It's Been A While...

Years.  It's been years, hasn't it?  Years and pages upon pages of a still unfinished book, three animals gone, two new cats, a girl growing up entirely too fast, an alcoholic father-in-law who gives curmudgeons a bad name, and a new obsession - weaving.

In terms of fictional time, I'm on the last twelve hours of the main plot.  Really, it's time to just write this bitch and be done with her, right?  I'm thinking probably so.

Tinker's gone, from God only knows how many things, but the pneumonia - and the underlying cancer that caused it - was the last straw.  After three days of feeding him with a syringe and sitting with him in the middle of the hall where he refused to move, I took him to the vet for one last visit.  We buried him in the backyard.

Sheba's gone.  She was blind and mostly deaf, and after Tinker died, I think she lost a sense of familiarity that made an enormous difference in the quality of her life.  She would still come up to the car when I came home every day - every single fucking day - stinky and adoring as always, but when I saw that she wasn't able to lay down to sleep anymore - and sleeping was one of her all-time favorite activities - I knew it was time.  So I gave her half of my dinner, which she scarfed down in her typically greedy fashion, and took her to the vet for one last visit.  We buried her in the backyard, next to Tinker.

Chloe's gone.  Her passing was the hardest.  Still is.  She's - had -  always been plagued by one health problem or another - gas (oh God, the flatulence was beyond toxic), skin problems, allergies, arthritis, spay incontinence.  We had her on I forget how many medications to manage all this craziness.  We really aren't sure what happened to her at the end.  We didn't get her to the vet in time to find out.  The night she died, she was listless and bloated, and wouldn't eat.  She was a hound dog with gas problems - lazy and bloated by nature - but the refusal to snap a piece of ham out of my hand was serious.  So we threatened her with the doctor the next morning, only she didn't wake up the next morning.  I don't know if the vet would have been able to do anything.  A stomach infection from something she ate?  Bloat?  I don't know.  We won't ever know.  We buried her in the backyard, next to Tinker and Sheba.

 

Aeryn, who is nine now, is understandably traumatized.  (I am, too, but I'm supposed to be the adult.)  Losing a pet is never easy - losing three in three years is horrible.  Now the fish - a magenta-colored male betta called Blueberry (it was blueberry season when she got him) -  is almost four years old, and every day I'm surprised to see he's not belly-up in the tank.  Aeryn's anxiety about his impending death is compounded by a flood of unwelcome growing-up mood swing hormones that are wreaking havoc on her emotions.

The new cats help, sometimes.  For Aeryn, most of it is knowing that they'll be around for a while, since we got them both before they were a year old.  They're getting friendlier, and they're certainly happier now that I'm playing with yarn.  Most times I let them play, too.

Speaking of yarn, weaving takes a lot of it, and quite a bit of setup time.  Once the loom is warped, though, the actual weaving itself goes fairly quickly.  I'll post some pictures later (once I can find the damned camera; I think Nicodemus may have eaten it).  It's ironic that I've worked in a textile mill for fifteen years and never shown the slightest interest in thread outside the plant until now.  An unexpected windfall made it possible for me to get my hands on a small lap loom, and a friend sent a ton of discontinued yarn my way - so much that it's hard for me to figure out what project to start first.

 

I am beginning to understand why the ideas and images of textile crafting - spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, et cetera - are so universal.  People have been playing around with fiber of one sort or another for quite some time - what strikes me particularly is the transformative aspect of the process.  A sheep grows a lot of wool, we shear it and harvest the wool.  The wool's just fluffy bits until you put a little spin on it and a very slight tug to straighten it out and then - what the fuck? - you've got YARN.  One of my friends spins, and the trick never fails to amaze me.

Of course it doesn't stop there.  You can spin other sorts of fibers and twist it together with the wool using any number of techniques.  You can dye the fiber or the yarn.  Or you can just pound the shit out of the wool and make felt out of it.  Or you... well.  I digress.

I can crochet.  A chain.  That's all.  I've never successfully made a hat or a scarf or anything worth gifting, and knitting is frankly beyond me.  Weaving, though, appeals to me on a number of levels, especially the one I've most recently discovered.

Any experienced weaver will tell you this, but I'm not an experienced weaver.  So two weeks ago when I put a lovely variegated yarn on my loom and paired it with a solid color, I expected to see something like a beachy sunset come off the loom, in a more or less placemat-shape.

It looks like Easter, actually, and it's way too big to be a placemat, and besides I don't decorate for Easter.  But it will become a tote bag for Aeryn to use gathering eggs this weekend, so it's not a total waste.  And I learned quite a few things, which allows me to impress my husband by throwing around words like "warp" and "weft" and "dropped ends" and "picks per inch" and stuff.

And there's one other thing I've learned about weaving, and I think it might apply to other things, too - you absolutely CANNOT RUSH the process.  You can take shortcuts, sometimes, and use whatever ingenious methods you can come up with to fabricate looms, splice ends, pull yarn ends through, but trying to do any of this when you're in a hurry is just not going to work.

So while I can weave without a beer in my hand, trying to set up and warp the loom sober is impossible.  Maybe I'll get there somewhere.  Until then, I've discovered a bad-ass hard cider that is just about perfect for warping.  Pictures later, provided I can extract the camera from the fat-ass's stomach.

 

~andi

Perspective

Waaay back when we started this blog, I remember thinking that since I have such an active, fertile imagination, I could - if I wanted to - imagine how awful it must be for someone to go through a natural disaster and lose the people they love. Like my hero Bartleby, I preferred not to.

I'd really like my imagination to just take a little break now and again. A couple of weeks ago, my brother-in-law, a brash, obnoxious, totally lovable New Yorker hailing from Brooklyn, had surgery to remove a malignant tumor the size of an orange from his lower intestine, and about two feet of colon along with it. You ought to see the scar; it's insane. It starts in the center of his chest, just under the solar plexus, and goes down like a zipper sewn in by a drunken tailor, to just above the happy trail, which is, I gather, not so happy at the moment.

So he had the surgery and the margins were clean and we were all happy and hell, Jimmy's going back to work in two weeks! Everything's back to normal.

Except it's not. Nowhere close.

He has two spots on his liver. At first They couldn't identify them - then decided it was cancer, and started him on either radiation or chemo immediately. Don't know which - this is all being filtered through my husband, who is less concerned with details and more concerned about his sister, who was, as of last night, officially freaking out.

Once They saw the two spots, the next question became whether it was liver cancer, or colon cancer that had spread to the liver. And then They had to figure out how far it had spread.

So off my brother- and sister-in-law went to the oncologist yesterday, to have a look at the results.

I don't know what they were, specifically. My father-in-law's text last night was highly melodramatic and I won't repeat it because it doesn't do any good to say something like that about a fifty-year-old man with two young daughters and a family history of fast-growing terminal cancer.

What I do know is that they're putting him on hard-core chemo for two weeks, then operating again. On his liver.

Goddamn it.

I understand how people turn to God in times like these - really, I do. Because that way, you at least feel like you can do something useful - you can pray. At the moment, I don't feel like I can do anything at all. Not for Jimmy, not for Christie, not for their daughters Addison and Cadyn. And I don't know what to do for Brian, who has known Jimmy since adolescence and is spending a lot of time in the backyard in the evenings, talking on the phone with his father, and drinking.

Maybe we can get an increase on our credit limit. That way, if we need to get there quickly, we can. I can't think of anything else to do. Tearing my hair out and screaming at the top of my lungs at this brutal injustice will do nothing but wreck my vocal cords.

See, when Brian and I are faced with something bad - like surgery on the cat or the dog, like impending foreclosure, like being too broke to afford child care - one of us is always able to say, "It's okay, honey. Everything's going to be all right."

But that's in the blue sky period, when nothing's certain, when the vet can still save a leg or a paw, when the fight with the mortgage company isn't over quite yet, when the biopsy hasn't come back from the doctor and it's probably nothing to worry about anyway. It's scary to think that compared to what my sister-in-law and her husband are going through right now, at this very moment, those things are a walk in the fucking park.

I came into work this morning and one of my co-workers was bitching as he usually does about something or other, it was all I could do not to offer him a big, heaping plate of Shut The Fuck Up. "Harry," I wanted to say, "you're reasonably healthy, although God knows you could drop dead of a heart attack at any second. Any of us could. Your daughter is grown up and healthy. You have a job, and you're fit enough to do it. You own your own goddamned house. So get some perspective and shut the fuck up."

I wish I could say to my husband that everything's going to be all right. But I can't. I wouldn't believe it, and neither would he.

Advice from my daughter

Whenever I tell people I’m writing a novel, they inevitably want to know when I will finish it; I hope this is because they’d like to read it, but I can’t speak for them, of course. Frankly, I’d like to know when I will finish it, too. I have 100 pages that are almost good enough, in my opinion, to send out for critiques. The first three chapters, in other words, although it may turn out to be four, depending on the story flow.

I am under the thumb of my own perfectionism. I can’t help but try to make it as readable and believable as I possibly can. I run across poor word choices, too many adverbs, repeated words, repeated phrases, continuity errors, et cetera et cetera ad fucking nauseam. I work almost every night after my family goes to bed, and I still don’t have the first three chapters.

However. Once I’ve sent those chapters out, I’ll take all the critiques I receive and put them in a separate file that I won’t even look at until much, much later. That will be a big help, I’m sure.

I’ve told one of my friends I’ll have the manuscript finished by the end of the year. The calendar, evil bastard that it is, tells me that this is eight weeks away. Yeah... no, don’t see it happening.

Given the time it takes for agents to read and reject or otherwise respond to queries, not to mention the lengthy process of publication if a house decides to buy the book, I suspect I’ll be working my day job for at least another two years. Which means that I have to deal with the causes of my procrastination there.

What it comes down to is that I’m not comfortable offering criticism to some of the managers here. Unfortunately one of those managers is my boss, whom, owing to circumstances beyond my control, I have to audit at least twice a year. Reporting nonconformances to her is a huge pain in the ass, and it makes me want to dig a very deep hole and hide away in it until the nonconformances go away.

This approach has not worked.

So I’ve been considering the feasibility of bringing up my discomfort with her and trying to improve our relationship. When I suggested this at the dinner table last night, I knew how absurd the idea was as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I'm going to change my boss or her attitude; that’s a fact. What I can change is my own approach to those uncomfortable situations.

Before I even began to articulate this line of reasoning out loud, my daughter piped up.

“Mom, you just have to remember three things. No, four. First, be polite. Second, talk slowly so they can understand you. Third, talk about important things, because that’s what people want to talk about when they’re at work. Fourth, be serious about it, because that’s how people act when they’re at work.”

Did I mention that she’s seven?

She had pegged my three main failings and told me how to correct them. When I’m talking to management about what they’ve fucked up, I tend to speak quickly to get it over with. I sometimes lump trivial stuff in with the important things. And I very often try to lighten the mood and come off as not-so-serious to avoid putting the other person on the defensive.

This takes a lot of time and energy. It’s a waste.

So I’m going to follow her advice. I’m going to be polite (I always am anyway, at least in these situations), I will speak slowly, I will focus on important things, and I will take them seriously. Because it’s my job, and as long as I’m here, I might as well do it right.

And if they don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.

a relatively mild and somewhat thoughtful rant

I am terribly sick of reading shit by published writers who have obviously stolen my fucking ideas. And of discovering that plot devices I have used are as common as flies on feces. And of having to consider and reconsider the title of the book.

Over the last few days, I've been reading Angelology, by Danielle Trussoni. The first twenty pages sucked me in, then the quality of the writing and the pace made me suspect that the senior editors had polished up those first twenty pages and quit, handing the rest of it down to the interns. Maybe they figured that once a reader is hooked, she won't put a book down. Fuckers are right, too, at least in my case.

The book is a fictional interpretation of angels, fallen and otherwise, and how they interact with the human world. Published this year. So I have to read it, to stay current and know what to rip off and what I can't, what works in terms of theory and application and what doesn't.

Parts of Angelology made me cackle, and not in a way that Trussoni would appreciate.* At the same time, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief that her take on fallen angels and the Nephilim (their progeny) digresses from mine in several major ways. Also she's hooking her concepts into a big good versus evil/end of the world kind of thing, whereas I just want to write a good love story.

That's another thing that distances me from this novel – it lacks the emotional depth that, for me, translates into the ephemeral quality of soul, of heart. And there are great passions described in this novel, human and “Nephilistic,” but they are described, not evoked. There's a ton of telling and not showing. I kinda thought that wasn't a good thing? Then again, I don't think emotional involvement is what she's going for; this is trying to be a thriller more than anything else. But hell, if I'm not going to get emotionally involved, I'd just as soon read Wikipedia.

Angelology is well-researched, much more so than my paltry efforts, and very imaginative. But the narrative devices, not to mention the names, strike me as more than a little contrived, and I don't really give a shit about any of the characters, not even the ones I want to like. This is uncharacteristic for me. Could be me, could be the writing. Either way, I'll be glad when it's over. Which doesn't really recommend it much.

I didn't mean for this a book review. I was supposed to segue very smoothly into a mention of one of the writer's blurbs on the back cover, you know, where other writers gush about the book in hopes that you'll trust them enough to give it a shot.

Four quotes down is a blurb by Raymond Khoury, author of The Last Templar and Sanctuary.

Goddamn it. Another one. William Faulkner published his potboiler Sanctuary in 1931. Way different from mine, but there it is. Then there's the TV show, which is straight-up sci-fi and has not exactly made enormous waves, critically speaking, but it's been renewed for a third season so apparently it doesn't entirely suck, which is entirely beside the point anyway. Khoury's thriller is actually called The Sanctuary, and I'm actually tempted to read it if only because I can't distill the idea of it into three or four words.

The main problem, as I see it, is Nora Roberts. You may have heard of her. Her Sanctuary is a romance, but, happily, not a paranormal one. There's a town called Sanctuary that's featured in the book, is all, and I haven't read it to find out how meaningful the word is.

It is profoundly meaningful to me. I had some godawful title picked out years ago, thinking, well, this sucks ass but it'll do for now and surely something better will strike me eventually. I can't remember when Sanctuary popped into my head, but as soon as it did, it stuck fast.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that the word is so flexible. In one sense, it means safety, a place of refuge. The other sense is a consecrated place of worship. For my story, it works on both these levels, because there's such a strong religious background to the thing. You can hardly escape it if you're writing about an angel and a witch, and I have no desire to. It works in the other sense, too. My MCs come to find sanctuary with each other, realizing that physical walls can't keep you safe any more than they can define a place of worship. Only love does that.

And ain't that just the cheesiest shit you ever heard? Fucking A.

But damn it, there's no other word that says safety and worship at the same time. I've looked. Extensively. And I've toyed with other cheesy titles, more traditionally romantic, that are so wretched I can't bring myself to repeat them to anyone, let along on a public blog.

Also, I had the names of the next two books picked out, both of which are single words beginning with S. Sanctuary, Serenity, Salvation. I mean, shit, how much simpler can it be, right?

But there are other things to worry about at the moment. For example, the soon-to-be-published fantasist in the critical writing group has mentioned in a crit for another person that using a random homeless person or bum as a plot device is almost a cliché. So, fuck, there's another scene that will need tweaking. Not a big deal, really, it's making me flex my muscles, imaginationally speaking (new word, you like it?).

Then there's the mention of a John Travolta movie called Michael, where the angel smells like cookies to a particular woman. One of my critters mentioned that a while back, too, so I'm having to work in a slightly different direction to keep that original.

Individually, these aren't hard to manage. What worries me is that there are more that I'm missing.

And sometimes I just have to throw up my hands and say, well, fuck, there are reasons for the cliches and they're called goddamned archetypes, you know? Scary things are underground, in basements, dungeons, caves, and catacombs. New York City is a backdrop for so many stories because it's bursting at the seams with them – anything you can possibly imagine has happened in New York City, and probably a lot of shit you can't, or would prefer not to. Homeless people make good stand-in characters because they're so far out of the norm you can make them do anything and it doesn't necessarily have to make sense immediately. Pull in a homeless person, a bum, a lunatic, and you immediately tap into the idea of the fringes of sanity and society, the absence of rules, the absence of safety. The element of chaos, in other words. And deathbed revelations happen because people often try to tie up their loose ends before they die. There's a reason we cherish last words.

Maybe it's not just cliché – maybe it's commonality, a language of story that we all understand. I don't know. Whatever.

It's not slowing me down, it's not messing with my motivation or making me doubt the work or the writing, it's just annoying. That's all.

Hope this post finds you both well, and looking forward to Halloween, even though some evil fucker scheduled it on a school night.

~Andi

*I am basing this on the sometimes pretentious writing, not to mention the author photograph on the inside back jacket. Maybe she does have a sense of humor – but if so, it doesn't show in this book.

free-floating anxiety

There's a whole lot of that swirling around me at the moment - or rather, in me. It's a very odd physical sensation and not at all pleasant - it's like the feeling you get right before you go down the other side of the rollercoaster, except not as dramatic and much more mysterious and disturbing.

I know part of what this is about. Ditching Blackwell, or relegating him to the back burner, is a huge step towards casting away the last bits of what this novel was years and years ago when I first started writing it. A little scary. Kinda feels like jumping off a cliff, which, of course, would explain the feeling.

But then some of it has to do with my progress. It's not like there hasn't been any - I'm working steadily and regularly, but when I get my daily updates from the critical writing board, I feel terribly anxious that I haven't offered any crits (not that there's a minimum or anything) and that I haven't posted anything else since the third scene.

And the only thing that helps is to work. So off I go to do the shit I have to do to make this weekend work. Finish shopping for the party, bake and frost the cake, clean the house so our visitors from out of town can at least have a clean toilet to vomit in should the need arise, and still slap some lunch together for Aeryn.

Then I can work. And then, hopefully, this awful sense that I'm plodding slowly down the road while everyone else is catching up with the ice cream truck, so scared that there won't be any left for me by the time I get there. It's almost like preemptive grief. Or disappointment. Or something.

No rest for the wicked, right?

Right.

Will someone please tell me...

... how to write this fucking book without having the priest's POV? Because he's a real pain in the ass to write. The male and female protagonists are coming along nicely but writing Blackwell is like pulling teeth.

Damn it. It's a paranormal, for crap's sake. SURELY I can figure out a way to get enough hints in on what's going on without having to bore the fuck out of a reader in these scenes, because they're boring the SHIT out of me.

Maybe... I don't know, a telepathic connection? A little more information from her mother? A misplaced ribbon? Damned if I know. But there has got to be a way out of this; I'm terribly, awfully sick of slogging through these scenes.

Pardon the vent. It's late. However, now that I've put my brain on this path, it might take a few stumbling steps while I'm asleep. Once I wash the water bottles. And other stuff. Damn it.

Prompt: Six Degrees of Separation

"Six Degrees of Separation" refers to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.

Here's my thought. Write something that illustrates this idea. That's all.

We've not had a prompt in a while, so I thought I'd throw it out there for your consideration.

Catch you later, ladies.

~andi

Go With It

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling hungover from exhaustion – groggy, headachy, slightly nauseaous. I'd tried to get to bed early, really I had, but the evening routine took longer than I expected – it always does – and I puttered around for too long. I did manage to get to bed before midnight, which was an improvement. But the damage through the week had been done, and it all caught up with me yesterday.

It took an Espresso Doubleshot and a big travel mug of coffee to finally wake me up, but wake up I did, even managing to get to work on time. Struggled through the morning, sneaked outside for my lunchtime nap, got some work done in the afternoon, and dragged my sorry ass back to the house.

Brian made dinner, bless him, and we all played a game of Sorry that was ruthless and vindictive and great fun. Combined with Aeryn's rediscovery of her kid-sized video camera, the evening was full of laughter and happiness and I couldn't have wished for a better end to a really fucking long week.

The giggles and another cup of strong coffee woke me up enough to start working on a troublesome scene, only to find that the paltry efforts I'd made earlier in the week had been eaten by Open Office. This is the first time OO has failed to recover a document.

I wasn't horribly disappointed, which tells you something about my progress and the quality of the writing, both of which pretty much sucked ass. So I started over, and found that it was easier going somehow. No idea why. But at this point I don't question; I just go with it.

The final collapse into bed was heavenly, and I felt like I'd earned it this week.

Cut to this morning. Woke in Aeryn's bed, although I barely remember how I got there, at eight-thirty, more than two hours past my weekday wake-up call. Brian had made coffee my way – in other words, ridiculously strong – and I made the blueberry-banana muffins about which I'd been fantasizing for several days now. They were every bit as good as I'd hoped they would be.

It was the best morning I've had in a long time.

So this inconsequential, relatively drama-free post is based on nothing but a rare feeling of contentment. It will pass, as everything does. I'll see Sheba and be reminded that her leg isn't healing quite as well as I'd like; I'll go to the Apple Festival and be jostled by crowds and screaming kids; I'll have to watch the pennies this week because blah, blah-blah blah blah. Doesn't matter.

At this point I don't question; I just go with it, grateful for every second.

~Andi

What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

Note: I spent entirely too long writing this, and while I am ashamed that it's not nearly as interesting as what else has been going on here, I'll feel like a total loser if I don't post it.

It's been a while, hasn't it? Not as long as the hiatus from my first blog – which I've never resumed – but, what, three months, four? Jesus, I don't even want to look to find out; it's too discouraging.

The details of the dramas happening in the Allen household are numerous and probably interesting only to myself and my immediate family, so I'll skip over that shit in favor of talking about What I Did On My Summer Vacation.

Seriously. Really, it's important. To me, anyway.

This year we took our first full week-long family vacation to Sunset Beach, North Carolina, where my husband grew up and where we got married. We shared a really sweet condo with his sister, her husband, and her two girls, 5 and 4, and discovered early on that the small pond behind our place was inhabited with at least three baby alligators and enough turtles that those fuckers started to creep me out after a while. The alligators didn't – at least not until I saw how fast those bastards could swim – but those turtles were just spine-chilling.

We got busted the first night there for the girls' dress-up shoes stomping across the ceiling of the woman downstairs. The men grumbled, but I thought she was actually pretty nice about it, all things considered. And having the girls relinquish the shoes on the tile for the rest of the week wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

We went to the pool, where Aeryn finally got over most of her nervousness about water. We went to the beach and splashed in bathwater waves. One afternoon when the tide was going out, I dove into a good-sized wave, tumbled around a bit, then surfaced to find myself surrounded by millions of tiny bubbles on the surface of the receding water. They tickled my legs as they disappeared back into the ocean. It felt like I was in the biggest bubble bath ever. With fish.

We – the adults, that is – went out a couple of times. The second night we went to a reunion of sorts at a local bar that was thankfully within walking distance of the condo. There was beer involved. A lot of beer.

I texted Brian's dad Skipper, who was watching the girls (sort of), to see how everyone was doing. His reply: “Sold 1. Fed 1 to gator. Other real quiet.” My favorite Skipper moment ever.

An old friend showed up with a fat joint, and after that I only remember a lot of giggling and a drunken shamble through the golf course to get home. Brian and Jimmy took the lead because Christie and I were incapable of self-navigation at that point. Jimmy pointed out that the fastest way back to the condo was over a ditch and through a small copse of trees.

Brian lost a perfectly good pair of Speedo flip-flops when he found out the ditch was wider than it looked. And I don't think we've yet gotten the mud out of that shirt. Somehow, we made it back with no further incident, although I was told the next day that what I thought was giggling was, to everyone else, raucous cackling. Go figure.

After about a day, I began to understand that only one person was going to make sure I had a good vacation, and that was me. No one else was going to say, “Hey, Andi, why doncha run off and go to the beach for a while?” or “That king-sized bed in there is just screaming to be napped on.”

One crucial point: Allens are notorious for their refusal to plan anything. “Why bother?” Brian says. “Shit's just gonna change anyway.” My argument is that whether or not it changes, I feel more comfortable with a plan, even knowing it's going to change, especially when you're working with three Allens, three girls under seven, a Yankee, and a bipolar.

So I started making my own plans, although I was happy to adjust them as long as I eventually did what I wanted to do. It sort of worked.

And twice, I took what is, for me, a radical step – I said no. Both of which involved social situations where I was going to be stuck with heavy smokers in environments saturated with old cigarette smoke and rotten beer. The first time, it took all of five seconds for me to walk in, look at Brian, and say, “Sorry, sweetie. Love ya. See you later, call me if you need a ride.” And that was that.

It was slightly harder to escape the second time, because it was a larger family gathering at Skipper's place. There was a lot more second-hand and third-hand smoke involved, and I couldn't get away from it, even outside.

Brian checked in with me at one point and, after a brief exchange, said, “You've made an appearance. You're good. Leave the car seat and go on back to the condo.” I must have looked desperate at that point, because he hugged me, and said, “It's OK. Just go.” Between the two of us we managed to blame the heat, humidity, and a fried oyster I'd eaten earlier in the day. Fuck if it mattered; I was outta there.

I went back to the condo as ordered and took a long, hot shower to get the sweat and smoke off, then snuggled into my new Eeyore sleep shirt, put on a mindless DVD, then settled on the couch to enjoy the peace and quiet. Three hours of peace and quiet. Fucking sublime.

The next to last day, it poured buckets. Brian and I found a place about a half an hour away with indoor black light putt-putt, an arcade, and a bar for the parents to escape to occasionally. The families split up on the ride home, and Aeryn, Brian and I got to the condo before Christie and her people. For a few minutes, it was just us.

The rain had stopped, and the temperature had dropped to about 90. I told Brian and Aeryn I was going to the beach one last time, and I asked Aeryn if she wanted to come with me. I fully expected her to say no – but she didn't. She got her stuff together and we trundled over the dilapidated bridge to Sunset Beach, where we watched pelicans feed, made sand... somethings, looked for shells, and let the waves toss us around a bit. She said, “Mom, I am SO glad I came with you! This is the best day ever!”

Yeah. I know – she's six-soon-to-be-seven, and it's often the best day ever for her, but it meant a lot to hear her say it, especially when it was just her and me, on a beach at sunset.

We drove the little blue crock pot back to the mountains, and things got batfuck crazy in the space of twelve short hours.

I lived through Friday – which is about all I can say for it – and when Saturday rolled around, I realized that I had not forgotten the most important thing I'd learned on my summer vacation, which was, essentially, how to go on a vacation. It's pretty simple, really. Figure out what you want to do – not what you have to do, or what you feel like you ought to do – figure out what you want to do, and do it in such a way that you don't neglect your fellow vacationers too much.

So Saturday we got back from wherever we'd gone that morning and I said, “OK, I'll take you to the skating rink. But first I'm taking a nap.” And I did. Eventually I got up and took her, as promised.

Sunday we came home from the most perfect breakfast ever – a huge Greek omelet with sinful cinnamon toast made from the restaurant's homemade sourdough bread and good strong coffee – and I was really, seriously sleepy. Odd, because I'd had enough coffee to give a bear the jitters. I decided I wanted to curl up in the recliner (aka the Mama chair) with my book and a soft throw blanket, and if I felt like going to sleep, I would. So I did. Eventually I got up and took Aeryn to the pool, as promised.

At the beach, I kept thinking, this is the only week of vacation I have taken since I can remember. I have no idea when I'll be able to do this again. So I would not waste one second doing something I sincerely did not want to do.

It worked pretty well, all things considered – as far as I know. And I'm certainly happier and much more patient with la famille when I don't feel cheated out of vacation time. Which shouldn't be restricted to vacation.

I think that's What I Learned On My Summer Vacation.

Oh, and also that ditches are usually bigger than they look in the dark, and that alligators don't like white bread because it gets stuck to the roof of the reptilian mouth.

Goals

If you're at all interested in music or Tim Roth, find The Legend of 1900. It's a glorious film - a little slow around the 5/8ths point, but maybe I was just tired and needed a nap. It's about a man who was born on an ocean liner and becomes a beyond-brilliant pianist. Never thought of Tim Roth as sexy, but seeing him on the piano - sometimes sweaty, sometimes so poignant it made me feel like a voyeur - well, let's just say it aroused me in all kinds of interesting ways.

Just as charming is his attitude to things he doesn't like; simple and direct, which of course reminds me of our beloved Kiki. When he's a child playing the liner's ballroom piano in the middle of the night, the captain and not a few of the passengers come in to listen. The captain stares for a moment or two in shock, then approaches the boy and says, "My boy. You must know that this is against all the regulations!" The boy stops for a second and says, "Fuck the regulations." Then he keeps playing. This is a recurring phrase, which is endearing.

On to the primary message of this post. We have in the past discussed goals - their importance, or lack thereof, etc. I am having problems with goals, and it seems to come down to the relatively simple error that I think I am capable of more than I am. You can probably imagine how much that pisses me off.

It's not just in Sanctuary. It's at work, too. I can usually meet the critical, high-visibility deadlines, but when I walk into work saying, "ok, I'm gonna finish two internal audits, follow up two corrective actions, and submit five revisions" it sounds perfectly reasonable to me. And it Never. Fucking. Happens.

Fuck the goals.

In the same vein, it seems reasonable that I should manage to write or revise 1000 words a night. That's only three pages. Is it because I start so late that I can't keep my eyes open? Friday night I worked up to around 700 and then sleep sucker-punched me and I was asleep before I even knew what happened.

At any rate, setting these apparently unreasonable goals - even though they sound entirely achievable to me - is creating no small amount of resentment on my part. I mean, if I can't meet these paltry goals, why set them at all?

Fuck the goals.

Obviously one less dramatic solution is to just adjust the goals so that they remain challenging but more achievable so that I establish a pattern of success instead of failure. Feeling like a loser every day is starting to wear on my self-esteem.

Fuck the goals.

PMS figures into this, I'm sure. And next weekend I'll be leaving for a week at the beach, which sounds glorious on the one hand and terrifying on the other. One of the critical methods I use to maintain some mental stability, on top of the meds, is to stick to the routine. Have a home base, to have something familiar waiting for me when I explore. In other words, "Don't ever get off the boat, man." If you've ever seen Apocalypse Now, you might remember the disastrous consequences of getting off the boat in the middle of a jungle.

I'm doing what I can in terms of planning to make sure I have familiar things around me when we get there - things I can control, because we'll be vacationing with my sister-in-law, her husband, her two daughters (ages 5 and 4), and my father-in-law. A lot of fucking variables.

That's not even considering the shit waiting on the other side once we get home. The day after we get back, my mother-in-law is coming for a three-day-visit, and she will be, no doubt, entirely grossed out by the state of my house, no matter how much we clean before we leave.

The day after she arrives, my dog Sheba goes in for major surgery to have a tumor removed from her leg.

Two days after that, Brian starts school.

The week after that, Aeryn goes back to school.

Yeah, things are going to be a little nuts. But that doesn't mean I have to be. And a first step is, I think, to make 800 words a night instead of a thousand. Once I get used to that I can push it farther. At any rate, I'm still working and still moving forward, even if it feels, as they say 'round these parts, like molasses in January.

a procrastinatory post

So I've managed to submit three scenes to the online critical writing board I joined a couple of months ago. I'm getting decent responses, and it's nice that people are still reading even if they're not completely and totally carried away by it.

However.

I need the input. I do. But what's frustrating me now is that I can get completely opposite responses on the same damned scene, the same passage, the same character, depending on who's reading it. This is a given. I knew it going in on some level, but seriously, what I've been reading borders on the absurd.

Example #1: In a scene between my main character and her mother, who is dying of a terminal disease, I have had wildly varying responses – from “I think this scene is very very good and here is why...” to “This does nothing to continue the story and it feels more like a lesson.”

Example #2: One critter thinks I'm neglecting the paranormal/fantasy aspect of the story. Another critter thinks I've overdone it to begin with and is relieved to see it lighten up a bit in the third scene.

Example #3: No one seems to agree on the correct format of a character's inner thoughts. Having researched this, I have come to the conclusion that it depends on the agent reading the story; in other words, it depends on their first readers, the ones who go through the slush pile to begin with. And how the fuck, I ask you, am I supposed to know what that reader prefers? Yes, I'm going to start with the obvious and just ask the agent. Because the author that the agency represents does her work in first person. Which does me no good at all in terms of learning the ropes of formatting inner thoughts – you hardly have to do it at all in first person. Fucking cheaters. I've tried to work through rewriting in first, but I'd lose a lot. Not worth it.

Example #4: In the first scene, I make a reference to a particular pagan holiday; in the second, I refer to a fairly common practice in meditation and spellwork called “grounding.” The pagan in the group noticed that the description of the holiday was too obvious and lost authenticity, while a non-pagan went so far as to say, “I don't even know what time of year that is” although to be honest I don't think she was reading very closely. As for the “grounding” reference, the pagan knew exactly what I was talking about and didn't need it explained. Several other critters were clueless to the point of thinking I was talking about some sort of electrical work.

It's insane. It depends on the reader's expectations, on the genres they enjoy, on the stuff they think is shit.

So how do I decide what to keep and what to throw away?

It comes down to the same thing, in the end. It's my decision. It reminds me of parenting in so many ways, but this, most of all: If your kid's got a cold or a rash or a fever or is biting or not potty-training fast enough or what the fuck ever, you can call all your friends who know anything at all about kids – the moms and dads, the aunts and uncles, the kid who babysits next door; you can get as much information as you like from the pediatrician and the internet and parenting forums (eek!), but in the end, it's up to you whether you take him to the doctor, wait out the fever, fill the scrip for antibiotics, spank your kid, bribe your kid with M & Ms to get her to use the toilet (I don't know anyone who's done that, I'm just making shit up, really) and so on.

Totally. Up. To. You.

And in this case, I can get Brian's opinion, but he will stay as far away from my final decision as possible. He shrugs and says “I don't know, honey. I got no dog in this fight. And opinions are like assholes anyway.”

My husband can be a perfect idiot in some ways – there are times when he demonstrates extraordinarily bad decision-making. But more often than not, he's pretty fucking smart. I listen – mostly – and just, you know, keep the wheels straight, and write the story I need to write.

I still think I need some more sex or violence in the first thirty pages, though. Plot monkeys, do your worst!

~Andi

high anxiety

A friend told me this morning that she had been experiencing some high anxiety lately - her son is about to do end-of-grade testing for the first time, her older son just graduated from college, and she's right at her own midterm for the class in some kind of human resource management thingamajig. I thought of the Mel Brooks movie and immediately wished I hadn't - other than marrying Anne Bancroft, I really think Mel Brooks should have stayed out of the movies altogether; at least I wouldn't be stuck sharing a house with my husband's copy of Blazing Saddles.

I digress.

What she meant was that she was experiencing a high level of anxiety. I originally thought of vertigo. But as my day has progressed, I'm beginning to think that sometimes there's not much of a difference.

Tonight I feel like I'm scrabbling for any kind of grip on the edge of a crumbling cliff - desperate, shaky, weak, and at the very beginning of a freefall, that half a second when your stomach realizes it's about to drop, and drop for a very long time. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. And I hate heights. It makes me impatient, angry, mean. It's supposed to have to do with my menstrual cycles, but tonight it's triggered by something else.

I've done as much as I can with the first three chapters. I'll put a finishing touch on the first scene, maybe run a spell-check, put it off as long as I can, then I'm sending the first chapter out for critiquing to an online critical writing group - a group of writers who do not know me and have no emotional investment in this book at all.

I'm scared shitless. And at the same time, I know that once I do this, once I just post the thing and have done with it, I'll be able to move on, because I'm frankly sick as hell of the first three everfucking chapters.

Plus maybe I'll be a little less of a cunt to my family. They don't deserve this.

~Andi

persevere

so i'm writing this pain in the ass scene that has to do with my villain, and i've been working on the damned thing for days now and getting nowhere. tonight i finally figure out what the action of the scene needs to be, which is great, progress. i get to where the action actually happens. again, progress.

then the coffee wears off and so does the goddamned inspiration, such as it is. i'm tired. brian's already in bed and i know i'm not going anywhere with this tonight; i've already missed my self-set deadline, what the fuck difference does another night make at this point?

i alt-tab to another window, i don't even know what i'm looking at anymore. then i remember my desktop wallpaper, which is a silly cartoon image of two characters from a movie-that-shall-remain-nameless with very determined looks on their faces. and i think, it's 11:30. i can do another half an hour. even if it doesn't go anywhere, i can do another half an hour.

so i alt-tab back to the file. and i keep writing. and i make yet another discovery about my villain that fits quite nicely into the assignment we had about our villains a month or two ago, and another piece of the puzzle slides into place.

this is why i stay up an extra half an hour. no, the writing's not perfect by any means; i'll tighten it up later when i'm fresh. but there's a beginning and an ending and by God it's the first three chapters. hallelujia.

~andi

p.s. i got new running shoes today and they KICK ASS.

Treasure Hunt

I'm not at a point where I can do this, but since the two of you are doing so much fun work bouncing ideas around, I thought maybe you would find this exercise interesting. It's from, of course, Writing Begins with the Breath (Hering).

Design a treasure hunt for your characters. Start with an object that has significant meaning to the character. Allow the character to focus on that object, describing it, holding it, imagining where it came from or how it came to be in his or her possession. Then, follow the object where it leads. Let the object, say, a socket wrench, spring you forward to a Rand McNally map of Nebraska. Let the map bounce you into a laundry room off a two-lane road in the Rockies. Keep going. Let object spring to object. Be specific in your descriptions. Enjoy the process. Let curiosity be your guide.

Both of your stories have travel as a starting point (or at least a very important theme) - so this could be a neat way to explore possibilities.

********

Based on both of your responses to my last post, I'm planning to send something out within a month. There's a small agency in NYC that will look at stuff as long as it's "in a mature stage of development" as long as you send in three complete chapters. I have my doubts about their effectiveness given their authors and publications, but it's worth a look. At the same time, there's an arts and music festival coming up over mother's day weekend in Black Mountain (www.theleaf.com) that is a very convenient deadline, plus there's no way I'm going to do a damned thing while I'm there except maybe catch up on my journal. So I'm pushing to get three chapters to readers at the earliest possible opportunity. Thanks to wise comments by my friends, my husband, and the plot monkeys, these three chapters are significantly different than what I started with. Which is fine; it's better. A lot better - or at least, it feels that way to me.

Wonder of wonders, I'm actually keeping up with the schedule. And I love it - the act of writing is so much more joyful than it was before I just accepted that there were some things that didn't belong in the story and ought to just go. Letting go has been a wonderful - if at times very painful - process.

So I hope to catch up with you both this weekend, hopefully? Until then, happy writing, happy imagining, happy running, happy baseball, happy everything, whatever you choose to do.

~Andi

bang head here

You know what?

I am either really screwed or at the cutting edge. I'm thinking screwed.

God, it would be so fucking easy to just give up.

Andi's goal, w/e 4/16

I just went through the latest synopsis and broke it down by scenes, and by projected (ok, sort of projected) dates of completion. If I can meet the deadlines (approximately), I should be able to finish the rewrite by Thanksgiving. And here I was thinking I'd be done by the Fourth of July. Fat fucking chance.

So I finish the rewrite, I revise, I submit to readers like yourselves and some other willing and not-so-willing victims, I continue to revise, and then by Easter of next year I start querying agents.

That's fair, right? I think a year is reasonable and realistic, especially if the rewrite is the primary goal to get done before the end of November. Which will take a lot of pressure off over Christmas. Please feel free to tell me I'm out of my mind if you think so, even though I quite possibly may tell you I think you're full of shit. *wink, grin*

As for this week, I'll be writing the third scene. Goal is to be done with it by Friday.

Thank you for both understanding how important this is to me. I really super appreciate it. I'm going to haul my ass to bed now and thank God that I didn't drink coffee tonight, because it's wrecking the hell out of my nerves. (Don't I sound like my mother? Terrifying.)

~Andi

on the way home today

cherry tree weeps pink
by sleek dark chocolate filly
on new emerald grass

At the funeral, 15

Blood loses its power when the heart that pumped it is no longer beating. There is a scar on my – no, there was a scar, high up on my thigh where no one would notice. Horry used a very sharp knife, so sharp I barely felt it pierce the skin. Then he dug deeper, to nick the artery and get a good flow going – and that, I felt. Hearing my own blood dripping into the bowl was almost as uncomfortable as the cut itself.

I would rather spend the rest of my life spilling blood for that damnable spell than be caught up in the atrocity that this man has committed against me, against God. I trusted him, oh God, I believed him, how could I have believed him? It could have been the drugs, it could have been desperation, it could have been a particular scripture passage that he read at a vulnerable moment – I was so weak, in such misery, that I would have done anything to give my girl another chance at communion with God. I thought then that it might save her. I was wrong.

Now she goes one way and I go another – her friends, her chosen family around her, and I pray, yes, I still pray to God despite the betrayal of His priest, I pray that they can keep her safe. If I have to endure this torment then please, God, don't let me see her die. Please let me go to my rest before I witness that. Please.
And if You deliver your justice to this priest for the trap he has laid for my soul, a soul that belongs to You and always has, I vow I will not take pleasure in it. She has seduced him; she has caught him up in her false promises, just like she caught John. But Father Blackwell has no family, no human ties to the world, no one to pull him out of her grasp. I pity him, I do. But I am ashamed to admit that in this moment, trapped between this world and the next, gripped still by the agony I felt at the moment of death, I pity myself more. How I live in that endless second of the last beat of my heart, the last strangled exhalation, when my body is even now being lowered into the ground, is something I cannot understand. Some hellish magic of the fiend, no doubt.

God, please let her find me. Please, show her how to let me go.

At the funeral, 14

more than twenty years it could have been yesterday when i saw you last i have changed underground you would hardly know me it was my fault my fault you should have known about john before you married him i swear i thought it was over he was done he did too he would not have dragged you into it nor paxton never her it’s time i can’t bring myself to do it catherine she’s innocent of our world she knows nothing no matter how experienced jaded she thinks she is experienced in the ways of magic we know better better and worse i’m so sorry so sorry so wish you were still here you could have told her yourself sent her to me you drag me into the light who will guard while i am gone you know what happened last time i must have her blood now that you are gone there’s no one else it must be hers to mend the lock and now now i must speak to her not the right time not any right time was months ago when you knew you were dying catherine why didn’t you tell her say something do you expect her to believe it coming from a madman she won’t remember me you would hardly know me i am so changed my reflection i reach out to touch the man is broken and starved of life love it was my fault my fault catherine why have you gone why didn’t you why is that you shining from my mind’s shadow are you here can i go back to the darkness should i should i can’t breathe are you speaking are you screaming can you hear me catherine you should have passed on you should be beyond there is your daughter she would listen if you spoke there is a ghost woman who will hear you what’s wrong with catherine please stop it hurts please ah no does he have you catherine does he know his mistress has she seduced tricked offered him the world like the devil she would make the devil weep don’t leave me here catherine please don’t go please don’t please


Weeping solves nothing. The girl is leaving and there’s no better time than now. She’ll feel safe with her friends and that big son of a bitch she was with is gone. If she gets in that car and drives away I’m fucked. The only thing I’m good for anyway is making sure no one else gets to the end of the tunnel because if they do, I can’t do a goddamned thing to keep them out of her hands. The bitch. The whore. The foul stinking hell-cunt. If I ever meet John Hollister in another life, he’ll die by inches for this living nightmare, bosom friend or not.

One step after another after another. Not that hard after all, and each step brings me closer to some small measure of relief. I can’t be the only one to keep her locked up. I’m not enough. Catherine's daughter has to help.

A large hand grabs my arm to stop me and I shake it off, no more hesitation, absit reverentia vero, by God, but the hand clamps down again and squeezes. I turn and raise my eyes to another big son of a bitch and wish not for the first time that my father had been as tall as John Hollister.

“Do I know you?” he says, and I recognize the voice of Authority. He's a cop.

“I doubt it,” I say, not meeting his eyes.

“Did you know Mrs. Hollister?”

“Yes,” I say, then “No. Not really.”

“Then what are you doing here, if I can ask?”

“You can't,” I say. The girl is leaving the tent now, surrounded by her friends and going to the long silver limousine that waits to take her wherever she's going from here. I wish to hell I knew where that was.

“Hey, look. I just need to ask you a couple of questions. You're not in trouble.”

“I have to go,” I say, and start away towards the group. The girl disappears into the car, followed by two more, but the older ones head towards the parking lot. If I run I can catch them, but I doubt they'll stop the car to talk to a dirty bum, no matter how calm I am, and I'm not feeling calm at the moment. I'm feeling that if I could, I'd knock this big fuck's block off.

Still, I try. I break into a lope that triggers piercing pain in my knees but I don't stop. The man is behind me, keeping up, but not stopping me. When I was young, I ran cross-country, but that body has disappeared into the tunnels and there's only this poor specimen left. I am fighting for breath in a matter of seconds. I am not surprised that I fall on my face, but I am surprised that the cop helps me up.

“Hey,” he says in a tone that doesn't sound like it comes from a cop's mouth, “No need for that. Here,” he says, and hands me a soft old-fashioned handkerchief. I clean the snot and tears off my face, and he says, “Keep it.”

“Thank you,” I say, watching the limousine drive slowly towards the cemetery gates.

“How do you know Paxton?” the cop says, suspicion creeping in the back door of his voice.

“I don't,” I say, with perfect honesty.

“Then what -”

“Thanks for the handkerchief,” I say, and walk away, to the footpath that leads to the pedestrian gate on Booth Avenue. There's a subway stop there, and just now I am longing to sit on a train, close my eyes, and, more than anything, pretend that I don't exist.

He doesn't follow. I don't care why.

At the funeral, 13

Jillian’s on her way up to the tent already. Sara is lagging behind with me, and Shen is – oh, there he is, with that attractive young lady with the notebook. I’m not in a hurry. We’ll get to Paxton eventually and I’d rather wait for all the other well-wishers to go so we can get a real moment with her. We may not see her again until Beltane in May. The business of death, tidying up the loose ends of a live well-lived; it can be all-consuming.

Jillian’s talking with her now. Their heads are together and their hands are on each other’s shoulders. I can see Paxton’s shoulders shaking, but she could be crying or laughing. When Jillian’s around, there’s no telling. As I get closer, I see that it’s a bit of both. Sara squeezes my arm and glances over to the side of the tent. Apparently she wants me to wait. I think we’ll be walking Paxton out to her car. In another moment, Shen catches up to us.

I see now why we’re waiting. Paxton is standing by the casket, her stillness unnerving, and so pale that she could be a cemetery statue herself. It doesn’t look like she’s planning to leave anytime soon. Jillian glances at the man standing a few feet away from Paxton but says nothing, for once. I share a look with Sara, who blinks in affirmation. That’s the one she met, then. The angel.

I am more than a little curious. Anecdotal evidence tells of angels appearing to one human being at a time, and otherwise invisible, unless, of course, said angels are about to smite a large number of sinners, in which case they like to make a dramatic entrance. To have an angel here among us looking, acting like a human – it’s hardly what I would have expected. For once, I wish I could see auras like Jillian. On a purely energetic level, I'm sure he's fascinating. And I can’t help but wonder how Paxton met him. What he’s doing here, on the other hand, is fairly obvious.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time a man gave up a holy calling for a woman. I should know.

Shen, Sara and I come closer to the casket. Paxton raises her eyes to us and gives us a wry half-smile – she's somber, but surviving.

"Thank you," she says, embracing each of us in turn. "Thank you for being here."

"We would have kept you company during the church service --"

"Shen, hush," Sara says.

"But I was late," he finishes, grinning at Sara.

Paxton's eyebrows shoot up and her smile grows. "You didn't go to church! Did you really?"

"For you, baby, I'd do about anything," Shen says. Paxton hugs him again, this time with fierce affection. The man behind her looks on with respectful amusement. I cough quietly and he looks to me, his face suddenly guarded. He could be hiding thousands of years of secrets behind those clear blue eyes and no one would know it – no one but me, that is.

I could try it – I've Found things on the spur of the moment more times than I can remember right now – but I doubt Paxton would appreciate it, it's almost impossible to Find a thing without knowing what I'm looking for, and it would be rude, besides. I'd prefer to start off an acquaintance with a celestial being on a good note.

Paxton sees who I'm looking at and she flushes pink. "I'm sorry," she says. "I should introduce you. Robert, this is -"

"Gabriel," the man says, and nods to me, but doesn't extend his hand.

She introduces the rest of us, and Shen is more or less well-behaved. I wonder if he notices anything unusual about Paxton's companion; I'll have to ask him later. Jillian can't take her eyes off the man, and Sara digs her elbow into Jillian's side to break the trance.

Paxton's attention has returned to the casket. During our brief exchange, the funeral director has discreetly removed the casket spray. Paxton touches the gleaming white of the coffin lid and for a moment it looks like she wants to lean down and kiss it. She doesn't, but she doesn't move, either. Sara looks at me, her meaning clear. Do something, Robert.

"Paxton," I say, and put my arm around her. "It's time to go, darling." Jillian has started to sniffle but is making an admirable effort to contain herself.

"I just want a few more minutes," she says, and I can hear the voice of a young girl in her words, maybe ten or eleven.

"No whining," Shen says sternly, and gives her a rude little shake. "C'mon, Pax. Let's get out of here." She jerks her shoulder away, but he doesn't let her go. Gabriel's posture changes slightly but it's enough to make me realize just how big he is. Shen notices, too, and he has the nerve to actually glare at Gabriel. There's a lot of history in that look, and I think Gabriel knows it, even if he doesn't know exactly what the history is.

"Sister," Shen says, more gently now. "Your mother is not attached to this place, to this body. She's attached to you. Wherever you go, she'll be there. There's no point hanging out here. And I'm hungry, so let's go get some Indian food and get drunk already."

Paxton slaps him, laughing. "Asshole," she says. Sara has kept her distance up to now, but she comes up to join us, as does Jillian. We stand together around Paxton, sharing the choice she has to make now. She knows it's time. The question is, how stubborn is she going to be about it?

Finally she nods, sniffs, and takes her hand off the casket. She wriggles out of our tight group with impressive diplomacy and goes to Gabriel. She slips off the coat she's wearing and hands it to him, but he just wraps it around her again, saying something that makes her laugh. She murmers something to him in response, and while I can't hear what she's saying, his reaction is very interesting. Except for a subtle line between his brows, his expression doesn't change, but his eyes do – while I watch, their color changes. They fade from limpid ocean blue to the turquoise of a Caribbean lagoon, and I glance over at Sara to see if she's noticed. When I look back at the angel, he is gazing at Paxton with eyes the color of opals, white and shimmering. There is a dangerous power behind them, and I can tell it's pulling at the reins of Gabriel's will. I don't think I'd want to be around if that power ever broke free.

"Jesus," Shen whispers, and while he doesn't look over, the line between Gabriel's eyes deepens. "Sorry," Shen says immediately. "No offense intended, man."

Still focused on Paxton, Gabriel shakes his head in response to a question she asks, then looks at us, his eyes still glowing with that disconcerting iridescence.

"It was good to meet you," he says to us. "Take care of her." It's not a request; it's an order, and we all know it. He turns and ducks under the tent, disappearing to whatever destination is calling him away. We may be the only people who notice him leave.

"Hey," Shen says, once Gabriel is gone. "Will we all fit in that limo, do you think?"