WIND IN THE TREES : A progress report.

Wind in the trees: My perfect writing weather.....

I am close to sending my agent the first 80 or so pages of The Maker's Cage. I think it is one of the best things I have ever written. It's one of the oddest....

Then I will be back in Limori almost full-time.  And by "almost" I mean I will continue what I am doing now. ..I will only be leaving Limori  when I can't see or hear any of the Limori characters that day..... 

Wind in the trees ::  I can always see their faces.

...but when those days come...
Russett will be the new secondary project.
(I said that very quietly. I don't want to scare him away...

...I would hate to have him think I might betray him. I won't. I have seen the places  he escaped and the scars on his hands.

missing the target, a writer's best friend

I will go to work in a few minutes...this whole post is a warm-up.

I love bad pictures (like all of these)  because I can't always remember where I took them or why or even  what the image IS.

This one might have been a back-bend sky shot taken somewhere at a writer's conference EARLY in the morning when I was running to get to the room before the attendees started to arrive because....I just like to have a little time to try to convince myself that I am qualified to teach writing.

This one is in the Florida
Everglades, I was with a friend after all the teaching and writer talk was done for the day. The funny part is I was trying to get picture of the white bird before it flew away

...trying so hard that I didn't use the zoom lens and ended up with two skies instead.

This one is in Morocco  and I am not sure how I screwed up and blurred the shot but I was looking out over the city from the high ridge that is casting the sunrise shadow before I visited classrooms, then spoke to young teachers.

And  last........... no clue where or what this is, but it's how I imagined the crowds below the Limori cliffs last night. Angry and scared.

and........

This is our dog's answer to thermal precision. She is very picky about her temperature ranges and spends a lot of her time listening to me clicking keys and talking aloud to people no one else can see.... yet.

The Unicorn's Secret and me.

I wrote these books years ago because I wanted to share the amazing dreams I had in 3rd and 4th grade. For almost two years I would get into bed each night, close my eyes and become the girl named Heart. Her adventures, her long journey home, was my journey, too. Every night I was Heart. Every morning I went to sleep in the dream, then immediately woke up in my own bed, with my mother telling me it was time to get ready for school

...I talked about the books on FB the other day and was amazed at how many people still love them, people of all ages who had shared them with their parents, children and grand children. Amazon carries them and any bookstore can get them. Simon & Schuster is the publisher. May all your dreams be amazing!

THE MAKER'S CAGE

This is the first page of the small project:  The BIG project is making good progress now, too.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 I miss my brother.
Levin taught me to read. He taught me everything our father didn’t want us to learn: How to climb the chimney shafts, how to use numbers, how to  and write and where to hide the books. We made a narrow side-shaft that led from Levin’s room up into the library ceiling so we could talk about the girls he hoped would pass their heritage tests and the boys I hoped my father wouldn’t choose for me.
We found a way to get outside the walls.
We sat in the moonlight and stared at the stars as often as we could, and we didn’t die. Then our father sent me here—to the dirty Walled City at the end of the world.  My mother said he wanted to protect me from something I was too young to understand, but I think he lied to her.
 I know he lied to me.
I am not a hearth guest here.
I am a prisoner trapped in a smelly little room.
I haven’t seen the sky since the old woman locked me in.


(next snippet below image)

Tangles....I am always surrounded by tangles 

(about thirty pages later:)   

Then I  heard a man laugh.

I whirled around to run, but I wasn’t quick enough.

The driver clamped his hand around my wrist and pulled me out
into the roadway. He was carrying a sack of blueberries in his free hand. 

"Heritage food,” he whispered, then leaned closer until I could feel his breath on my cheek. "First, Second, and Third Dome people can smell blueberries as far away as most people can smell smoke," he said. "Did you know that?”

I stared at him without speaking and he laughed again.






About 20 more pages into the book: The Makers Cage




I suddenly stopped whispering. 
.....not because I wanted to, but because my lips had closed. 
I tried to open them  and I couldn't. 
But I could hear my father walking away

HUGE THANKS to everyone asking about the third book of the trilogy. I am working on it and two other things (when the big book stalls).  I am sorry for the wait and can't tell you what all the support and kind comments mean to me.

Working!!!

I realized today that it had been FAR too long between updates here. I apologize. I am still working on three things at once!  


Most of that time goes to the BIG book.....((Book 3 of A Resurrection of Magic))  which is actually shrinking at this point. The third book of the trilogy will end up to be about half what the initial draft was and I will end up knowing a hundred gazillion things about the characters and their lives and the city of Limori and its history that you won't ... and you will be glad. I promise. I am WAY too fascinated by tiny things.
(((And I hope to turn some of  the best oddments into short stories...))) 






The second thing is nearing completion and will be off to my agent soon. I love the way it has changed from something odd into something odder still....and far more complicated. While I hold my breath for the agent's response, I will continue to give the big (now shrinking) last book of the trilogy almost all my time.




Russet is the third thing, the twitter novel I began writing SO long ago, then set aside to write the BIG book (that is, I assure you one last time, shrinking now.)




Questions??? Remarks?  Feel free to tell me to hurry it up already. It might help me write faster. Pressure is my friend.  


HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!  May all good things come to you and your families

I realized today that it had been FAR too long between updates here. I apologize. I am still working on three things at once!  Most of that time goes to the BIG book.....((Book 3 of A Resurrection of Magic))  which is actually shrinking at this point. The third book of the trilogy will end up to be about half what the initial draft was and I will end up knowing a hundred gazillion things about the characters and their lives and the city of Limori and its history that you won't ... and you will be glad. I promise. I am WAY too fascinated by tiny things. (((And I hope to turn some of  the best oddments into short stories...)))  The second thing is nearing completion and will be off to my agent soon. I love the way it has changed from something odd into something odder still....and far more complicated. While I hold my breath for the agent's response, I will continue to give the big (now shrinking) last book of the trilogy almost all my time.







Russet is the third thing, the twitter novel I began writing SO long ago, then set aside to write the BIG book (that is, I assure you one last time, shrinking now.)




Questions??? Remarks?  Feel free to tell me to hurry it up already. It might help me write faster. Pressure is my friend.   It really is...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!  May all good things come to you and your families!

I am writing like wind and fire and stardust and it is still taking a long time....thanks to everyone cheering me on. Thanks to everyone wishing I could do this faster, but I can't.  I can only tell you that the re-write of  third book of the trilogy is getting deeper and steeper and ....stranger ....

 I am buried in my own writing and I am doing writing consultations.... 
 (((( for more critique and consult info contact me:::  kathleenduey at earthlink dot net. 


.......but it's hard to keep up with the blog in the middle of all this. If you are tired of having to wait for news here, I am on FB   https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.duey  and give people (SMALL*) updates almost daily.

All three of the books I am working on are progressing faster than they were before I decided to switch back and forth. It's working. YAY!  When one of the projects needs time to breath....I go visit the others.



I love tangled trees. This one was in a yard with a big dog.
Good thing I can speak DOG. 
And TREE.

Writing/Teaching/ and my Aunt Molly

I took this picture walking in a strange city years ago....because it reminded me of my Aunt Molly's fancy windows. She is the reason I write and the reason I finally began to teach writing at conferences, schools, and retreats. It wasn't anything she said to me. It was the hatbox full of poems and little stories we found when she passed away in her late eighties. No one in the family knew she wrote. She hid it. If it hadn't been for an intuitive teacher and that magic hat box, I might never have even tried to write.

This year I have taught writing at six academic/retreat/and/or SCBWI events. I had the joy of being an SCBWI mentor last year and will be teaching at two more writing events before this year is over. I love the opportunities to help other writers and widen my own understanding of every kind of writing.

Two years ago I began doing writing sessions/consultations/skill teaching/ via Skype or phone..from my own home.  I fell in love with the one-on-one sessions. They are held in my own quiet room where I can conduct long-duration consults, with no one tapping the table to remind us of the time elapsed. I can ask enough questions to make sure I understand what the writers are trying to do, then help them do it.

I will work with any serious writer.
To see my usual rates and session choices you can contact me @::    kathleenduey at earthlink dot net

FB       *** https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.duey
Twitter ***   https://twitter.com/kdueykduey

shadows.....

Shadows. Oh, how I love them

The oddness of scents and books

I have to get to work....but first.....

This is the Ice Cream Bean Tree that shades the sliding door of my office. When it is blooming there is a sweet, very strange perfume in the air that appears and disappears with every tiny breath of a breeze.
This tree is making it's first appearance in a book this morning....
where it makes some people sick and not others....and no one knows why.
Yet.

 

Late afternoon sun-sifting via one of my epiphyllums. I am sorry that I am so absent here. I am writing like mad, like wolves are behind me. I am slowly unwinding the editor's comments on the first draft. Wow this is a complex book. Who wrote this massive, convoluted two-timeline monster of a........oh. Yeah. I did.

  So this morning I am working on Outside the Walls to address astute agent concerns. Since I don't outline plots or character arcs, I have decided to start here:

Oh, look.

It's morning.
I am working on three writing projects now:

First:::
book #3/ A Resurrection of Magic

Second:::
Outside the Walls, a story about tradition and fear.

Third::
Russet, a story that spans a lifetime. Maybe. (It began as a twitter novel and amazes me every day.)

And I am preparing for teaching at the Monterey CA festival of the arts in a few weeks.

I love my job.

The massive trunk of my Phytolacca tree. Every part of it, bark, flower, leaves and sap, is poisonous.

The revision process for A Resurrection of  Magic book #3 is just now beginning. YAY! The editor and I are in contact and she will soon begin wading through  600 pages of strange people with weird, elongated lives. Sadima and Hahp began their stories in Book#1 living in the same city, but 200 years apart in time. That gap has closed, slowly but surely, and they are now breathing the same air and looking at the same sky. Except that it isn't the same. The magicians keep changing it. They won't listen to me or anyone else. They never have. 

Outside the Walls: The Maker's Place

       
           

      The Moon was windblown and bright. I could see the girl, but she was an outline, part of the night, and she didn't answer me. She just started walking again, heading back toward the wagon road. We followed her until she turned and gestured at us to stop. "Hide here and wait for me," she whispered. 

         Before we could react, she was running down the narrow, muddy track, disappearing into the trees. Fob and I looked at each other. I could tell he was still angry. I was, too, but that was the least of my worries. The girl was almost impossible to like, but I liked her anyway because she wasn’t afraid. I was. I had never known anyone who wasn’t afraid. So I started walking, following her.

            When I heard an odd sound, I ran and I could hear Fob’s footsteps behind me. We kept going, staying close to the edge of the rutted road so we could disappear into the trees if we needed to—then we finally stopped when we saw the glint of another metal cage shining in the moonlight.  It looked like the one we had seen on the wagon, except it was bigger and full of odd things: There was a pile of what looked like dried clover, a long, thin rake of some kind, a mound of blackish tar, and a row of woven baskets like the wagon drivers hired people in the Old City to make, but they were woven much finer, the sizes and shapes more complicated than any basket I had ever seen.

            Fob and I stood shoulder to shoulder, looking at the cage until a little breeze ruffled the clover and I stepped back from a strong, strange smell in the air—just an instant before the girl was coming toward us, waving her hands,  screaming at us to run. We turned and sprinted back up the road. She caught up and we all kept running until we were back on the far side of the meadow, gasping for breath. Then she turned to me.  “What’s your name?”
            That pissed me off. Things were bad enough without stupid jokes. She was the only one who had kept her name a secret.
            “What’s your name?” she asked me again.
            “Dickens!”  I leaned toward her and shouted, hoping to startle her into jumping. But she didn’t. She just turned to Fob. “Tell me your name.”   
            He looked at me, then at the girl. “My name is Fob,” he said quietly. “You know that. What’s your name? Have you found a new one yet?”  The girl shook her head, and they stared at each other, like dogs that were about to fight.

            The girl glared at Fob for a moment more, then she exhaled and stepped back. “That was a makers-place. One where the poisons are made.”
            My  skin prickled. Fob and I had both awakened by the river without any memories. Everyone in the Old City does.  I looked at the girl. “The children in the wagon seemed so sad and—”

        “No,” she interrupted. Her shoulders dropped and she looked up at the moon before she answered.  “They are small but they aren’t children. Those are the makers.”

Russet (in progress)

    When the train slows, then stops, I close the curtain--all but a slit, so I can peek out. From where I am sitting I mostly see the tops of people’s heads. They are getting off the train, hugging the relatives and friends who are there to pick them up.  

     I am almost relaxed until I think I see the jeans-and-running shoes guy.

     
     I hold my breath.

     
     Yeah. It’s him.
     He’s pacing a wide circle, or I might never have noticed him. He’s not glancing up or down. He isn’t looking for me. He tilts his head and I realize that he has a phone against his ear. I sit up straighter. Is he talking to my father?

     I put the make-up back on in a few seconds.

     More this time.

     I want to look a little older, sixteen or seventeen, less gloss, more color on my mouth. 

     
     I leave my jeans on, switch to a soft pink tee that says “Geek
Magneto” under a loose, light jacket from the Salvation Army bin. It covers my lack of breasts and my battered knuckles. Then, once I am a girl again, I hurry.

     I swim upstream against the people boarding.

     When I finally get through an open door, the man is still pacing in circles.

      
      I fall into step with a group of people headed his way and strain to hear his end of the phone conversation. I slow down as we get closer and fiddle with my jacket zip, my back toward him, then pretend to answer my own phone before I walk past. I catch seven words: “No. Not yet. But he’s here somewhere.”  

       I keep walking, my skin crawling, my stomach tight.

Every morning I check email. This morning, among the fan mail, there was an especially kind letter from a reader in France who loved my books and was learning to speak English in part so that she could read my work in English. I skimmed her letter, then went down though other emails, answered a few business things,  cleaned out a few ads, etc, then went back to answer the fanmail and it was all there....except for the letter from France.

I tried to find it, and I have no idea how I lost it, but I did. So I apologize.

Dear reader in France, in case you read this blog, I want to thank you for the kind words and for liking my books and taking the time to write me. Your English is far better than my French will ever be and you made me smile. Thank you.

All best wishes,
kathleen

OUTSIDE THE WALLS

     I am always amazed at the evolution of any story I write. The more I   follow the characters around, the more I begin to understand their world, their hearts. This place is a bleak one, I knew that from the start. I have been reading about child labor, witch trials, faeries, folk tales, and the history of segregation in many cultures, recent and ancient. So.... 

Here is the first page of the book as of this morning. 

********************************  

   

                                               Chapter One  

                       

            The night-walkers only come when the moon is a thin, curved slit of cold light. They wear black robes and each one carries a sleeping child. Sometimes there are three or four night-walkers. Sometimes there are ten or twenty.  Each child is left to wake up on the riverbank below the Old City. 

            They don’t know where they are. 

            They don’t know who they are.

            They can’t remember where they came from or anything else.

            I couldn't.

            No one ever can.          

            A few of them will sit and stare at their own bare feet long enough to starve. Every year, some wander into the river, and let the water bury them somewhere far downstream. But most of them stop crying and start looking for food when the sun comes up. 

            Almost everyone helps them at first.

            We all know how hard it is.  

            But there are as many hungry children in the Old City as there are pigeons, crows, mice, rats and ants. And there is never enough food for all of us. Never. 

                               I don't use plot charts, but if I did, they would look like this: