Writing updates #7

I am tracking the progress of Book #3 of A Resurrection of Magic. NO spoilers will be posted. I promise.

If you want to go back to the beginning: 

http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html
http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011/05/writing-updates-all-projects-2.html
http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011/06/writing-updates-3-2011.html
http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011/07/writing-updates-4.html
http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011/07/writing-updates-5.html
http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011/09/writing-updates-6.html

Or you can just start here:::

A Resurrection of Magic is a trilogy. Two books are finished: (( see the books))  and I am writing the third one now. In these books there are two voices and two stories that go back and forth, every other chapter. The stories begin  200 years apart and the first one causes the second one...

9:25:2011

The city of Limori is tense this morning, on the edge of something I can't predict. The magistrates--mostly descendants of the old royal families--are hiring guards and training them to fight.  The merchants--including Hahp's father--see an opportunity to break the stranglehold of the magistrates control, their laws, their fees. The wizards are not what they seem to be.  And the Eridians are learning that their beliefs are based on one girl's fears, and her genius, and her love.

Everything in this picture has a story.  The sugar  bowl was my Aunt Mollie's. The button jar took twenty years to fill.  I bought the bracelet from a beautiful Apache woman on a train in New Mexico.  The lovely blue paperweight is a gift from the fabulous  http://www.bluewillowbookshop.com/  I found the carved deer bone in Colorado when I was ten. I heard my horse's hoof click on it as we scrambled up a bank, caught a glimpse of the shape. So I tethered my horse to a willow tree and slid back down to look. Sadima has found something this morning, something that scares her, and gives her hope. 

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8.27.2010


It's getting harder to make sure there are no spoilers. The book is about 2/3's finished so everything is becoming more tense, tighter, harder to talk about without actually talking about it.  I can tell you this: there will probably be some kind of bloodshed soon. 

Afternoon shadows on my phytolacca dioica. The trunk is nearly six feet wide now.  Every part of this tree is poisonous: leaf, root, bark, flower and seed. It reminds me of Somiss: amazing and deadly. 

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9. 30. 2011
Hahp has done something he didn't think he *could* do. I am wondering if he can live through it. If he can't, everything changes. Writing involves every part of me and I am sitting here crying. I hate the wizards. I understand them--I do. But I hate them.  

If you could fly high enough, the wind sifting through your fingers, your hair tied tight with a thread from the hemline of your robe, Limori would look like this tonight. The bonfires, the torch runners,  the lanterns on the carriages as people try to get out of the city.
Anger and fear.
Fear and anger.


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10: 04: 2011
I have been reading research the past few weeks, mostly about ancient civilizations. I am trying to understand Limori better, how every set of rulers, every war, marks every generation that follows it.   

A colonial graveyard in Boston. Most of the inscriptions are too weathered to read.  There is a much older graveyard near Limori, next to what is now Malek Park--Hahp's father bought the land and couldn't care less about the history that lies in the ground.  Sadima hid three  keys there once, and now has them back. She is trying to remember what doors they open.  She can't remember that she never knew.

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10 10 2011
Late last night, Hahp heard a voice I thought he would never hear.  This is getting so strange. It always feels like the characters lead me along, now it feels like they are dragging me away from what I thought would happen toward reality. Their reality. 

This is  Volubilis, the southernmost Roman city ever built. It's in what is now Morocco.  Stone survives.  I kept thinking that while I was walking around, staring at the remains of baths, barracks, grand homes.  Stone survives. The cliffs outside the city of Limori have held magic and magicians for so long that there is no clear  beginning point of their history.  I thought it had been hundreds of years. Now, I think it might be thousands... 

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This morning two characters will meet ....two people I thought would never meet... I have no idea what I will do if one of them doesn't survive the meeting.  I am afraid to finish the scene. 

This was taken out a train window and the human brain follows the laws of motion to blur what is close and make it easier to see what's in the distance. Staring out train windows is apparently a lot like writing a novel.

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10 23 2011
I woke up with the ending in my head. I have a lot to write to get there, and I am sure it will change as the characters live through it--and it is off in the distance and blurry. But I can see it from here. I can. 

This tree is on Oahu, Hawaii, in a botanical garden filled with odd and amazing trees.  I didn't write down the scientific name...but the common name is "cannonball tree". There was a warning sign, telling people to stand back. So I was respectful and quiet, and  can tell you that the fruits are huge, heavy, smooth and that they smelled--impossibly-- like vomit and a strange, distant, perfume.  As I walked away, one of the fruits fell--on the far side of the tree, nowhere near me, and I had this tiny moment of feeling like it meant something, like the tree was telling me it could have hurt me, but hadn't.  Sadima feels that way this morning. Like she has been warned, but also spared.


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10 30 2011
There is a boy who has been fighting for years just to stay alive. He is hiding, standing in the dark, holding his breath, wishing he'd had the courage to jump into the deep water six years before. He almost wants to be found. He is longing to end the fight, to stop the fear, to put down the double-edged knife of hope.

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11 14 2011
Sadima is in Market Square this morning.  All around her people are scared, close to panic, staring upward...   

 I have no idea what she is going to do--or not do.  She has a reason to live now, though, and that changes everything.

This is me, hiding behind the French edition of book #2. My series title is : A Resurrection of Magic.  Their title for the trilogy is:  The Price of Magic.  We are both right. 


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11.20.2011


I stopped writing last night in the middle of a scene because I wasn't sure how Hahp would react to something. Prisoners who have been kept against their will for years carry their fear and rage in different ways. Hahp has, for most of his time in the cliffs, blamed his father. That's changing and I need to understand why, so I hope he will tell me. I know this much : his feelings, his reasons, aren't simple. They are tangled, barbed. I am not at all sure he will tell me the truth...or if he will talk to me at all.

trees from three continents, now imprisoned in my yard

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In the city of Limori, like anywhere else, the people who have read the history books understand things people who can't read never will. Over almost 200 years, Somiss has stolen, bought, preserved and studied almost all the books the royal families once owned. He will not make the mistakes the ancient wizards made.





This is a little tangle of barbed wire I dug up in the garden. In Colorado,  it was common, a leftover from the range wars. Farmers used it to keep free range cattle out of their corn. The cattlemen cut the wire every chance they got. It was a small, strange war to settle who owned the land that had been stolen from the First Nations--the people who came here from other places many centuries before Spain decided to colonize Mexico, before Englishmen sent their second sons to a new world to make a fortune from slave labor. And all of this happened thousands of years after the incredible building that eventually became the Pantheon was built in what eventually became Rome, Italy. History is always shameful, sometimes glorious, and always still in progress.


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12.25.2011


People who have have impacted each other's lives for over two hundred years are standing in Market Square about 30 paces from each other--and they don't know it. The wind is rising and rain is starting to spatter. The South Enders know it's time to go home, but they can't. They just...can't.  I am  trying to stand close enough to peek over their shoulders so I can see what they see coming from beyond the trees. .

This tree lives in WI.  You can tell it loves the wind--and fears it.

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12 19 2011


I know these entries are getting farther apart. I apologize. I am living in Limori now, barely coming up for food and water.  I am on Chapter 64 and holding my breath because the characters I love best are all in danger. The city is full of anger and blame--almost none of it aimed at the real source the problem. 

The sky, seen through a Giant Bird of Paradise tree, There is a rat's nest on the right, and an empty bloom sheath on the left. I could smell the flowers still, a little, but the rat-stink was much stronger.

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12 28 2011

Today in Limori's South End streets, Sadima  heard a shout behind her. She recognized the voice, but she didn't look back. She didn't walk faster or slower and she didn't try to hide....she just kept walking. Sometimes that's all you can do.  

This is my Euphorbia.  It's a succulent, not a cactus, but the thorns are about 2 inches long and needle sharp.The white sap is milky, caustic, and poisonous. It drips out of even the smallest scratch. The plant was about two feet tall and a foot wide when I freed it from its container and introduced it to real dirt.  It has grown slowly, relentlessly.  It's well over six feet tall and at least six feet wide now.  If I wanted to take it out (I don't, but if I did) it would be almost impossible. It intends to take over the world. How did I not see this coming? 










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