The Next Thing...

Have I been slacking at book promotion this summer? Yes, yes I have.  

Is it because I'm lounging on the divan, popping bonbons into my gullet and binge-watching David Attenborough? No, not at all. 

First, I don't have an actual divan. Second, I can't eat dairy. Third, well, honestly, I do enjoy his lovely voice, but television is not my vice. 

Instead I have been listening to a playlist heavy on Anaïas Mitchell, Allison Kraus, Hozier, and Rhiannon Gibbons, working on the next thing.

The next thing.  
​If I were a younger writer, I might have put this next thing aside and focused instead on writing another novel like She Taught Me Everything. A contemporary family drama, say.  It would be a smart career move, to focus on building a brand for my readers to more easily identify me. Excellent strategy long-term.

But I am not a young writer. So rather than thinking about building a brand within a genre, I have passions. Ambitions. Wild horsey dreams.

My potential projects are all over the place: short story collections, a memoir of life with the small dog, that story about that woman landing on that strange planet, or the one about the virus, and also, of course, maybe something about that guy I sail with.

via GIPHY

​Plus this other chunk of words: what I've labeled on my computer as the "Woodkeep trio."
​
These are three (actually five now, but okay, it started as three) related stories clamoring to become as big as a Rubens, and which ask significant chunks of time from me. ​

Saint George and the Dragon by Peter Paul Rubens ~1605.

The three (five) are very different from She Taught Me Everything --like set in a pre-Industrial magic fairy-tale world different.

If I've lost you at fairy tale, so be it.  

The folks clamoring in my imagination don't care about genre conventions. Who am I to argue with fictional characters and their demands? They have a story to tell, dammit!  
But enough excuse-making. They are who they are.

Two Scottish ballads haunt me. One is Tam Lin, about Janet, a spunky noblewoman who will NOT be told what to do. Forbidden to go to Carter Hall, she hikes up skirts and skedaddles, "for young Tam Lin is there."  
As night follows day, Janet finds herself pregnant, and thinks to end the pregnancy with some herbs at Carter Hall.  Tam Lin confronts her and when she says that she will NOT be having a baby with some freaky-deeky fairy knight, he tells her that he's just a poor human, held prisoner by the Queen of Fairyland.
And if Janet is willing, she can save Tam Lin from a fate worse than death this coming Halloween...   

The other ballad is Thomas True or Thomas the Rhymer, in which a guy is snatched up by the queen of fairies — that hussy! — and when he tells her that he wants to go home to the world of humans, she says fine, be that way, and she lets him go...giving him the gift of speaking only truth. Nice gift! 

And that's partly what is inspiring me this summer. These two ballads, along with The Princess Bride, the concept of true love, and a cat. Not a real cat, because allergies, but a cat. 

I don't have a title yet (working on it!), but I do have a date with my editor. Which means, I must hustle back to the—oh, yeah, I am already at my computer.