The Nameless New Lair

By ten-thirty yesterday morning, I was fairly certain I'd never feel organized, tidy, or able to think again. My Lair was no more, my bedroom looked like the aftermath of Armegeddon, and Sarah and I had both inhaled so much dust that she, at least, had begun to crack puns. And we both hate puns. We were getting loopy. There's a fair amount of brain power involved in combining two stuffed bookcases into one, toting out a heavy hopechest stuffed with letters, favorite books, and things from my childhood, moving another hopechest into that spot, finding where on earth my art supplies was to go, and carting in a desk and all my trappings. We did it, though, and fled downstairs to find there was nothing to eat but salad. After having nothing to eat all day but yogurt. That sent us packing to Starbucks where I bought an Izze and buried myself in Stephen Lawhead's Tuck between three different groups of our friends descending on us by chance. (This is what happens when there is only one coffee shop in town, apparently.) An Izze and friends do minister to a mind diseased (unlike plum puffs) and I returned home in a far better mood than I left. Soon after my return, the UPS man came with two boxes stuffed full of copies of Fly Away Home which I then promptly autographed and packaged up. Mama is sending them this morning after Sarah tests for her license. So those of you who ordered copies, SO sorry for the wait; you will receive them soon and I hope your enjoyment won't be lessened by the unfortunate wait.

Today, after waking up properly, I decorated this new writing space with the old things (small wall-space meant things like the illustrations for Cottleston Pie had to go into the hope-chest) and stood my sign from Wyatt Fairlead above the door. That is always the final measure in designating a new writing space: does my Author's Study sign adorn the lintel? If so, I really have moved in.

The longer I spend in this corner, the more I think it will serve well. I think I will be comfortable here. I haven't found the perfect name for it yet, but it is a pleasant, more public writing space that I think I will grow to enjoy quite a lot. Public? In your bedroom? Darlings, if you knew how much mine and Sarah's room stands as a family hang-out, you'd laugh. Levi is now playing matchbox cars on the floor, and Leah and Anna are traveling back and forth from the hall, through my bedroom, through the bathroom door, into their bedroom through the bathroom. They've decided to go with a travel-theme as soon as Abby moves out. The little girls painted my Lair an astonishing shade of pink. They love it, but I had to laugh because it literally makes the room glow. Hopefully as soon as they have furniture in it, the color will tame. Currently it is quite...energetic. Anyway, I thought you'd probably like to see pictures of the new scene of all crimes. Let me know if you have any brilliant ideas for a name!

I decided to display our antique books in the tea-cup cabinet near my desk.

There you have it! Do you have any idea what it ought to be christened? I suppose that will come with time. For now, I'm just blessed that Sarah is in support of letting me commandeer a whole corner for my work. :)

In Which the Lair Fades

I wanted to alert you that in honor of celebrating a week of "public" life, the Kindle version of Fly Away Home is going to be on sale for $2.99 during its second week of life! That means that from now till February 28 it will only cost $2.99 to pick up a copy. If you didn't win the giveaway for the print copies and would like to read Fly Away Home, now's the perfect time. As much as I love that book, there have been large upheavals and strides forward in writing Anon, Sir, Anon, and I am so excited to be able to get back to talking about it more. I've been keeping a steady pace of about 1500 words a day which means that the book is over halfway finished at 36,505 words. It was never meant to be a terribly long book and I expect it'll wrap up around 60,000 words all told. I've had such fun creating the characters in this story and giving them all sorts of lovely complexities. Also, this is the first book I've actually put physical danger in...which is kind of fun to write, actually. Naturally, there were some battle scenes in The Scarlet Gypsy-Song, but hardly a lot and admittedly not terribly gripping. My characters seem to face emotional crises rather than physical ones most of the time. Courtesy of living in civilized places, I suppose.

I know I'm keeping a bit more tight-fisted over this story than the others--naturally. It's a mystery and I can't have spoilers running all round the web, can I? I will say, though, that all the characters have surprised me so far. Everyone seems to want to be connected to everyone else in ways I certainly never planned. It makes accusations nasty. It makes everyone suspect. It makes the mystery complicated. I'm hoping to limit my beta-readers to only four people. Jenny would laugh and say that's still too many, but I'm trying. Fly Away Home took so long in coming to actual published life that many of you have already read it. And that's okay. As a debut novel, it needed help from many angles. But I am going to be particular in this story and I need to keep the "inner circle" rather small. More changes are also afoot in the family. Children will grow up and need spreading-out space. This means that my Lair will soon become a bedroom for the little girls. Where am I going? Well, once I say goodbye to my Westward-facing window and the temporary luxury of having a room to oneself, we're rearranging our bedroom so that I get the corner near the window for an office area. I think it will work out rather nicely and I'm excited to share pictures once the transition is made. I will be needing a new name for it, though. This is the Lair and though it was short-lived, it served me well. When Wyatt Fairlead left home, he called his rented room "The Crevice" since it was the only clean spot in the entire building...I am going to need to come up with something sunny and cozy for the new place. I remind myself that it is practically unheard of for any author to have an entire room in her family's house strictly for her own benefit, and I don't really need all the room the Lair provides. It will work out well...I just need to be clever with consolidating two bookcases into one.

Well! Here's to a weekend of the Fly Away Home sale, cleaning, springlike temperatures, and trying to finish Eric Metaxa's Bonhoeffer! Between reading Bonhoeffer and hearing about the Ukrainian Crisis, my dreams have been rather strange. Last night I was an Army officer under Benedict Cumberbatch's command, scrambling children into darkened rooms as RAF officer Martin Freeman bombed our tactical school. It was rather heady.

“I know you don’t like me, Vivi, but we could have made shift of it, you and I.”

Thus runs time

“I demand to know what your business is—why you sought us out. Prithee, what is this, sir?” It was not until later she realized she had lapsed into the graceful lilt of the Scarlettanian tongue."      -The Scarlet-Gypsy Song

A few thousand words back now in my Gypsy-Song I began to notice a strange thing occurring to my characters. At the start of the book--back in London, I mean--the Macefield children were very...childish, for lack of a better term. They were rambunctious children, irresponsible, naughty, cheeky. But as they tumbled out of our world and into Scarlettania something happened to them. Something imperceptible as it was definite.

 My children grew up.

At first I worried--what had happened to my characters? Should they remain as they were? And then I realized that the change had grown naturally out of the rhythm of the tale. As the plot progresses, so do the children. It is, therefore, not surprising that the dastardly Peter Quickenhelm should make advances toward Adelaide before finally kidnapping her. It is not surprising that Eugenie learns to talk and Fergus loses his lisp. It is not surprising that Charlotte becomes the sole caretaker of "the babies." It is not surprising that Darby and Bertram go off to war. How many ten and eight year-olds do you know that are manly enough to handle battle? None, I'll warrant. And yet they were somehow changed in that passage from Earth to Scarlettania. People grow stronger there. They grow older. There is nothing startling in the change but it is a change all the same. I think the change lies mostly within. The children are not noticeably taller and yet they are certainly wiser, wittier, capable of more. Why? Why? Certainly it is not the sweet waters of the River Rhune that made the change, nor the clear air of the East Striding. What then? And then I happened upon it. the change came with the expectations of the people of Scarlettania.
“You have been weighed in the balance and found lacking,” the king said... "But we Scarlettanian-folk specialize in just and noble weights and measures; and if one considers—in addition to the weights of your trespasses, which are heavy indeed—the weights of your lives’ experience, one must acknowledge that is not so grievous a matter after all. You have had a paltry dose of lessons in what matters in this world and your own.”

Once in this new world, the Macefields were required to have their faults weighed and balanced as grown-ups might. They were not treated as children any longer. With this new treatment came the change. When more than customary expectations are demanded from a person, his courage and character [ought to] rise to the occasion. That's what happened to the Macefield bunch. That's what happens to us if we see ourselves in the Lord's mirror for what we are. And then, when we look in the back of the mirror to see Christ's gift, we grow. We grow in ways imperceptible and visible. We grow in ways we'd never imagined. We grow and we are forever changed.

"...What say you, Adelaide-mine?" The long fingers closed around her arm and rooted her to the spot.
Adelaide's heart thundered in her chest but she would not show fear to this man. She raised her eyes to meet his with frank clarity. "I say to death with you. To death with your traitorous wolf-kind."  

-The Scarlet-Gypsy Song