Grief

My Dad will have been gone four years this July. It was a long and hard death for him. He'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's nearly 20 years before. He outlived my Mom by five years, and struggled to the very end in a body that literally disintegrated around him. My sister and her son took care of him and I helped when I could. But in the end we could only wait until he gave up.

I don't remember everything that happened then, but this is what I do remember:

Reading saved my life. My oldest best friend, Loren Rhoads was finishing up her space opera trilogy, In The Wake of the Templars, which she had sold to Night Shade Books. The fact that my friend had made a sale to a major publisher was literally the best thing that happened in.... it seemed like years.

She was on the tightest deadline I could imagine--it was months, where I take years to finish anything. Loren was doing it.

In the midst of all of that, she started sending me the book in progress, chapter by chapter. Now I couldn't tell you if it was one a week or a day, but it seemed as though, I woke up every day to something new, something exciting. Something that wasn't me at work, carrying my phone around all day waiting for the CALL.

My last memory of my Dad was that last day, sitting by his bed, trying to get him to wake up and take some water. It's also of Raena and her adventures. No More Heroes was so much more than a distractaction. It was a story that I could hang on to, in spite of everything. As I read Loren's story, I even had hope that there would be a time I could write my own again. I don't think I ever thanked her properly for that. 

Find all of them here

Day Eight: Two. More. Pages. Of something completely different.

So, here's this week's first page. Well, it's two pages, but you know.... So it's from a space opera I've been working on... Sorta, with Loren Rhoads, who is the Queen Of Getting Me In Trouble.

So the story is called Drifter, and it's about the crew of the Panacea, who come across a derelict ship, just floating along in space, the middle of relative night. Well, the crew are pretty honest when they can be, but how can you just let all those perfectly good parts go? Of course they find more on the ship than parts..... And new boots.

This scene is towards the end. Tarik is a member of the crew and Raena is on the run from the Empire. You may remember Tarik, and certainly Raena from Loren's trilogy, In the Wake of the Templars. (If you don't, start with the first one, The Dangerous Type. they're awesome and you won't regret it!)  Here they are teenagers, having just met. Poor Tarik is younger, and has barely spoken to a girl before.....

“I gotta a buncha brothers and sisters.” Tarik said before he thought it through.

Raena gave him a half smile. “A bunch? Where are they now?”

Tarik looked out the port, habit from left over from home, when he could tell time by the slant of the sun. It was the only thing he missed. Almost. He’d been on the Plague for only a year, but he already knew he never wanted dirt under his boots again. “There…. Were seven of us. All working the Coalition base on APLANET . We were loading the Panacea when the Imps hit the port.” He rubbed his eyes. “My sister gave me her blaster and sealed me into the hold with the supplies. She said one of them would find me.”

He left off the rest.

“I have a sister.” Raena said. “She would have done that for me too.”

“Yeah.” Tarik stuck a smile on his face and put his siblings to the back of his brain. “Even if you wished she didn’t.”

“Defiantly.”

Then they were both silent. Tarik wanted to apologize. Instead he said, “So do you play-----?”

Raena snorted. “Can I win credit off you?”

“Shaa.” Tarik scoffed. “You c’n try. Like I have any credit.”

The game they play here, and then:

“Do you think your sister survived?”

That caught him off guard. Sky and Doc didn’t talk about the past much. Not theirs, not his. Tarik had picked up the trick. Somehow Raena made him want to feel like he’d come from somewhere again. He shrugged. “Well, she didn’t have a blaster.”

There was a pause. Tarik really hoped Raena wouldn’t tell him the odds or worse, call Taryn a traitor to the Empire. Tarik knew that Raena might think it, but saying it would ruin his chance of making her into a friend. “No. I don’t think any of them survived the attack.”

That wasn’t what he told Doc. Not ever. Doc would never forgive herself for not saving all of them. She needed him to be hopeful, but Tarik wasn’t stupid. His family was dead. The Empire didn’t take grunts prisoner, why would they? No. Tarik knew that they were just extra weight.

“I’m sorry,” Raena said.

Again, he shrugged. “We grew up in the cause. We knew the risks. I just never thought I’d be the only one left.”

She smiled at him, and Tarik wondered if she understood. Who had she lost? Her sister? What about her parents? He hoped, if he talked, she might tell him something about herself. But she revealed nothing at all. So he smiled back. “I guess I just think now that I’m living on borrowed time. I should dead, like they are.”

“Then I’d be dead too.”

His smile widened. “Hope you don’t hold that against me too much.”

The things I (would have) left behind

My best friend and I have always written. We've known each other and have shared our stories for over thirty years. We have lived on opposite sides of the country for almost two thirds of that time, and of course become different people than we were as kids. We've had different lives, but writing has always been the constant.

She asked me, a while ago if she could use a character of mine in a new story she was writing. She would change his name, and the setting, of course, but she wanted to know if it was alright with me if he made an appearance.

I didn't know what to say. I was more than happy to let her have him. I wasn't doing anything with him, that was for sure.  When she began to talk about what role he would play in this new story of hers, I was hit with a wave of uncertainty, as though I was falling back into who I was all those years ago. I was jealous of her new idea, of the writer she was. I felt awful. She had improved her writing so much since then, why was I still struggling with every word?

I wanted to protect what was mine, but I also wanted to let him go. I wanted to see what she did with him. Of the two of us, I had more faith in her than I did in me, to complete the story.

So I gave up my seventeen year old self who felt inferior, and angry about being inferior. That was the first thing, and it wasn't easy. Then I decided to try to be as much help as I could. Not only because she is my best friend, but because I knew I would learn things along the way.

She did finish the book, and my character, who is a relatively minor one, is also one of the heroes. He comes across as a guy who is just doing the best he can while trying to stay as deceit as he can. He's perfect, but he's also not mine anymore. He's one facet of my character, as seen through her eyes, so reading him was so much more fun than I ever expected.

There was another unexpected bonus. She got me thinking about those stories we wrote back then. I decided it might be time for me to start telling my version. I could write that character from the present, with all the things I've learned since we were kids added in. I haven't stayed in the same place, I've moved forward, I've just moved differently. I wanted a story that reflected that, even if only to myself.

The result is the novel I'm working on now, called “The Night Was Not.” It's a neo-Victorian story. This incarnation of the character is called Kerry Hazard. He flies an airship, and is called back to the city of his childhood by an ominous message from a friend. It's a very different story from my friend's novel, which is a space opera (yay!), but the character came from the same place. He was born in the back of a notebook, scribbled in while lying on either of our bedroom floors in the middle of the night. It's where he would have stayed if she hadn't picked him up again.