World Blog Tour

Today I'd like to thank Suzanne Purvis at www.suzannepurvis.blogspot.com for inviting me on this great tour of blogs! Thanks Suzanne, I'm super excited! For those of you who haven't met Suzanne yet, she's a a published author of children's books and a really kind, supportive (and patient!) mentor to those of us just finding our writing/blogging legs.

A Little About Me...

I like being outdoors. I get my best ideas when I'm walking. I also like to ride my bike. I ride it the same way I did when I was a kid, hence all of the scars on my knees. I stand up on the pedals and push down on them with the flat of my foot, I lean across my handlebars, my elbows extended, I puff my mighty way up the inclines: puff, puff, puff-grrrr- until I reach the top and then... I go really fast down the hills so I can feel the wind whipping through my hair and little animals gasp in terror at my unstoppable charge and frantically scurry out of my way, sometimes tripping in their haste.

I also like to knit...socks.

Four Questions About My Writing...

Here I go...

What am I working on?

I'm working on world building. I write urban fantasy and I like to create my own reality.You don't think so much about how detailed your world will need to be when you first start. For example- what music do they listen to, do they watch tv, how will they wear their hair? But those things are super important to know, even if they never end up in the book. 

I think when you're first starting out as a writer you need to know as much as possible about each character and what's going on in their world. That way when you begin actually writing the novel it will flow more easily for you and you won't have to start and stop as much, which is just discouraging. 

So my experience has taught me that I should always answer as many questions before I start writing as I possible can.

How Does My Work Differ From Others of This Genre?

Well, it's important to respect the rules of your genre. So, if you're asking me, do I break them? Yes. But! I also go back and un-break them, too. Because, they exist for a reason and I humbly admit that I am not bigger than the rules. 

On the other hand, (tell me you knew that was coming) You can't write a book with the goal of selling it. If you write something with the intention of creating a marketable product you'll end up just being a creative typist. I prefer to be a teller of tales and sometimes that means I sacrifice the popular trends in order to write as the story is telling itself to me.

Why Do I Write What I Write?

I write like I paint and create music-it just sort of comes out. I'm often surprised by what I've written when I go back to revise and edit. It can be like I am a conduit for the story. I think that goes back to the first answer. The more I work on building the environment, the more I can just allow the story to tell itself. I become as much reader as I am writer. 

How Does My Writing Process Work?

I like to immerse myself in the tale so that I can hear the voices of each character and smell the scents that they do. I think that when I do this it creates a more all inclusive experience for the reader. I "notice" things, like- that I still have a knife in my hand or that the bottom of my shoe is sticky, that I don't think I would notice if I was "thinking" about what I was writing.

 Thank you so much Suzanne Purvis for allowing me to tag along on this fun World Blog Tour.

And please come back again. Next week I'll be continuing my Story of Blaize with part 6! Hope to see you and feel free to add a comment.

My gift to everyone who has been kind enough to read  my post is this link writingmusings.com which is Judy Post's blog. She's fabulous!  Please check her out  on July 22 or before : )

Thanks so much and hope to see you again, Sia

The Story of Blaize part 5 This is one of the main characters in The Witch Wars

But I miss you most of all, my darling  When autumn leaves start to fall

He woke to a sense of more.  As if he was more awake then he had ever been. The fan spinning overhead stirred more air than it had ever stirred before, the clock sitting on his nightstand ticked more tocks than it had ever ticked before, his nose needed blowing more than it had ever needed it before and his teeth ground together with more irritation than he had ever felt before. His first thought was I need a drink. And he realized that he wanted one more than he had ever wanted anything before.

He tried to move but his body wasn’t taking messages. He was laid out in a flat line down the center of the bed with his hands fisted on either side of him at his hips. His mouth hurt- his lips and teeth and tongue…swollen. But that was all he could feel.

Angel lay draped across his chest. He knew that because the fan was blowing little wisps of her hair across his face that tickled the inside of his nose. Also, she seemed to be breathing all of the air in the room and leaving none for him. And, she was pinching his nerves in that way that left his limbs numb and tingly. It was unpleasant.

Impatiently, unaccountably angry, he shoved her.

In the half- light coming from his bedroom closet she stirred sensuously and pulled away. Leaning up she smiled sleepily down on him and said, “I’m awake. I’m awake.”

He recalled his dream and the way she had looked down on him and it came back more vividly than he had ever recalled a dream before. More like a memory, with tangible smells and the feeling of hands leaving imprints on his skin as he was lifted.

He panicked. Feeling held down and trapped, he meant to lash out at her, could actually feel the yell crawling up his throat. But then-she rubbed her drowsy eyes-her fist balled up like a child’s- smiled- like the first time they had met. And just like that he breathed her name on a sigh, “Angel” and paused his breath at her beauty.

Her features were tiny, delicate and yet her brown eyes were large.  When she was standing she seemed to be all arms and legs and long, shiny curls but there was lushness to her. If he was a poet he would say that she reminded him of a spring bulb resisting the harsh March winds determined to peep her noddy head out and bloom in the sun. Her innocence, the scent of which could drive him mad, was defiance against the hell they lived in now. And he never doubted that she could do it-resist nature to get her way-she may be named Angel but she had the devil’s own stubborn streak.

He was sorry he thought it but couldn’t help but wonder was she really so innocent anymore?

“Why are you listening to this morbid song?” she frowned playfully at him. He didn’t stop her when she reached across the mattress and shut Mile’s horn off. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head to help clear it. He pretended not to notice how runny her nose was. But when she lifted her blue veined arm and combed her fingers through his hair in rough-play pulling at the strands he jerked away. ”Cut it out.”

She pouted. “What’s wrong with you?” Blaize stared at her mouth as she formed the words. Her lips without his kisses weren’t so pink or lush now. “You look pale,” he said.

She started, tried to recover by reaching for a cigarette, “Why can’t you be nice to me, Blaize? Why do you have to hurt me when you know how much I’ve been through?”

He didn’t move. It had become their routine. Funny how you could reach out to take a girl’s hand, pull her fingers to your mouth to suckle their delectable sweetness and somehow change everything. Maybe that was the much he was feeling- too much, too soon, too late, too many, whatever. Funny how one innocent question could blow-out your entire life.

What’s wrong with your fingernails?

He’d laughed. Now when he thought about it he couldn’t believe he’d laughed.

What’s wrong with your fingernails?

She’d looked at him like he’d stabbed her. Like it was that time again when she’d lost the baby and she was telling him how it had been for her, in the girl’s bathroom at school, in the stall, all that blood. He’d felt the guilt of what he’d done to her like one of those anvils in a cartoon landing on his head.

She stared at his blank face for a heartbeat and then laughed out a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Fine, whatever, let’s get dressed. I don’t want to be late.”

It wasn’t until she had scrambled across his body and flopped off the bed that he felt the first tingles of awareness return-the first fresh wave of air flow over him.

The Story of Blaize part four The Witch Wars

 Since you went away, The days grow long  And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song

In his sleep, in his dreams he heard bells ringing. Softly at first, little tinkling bits of silver, but they grew louder until they irritated him.  He tried to toss but his limbs were leaden. The bells became a chorus of static that rose and flooded his sensitive ears. It smoothed into Latin hymns sung in far, distant voices. Again, he tried to move, to shush and still and sleep but the weight of her body was on his and he couldn’t get away.

Then they were holding hands. Her smile was pressed against his cheek and her laugh rang sweet in his ears. They were together, lighting the candles at Christmas mass. The pungent smell of incense burnt his nostrils, made his nose itch. It was a hundred years ago, when they were young…before, before, before.

The wind blew through the sanctuary. It swirled with a lion’s roar that filled the empty spaces and left him so cold he felt his fingers freeze until they slipped from hers. And then she was gone.

He turned to look for her, turned his head, searching, rolling his eyes in their thin lidded sockets but the church was empty now and dark. Only the Christ hung against the wall, nailed to his cross, bleeding. Blaize felt his piercings in his own trembling flesh and felt his own bones shift where the shaft of the nail penetrated and the splinters of the wood sank deep. He felt his ankles bound tight with coarse twine.  He was lifted high and the cold enveloped him front and back and through and through until…with a jarring pain, he was placed on the wall, hung upon his own cross.

Through the heat that was his blood leaking from his wounds he heard a new sound. He was dizzy, and that puzzled him because he knew that he still slept, and so it took him a moment to separate the heat from the sound. With an effort that made bile rise to his throat he sorted one from the other.

He pried his sticky lashes apart, raised his gaze half shuttered and swollen, swallowed more bile.

She looked down from above, her hair a fragrant tangle that brushed against his skin. In the soft candle’s glow she was flushed, her lips pink again, his angel. He watched her eyes fill with tears that ran down her cheeks, like rain. They dripped hot on his skin when she bent, placed feathered kisses across his brow.

He wanted to wipe them, her tears, to trace them with his fingertips. His reaching fingers stretched but they were still bound to the cross. He felt anger grow in his belly. The anger made him remember.

“Why?” his thick, parched tongue begged.

In his dream the angel faded and his anger leapt with claws extended. He shook with it- with the good-byes and the not-enoughs and the just-let-me-get-through-its. He reared up to bite it. He wanted to sink his fierce canines into I-don’t-love-you-anymore. But the pain of his bondage bite into him first and he sank back under the weight of his defeat.

The pain built until it was like a vulture tearing his guts out before he could die. It gnawed on his brain with sharp little teeth and clawed what was inside of him out. It saturated him in neon agony and crept up, up, up. And the voices came back, louder, and the cold, even colder- until even the breath in his lungs was frozen into a wheeze.

“Wake up!” he commanded his sleeping self, “Wake up!” But the dream wouldn’t end and he knew he would die there.

He turned to bury his sobs and regrets in the pillow. He’d forgotten the Christ was still hung on the cross beside him. It had been a long time. For a moment he had a glimpse of his childhood through the rending pain- his mother, kneeling beside him, her cool hand brushing the hair out of his eyes. He could feel her there-tender, smooth and he heard her voice whispering.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

And then the pain split him in two.

The Story of Blaize part 3 The Witch Wars

The sunburned hands   I used to hold.

When she stirred, gasped in her sleep, fitful in her dreams, he thought about all of the times he had laid beneath her, just like this, feeling the too slight weight of her pressing down on him. He pinched the curl he was playing with between his broad fingers and released it. The blue black strands snapped tight around his wrist and clung.

As he drifted towards sleep, soothed her with his hand up and down her back, he remembered. Their first date and the way the rain on her cheeks had looked like tears. The first moment their mouths had met. How shy her lips had been. The whispered shush of two bodies fumbling in the dark. And how he had stroked her, just like this, after their first time together.

She’s been so afraid that her father would find out. And then, their senior year, there’d been the baby, until the baby was gone. They’d fought and they’d made-up. They’d had each other and through it all, they’d loved. 

And just like this he’d held her until she’d left him. Gone to school and he couldn’t follow. She’d come back, every now and then, but she’d never come home.

Not even when the Wicked started imposing sanctions and the humans weren’t allowed to attend any schools passed the twelfth grade. He’d wanted to hold her, still felt her in his blood like a fever but by then she wouldn’t let him. She’d told him that she was different now. That school had changed her. That she wasn’t in high school anymore.

But then three months ago he’d found her on his doorstep. He’d looked into her beautiful brown eyes swimming with tears, listened to her tell how her father had been taken in the latest round of arrests. She had needed him to hold her again.

So he had put his newly rebuilt life on hold and he had let her back in. And he’d watched, helpless, as day by day she’d faded a little more. Until now she was just a black and blue shadow haunting his bedroom.

The Story of Blaize part 2 The Witch Wars

I see your lips The summer kisses

She shifted, restless in her sleep, and the cotton sheets rustled. The bony jut of her hip pressed into his. He soothed her with whispers and fingertips stroked across the gentle slope of her bare shoulder.

They’d been so close once. Not just their bodies but their hearts and feelings. Sometimes when he looked at her she was still the same amazing, brilliant girl he’d fallen in love with as an over-eager high school sophomore but, more and more lately…she just wasn’t.

He turned his head to look at her, to trace the plane of her cheek, the soft plush of her pink lips. With another restless moan she turned away from him, burrowed deeper.  He let her hide, moved his wandering fingers along the fragile length of her arm, raised it to tease the blue veins with a slow sweep of his tongue where the pulse beat at her wrist.

She meowed sweetly, shifted across his chest. “Ewww… Blaize, don’t lick me.” The honey of her voice melted down his spine.

“Why not, you didn’t seem to mind when I licked you earlier?” He whispered back. He waited, hoping she’d answer, needing her to, but her even breaths told him she had drifted away again. Patiently, he separated a long tress of her hair from where it lay across the pillow and played the jagged ends across his palm as Miles played his horn… 

The Story of Blaize The Witch Wars

The falling leaves drift by the window The autumn leaves all red and gold   

Silver trumpet notes poured from Miles Davis’s horn and washed over Blaize where he lay tangled in the sheets and sweaty. Through his sex torpor he felt Angel’s warm body, draped languid and replete across his. Her fluttering lashes were still leaving butterfly kiss across his chest but he knew she was asleep.

The setting sun slanted long, golden rays passed the curtains and spread them across the bed like a warm October blanket. From the open window he could hear someone kicking through the pile of leaves he’d raked up earlier. The thought of his mother demanding he go out there and rake them again ended on a yawn.

He didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything outside of this bed. He didn’t want to think or feel. Not about anything that didn’t involve processed cheese products. Mostly, he didn’t want to fight anymore. Not with his mom and not with Angel. Because, he didn’t understand how it had all gotten so complicated. When had loving her stopped being enough?

Slowly, he let his fingers swirl across the lush heat of her still slick back. He buried his face in her neck and breathed in the baby powder scent of her. When she moaned, he lifted dark tresses of her tangled hair away from her face. Her skin was pale and thin now. Since she’d come home she was all blue veins and shallow breathes. 

SummerTime

Girls in short dresses and flip-floppin' shoes
Flirtin' with boys with shaved heads and tatoos
Fire hydrants are spraying. God! It's so hot!
Kids are out playin' in overgrown lots.
It's summer in the City...
Wait for the party to dance in the dark
Fireworks and joy-rides and sex in the park
Sweet summer ices that melt on your tongue
Like days through our fingers while we are young...
Sia Marion