Freewriting as Fuel

I'm back! Back home, that is, and very much plugged back in. Thank you all for the well-wishes - I did have a great anniversary, a lovely vacation, and a wonderful birthday. To my great happiness, my birthday was exactly what I wanted: a delicious breakfast, then a fantastic, grueling four-hour hike, a hot shower, and an amazing and enormous dinner (with wine, of course). Call me crazy, but I love the feeling of happy, exhausted accomplishment when I finish a long hike, with a delicious feast as a well-deserved reward. And besides, with a view like this at the top of the mountain, I'd hike it any day, feast or not:

That picture doesn't even do it justice, because I got way too much of the top of the mountain in the foreground, and not enough of the view beyond it! It's a 360 degree view, which I also couldn't capture, of the Green Mountains and the Mad River Valley, and on a clear day, you can even see across Lake Champlain to the Adirondacks. It's gorgeous.

At any rate, I'm back at my job and at my desk, and still using the impetus from the movie to propel me into some work. The more I freewrite, the more I'm inspired to keep going, so I'm going to use that fuel to help me churn out as much as I can while I have time today. It does feel great to be writing, even if I have to give myself little do-nothing breaks for additional motivation - that vacation mentality is a little hard to shake.

So, while I kick my butt back into gear, I thought I'd post a little bit of what I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I did say I might do that, after all, and I like to keep my promises...even if I'm the only one who remembers them. And yes, it's maybe possible that I didn't have time to come up with a longer blog post. Maybe.

This little snippet is from the Tibetan lifetime (since that's what the movie was about, and what I was in the middle of researching when I stopped to watch it), and as always, it's barely been reread, much less edited. When I wrote it, I was thinking of this being the very beginning of the Tibetan section... but we'll see.

It was winter, thick and heavy, like the snows that blanketed the peaks and hid all of the passes. It was no time for a journey.

Tashi slid his fingers – brown and leathered and rough, like the rest of him – over the parchment. He couldn’t read the blocks of black ink, spidery and strange, but he knew what they said; he had gotten a lama to tell him the story the parchment held, and he’d memorized it, fast, a flash of lightning seared into his mind. There was nothing to be gained from it anymore; he should throw it into the fire and let it bake his tsampa for him, let it cook the dough along with the tea for his breakfast, but for some reason he held onto it anyway, and kept touching it, as if it had more to tell him.

Dawn crept through the cracks in the tent, blue and sheer with frost. It was cold, bone cold, with storms chasing the clear sky into darkness: no time for a journey, and yet here he was, embarking on one anyway.

He wouldn’t have done it for anyone else. Tashi stirred the hearth, blowing on it gently, until it caught and the embers blossomed into flame. No other soul could have called him back; not Diki, long-dead anyway, taken from his side by a wasting sickness ten years after they married; not his brothers (he refused to dignify them with their names, even in the silence of his mind) or their pale, weak daughters, or – he added quickly, before memory could settle too deeply into him – anyone else. Only Dorje, his son, could force him to go home.

A to Z Challenge: X is for Xinjiang Fine Wool

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).

X is for Xinjiang Fine Wool

Yes, I have a perfect 'X' for today! So, Xinjiang Fine Wool are a breed of sheep. And sheep appear in not one, but TWO of the lifetimes in my work in progress, in VIWs (Very Important Ways)! TOTAL connection, right?! I feel super lucky, 'cause X might be a really tough day for people, but I'm all set with my awesome sheep!

I mean, Xinjiang Fine Wool Sheep are from China, and yeah, OK, of my two shepherds, Damon is Greek and Taylor is Australian, but still, another lifetime in this book takes place in Tibet, and Tashi's family probably has sheep, and Tibet's, like, SO close to China!

Right???

OK. I know.

I give up.

I admit it, I'm seriously reaching for a topic today, but... Well, no 'but'. I'm just reaching. I really did try to find an appropriate 'X' for today, but this was the best I could do. I wish I could tell you that tomorrow and Wednesday will be back to normal, but, um, considering that the letters are 'Y' and 'Z', they kind of won't.

But while I'm pretending that Xinjiang Fine Wool sheep have anything at all to do with my novel, I should at least give you a picture of them, right?

Here you go:

Image courtesy of http://www.sheep101.info/Images/Breeds/Xmerino1.jpg

Cute, aren't they? Now I'll have to make sure that Taylor, at least, has some sheep that are part Xinjiang Fine Wool...

A to Z Challenge: W is for Wind

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).

W is for Wind

Everything I've read about Tibet - and at this point, that's getting to be quite a list - invariably talks about the landscape, and the weather. This is understandable: when your country is nicknamed "the roof of the world", it's for some very good reasons.

Take this, for example:

Photo courtesy of http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/the-roof-of-the-world-melting/

And this:

Photo courtesy of http://phoebettmh.blogspot.com/2011/06/tibet-roof-of-world-om-mani-padme-hum.html

And this:

Photo courtesy of http://nickykelvin.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/the-roof-of-the-world-tibet/

I mean, I can only imagine, looking at these, that the natural world plays a huge role in the life of most Tibetans.

This was the jumping-off point for my next snippet, which takes place, of course, during the Tibetan lifetime, around 600 CE. I will say that I'm not sure that this is going to make it into the book, but I'm posting it anyway, because it's about wind, and that is today's theme, after all:

It was a cut-wind day. Tashi felt it as soon as he opened the roof door, and rose into the dawn light; felt it on his hand as it held on, in the joints, the slice and cold cutting of the air. He called for his wife, and as his mouth made her name, he remembered. She died, a long time back, too long a time for the remembering to hurt. It was his duty, once hers, to wake at first light, and climb to the roof, and make the offerings.

But the wind. The wind was cutting, not a good omen. He hovered on the ladder, the top of his head just edging into the sky, and thought. It would be better, maybe, to skip the offering, and retreat into the house, and not let the wind slash him (and he laughed to think this, because his brothers – his dutiful, stupid brothers – would pale and faint to know he even dared to wonder about not lighting the fire). But then again, if it was a bad day already, he needed help. 

Tashi sighed, and forced his legs up the ladder. Hips creaking, another bad sign, maybe just age, but maybe the day, too. He lit the yak-dung as quickly as he could, shielding the sparks from the wind, and burned some dried fruit in the flame. The smoke lifted, a curling sweet-smelling flag. With the offering came the feeling better, as it always did; the warm spreading light in his limbs, the easing open of his chest. He nodded to himself, and even dared to stay on the ladder a few minutes longer, resting his arms on the roof, and watching. Watching as the other fingers of smoke rose all around him, thin black lines against the blue-ing sky and the high wall of mountains, as his family woke and climbed and prayed, and the sweetness of their offerings – barley, fruit, butter – filled the air, and softened the edge of the wind. 

He was feeling so much better that he almost didn't see it. Almost. Tashi was keen-eyed, though, always had been, and age had left his eyes alone even as it pushed down on everything else. So through the good feelings, and the ease, and the rush of color over the snowy peaks, he caught the wind in its moment of spite. A slice; a quick lashing; right at the smoke over the Big House. No more reaching finger; no more flag of offering. The smoke tattered, and wavered, and broke.

Tashi sucked in a breath and felt the cut hit his lungs, cold and sharp, and withdrew into the house so fast he almost fell off the ladder. He stood at the bottom, panting, pressing a hand to his chest; now he knew. 

It was a cut-wind day, because it was a day of death. 

A to Z Challenge: O is for Outcast

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).

O is for Outcast

I know I must be confusing everyone by jumping around through various time periods, mythological figures, characters, and Uber Characters, but that's what happens when you try to write a book about two souls in six different lifetimes. I don't blame you if you're a bit confused; I have to constantly check my own darn outline to remind myself of what I'm doing!

So, just to recap before we move on: so far during this A to Z Challenge I've talked about the lifetime in Ancient Greece, where the souls are Apollo and Damon; the lifetime in modern Australia, where they become Nat and Taylor; and the lifetime in India (probably), where the souls are Emma (most likely), and an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga.

With me so far? GREAT. Now I'm going to talk about the lifetime in Tibet circa 600 CE, where our two souls are living as Tashi and Choden - and Tashi is learning why he wants to be an outcast, and Choden is, unfortunately, learning what it means to fall in love with an outcast. They're both members of farming families, living in separate but neighboring villages; Tashi is independent, creative, and rebellious to the point of absurdity (what we might today call contrary purely for the sake of being contrary), and Choden is...well, since I have yet to reveal the other Uber Character (letter R, folks), let's just call her a little more traditional.

The basic premise is this: Tashi and Choden meet, by chance, as children, and their relationship develops slowly and naturally over years as they grow up, and eventually fall in love. Normally it might be hard for kids from different villages to spend time together, but I've mentioned that Tashi is a bit rebellious; it's no problem having a secret friendship when you like breaking rules. When they reach adulthood, they find out that this entire time they've actually been betrothed to each other, arranged by their parents since they were very young, of course.

Happiness, right? Lucky chance? Not so fast.  There are two twists: first, Tashi has sworn that he'll never marry the woman his parents want him to (contrary, remember?); and second, Choden is betrothed to Tashi...and his two older brothers. Yes, that's polyandry, my friends. Check back in on letter P for that one.

If Tashi refuses to marry Choden with his brothers, he'll be rejecting the woman he secretly loves, and dividing the family - there's an actual word for this in Tibet, which translates roughly as 'fission', and it's a very bad thing. He'll lose all right to his family's land and money, and be forced to strike out on his own, as an outcast...and he'll lose Choden before he ever even got her. What does he choose? Well, I did just write a post about heartbreak last week...