Well I’ve been nominated by Arie Farnam, author of The Soul and the Seed to participate in the Work in Progress Blog Tour. The idea is to post the first sentence of each of the first three chapters of your work in progress.

My current work is the sequel to my urban fantasy novel Murder Between the Worlds. This book picks up where the last one left off with my protagonist, Allie, trying to get her life back to normal after her attempt to help the police solve a series of murders in the first book. She’s learning that moving on isn’t as easy as she wants it to be, especially since things aren’t as neatly tied up as the authorities all think they are. There’s several mysterious things afoot, from missing girls to arson, and someone is going to a lot of trouble to make Allie’s life unpleasant, but the biggest threat might be the one no one sees at all…

Anyway, here are the first couple sentences/paragraph from the first three chapters of the rough draft. Enjoy!

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So there’s a post on a major blogsite about 8 ways to tell if you may have fairy blood. The list is heavily prejudiced towards a modern (post-Victorian) view of fairies and specifically of winged flower fairies as far as I can tell. It also includes an array of characteristics that could apply to many people for many reasons, like feeling the need to lighten the mood in serious situations with humor.

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This is expanded and re-posted from a blog I wrote a couple years ago called “The Ethics of Information”

Several years ago I wrote this: Twice in the past week I have seen people post online direct quotes they did not write. One was a prayer and the other an excerpt from a book, but in both cases no source was given, nor was it even mentioned in the original post that the person posting the information wasn’t the author of it.

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[In honor of the author’s work, no butchering excerpt of her poem will be posted. Please click through to the author’s website to see the entire work.]

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I started writing the sequel to my novel (which is free on amazon right now) a couple weeks ago. As part of my writing process I post little word count update and plot hints on my facebook page as I write and I thought it would be fun to share them here as a follow up to my “Novels, sequels and looking back” post. At this point I think I’m about 1/3 of the way through the draft of the new book, so here’s where it’s at so far:

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“The wind concentrated upon the ship where Donn the king was, and Donn was drowned at the Sandhills; whence Tech Duinn derives its name.” – Lebor Gabala Erenn, volume 5

There is some debate about whether the Irish have a God of the dead, but if they do its generally agreed that it would be Donn, a king of the Milesians who died at sea when the sons of Mil were trying to take Ireland. The place where he died, off the southwest coast of Ireland, was called Tech Duinn – Donn’s house. Tech Duinn became equated in folklore with the Otherworldly land of the dead and Donn with a primal ancestor and underworld God (Jones, 2004).

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So I’m working on the sequel to the novel I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo, and I’m having as much fun with it as I did with the first one. Something I did to help stay motivated during NaNoWriMo last year was to post word counts and little summaries of plots points or how the writing was going every day. I’m doing it again for the new book on facebook but I thought it would be fun to post the recap of all the posts from the first one, Murder Between the Worlds. It’s an interesting look back at the process I went through while I was writing and also some fun hints about the way the story developed:

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I know I don’t often write about my own personal experiences with deities and spirits. There’s a couple reasons for that, including that it’s often hard to put such experiences into words. I also find that discussing such experiences is a very soul baring, exposing kind of thing and I’m not a big one for offering up that part of myself to public scrutiny. The biggest reason though is probably the simplest: it is nearly impossible to put a numinous experience into words without losing the very quality in it that made it numinous. Trying to describe it loses its feeling of mystery. You just can’t really convey in words what it was to experience the thing you are trying to share. Nonetheless I am going to try here, but I’ll take a page from the old Fili and Druids’ books (pun intended) and attempt to do it in poetry.

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Yesterday I wrote a guest blog for Raise the Horns on Patheos titled The Morrigan, War, & How We See Our Gods. It looks at the more difficult aspects of the Morrigan’s mythology and character and why it’s important, in my opinion, to face those things in her we fear or are disturbed by instead of turning away from them or trying to minimize them. It also touches on the equally challenging subject of the value of war in the quest for peace. Click over and give it a read if you’re interested.

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We talk a lot about goddesses of sovereignty, especially in Irish polytheism, but there is a disconnect between the ancient understanding of what those goddesses did and what they are seen to do in a modern context. Often the way that sovereignty is perceived is heavily colored by modern ideals of the value of the individual and of individual freedom, while the ancient view saw sovereignty as the right of one person to exert control over others. This disconnect is born from a misunderstanding or romanticism of the historic concept and yet may also represent a way in which the old gods are evolving and adapting to a new world.

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