Falling Star involved a lot of research on the late fourteenth century in Europe, and then throwing out or altering parts of it because magic. I wallow in description a lot: probably too much, for people who don’t like historical detail, but it was a lot of fun to take the time to show that I had done the research. Lord of the Isles as a title is a bit of an exception, since in the real world, it’s a Scottish title.

Titles for stories are usually a challenge for me, and I generally hate them after the fact, but I like this one, because it works on a couple levels. The body of the action takes place during a meteor shower, so under cover of what are often misnamed falling or shooting stars, with a lot of important bits deliberately staged at night (the introduction, the first real conversation with Arthur, finding out what Rigel had done). All of the characters except Eadweard are also named after stars: Vega for the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, Arthur as an Anglicization of Arcturus,  the brightest star in Bootes (and also to suggest that he’s a good King by way of association with King Arthur), Rigel as the brightest star in Orion. I get a lot of mileage out of that one astronomy class I took in university. In hindsight, I’d have gone for something like Albireo (from the constellation Cygnus) for the King of Alba, because, while it might not suggest a common name for an English King like a modified version of Edward does, it sounds more like Alba and might further suggest that this is Alba rather than England, and things are different here.

I could cut over to Wharf Street here, avoid all the foot traffic of the end of the work day, but I head to Government Street instead. It’s Thursday, which means that the chalk artist whose name I’ve never learned will have recreated another masterpiece on the sidewalk. I’ve only recognized two so far – Girl With A Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa – but they’re gorgeous, and I love that we have someone here who can do that. He’s done a detail from Waterhouse, this week. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and juggle my bakery box to dig out a notebook and pen. I want to look up the full painting when I get home (I, unlike everyone even on this island out of time, don’t have a smartphone). I garner a couple annoyed looks from passerby forced to step around me, but other people are slowing to look at the chalk, too.

Past the gargantuan Bay building, which dominates arguably between one and four city blocks, depending how you divvy up the warren of downtown into “blocks,” it’s an easy slope downhill to the Inner Harbour. Darth Vader, a local violinist, is just packing up for the day at his corner across from Visitor Information. I smile at him as I go past, though I can’t see whether he smiles back behind the mask. There’s always some kind of knot of tourists in front of Visitor Information, and I slip through them on my way to the stairs. The stairs hug the seawall on the way down, and are wide and shallow and a little uneven, since they’ve been part of the promenade for something like a century. As usual there’s a mix of homeless artists under patio umbrellas obviously nicked from the seafood grill just up the stairs and around the corner and professionals doing caricatures and selling art cards from small tables. I meander down the promenade to the dock for the bum boats, those tiny little water taxis roughly the size of minivans. If it weren’t for the ocean kayakers, they’d be the smallest thing on the Inner Harbour.

Jeremy finishes his shift, and the bum boat tours for the day, in about twenty minutes, so I park on one of the oversized steps of the promenade, tucking my skirt around me. A quick glance at the Visitor Information clock tower affirms that, yes, I haven’t been able to magically skip ten minutes in the walk down the stairs. I open the bakery box and dig out one of the melon breads to pick at while I wait for him. It’s a far cry from the high tea being served above me and across the street at the Empress Hotel; iconic finger sandwiches in a formal English garden that now hosts a statue of Emily Carr, our homegrown leading light in art. I did tea there once, when I was visiting Nanna a few years ago. When Nanna would think of things like that, and still had the wherewithal to plan them. We’d done a tour of the Legislature, too; the center of government that also served as building-shaped art framing a third of the harbour. The Empress, by the same architect in the same sweeping and gothic style, makes up the center third. And on the left as you entered the harbour is Visitor Information with its useful but entirely unimpressive Art Deco clock tower.

Jeremy is finally done, and I rise to meet him, brushing off the back of my skirt. I snag his arm, and we walk companionably back to his condo in James Bay for dinner and my own personal escape from the obligations that lurk in the heart of downtown.

It’s also because I’m moving. In two weeks time I’ll be on a bus headed from Seattle to Minneapolis as the middle and longest leg of my trip from Victoria to Madison. I’m moving for a multitude of reasons, and aside from my own abhorrence of moving and lack of car, it’s been a fairly straightforward process: I’m still going to be doing webwork for the same bike store I work in now. The only thing that will change is no customers and I can work in my pajamas. I am going from living with my mom, where I’ve been staying since the end of my lease, to living with my best friend who is already doing things like unpacking the boxes I’ve mailed and crocheting me my very own blanket. My EMR license is viable for reciprocity, so I don’t need to take classes again, just do NREMT exams and local jurisprudence, all of which I can set up there.

Regular Wednesday blog posts will continue for the duration, as I have them scheduled pretty well in advance, so the only difference should be the lack of fiction posts. 

I wrote it in the summer of 2011, and, like so many things, it was for Adam’s contest. The prompt was parody, so I wrote a parody of a person.

She’s since become a friend, but at the time I was having a lot of difficulty connecting with her. She’d initially taken critique very badly, and then become reliant on getting critique (mostly from me or another friend of mine) before turning in, and hadn’t had a particularly good English education (which is something I shouldn’t hold against people, but tend to in writing-oriented settings). She’d also written a story with me as a character in it, with particular attention to my bosom. I was neither pleased nor comfortable with this. Since then, she’s grown in leaps and bounds, and joined me in the semi-finals this year, as well as being published several times over the course of the year. She and I have also talked a lot more.

Her username is The Solarized Night, which gave root to a lot of the imagery: the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, are the result of solar flares, and are most visible at night.

Luminosity is a term for self-awareness.

She lives in the Southern hemisphere, while I and Adam live in the Northern hemisphere.

With that knowledge, everything else about the poem kind of falls into place: from vague imagery about long nights and the Northern Lights to excoriation of someone I did not consider as acting rationally or particularly intelligently and considered attention-seeking.

What’s worse is that she liked the poem, but did not understand the meaning (I will probably link her this post).

Also I got a perfect score for this, the only one I’ve ever gotten. It is the reason I’m one of five people in the Hall of Perfection, and it can also be read here.

In sum: cruel and petty idea, well-executed.

That’s where this is from. It was written in the winter of 2007 or 2008: I’m not sure which. I only uploaded everything to Google Docs in 2010, because I didn’t want to lose all of the writing I’d done for the writing group I was part of in high school.

So this is how far I’ve come as a writer in the last five years, and contrasts with last week when I posted something just barely finished. It’s also an experiment in how far I’ve come as a person able to objectively critique my own work and not just go hide under a rock.

Apparently this was based on a dream I had. Oh! And I think it was around New Year’s in 2008, as I drew this:

Apparently these are the characters?

He told me to write a fairy tale, and that it couldn’t be a retelling.

After like an hour reading about Aarne-Thompson classifications and other components of fairy tales and nagging people for prompts and a failed first draft that involved Spivak pronouns and arguments and some really overcomplicated stuff with AI and gender, this happened.

The central idea was that the Devil always gets his due, and Orphne would lose in some way that didn’t actually involve being triumphed over (thus, cheating at cards).

Then somehow the seven deadly sins?

I wanted to have all of them, with the kind of double thing that the Devil, whose initial sin was pride, would be caught up in lust, and the nymph, who is generally associated with lust and deals mostly in that, would have a mistake of pride.

It came out really well, I think. I don’t even know. Next week: something I pull from the depths of the archives, and lengthy and embarrassed meta.

Edit: I won the contest! Wooooooo!