A Cup of Darkness

"Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.” - Novalis | Writer | Editing the first draft of my first book | Small Fantasy, Soft Si-Fi, and Alternative Literature

[ivorjerome]

New to this blog?

Greetings and welcome!

I am a young writer and I go by the pen name Ivor Jerome. This is a blog dedicated to my current works-in-progress and any updates I may have about them. I’ll be showing off cover art, book blurbs, special teasers, and anything else that springs to mind. 

Please enjoy this writing journey with me. I love seeing other people’s work too!

At the moment, I am performing major edits on my first real novel: They Are But a Breath. Set in a mythical desert land called Siddam, it tells the story of three brothers, the first a solider, the second a prophet, and the third only a child, dealing with the abuses of their father while also experiencing the strange call of a nearly forgotten deity. As their lives crash back into each other after years of separation, they each are given choices that will not only affect their lives, but perhaps their very souls as well. 

Current cover design:

Other WIP:

The Mythic Trilogy: 

Mythic, Cataclysmica, and Deify are what I call a “Small Fantasy.” It is a world based on the intersection between Germanic and Greco-Roman Folklore, but although the setting is large and rich, the story will be small (I was never interested in large wars or political intrigue). It features a young woman named Ganymede (yes, I know that is originally a boy’s name) who is in possession of a book of fairy tales so old and tattered that its cover is missing---but worse of all, so is the ending. She sets out on a quest with her little donkey to find out the ending to the story. Along the way she meets Uthor, the youngest son of the King, who agrees to help her find the missing pages if she will use her knowledge of history and mythology to solve the mystery of a string of temple and museum robberies. But, of course, things are always more than what they seem...

Romance the Undead

A series of Pacific NW Paranormal mystery/romances. Think “mid-90's grunge pacific northwest twin-peaks" vibe.

Various short stories:

2023 Inkling's Challenge: Strange Gods

Ugh so I am not happy with how my @inklings-challenge story is turning out. I like the idea, don't think it's executed the best and it's not

2. 2024 Inkling's February Challenge: Tam Lin

2024 Four Loves Fairy Tale Challenge: Here is my Tam Lin retelling for the @inklings challenge. Part 1: There once was a very rich merchant

3. 2024 Inkling's Challenge: The Top of the World

Okay doeky, I have completed my short story for the @inklings-challenge! It really was a challenge for me because I got team Tolkien and I a

4. 2024 Inkling's Christmas Challenge: The Empress Celeste

The Empress Celeste_Draft 2.pdf

Finished with my Christmas @inklings-challenge for 2024! I have ideas to expand or write a series of stories as it feels like a sort of preq

Poems:

On the Wings of Eternity

this is a rough poem idea: airplane travels through time and a knight sees it. Based on the painting below, which I would cite but I cannot

God in a cloud In a womb In a box God walked in a garden With his son of the dust God in a garden In the cool In the dark God spoke from a f

*Feel free to reblog but please do not repost anything without credit. Thank you!

[ivorjerome]

Flight

Staring upward at the gliding pale sea Bolted to the earth Bound by gravity

Corals of clouds stratify In white waves From horizon to horizon

I saw grey clouds ready to burst Gold and green-yellow trees, lit as if The sun shone within Rain across the river, strikes purple lightning I saw mankind fall from the sky With not a scratch on ‘em

Staring up at the sky through metal grates Crossed above my head My body aches The rays stretch further along the concrete

What else is there to do? But shut tight your eyes And take flight

[ivorjerome]

Cleave

I took my bride weeping from her home Fair was her cheek and fair was her hair I took her home with me to the sea On rocky shores where lions lie I took her from her mother From the warmth of her bed I took her from her father Heart in dread and pleading I took her by the hand leading Away from the cool and green of her gardens growing With her sowing hardening soil I took her heart and eyes in weeping Sleeping at the edge of the waters I took her hands and feet Weaving every tear and pearl at my table I took her tongue and breath Song thrown in churning waters I took her and love her in my home on the waves A stone in a storm-petrel’s throat

[ivorjerome]

Short story called The Tallahassee Morning Glory.

[ivorjerome]

Her cheek had gone from pale to red and O'Dell thought she might cry, but not a tear fell down her face. In fact he had never seen her cry. Become flush with white angry, bite coldy cruel answers to his questions, or steal longing glances at Fritz as though there was something inside him she had once had and was now lost or that she had never had and wished to take, but never in any of these had tears flown. She would not let them. At least not with him watching.

“What if you had ten thousand fighting men?” he asked it without thinking, the old roots of childish fancies long ago born from history books and nursery tales taking hold his blood. “Ten thousand soldiers, and you a fairy queen to command them with your every whim. What then?” He could see her all in blood-gold and white coals on a throne of roses and sea-shells, looking angry and terrible and lovely, fingers curled round a starry wand, pointing her hoards to her enemies below.

She did not laugh or toss her head. “I would send them out, I think, into the waves. Pull me back the deepest, blackest, most horrid thing, and have it brought to my castle. I suppose I have a castle.”

“Yes. Ten castles.”

“Well I’d take it to my favorite one. And it would bite and claw and draw blood but I’d feed it my enemies whole up. And it would hate me, for keeping it out of the sea with my magic. I suppose I have magic too.”

“Of course,” said O’Dell, swallowing.

“Oh it would hate me,” she spoke softly, almost tenderly, as if it’s hatred were something wonderful, something longed for. “It would hate me and love me and tear me to pieces and I’d put myself together again and again and again for it to break with its love, until the ocean dried and the stars burnt all out.”

[ivorjerome]

I wrote this a few weeks ago but that post about Charon made me go finish editing it. It's very short for me, only 1500 words or so

[ivorjerome]

Orbit

There sleeping in an August dawn

Before the sun winks his eye

Bruised blue outside the window

Awake yet listening to the stillness

A cupboard opens in the kitchen a floor above

Clinks and running water sound softly

From the early riser trying with all his heart to be considerate

Bitter scent of bubbling coffee rouses

A boy from his bed

No breakfast

Too early

Excitement tapping out each heartbeat as the wind

Cool and earth-smelling

Rushes free on the highway

Father balances coffee in one hand, never a drop spilt, and the wheel in the other

Dark fields turn grey, set fire as light shoots straight sharp rays to hit the cattles' eyes as they graze

A smear of black and white and sometimes mud outside the window

Fingers tapping

Stretching up in the distance a single white mark against a domed sky

Enormous as a magic beanstalk

Catching the eye

Stirring the heart

A lookout point clusters with other early risers

Sleepless, silent, speaking only in whispers

Watching across the waters

For the echo of a countdown

Then the sound explodes out

All bodies run to the railing

The boy pulls his father forward, wriggling to the front

Shivering in the cool breeze

Gripping tightly

Steam billows in a gown of white

Heat erupts with the shivering ground

Traveling from the soles of feet to the top of the many heads

The rocket stretches away from earth

Brushes the first step of heaven

And the young boy holds his father's hand

Like a planet in orbit around a bright star

[ivorjerome]

The Letter

Deliver to: The white lily garden On the crescent of the moon, Where the hourglass spills On its side, The sands balanced still, Where my beloved dreams.

Sent from: The sunken fountain At the bottom of the lavender sea, Where pearled fishes fly Under the rocking foam, Where I sew new stars In the reflection of the sky.

[ivorjerome]

Mantle Dragon

There lives a dragon In segments of white, Holly-berry red and green, bright peppermint shades, Scaled in hexagonal grannysquares Hung against the fire-warm bricks

On Christmas Eve his belly plumps Of German chocolate frogs, canned sardines in olive oil, Candied blackberries, swiss army pocket knives, Aged packages of cheddar cheese, rolls of butterscotch, Dried sausages, raspberry coffee beans, and candy canes

Year by year his tail grows Over the fireplace, Packed away in storage boxes labeled Christmas in black marker, Deeply sleeping for eleven long months Until December stirs his jaws again

[ivorjerome]

She's thinking about a bench in a park that she would sit at feeding ducks. Or something of that sort. She's thinking about how it was under the long arms of a weeping willows and that if she were to go back now, it would be all changed, you know. The tree chopped down, even the stump uprooted. The pond filled in, the bench tossed in the city dump. Concrete and white and yellow lines marking where she had once played among growing things and was happy. I think she is thinking about her mother."

I paused, blushing from speaking so much. Good grief, I went on some! Poor Luriel was eyeing me, head tilted. I suppose I must sound like my grandpa, going on like that. Well, it couldn't be helped. It happens as one ages, seeing as you've lived so long you have a story for everything.

"I wonder that you don't go mad, having life rush on with no stopping it," the postmen said, almost too quiet for my poor ears. His eyes held a flash of curiosity.

"But of course! Don't we all?" I said cheerfully, stepping up to the door. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Luriel shaking his head slowly but I paid it no mind. I knew that look on this poor woman's face. I had seen it myself in the green-edged mirror at my old home in Pressfield. She looked as though one little puff from this wind might be the end of her. Well, this letter would be just the thing!

My fingers stiffened with cold, the light now so dim that I could not longer read the scrawl on the back of the packet, I opened the mail flap.

[ivorjerome]

December 1st

Vapor trails streak across the cold winter sky Cat whiskers Dragon scratches Winter sky that always seems to hang in gloom and pink Regardless of the time of day A tree sweatered in ivy A mother putting up paper snowflakes with her children In a front window A dead bird lies in the mud by the children’s playground Lines of white-cheeked goose A few gulls Pecking at the grass Vees of black birds and clattering crows overhead White speckles of lichen on the clear sidewalk That always leads home

[ivorjerome]

On the way to his rooms, just down at the end of the eastern wing that would have shown the foamy grey of the sea in the distance had not fields and woods crowded out the horizon, he thought of how he could paint the orange light of the oil lamp and the white-coal crystal doorknob in that moment where she had paused, nothing else visible save darkness and the white of her fingers. Her face—her eyes—would be hidden by her hair, head bent down and slightly tilted towards the doorframe, away from the viewer.

He would frame her near the bottom right corner, letting the walls, deep and black and purple fill up the rest of the canvas. Perhaps even Waterhouse would pose up at the top of on of the reliefs that patterned the hallway, almost a suggestion rather a corporeal beast, only differentiated from the darkness by the light reflecting off his feathers and terrible eyes. Bedtime of the Modern Sybil or something like that.

Hang the business, he thought, before stripping down to his under-clothes and falling into his own bed, for once instantly asleep.

[ivorjerome]

At The Celimonica he arrived a little red with cold and a little numb around the fingers but the attendants greeted him with hot brandy in exchange for checking in his coat and scarf.

Up the stairs in low lit rooms simmering with smoke and hot food and after dinner coffee, laughter and clattering billiard balls filled his ears and shut up everything in his mind back into its proper box. Here was Quinton and Hale, here was fresh duck swimming in mushrooms and roasted potatoes, here was a roaring fire and roaring conversation, though O'Dell for his part was content to speak but rarely and beat hand after hand of cards.

In truth, he would have rather gone down to the quieter places, to the bohemian houses and painters studios, eaten tiny pickles and sardines on over-salted crackers while discussing some stuffy new volume of poetry newly published, but he knew that the chest in his mind that looked like a coffin where the girl was kept would never shut in those places. Where there was poetry or light on a canvas or a smear of white clay, there she would be, staring hatred at him with black-gold eyes.

It was worse in the dark pews of a church. He had found it was never possible to keep certain drawers in his mind shut whenever he passed through a cathedral's doors, no matter how hard he tried, even before—well, before Europe. Before he had sworn off all Rockford's delicious vices. He felt that priests and preachers could see all that was in his mind spilling out onto the marble floors, blackening their pure white with old poisons. But they had never cast him out. "Despair is the worst sin," one of the Dominican friars had told him, on one of his walks through the French countryside. "Do you think yourself so above Christ that you have sinned in a way He cannot forgive? Nonsense. Sin is uncreative. A million times Father Paul has heard the same wicked thing over and over again and soon one learns if there is one thing that is uncreative in this world it is sin. Being an artist, son, that should comfort you."

"If it isn't sin, what's the most creative thing then?" O'Dell had asked.

"Love," said the Dominican.

[ivorjerome]

"Steam billowed into the air, dark against the red smear in the cold horizon. The grinding squeals of steel wheels against the tracks bothered O'Dell but little. He owed his life to railroads and the long golden plains across which they stretched. Before that, it had been long strands of white cotton in the mills, stained pink with blood until his young fingers grew as hard as the steel which built his own little empire--modest compared to Rockford's and Quinton's and the rest, but the very doorstep of heaven to himself, his mother, now passed, and his sister, now married."

-Ivor Jerome, Cream and Honey WIP

[ivorjerome]

An Evening Walk in the Last Days of Summer

What a wild Friday night Shuffling papers looking for some divine intervention Words of inspiration Words with tang and bite Each toe painted a different piece of arriving autumn Aspen eyes have blinked shut Clouds so white and thin they float like enormous fish bones A talk with God on the jungle gym Far distant freeways sparkle with evening headlights Yellow and white and red in hazy dots between northern hills Watch the airplanes drift from edge To edge of the world

[ivorjerome]

I finished the first draft of my Snow White retelling, The Chain and the Doll. It needs editing but at least it's technically completed now. It's around 45,000 words which is about 40,000 words more than I originally intended but oh well.

[ivorjerome]

Thank you for reading it! I updated it so I think it should be good now

[ivorjerome]

I finished the first draft of my Snow White retelling, The Chain and the Doll. It needs editing but at least it's technically completed now. It's around 45,000 words which is about 40,000 words more than I originally intended but oh well.

The Chain and the Doll