Best ever inbox today, but for now I'll keep that to myself... ! 

Meanwhile, still editing the ms. into past tense, just came across the following passage.  Must have done it late at night, because I only half remember writing it:

    "I pulled down the red leather box and rinsed my shoulder with rubbing alcohol.  The stinging went deep, all the way into the bones of my arms.  Finally, I slid my shoulder under the tap.  The cold faucet pressed uncomfortably into my skin as the water dredged icily through the ragged marks, carrying threads of blood down the sides of my arm.  
    There had always been a portion of me that loved pain.  Pain was shelter.  It focused my mind, bringing me clarity; a quiet that tilted through me like ice.  Pain was my drug, and I watched myself now, waiting for the old feeling in me to rise up and take its taste.  But the rush never came.  I was numb.
     I greased the cuts with long snail trails of Neosporin, and then, walking back to bed, I saw the frostwork of old scars on my thighs peeking up curiously at me from beneath the hem of my sleep-shirt.  Who was I becoming?"


Dark & lovely, that's how I like it.  

Andrew and I, feeling grand before a dear one's birthday party on Isle of Palms.  

The last few months I've felt more deeply in love with Andrew than ever- losing James, my brother, has been so hard that its made me deeply grateful for everything good in life.  

As Andrew puts it, sometimes you just have to let go and let Donna Summer tell you how it is.

I la la love you, my beem beem.  

But I still can't quite juggle! 

My cousin came to visit us recently, and another dear friend- T- took us out to see
Drayton Hall and Middleton Plantations, where he foxhunts with hounds on the weekends. 

It was extraordinary.  The hush of the place, the tremendous beauty, made it feel as though we were walking together through stopped time.  And it is always wonderful to spend time with T.  He's beautiful to talk with and so much fun.  For a little while we were able to meet regularly at St. Albans 
to work together but we've both been traveling so much we hadn't been able to align in a while.  

I was a somewhat neglectful host, as I still had to finish edits on the manuscript for that agent.  Finished it at 2 am last Monday.  Deep sense of relief.  Happy with it.  

But... in discussions with other agents, there seems to be a clear preference for manuscripts written in past tense as opposed to present tense.  !

(Here's an interesting article about it.)

So because I made all these delicious revisions to the thing when putting it into present... I've started work on a 2nd version of it which is written in past.  The story works well either way, frankly, and I just. want. to. place. it.  Don't care.  

You've got to be tired about hearing about all this, but hopefully it is helpful to somebody out there.  Anyway, this go-round is cake, because I'm not making any more revisions.  (Okay, maybe a couple.  Am endlessly obsessive.)

Anyway.  So I'm doing about an hour a day on Savages, flipping Evening's Land back into past, and trying to stay on top of freelance work as well: no time to do much more than make notes in the journal.  So clearly: am awful at staying on top of this place, but even though I'm an infrequent poster, it's helpful to have it niggling away on my to-do list all the time, because otherwise the journal would have fallen by the wayside.   Even though I can't put a lot of what I write in there on here, I do source from it sometimes.  And when all's said and done, I want to have it, you know?  Life goes so fast.  

Also, little snippets in it- the explorations of mind and the character studies, primarily- are incredibly helpful for my fiction.  

I do think everyone should try to keep one.  Yea, we all fall wicked behind on them, but I can't imagine any other tool more helpful for... well... civilization. 

 If you are very honest with yourself in the pages, and also sometimes use them for contemplation, 
you can't help but want to try a bit harder at being a more decent version of yourself.  And if you write about others for long at all, you gain empathy.  Also- what a wonderful snapshot of mind.  Although, as GVG pointed out once, how terrible if anyone finds it!  

Well, to paraphrase the immortal Scarlett O'Hara.... I'll just think about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, dear, you may not see me for a while.  No surprises there.  

Yup, I'm editing the whole thing.  Again.  All over again.  

I've got the full manuscript out with (!) a dozen agents now, and one suggested I do a run through for tense, as there's a couple passages that are unclear.

And... you know what... I realized that the whole novel, except for the flash-back chapters, is better as present tense.  So.  

Fuck.  Shit.  Here I go.  Again.  And of course, I find myself editing other things as well.  

You've seen the above passage before in its earlier incarnation.  The difference between that version and the one above- well, that pretty much explains what I'm up to right now.  

So Savages is on hold again, and pretty much everything else, too.  But... it's ravishingly gorgeous porch weather.  And the pages fold back... and the separations between objects dissolve... and pretty soon I'll be finished again.  


Hah.  Right. 


.... are you curious about the rest of the chapter, though?  





"I go towards the sofa, where a book of Caravaggio’s paintings is cocked across one arm of the sofa.  Niall picks it up and flips through its pages.  It’s one of Dad’s favorites, littered all through with pen doodles and coffee rings.  One of his favorite ways to get ideas is to sit down with a pile of art books and tech magazines.

“You spend a lot of time in this room, Miss Walker?”  Niall says.

I flop down onto the sofa.  

“Sure.”  Braiding my hair out of my face, I wriggle back into one corner of the sofa and fold my legs up beneath me.   

“Mind if I smoke?” he says, and I smile.  

“Open a window first.”  

He does and then begins crumbling tobacco from a pouch into the bowl of a pipe, which has materialized from the pocket of his jacket.  He sits beside me, letting his leg fall against mine as he presses tobacco into the bowl with the stained pads of his fingers.  When he’s tamped the pipe full, he lights the thatch of tobacco with two matches, drawing once before letting it go out, creating an insulating layer of ash.  

“It’s got a ceremony to it, doesn’t it.  Pipe smoking.”

“Oh yes,” Niall says.  Tamping the ash with his finger, he settles down to smoke, taking slow draws while he moves his match around the bowl, sipping fire into the tobacco.   

“An old ceremony.  Men have always liked fire.  We learned to make fire before we learned to speak.  Strange, isn’t it?  To think of anatomically modern humans, sitting silently around the first campfires.”  He smiles, blue smoke pluming around him.  “Sitting there.  Just staring at each other.”  

“Before words.”

Niall shakes out the matches and drops them into a mug on the table.   The room is colored green from the streetlights through the magnolias; now and again, a bolt of lightning makes the lamps shudder.  

“But maybe what they wanted to say didn’t need words at all.  Maybe words have just gotten in the way of everything.”  

“That’s one way to think of things, certainly,” he says.

“Hm.”  I slide my fingers down between the couch cushions and tug up a flask.  “Brandy?”    

“Nice stash, but none for me, thank you, Ada.”  

The blade-sharp sweetness, lighting first my throat and then my head.  I soften, lean back.   

“Ah.”  Niall snaps his fingers, watching me.  “That’s why you were out in the rain- you are Drunk, young lady, drunk, with a capital D.”  

“Maybe.  And what about you?”

“I?  Never.”  

A creeping electricity begins to move over my arms, and I look up to see a boy-sized shadow at the window.  

“Ada.  Get away from him,” the boy says.  The ghost.

I close my eyes, casting my thoughts to him.  “You just want me to see you- you get stronger when I see you.  That’s why you keep coming through to me, isn’t it?”

“Ada-”  

Go away.  Leave me for now, I don’t want you.”

“Wonderful storm,” Niall says, watching me.

“Yes, it is.  A wonderful storm.”

“You’re an unusual girl.  But then isn’t everyone, once you get to know them.”

“Some people are boring,” I say.  

Niall’s pipe lights in his hand, as strongly as if he’s drawn on it.  

“Must be a breeze in the room,” I say.  “These old houses.”

“Maybe you aren’t asking the right questions, then,” he says.  “Everybody, absolutely everybody, has a story.  Some might surprise you.”

“You really believe that?”

He re-crosses his legs.  “I surely do.”

Creek cold fingers run through the underside of my hair, gently undoing my braid.  My spine tingles as the boy, invisible to Niall, strokes my hair down over the arm of the sofa.  When I don’t react, he won't let go of my hair, and I have to stretch back, casually lifting my arms up behind my head, batting at his hands.

“Stop,” I say to him, silently.  

“Maybe I don’t make such a good pet after all,” the ghost says, bitterly.  I feel his breath at the side of my face and then he comes around the sofa on his knees, looking at me searchingly.  He kisses the hollow of my neck and rests his face alongside mine.  

I look at Niall.  Surely he’s felt the temperature drop in the room.  But Niall only draws concentratedly on his pipe, looking at our bookshelves.

“Listen to me,” the boy says, intently.  “Niall is not what he seems.  You have to get away from him.  Listen to me.  Now.”

I struggle free of him, brushing my hair indifferently over one shoulder.  

“Yet you dislike parties,” I say to Niall, my voice uneven.  I’m still shaken by the idea that the ghost might be using me, instead of the other way around.

“I don’t have the right touch.  Party talk takes a happy frivolity, which I don’t possess,”  Niall says, watching me keenly.

The boy flickers, growing weaker, and then slips away.  Whether he’ll admit it or not, I know that I’ve figured out he does become weaker when I ignore him.  Which means that he must become stronger every time that I call on him, too.  

Will the same hold true for Nell?  -if I can find her.

“But Jo is excellent at it.  Party talk,” Niall says.  

“So you think your wife is frivolous?”  I tip back the brandy as lightning ghosts over the room.  The lamps flare.  

“Mm,” he says.  

“Maybe what you want to say doesn’t require questions at all,” I say, laughing.    

“I think you’re a little young for me,” he says.

“That’s not what I meant-”  

Niall shifts closer, and I feel a strange bloom come inside me that is like the flaring of the lamps- and the boy returns, so faint this time that I can hardly see him at all.  

He grabs at my wrists with a rapidly eroding grace.  “Ada, get away from him, don’t you see that this is not a game?”

“You think I’m coming on to you, Niall?  We’re only talking…”  I stand carelessly and go towards the windows to look out at the storm, my pulse racing.  

I can see Niall’s reflection studying the small of my back.  

“Maybe the thing, the problem here, is the brandy.  Too much brandy,”  I say, and pretend to drink again.

The bloom fades back.  “I remember my first drink,” Niall says.  “You feel it running along under your skin, just as if it were loosening flesh from bone, yet it’s wonderful, completely wonderful.”  

He taps his pipe gently.  

“Feel what?”

“The alcohol.”

“Oh.”

“You know, some people hate it.  To feel that straitjacket of inhibitions just sliding away.  Losing control, making mistakes.”  

The boy brushes my cheek faintly.  “I can’t stay any longer.  Promise me you’ll be careful.  Promise me you’ll leave.”

“You really are a professor, aren’t you, huh?” I say.  

“I’m a researcher, truly, but the term doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, shall we say, in nearly the same—”

“What do you research?”

“Just garbage.  Philosophy, books to ruin your life, make you question everything that you cherish and believe in.”  He smiles wolfishly. “In the end it all comes down to a single idea.  A man is just a man and no more.  Anyway.”

“Anyway is a strange word, when you think about it.  It’s a secret passage of a word.  ‘Anyway’- it always takes you from here to there.”

“Ada, my dear, you are fascinating, and I have forgotten myself.  It’s late.  You should go on to bed.  I can show myself out.  Your parents probably don’t even realize I’m still here.”  

“You haven’t finished your pipe.”  

“I have.”

I feel the brandy in me coming on as a delicious, slow swimming-up.  Niall still holds his pipe between his fingers and I touch it experimentally, testing its warmth.

“Good night, Ada,” he says, and goes quickly down the stairs.