sacred scars update, quick and done

Jux has survived, a homeless, familyless child in a starving city with cobblestone streets and an inept king. He has loved only one person, and she is in terrible trouble.

Sadima is running, sobbing in each breath, too terrified to even look back.

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Hahp is standing before a wall of stone, shaking, knowing he must walk through it, knowing what it will do to him.

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This is a ceiling from a Paris renovation of an historic building. Standing beneath it, I thought about massive wealth, the options it brings, the art that money midwives. Somiss's mother has ceilings like this, painted, with gold leaf on the rosettes.








Adding this on June 2, 2011:  Updates on the third book in progress can be found here:
http://kathleenduey.blogspot.com/2011/05/writing-updates-all-projects-2.html

time, time, time...

These cobbles are in Paris. I have moved them to Limori's slum South-End, a dockside squalorous place--and where Sadima is now.

The writing is flying again. The time line is resolving itself. About 200 years pass in one story and less than 10 in the other. I have been pacing a lot, considering various devices. But the every-other-chapter format is enough. I don't want devices and visible structure to upstage the characters. Not even a little. So I am going straight at it, and I think (hope, want to believe) it's working.

Limori's neighborhoods

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.Limori, once you are up the hill from the docks, out of South -End's squalor and jumble, is a city of wood and brick. Beyond that, Ferrin Hill has estates, massive homes of quarried stone, built, like castles, to last generations. I realized this morning that I pictured the neighborhoods around Market Square like some of the older ones in Boston-a city I have visited only three times.

Writing about book-building here has made me notice where things come from, how I paste realities together to form a tangible fantasy, while I think I am just following the characters around. The Eridians have basis in fact, too. Writing all those middle grade historical novels left me with piles and e-piles of research, all of which include great stories I couldn't use at the time. America has a long history of cultural experiments.