Excerpt from 'Unearthly'

"When I ran out of stories I began again at their beginning, watching her face become soft and abstract.  The wilderness in her rippled beneath my hands.  I wondered how much longer I could keep her.

Any moment now she’ll look up, she’ll glance at me.  Her eyes are windows on the world she lives in, that greatest of elsewheres: the between land of the changelings.  And when I look at her I can taste it.  I almost taste it.  The pile of coats, my wife’s voice, the hail of insects against the glass: everything recedes except my Ulla, phosphorescent and uncharted.  My silent, waking dream."  


-excerpt from 'Unearthly', by Pauline West

I finished Astra!  While it undergoes initial review I've been working on new projects: a few short stories, which I'll try and remember to post bits of here...


and of course I've returned once more to the novel which has been haunting me now for several years.  I've written two complete drafts of it and have more or less scrapped each one.  The story continues to twist away from my grasp just as it obsesses me.  Maddening.  Something of a relief to work on short stories, which bite me and then retreat away again, back into the woods from where they came.