A to Z Challenge: R is for Rule Abider

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

R is for Rule Abider

Yes, I know I'm conjugating that verb in strange and incorrect ways, but I'm calling it artistic license, so bear with me.

Let's go back in time for a moment, all the way back to April 7th - two whole weeks ago! - when this year's A to Z Challenge was in its toddler-hood, and we were all only posting about the letter 'F'. That day, my post was 'F is for Free Spirit', and I talked about the first of my two Uber Characters.

Once again, that's a made-up term, which I define as the umbrella character for every mortal person in each lifetime that a soul has. Since this novel is going to follow two souls from life to life, I thought I needed to decide what defined each soul: the traits, needs, and basic sense of spirit that are innate to the soul, and that would carry through from life to life.

So, the first soul was a Free Spirit - fiercely independent, suspicious of rules and authority of all kinds, and a bit wild, often in unexpected ways. The second soul, of course, is the Rule Abider.

This is Uber Character #2: cautious, controlled, and a lover of stability. This is a conservative person in the  true meaning of the word: not necessarily religiously or politically, but in attitude and outlook. As Google defines it, this is "holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation." In other words, this soul is just as likely to be a dominatrix as it is to be a priest. I know that sounds strange, but it really depends on how you define 'traditional.' Think about it: this soul would be a lover of rules and control - perfect for a dominatrix - who adheres to age-old traditions about that dominant role, and who keeps strict, ironclad boundaries between his/herself and clients.

See what I mean?

Now, of course, we have two diametrically opposed Uber Characters who couldn't be more different - and yet who find, over and over and over again, from lifetime to lifetime, that they are inexplicably and inextricably bound to each other. It's a case of each soul helping the other to grow where it needs it the most. Like yin and yang, or even simple puzzle pieces, they just fit together. The problem, of course, is convincing them of that fact, and that's where conflict, and fun, come in.

A to Z Challenge: N is for Natalie

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).


N is for Natalie

I teased you about this for far too long - but in my defense, it was t the alphabet's fault! 'B' and 'N' are just too damn far apart.

It's finally time to talk about Natalie, or Nat, as everyone calls her. A little refresher: Nat appears in the lifetime in 1960's Australia, and she spends her days driving around the country on her motorcycle. Yes, she does have the requisite leather jacket, attitude, and some seriously awesome - if also rather worn out and ratty - boots.

Nat is a true vagabond: she's in her 30's when we meet her, and since she was about 17 years old, she's spent her life on the road. When she runs out of money, she stops somewhere and picks up some work, but as soon as she has enough saved up, she's back on her bike again.

This is how she met Taylor, the other soul and of course love interest: she was near the sheep farm when her money ran out, and was lucky enough that it was shearing time, and that Taylor needed the help badly enough to not care that she had no experience. Taylor hired her on the spot, and the rest - well, the rest is the whole story. And yes, to find out more about Taylor, you are going to have to wait until 'T' day. Darn that alphabet...

If you haven't guessed by now, Nat is of course the Free Spirit soul. She loves the freedom of the road; it's the only place she's ever really felt at home. Late in the story, Taylor accuses her of running away, and it's true, she does run - but she has far too much haunting her in her past to stay too long in one place. If there's one thing Nat's learned, it's that no one can catch you if you just keep moving.

In fact, before she met Taylor, she never returned to the same place more than once. But now, no matter how many times she leaves, she keeps finding herself back at Taylor's farm, over and over and over again. If she's not careful, she might find that the road suddenly isn't enough for her anymore...

I'll let Taylor give you a little description of Nat. This is from the day they first meet, when Nat shows up on the farm, and Taylor is desperate for help (and all sheep farming stuff is utterly made up for now, so please forgive the blatant inaccuracies):

I was in the barn, trying to figure out how in bloody hell I was going to shear the sheep with no help, and I’ll say it now: I shouldn't have been around the sheep. Animals can tell when you’re off; they smell it and sense it on you, like oil or smoke. It’s one of the first rules of the farm and I’d known it since I was a kid, and I was busy breaking it anyway. 

At any rate, I was wrestling with a sheep when she appeared in the barn door. I wish I’d been doing something else, something stronger and calmer, but I wasn't; I had my arms wrapped around a crabby old ewe, trying to push her into the stall I’d rigged up, and she was crying out at the top of her voice and telling the whole bloody flock to run for the hills. 

“Need a hand?”

I glanced at the door and saw a person, a real live able-bodied person, and nodded. I didn't have breath left for talking. The girl came over and helped me corral the stubborn ewe into the stall; I caught a glimpse of long hair and fair skin, and an old leather jacket, and that was about all I had time for. The ewe was bucking and kicking, panicking, and I knew she’d hurt herself if I didn't let her out soon. I got her sheared as fast as I could. She was so wild she barely felt it; she kept crying out, poor thing, and as soon as I was done I kicked open the stall door and let her go. She ran for the far wall, near the water, and stood there glaring at me. 

I turned away. She’d forgive me soon enough; more likely she’d forget before she could, and would let me handle her with the same irritated patience she always had. I let the ewe be, and took a good look at my helper.

She was older than I’d first thought; there was a leanness to her freckled cheeks, and a few fine lines around her eyes, that told me she was well out of her teens and through her twenties, and stepping into her thirties. She was shorter than me, and slighter, dressed in a black motorcycle jacket and jeans so old and worn that they looked like they’d been painted on her body. Not because they were tight, but because they’d stopped trying to have their own shape, and conformed to hers instead. 

“Thanks,” I said.

“Sure.” She smiled, a flash of white teeth and brown eyes, and for the first time, but definitely not the last, I felt like I'd been blinded. Like the sun flashing off of metal, bright and too hot, when you're not expecting it. “I’m Nat, short for Natalie,” she said. She held out her hand. Her skin was soft and her hand was small in mine.

I’m not the kind of person to make bold statements. I like to keep things simple and straightforward, and I stay away from pretty language. So now I don’t know how to say what happened. I looked in her eyes, and...something happened. Something quick and bruising, like a high wind blowing or the sharp kick of a ewe’s hoof. 

“I’m Taylor,” I said. I dropped her hand like a hot stone.

A to Z Challenge: L is for Love

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

L is for Love

Note: The excerpt here is definitely PG-13. Nothing explicit, but quite a lot suggested. Not appropriate for younger audiences! 

There are so many different kinds of love: even romantic love takes so many forms. Infatuation (as some of you recognized from that snippet I posted); obsessive love; young love; falling out of love; mature, generous love. My WIP is going to move through some of these different kinds, from Apollo's dramatic crushes in the Ancient Greek lifetime to, eventually, a truer, deeper, braver love between Nat and Taylor in the modern Australian lifetime.

That deeper love takes quite a lot of time and effort to get to, though, and there are a lot of bumps in the road along the way. Many times both of them are sure they'll never make it; in fact, they're shocked when they realize they even want to make it. Both Nat and Taylor have scars and baggage in their histories, and neither of them trusts easily.

Remember, Nat is a wanderer; she spends most of her time on the road on her motorcycle, and her affair with Taylor evolves during many visits over a long period of time. The format is always the same: she shows up at Taylor's farm without warning, stays for a while, and leaves again, without warning, over and over. Here's a snippet about one of her visits, told from Taylor's POV. In many ways, it's about the strange things we do and say when we love but are afraid, especially as our pasts get in the way. I know, it's ridiculously out of context and too long. Oh well...what are snippets for?? As always, I make no foolish promises about quality, and all standard disclaimers apply:

I was fixing fences the next time Nat showed up, months later. She rolled into the yard early one morning in a racket of rattling metal and whining gears, and took the bike right into the barn without saying a word. I heard the clatter but I was fields away, patching a rotting fence, and by the time I made it back she already had parts scattered across the floor. 

I leaned against the door and watched her work. “What’s broken this time?”

She flashed me a smile, and as always it was like squinting into the sun. “Everything,” she answered. “Of course. Stupid bloody thing.” She gave the chrome frame an affectionate pat, and then went back to work. Nothing else.

So I went back out into the fields and hammered planks into the fence with so much force that I splintered the wood, and had to go back to the shed and cut myself some new pieces, so that the whole thing took three times as long as it should have. By the time I’d finished putting away my tools, and was washing up for supper, I knew what I had to say, down to the last word. It didn't involve her staying. 

I went inside the house. “Nat?” I called, “I need to talk to you.” The whole house, though, was filled with the smell of herbs and the sizzle of fat; I walked into the kitchen to find Nat pulling a well-browned roast out of the oven. 

She blew her hair out of her eyes and gave me another brilliant smile, and said, “Perfect timing. Come and sit.”

I followed her into the dining room. There was salad and mashed potatoes and this still-sizzling roast, and glasses filled with red wine, and two places set. “I got the meat out of your freezer; I hope you don’t mind?” she asked, settling the steaming platter onto the table. “I wasn't sure if I’d have time to thaw and cook it before supper, but I managed.” 

I shook my head, and picked up a wine glass. “Ah,” she said, her eyes laughing at me, “That I brought with me. I know you don’t drink during the week but I thought I might convince you to make an exception.”

“What’s the occasion?” I asked.

“No occasion,” she said, sitting down at the table and spreading a napkin over her lap, and avoiding my eyes, “I just wanted some wine. Are you going to sit down or what?”

I did sit, and even though I knew better, I drank the wine, which was rich and strong and full of smoke, and set my head spinning. 

Nat started spooning food onto my plate. “What did you want to talk to me about?” she asked, dropping a mound of potatoes next to the giant slice of mutton in front of me. 

I watched her fill her own plate; it was the first chance I had to get a good look at her. She was thinner, too thin, her cheekbones standing out in her face, and there were heavy shadows under her eyes. “Oh. Nothing important,” I said. 

She looked up and caught me staring, and then looked back down at her plate, and she didn't ask me again. Instead, she started eating in silence, so I followed suit. I was about five bites in when she dropped her fork and gave me a look so bright I could feel the heat of it across the table, and then she grabbed my chin and kissed me. Before I knew what was happening, she was in my lap, unbuttoning my shirt. We did eat, later, but we had to reheat the food. I didn't get a chance to tell her how good it all tasted until the next day.   

The rest of those three days were just the same. She would disappear into the barn for hours at a time and couldn't spare me two words strung together, no matter what I said or asked, and then she’d come up behind me in the field, or suddenly get up from working on the bike, and have her hands inside my clothes so fast I didn't have time to blink. One time, just before supper on the third night, she came up behind me while I was washing my hands at the outdoor sink, and shoved her hand down my pants. I jumped about five feet in the air and grabbed her wrist, and turned around to face her, expecting to see her laughing, but her face was so intent and so full of naked desire that I ended up making love to her right there, where anyone driving by might have seen us. 

A to Z Challenge: F is for Free Spirit

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

F is for Free Spirit

No, I'm not selling jeans (more's the pity, too. I always wanted to be cool enough to be in the fashion industry); I'm creating Uber Characters.

Don't look that up; I coined the term. At least, I think I did, just now, as I was writing this. You see, as I've mentioned (yes, I know, ad nauseam, but there are NEW visitors here thanks to A to Z!) my WIP involves following two souls through six or more lifetimes. While that means that each soul will have a new name, history, appearance, and even personality in each lifetime - i.e. the normal characters I need to create - there also needs to be some core identity, some essential piece of each soul that is the same in every life. My hope is that the reader will be able to say, "Oh, I bet this girl is the Damon character from that Greek story," or something like that, anyway. To put it simply, each soul should is some important way be recognizable as itself.

This of course leads to some very metaphysical questions - "What is the essential piece of a soul?" being just one of the many totally unanswerable ones - so I decided to deal with this the best way I knew how: by making each soul a sort of umbrella character for every mortal person in every lifetime it has. You know, as in an Uber Character. One of the first things I did when I started working on this novel was to create character analyses for both souls, complete with detailed psychological profiles.

So this is Uber Character #1: fiercely independent, suspicious of rules and authority of all kinds, and a bit wild - although that wildness can take some very different, and unexpected, forms.

This is the soul I call the Free Spirit. What is the other soul, Uber Character #2? Well, it'll appear somewhere during the A to Z Challenge...but I'm not telling which letter, because it's way more fun that way. Any guesses?