been so expensive I had started trying to learn to lay 'em myself!
Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈 Author Icon - We got good at unpacking fast because the movers will come take the old boxes away if you do it within 30 days. We'll see if we're still good at it, I guess--my usual plan is to feverishly discard before we head down the road. Like a whale leaping to knock the barnacles off itself...
Home (to the old house) for a while, anyway, to start getting things into boxes and the place set up for showings. Times/dates for when we head to the new house TBD, we should know soon. Meantime my dog is very offended with me for cleaning him.

Will I write until we are safely ensconced in the new place? I have no idea, but I can tell you one thing, friends: I read some books on my plane/rental car/uber odyssey these last few days, and ya'll are at LEAST as good as *those* writers. (One--published, bestselling--book I read had a character saying "when I looked at him, my gaze was hard". As if the POV character could step outside herself for a minute, or perhaps catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and notice how her gaze appears to others. [No, there is no mirror, she is a peasant in a shack at that point.] MY writing pals would never let ME get away with these kinds of shenanigans and goings-on, is all I'm saying.)

Hopefully I can do some reviews tomorrow, if I get enough floor-waxing done...
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Do you know yet where you are going?
Today the Husband is meeting his new work site people and I am scoping out our (possible) new town. First order of business: find the library and the bookstores. Then I will know which house to buy...
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JACE  Author Icon
My Dad was career Air Force and we moved around a lot when I was younger. I moved five times in my first eight years of school, spending the third grade in Mississippi, Maine and Michigan.

But I always spent the first couple days in a new town riding up and down every street on my bike to learn my way around. We always moved to small towns of fewer than 5000. What fun!
Wow! They really don't give you much time to think about it , do they?
Dave  Author Icon
Big doings at my house--we found out last night my husband will be changing jobs and we'll will be relocating. Exciting times--and I hope much better work life balance for him--but a buttload of work for me, so if you don't see me as frequently for a bit, never fear. I will return! Just have a lot of packing to do... :)
Edited a chapter of Old Thing. Maybe can get to writing more of New Thing if kid appointments today don't take forever; maybe will take a paper copy of Other Old Thing with me to the orthodontist waiting room and sit there with a red pencil, looking official?

(True fact: Staples will print out and coil-bind your novel manuscript for you, and then you can read it on paper and scribble all over it with colored pencils like God intended. For some reason this makes it easier to catch things than staring at it on a series of screens. I also like this better than my previous method of "print out a chapter at a time and lose the pages".)
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Good to know! Thanks!
I hear you about paper copies. I wrote that way exclusively when I was very young. Now that my lazy streak has taken hold, I figure it will have to be typed to post anyway, so I just work that way from start to finish; just one of the many reasons that I'm not a household name... *Wink*
For days now I have been resisting writing yet another chunk of FEELINGS because I was looking sternly at this WIP like "now you listen here, young man, you can have your feelings when you finish all your vegetables plot!" But this morning I was so tired and bebothered at the prospect of a day full of Appointments that I said "fine, FINE, have some feelings, WIP. As a treat. Fine! If it will make you shut up about it!"

And now I know what will happen in the next three chapters, including a lot of plot, and I'm so annoyed.

(Have not *written* it yet. Well, I've apparently written two half-chapters. But I *know*, which is half the battle.)
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I like the feelings... But I know what you mean. I will look forward to the new chapters!
Vampyr14 Author Icon - I like the feelings TOO, just...was feeling annoyed about not knowing what plot would happen next. But now I know! Brains are very fickle.
That's what G.I. Joe said, "Now you know, and knowing is half the battle."
Edited a chapter of the old thing. Wrote 1400 words of the new thing--they probably don't go where I have them right now, but oh well. They'll be useful someday. Not bad for the first Monday of DST.
On the downside, I was super busy today and didn't get much writing done. On the upside, I got a cool review from Phantom Reviewer Author IconMail Icon, who is reading my Novel What Has Something Wrong With It, and I think I figured out a character's whole deal. (In a different novel. He had not told me his whole deal until today. I already know the whole deals of the characters in Novel What Has Something Wrong With It. I think.)

I was feeling a bit annoyed with myself that I didn't write today until I remembered that daylight savings time always messes me up for a few days, and my writing also gets messed up. Be gentle with yourselves if you can, and get to bed early. (People in other, saner countries, or Arizona, count your blessings.
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On the topic of daylight savings time, I agree with the reply given by an old native of this land when he was asked about it, "Only a white man would be foolish enough to believe he can cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it onto the bottom, and have a longer blanket."
Edited some old chapters last night. This morning, got about 1000 words on a new chapter of the WIP. Feeling a little like this chapter is too full of thinky-thoughts; pretty sure I'm going to have to have something bad happen to the characters by the end of it. For one thing, the villain is still way too far in the background.

But! I have foolishly done a bunch of typing, a bunch of cleaning, AND a bunch of piano-playing this week, and my wrist is getting borked. (Stop and do your ergonomic stretches, kids! Do your warmups!) Guess I'll have to do some reading for the next little while, oh no...
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Lower their credit score. That would suck.
I hear you on the wrist thing, I scraped wallpaper yesterday and my shoulder and wrist are revolting today.
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