Monday 3 December 2012

To everyone who commented on the anniversary post, on one of the new Prologue Chapters, or really, on anything I’ve written here ever – thank you. I’ve thanked you all before for all you’ve given me by acting as the canvases on which I’ve been able to paint this story, but I also appreciate the support you’ve given me over the years, and especially the encouragement these last days. I am honoured and flattered by your praise, but more than that you’ve made me feel less guilty about my doubts about what I’m going to do next. You’ve turned it from something I “failed at,” because it has sputtering out lately, into something I have perhaps grown beyond, but which I will always look back on with fondness.

This isn’t the end, though – I’m not saying I’m abandoning this story or this site just yet. But I feel like my decisions will be based on positive motivations – eagerness, excitement, curiosity, inspiration – and not negative ones like guilt or stone-​cold self-​discipline. (Paradoxically that may reignite my passion for Lothere, who knows?)

No spoilers (yet)

I know some of you are worried that you’ll never find out what happened to some of your favourite characters. So I hereby repeat my promise that if I do ever officially decide to quit working on the story – or if it begins to look like I simply never will find the drive to come back to it – I will write a detailed summary of everything I had planned. (Mind you, there are storylines I never did figure out how to unravel…)

I still love these characters and their stories, and I would like to transmit as much as possible of them to you, before the well runs dry. But for that reason, I am still very hesitant to write such a document, even if it wouldn’t be “canon” if I decided to return to the story. As any reader who has met me in person knows :redface: , in a moment of excitement it can be very tempting to just explain all your story plans to someone. It feels a lot like the act of writing a story, without all the messy, difficult work of writing it. It might satisfy my short-​term cravings to tell these stories, but it would be a disservice to the characters, to the readers, and even myself.

So don’t tempt me! >8)

I want to get these Prologue Chapters written (still taking requests!) and then I shall see.

Other things

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in the previous post, I will give you, O loyal readers, a chance to read some of the other things I have been working on recently. I do not really intend for them to be “published” online, so I’m just putting them up as PDFs, and I won’t promise they’ll stay up for long.

I don’t have titles for either of these, so they will just go by the main characters’ names for now.

Muirenn (NaNo 2012)

As I mentioned the other day, this is about 26,000 words (50 PDF pages), or – based on the narrative structure – about the first 1⁄5th of a novel. Compared to my usual stuff it’s no more polished than you would expect from the mad dash that is NaNoWriMo.

While I was writing it I wasn’t sure if it had legs, but now that I’ve put it aside for a few days, I think it might be worth coming back to.

It is a sort of historical romance novel with whodunnit elements, I guess? There’s definitely kissing.

It takes place in 854 AD in southern Ireland – specifically in the Kingdom of Osraige, which is where Cearball’s family is from. Our heroine is a very tall, gawky young lady with one permanently-​dilated pupil, who was born to dead parents, with a caul over her head. She has made the most of her strangeness by pretending that she can see the dead and speak to her pet raven, but maintaining her social standing and security requires a lonely tightrope walk over a net of lies.

I made Muirenn to explore the other side of those vaguely sorceress-​like women who often appear in historical fiction of sufficiently distant date, namely: what if one of those women was entirely a fraud?

It’s also the first time I wrote anything significant in the first person. But it was so obviously right for her.

To download, replace “Mary” with “Muirenn” in the link:

http://​www​.lothere​.com/​f​i​l​e​s​/​M​a​r​y.pdf

Maggie

Maggie’s story was just supposed to be a quick one-​scene sketch as an exercise in writing something frankly naughty. I was absolutely stuck with whatever Lothere chapter I was working on, and I wanted to do something completely different in an attempt to unstick myself.

But Maggie was such a delightful and amusing character to write, her little sketch grew into two scenes (17 PDF pages), and it could easily continue. It did threaten to dethrone Lothere entirely from my head for a while.

It is not tremendously erotic (yet), but it is unabashedly nothing but naughty. (Just like Maggie.) So some of you might enjoy that.

It’s historical fiction (what else) set in Scotland. I am thinking 16th century, but the setting is rather vague. Who needs backstory? Let’s get straight to the smut.

To download replace “Molly” with “Maggie” in the link:

http://​www​.lothere​.com/​f​i​l​e​s​/​M​o​l​l​y.pdf