Romilly John SFF @romilly-jay - Tumblr Blog

Altar Piece

Getting closer to the end of the Tumblr part of the project (and, indirectly, closer to having to commit in some measure to a final shape for this project, or, for this part of the project, at least...)

I came back from the north with ideas, experiences, locations, feelings I'd like to see incorporated into the final - slightly melancholy, faintly foreboding - transitional parts of the novel. The parts that sit liminally - beyond the HEA I'm willing for S and H (not quite written but imagined) - and before any "sequel" - which is even less written or envisaged...

I wrote about - the hope, the fragility, the fear - for a freewriting session with the writing group I currently attend - and capturing extracts, lightly reworked, here - as prayer, as hope, as statement of intent...

The prompt:

I find myself

I find myself: clutching at an evaporating feeling – the feeling of being, untroubled, on a distant shore, seabirds pecking at seaweed-pools or swirling above me. I want this feeling to soak into the final scenes of the novel I am longing to return to – and scared to return to. I flip between certainty that the mood will well up from the page (and that if it doesn’t, it isn’t meant to) – and terror that I’ll fail. Terror is probably too strong a word for this eggshell-thin feeling. It’s thinner than that – less substantial. It’s a crawling itch of worry, not a decibel-shout of storm crashing over my head. More a mosquito than a lightning strike – and yes either one of those things could potentially destroy me but one is more likely to than the other…

The prompt:

An altar to [this] creativity: What is it made of?

The Time Tumbler altar would be –

Transient. Temporary. An altar for this slim, flickering moment.

Never intended to last as a statement for the ages. Not echoing or iterating the hubris of Ozymandia. And not likely, therefore, to survive as remnant shreds to mock or undercut or underline the tragedy of our human brevity. If the brevity of our occupation of consciousness is, indeed, tragic. I mean, it feels like it *is* - but does it have to be?

This altar is at peace with the falling pressure of the passing minutes. It is composed of petals, falling into decay. Perhaps patterns traced in dust or sand or pollen. Designed to be temporary. Designed to mean one thing in the moment of creation when they are crisp and clean – something else when they are half-obscured – and something else again when a visitor can scarcely tell there was intention behind the breath-scattered ash on the smooth, cold, stone surface of the base.

[Fascinating that the swift decay of the main altar components - the patterning of sand, wilt of petal, racing past of instants - are cradled on the dense solidity of granite-limestone-basalt-obsidian... fascinating, too, that these are also collapsing, entropic, towards dust - just on a scale near-imperceptible to my non-TT human senses... And that makes me wonder - how would a TT perceive the passing of aeons? Could they? Would they? - sense deep time - differently from me?]

#am writing #am revising #weird fairytale

Reflections on Blog-i-sode Fifty (!!!)

Okay so I've understood that almost all the set up in this piece getting Mal into that final position is going to be stripped out.

But that I still want to get M to the same place *eventually*. And although I intend him to land "in the water" (again), no reason why he can't transit briefly through the tree-concept on the way. [It's a raft BTW not the floor of the cottage but I like how momentarily it's both?]

I was high up – tree branch level.

There were leaves i In my face, a tangle of leaf-type-things. Spiky thorn-leaves I’d typically associate with a bush-shrub, but also the dark-heart pendant shapes of ivy, also the wiggly-edged, light-veined brightness of young oak, the slick, shiny, poison-looking green of bay laurel. All, apparently, woven together on the same plant. Like someone had collected memory fragments for tree and combined them into one entity.

So this last piece will stay - but probably without rising up from an apparent near-death / actual-death experience. [Although the thing that worked about this - looking back - is that it put S and M in clearly parallel positions, both leading them ultimately into in-between exile.]

So this is an amended version of that final small part - where the transition is assumed to be M moving (admittedly rather abruptly and unprepared-ly!) from the BZ to the in-between.

I was F-A-L-L-I-N-G….

Falling. Flailing. Turning. Tumbling.

Tumbling - but not with any sense of being in control of the jump.

All effort going into trying to remember how - trying to right myself.

I landed! A roll, a tumble, a flailing of thankfully whole-feeling limbs. Body flexing and responding as I wanted it to - as, I guess, normal. I was inexplicably back in what looked and felt like my body.

Something hard beneath me. Wooden planks? Floorboards?

And – I was alone.

===================================

ATM I'm more thinking that M will be going about his restricted lil life in the Broken Zone and that Tay's acts as the connection - dumping *him* into the in-between as the other side of the seesaw, the counter-balance to Hravn and Shalva not falling in, this time round the loop.

And I like *this* description of the sensation of being flung out from the regular time-flow, so will probably weave that in again, just from different starting point. A reaction to Tay sending in the Slim Slider and M (instinctively? deliberately?) picking it up as it touches the rift?

There was a dramatic, though eerily silent, explosion of sparks where the metallic scarring on my right palm intersected with the inhibitor bracelet embedded around my right wrist. The whole of my right arm was engulfed in a spitting shower of flames that boiled up at that exact spot. Red // then orange // then yellow // then white // then – multiples shades of green. Green. GREEN? Yes, suddenly, there was a green tinge across everything I was looking at. Shades of green suffused my vision. light and delicate at the centre and coalescing to a dark, fuzzy moss-colour and moss-texture round the edges of my field of view. I had an immediate, involuntary sense-memory of plunging into ocean at the end of my last (ever?) time-jump, so vivid that I gasped and my left hand flew up to my eyes, as if I could wipe the green tint away, like so much seaweed. I coughed to expel seawater, but my mouth was dry.

It's very important to me that Shalva plays an active part in her own rescue (// balancing between putting her in the lead position but/and also calling in collaboration with her network to Get It Done...) but/and I don't think I'm going to do that by having her complex plan with getting the token *out* of the in-between // *to* Emilia //*to* Mallory and back to herself - the version of herself that's still in the tree. Like - I kinda see it (it's the looping back round to her earlier self when she can't directly move around in time - any more than Mallory can) so - *maybe* - but I would really prefer to do something that's a bit more <<straight-line>>

In the current version of the story I'm not too sure how I would use this but I would like to keep on the "recycle me if possible" bench:

Beyond the leaves, then in amongst them, two faces.

One is an old-ish lady* whose face seems faintly familiar. She’s wearing an orange, full-length, full sleeved overall, the kind designed for protection in an active environment.

The other, also female, is in Time-Tumbler jump wear and seeing her fills me with a burst of joy that starts in my midriff and swells up in my chest until I think I might explode.

‘Mallory? MALLORY!’ she was shouting.

Or - does it matter really, actually? In a version of the story where M is not being framed as the protagonist - but S is. Does it matter that he's seen images of Netty on the wall in the PWN? Not much, amIrite?

*Manners! Old-ish??? If only you knew...! The weird med-tech keeping her alive and relatively young means that she's simultaneously bio-young and chrono-ANCIENT (but why would M know that? He must just be young enough that 35 seems entirely decripid already...)

#am writing #am revising

Blog-i-sode Fifty

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

Lost –

I wish I could say that this vision (hallucination?) spurred me into some kind of action.

It didn’t. I gawped. I glanced in the direction Blue Light’s machine had vanished, feeling a distant, disembodied curiosity about whether I could spot any sign that it was returning. Nothing. Glanced in the direction I myself had arrived from, in case the machines had circled round and were approaching from a tunnel that connected into that one. There were several routes they could take from the far side of the loading bay section that would achieve that, I happened to know. My brain automatically drifting towards enumerating them and making a quick calculation as to which they would be more likely to use and –

Mallory. Mallory. Mallory?

Weird echo inside my head, like I was ‘hearing’ someone as they thought my name.

I snapped out of my map-route reverie to find I was standing in front of the painting with Shalva’s token in my hand. I must have opened the pocket it was in and grabbed hold of it from force of the same engrained habit that had me stowing it in there in the first place.

‘AWK.’

I became aware that Pirate was standing very close to my legs. I looked down to see her pulling energetically at my bandage – the one I’d stuffed into the same pocket in a loose knot and which must have fallen out when I retrieved the token. The bandage was resisting the bird’s tugging motion, because, I realised, I was standing on one side of its knotted coil.

An idea struck me. I could use the bandage to tie the token back onto Pirate’s leg. Pirate could deliver the token to the girl-in-the-mural. From paint she came and to paint…

It was, I quickly saw, a terrible, terrible idea. I had no right to assume the collared crow would be willing to trade one mural-home for another. I had no evidence that I would be capable of opening a – what did Emilia call it… fissure – into the time-rift painting and no assurance I’d be capable of enduring the effects if the metal in my arm burst into flames.

And if I did manage to deliver the crow into the time-point depicted in the mural, that would surely mean sending them into danger, perhaps to their own death. Dubious choice whether or not it helped tree-Shalva and I had no logical grounds for thinking that it would.

Shaking my head, I bent to pick up the bandage, intending to put it back in my pocket.

At that exact moment, I heard the crackle of intercom static and saw the emergency lighting flick on a couple of bays over. Out of time and still timebound. My time was up.

I fumbled at the bandage with leaden fingers, picking it up but immediately dropping it again. I made a grab for its loosely knotted centre and instead batted it with the back of my hand so that it bounced against the wall and then back at me… past me… low and slow.

I span round and reached out for the catch but instead dropped the KeepSafe token, the momentum of my turn sending it scudding off along the floor.

Flurry of wings and skittering of clawed feet on a hard, stony surface – Pirate sprang into action and chased after the token, her movements fiercer and faster than mine.

‘Pirate!’ I hiss-shouted, giving chase, my actions fuelled by a bump of urgency from my conviction that I could hear machines moving towards us across the adjacent loading bay.

Pirate reached the token, snatched it off the ground, and wheeled back towards me.

Already in clumsy motion, I overshot and found myself staring at through into the next loading bay right as one of the flying machines appeared at the top of the doorway.

I’m – outoftime – outoftime – outoftime– I’m –

Pirate awk’d behind me. The sound was a welcome distraction from staring towards the floating machine like a doomed rabbit.

I turned to see the bird staring at the mural. She seemed to be fixated on the same spot as before. Not the girl-in-the-tree. Something at the base of the tree, where the blended tree-girl’s feet could just be seen, encased inside a tangle of tree-roots. Was it – the KeepSafe?

The bird’s head moved. Tilted. She was looking from one side, then from the other.

Then, everything seemed to happen all at once.

Pirate made a sudden lunge at the painting, Shalva’s token still gripped in her beak. Instinctively – I couldn’t have explained why, precisely – I rushed to pull her away from the painted surface. Maybe it was as simple as the scene triggered memories of danger – not just danger, peril! – and terror – and loss – and grief – and worry about unravelling consequences.

In the same instant, two further machines appeared in the entrance. I had a flash impression of them as I moved. The smaller machine was a second flying unit and as it appeared, it fell into alignment with the one already there, up towards the ceiling. The other new arrival, the larger one – much larger than I remembered, large enough that it almost filled the doorway – was the wheeled machine, from [the future-times before] and from just now in the corridor. The one I felt sure detected me behind the rockfall but for reasons unknown had let me get away. Couldn’t really imagine that would happen again, here.

My nerves were firing so fast they seemed to transform what I saw into a kind of tableau. Disembodied and remote, like it was somehow nothing to do with me after all. A living mural echoing and in opposition to the painted one I was heading towards.

As if from a long way off, I faintly heard the transmission crackle as one of the flying machines sent a status update: ‘Visual contact confirmed: Two living entities, one avian, the other human with identifiably Terran implant around the RH carpus. Identity unconfirmed.’

And, ethereal /// far-away /// insubstantial /// the matching crackle of a response –

‘Okay, that’s enough for now. We can do the rest here. Bring ‘em in, Bramble.’

***

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

And Found –

I was moving quite fast as the closing crackle signified the remote speaker signing off and my plan was roughly as sophisticated as: catch the crow as if this was a ball game and let the momentum carry me out into the tunnels beyond. I couldn’t really hope to out-run Blue Light’s search party, but I thought I might be able to hide from them. Especially if the wheeled machine was still minded to pretend it couldn’t find me.

It was never a great plan and it became completely unworkable the moment grabbed at Pirate, using both hands, as if I was planning to hug her into my chest and run down the field towards Goal. Which, somehow, was roughly what my brain thought I was trying to do.

Unfortunately, exactly when I made contact with Pirate, Pirate also made a stabbing motion in the direction of the painted KeepSafe and I felt the judder through her body and into mine as she connected hard against rock. I heard the dull tink of metal being struck with some energy against a hard surface. From beak or token, I couldn’t tell.

I might have worried that the bird had hurt herself, but my attention was consumed by greater fear for myself. Because, as Pirate connected with the wall, there was a dramatic, though eerily silent, explosion of sparks where the metallic scarring on my right palm intersected with the inhibitor bracelet embedded around my right wrist. The whole of my right arm was engulfed in a spitting shower of flames that boiled up at that exact spot.

Red // then orange // then yellow // then white // then – multiples shades of green.

Green. GREEN? Yes, suddenly, there was a green tinge across everything I was looking at. Shades of green suffused my vision. light and delicate at the centre and coalescing to a dark, fuzzy moss-colour and moss-texture round the edges of my field of view. I had an immediate, involuntary sense-memory of plunging into ocean at the end of my last (ever?) time-jump, so vivid that I gasped and my left hand flew up to my eyes, as if I could wipe the green tint away, like so much seaweed. I coughed to expel seawater, but my mouth was dry.

My cough – didn’t sound right, though. It came out high and strangled and alien.

Far, far away, an alarm was blaring. It pulled at me, demanding my attention.

I turned and – found myself looking down at a crumpled body. Mine. I was – it was –

motionless, with dark smoke rising all along its (my?) right side. The larger machine and one of the flying units were bending over it, doing things that might have been intended to help or might have been about collecting the data. The alarm was coming from the second small unit.

But – if I was there, how was I also watching from here?

(Where was here? Did I die? Was this… afterwards?)

(And – what happened to the bird? Where was Pirate?)

‘Awk,’ said Pirate, flooding me with relief.

She sounded close. So-very-close. Wh – ?

I looked in the direction of the noise and caught movement from beyond the end of my nose, the dark, blunt outline of the crow’s beak. Still green-infused, I saw a flash of iridescent feathers. I heard the crow’s beak snick closed and open but – I also felt it move.

I rolled my eye around again. My perspective was coming from higher up than I was used to. I risked a glance back at crumpled-body-Mallory. Yes, I was looking down on the scene not from directly above but from a steep angle, two body-heights or so up. Would have been a pretty nice starting point for a time-jump, as some part-buried instinct reminded me.

From up here, I had a clear view of the various medical-looking devices attached to crumpled-Mallory’s collapsed body.

The body had been rolled onto its back and a hand-sized box had been attached left-of-centre of the chest, where it was making a regular series of buzzing, electronic-sounding pulse-beats. The unencumbered left wrist now had a strappy thing bound around it. There was a thin glass tube protruding from the mouth and a collection of small, round, silvered patches attached to temples and throat and perhaps in other places I couldn’t immediately see.

If I ignored how queasy all that was making me feel, I could focus on my absolute horror to see one of the flying units clamped onto the right wrist and drilling into it. I realised, to a spasm of disgust, that I could hear the high whine of the drill as it dug in, then felt wild – illogical? – relief when I understood that the drill was positioned not against the body’s flesh but right in the middle of the inhibitor bracelet and more relief still when the drilling ceased.

‘Report.’ Blue Light’s voice, staticky and remote.

‘Device is identifiably related to proprietary medical tech and has been configured for neural intervention but the specific configuration is not recognised. Impossible to make an accurate assessment of the purpose or function of the adaptation absent a living test subject.’

‘The tech recipient can’t be revived?’

‘Unclear. Probability of successful revival is greater than nil based on pathway analysis but ninety six percent of the initial routes identified ended with resuscitation failure.’

‘Bring it anyway. Much easier to reverse-engineer the implant if resuscitation can be achieved and we have a wider set of options to work with here than in the field.’

‘Confirmed,’ the machine said.

I bounded forward to prevent them, or try to, ignoring how badly that went for me the first time round. Except – I banged into something invisible, solid, impenetrable.

There was no way for me to intervene, not even uselessly.

No option but to watch as the machines began working to move the body from the floor up onto the tray-style surface that the wheeled machine had uncovered in readiness.

No option? Not true. I had the option not to watch. And I took it.

I turned round – with more of a hopping motion than I was used to using – and found a partial explanation for the angle of my perspective and for the green tinges to my vision.

I was high up – tree branch level. There were leaves in my face, a tangle of leaf-types. The spiky thorn-leaves I’d typically associate with a bush-shrub, but also the dark-heart pendant shapes of ivy, the wiggly-edged, light-veined brightness of young oak, and the slick, shiny, poison-looking green of bay laurel. All, apparently, woven together on the same plant. Like someone had collected memory fragments for tree and combined them into one entity.

My eyes adjusted and – beyond the leaves, then in amongst them, two faces.

One is an old-ish lady whose face seems faintly familiar. She’s wearing an orange, full-length, full sleeved overall, the kind designed for protection in an active environment.

The other, also female, is in Time-Tumbler jump wear and seeing her fills me with a burst of joy that starts in my midriff and swells up in my chest until I think I might explode.

‘Mallory? MALLORY!’ she was shouting.

How she could recognise me, I –

Her hand reached for me, past and through the branches, and when she touched me – A fizzing, sparking eruption of flame and light and I was f-a-l-l-i-n-g….

Falling. Flailing. Turning. Tumbling. Trying to right myself.

I landed – with a crunch/crash and a scramble of comfortingly human limbs.

I was inexplicably back in what looked and felt like my body.

Something hard beneath me. Wooden planks? Floorboards?

And – I was alone.

#science fiction #time travel #body horror #am writing #am revising

Things I // Do Not // Want to Remember

This is a raw draft - lightly revisited - from a writing group free-writing session and I'm chucking it in here as additional raw material. Fitting it into the series of things that have inspired / are inspiring / me as an ///interior/// creative source rather than the usual ///exterior/// sources.

I was expecting to write some kind of freeform verse - from the prompt, my idea was that it might be an example of the kinds of poetry that would be read at a TT Farewelling. Or even from the liturgy.

That's not what happened. Instead, I was drawn into thinking about what it might *feel* like to live within a culture where memory, already non-linear, might have that effect exaggerated by including memories from well beyond the span of one's own lifetime. And then - inevitably? - became drawn to the feeling of living with/after an Un-naming. When memories would presumably still arise but should not be vocalised.

This is from Hanne's POV (itself interesting bcz typically I have zero at all desire to write from within her perspective - a written doc perhaps?)

What it is to remember tomorrow morning’s dew /// the smell of bread rising next Tuesday /// the precise twist-turning path of a brook by the meadow on your great-great-grandmother’s wedding day – altered forever by the great floods when your father was seven then erased again when your uncle - your Da's baby brother - dammed upstream of the meadow to create a fish farm [nursery] once he inherited the farm.

What it is to remember -

How your hair flops across one eyebrow, how you touch it away and how your nose wrinkles when it immediately falls back – to remember being with you every day, every day and now not able to mention your name, ever, ever again. To know that I could meet you to walk to the far end of the training ground again, together. Yesterday, or the day before or the same time last year or a decade ago. But never forward. Never when you’re thirty. Eighty-two. Nineteen. Never then. Never.

What it will mean for me when I walk into the schoolzone one final time and graduate alone – alone in a crowd of my peers – alone in having no jump-partner. Alone in all the ways that matter. To see a life of service unfolding before me and no companion to shake the folds out as we reach them. And that you ///SHOULD/// be here. That it’s by some unacceptable freakery that you are - - - - - - - - - NOT.

==============================================

So no, I won’t be going back again.

Not until I’ve unpuzzled the puzzle. Found you when you are. We’ll be coming back together, dammit – or not at all. There’s no accepting this un-natural severing. This chrono-segregation. I saw you tumble – whole - before the end. Before the rift erupted. I saw you jump – into the void. I will spend what life remained convinced - convicted - you live! That you live, breathe, dwell - out of time but barely. Nearly within reach...

Only –

Terrible thought. Any life I live from NOW hollows me. Age me, alter me. How can we find ourselves again pinned into a future that has gouged me and left you – untouched. How could I bear our de-sychronisation?

It can’t be borne. I refuse it. If the timeflow cannot be re-entered 'normally' - in the normal course of things, no-one spends more than moments in-between - that rupture cannot be endured /// It must be repaired. Repealed. Reversed. Re-sealed. I *must* unloop, untwist this.

==============================================

#am writing #am revising #time travel #science fiction #weird fairytale

Reflections on Blog-i-sode Forty-Nine

[Whoop! Exciting to be working my way into and through the last ten entries - this is the ninth from the end. Also - *waaaaah* because this process has been SO rich /// fulfilling /// rewarding /// generative. Also - feel like a CHEAT today bcz these are fun words that DON'T BELONG.*]

*I say "these words don't belong" with the *greatest* confidence and yet I also - with great confidence - predicted the elimination of time-travelling Pirate [the collared crow] and yet, and yet, with some adjustment to the context,** I'm now planning to retain her "cameo". In quotes because I'm not convinced it's merely a cameo, either...!!

** it's the elimination of the context that will be fatal to the present scenes: IF Mallory is no longer going to hide in the past somewhere in the tunnels. And I'm pretty sure he isn't. [On which - I have literally thousands and thousands of words that cover various, different characters wandering around in the Starah Miasto tunnel complex and almost ALL of which have ended up on the cutting room floor.*** Like, definitively We Regret That We No Longer Have Room For This In Our Vision Of The Narrative. Not Now. Not Anywhen. Just - No. Sorry.]

*** This has happened SO MUCH that I can only take it as evidence that my Unconscious Self has had something deeply tethering to work through - something that involves: isolation, darkness, a desperate search to be reunited with loved ones, [but also] small scraps of hope in the depths of lost-dark-isolation [ - try as I might, the narrative resists becoming horror and instead, veers towards a kind of hope-after-hope].

==============================================

This is - fundamentally - the reason I want Pirate back in the narrative, her role preserved: bcz I spent some time in a bird hide up in Scotland and it inspired two specific, particular, TR-related thoughts.

The first was: I want this exact structure to be the place Mallory hides out - no pun intended - in the period between crash-landing into the twins'-era past [well before his own lifetime, also before the PWN is established, thus before his adopted native present as a guardian]. If he's not going to live in the cave complex and IS going to live - scrappily - somewhere in the Broken Zone, well, I want him to live in THIS. *And* my busy brain just invented the reason it might exist - thanks, Netty.

The second was: I want his time there to *feel* more like the way I felt being in this space - full of yearning, receiving bittersweet comfort from the landscape, experiencing both-isolation-and-calming-reassurance. Not a tone mostly of despair, from a sense of exile and failure - but a sense of being FAR AWAY and yet being nourished in the place you're in, being fed by what *is* present, being calmed, and - yes! - comforted.

PS the views are there for mood/tone not to establish the setting - in the Broken Zone, M is an awfully long way from the sea. Once he's been bizarrely crash-bounced into HIS version of the in-between, on the other hand... it's first a raft and then an island and this applies perfectly.

================================================

Which leaves me with the question: what if anything would I want to rescue - as scraps - from the text in B-49? Gonna drop those scraps in below, as "treasure" for some future-time "dressing-up box"...

/// Hilariously, in retrospect, my first instinct was to freeze. Idiot. Like stopping moving now would convince whoever was on their way over here to stop investigating. /// Happily, getting angry with myself was the jolt I needed to start moving again. ///

/// I discovered that I’d retracted my wrist involuntarily, hiding it behind my body. Like that would help. /// I considered retreating but decided that the noise would be detectable. I was just going to have to wait it out. And hope… for what? That the unit searching for me couldn’t check CO2 concentrations for signs of human respiration? Or wouldn’t think of using an infrared scan to test for nearby body heat signatures? (I’d read about original settler technologies in the Archives during some of my extensive downtime at the Place Without Names, though it never once occurred to me to be afraid of one day experiencing them.) ///

///To my horror, the machine was looking exactly in my direction. /// As I watched, the pincers retracted towards the machine’s comms interface in what could have approximated to putting a finger across the lips. Shhhhh. Then, the machine executed a slow, deliberate 180 degree spin away from me and opened a staticky transmission channel. ///

/// When I – finally – extracted myself, Pirate, the collared crow, was nowhere to be seen. /// Now that she was missing – missing or at any rate, not obviously here – I was torn. Could I spare any of my valuable running away time to try to track her down? And – did I need to? ///

==============================================

The thought filled me with terror – and with gut-longing for my friends.

I turned back to the mural and gazed at Shalva-in-the-tree. There she was, painted, both here-and-not-here. I said her name to myself again. A defiance. A claim: that Shalva remained - alive - somewhen and that the question I should always have pursued was *WHICH when*.

I made eye contact and again had the disconcerting feeling that the girl-in-the-tree-in-the-painting was looking right back at me. I imagined her stepping out of the tree to join me. Imagined us putting our resources together, figuring out how to escape. Evade. Get home.

What happened instead was, I suppose, just as implausible but utterly convinced me. Mural-Shalva’s lips started to move. Well, they moved or I hallucinated them moving. In my head, her voice was instantly – delightfully –recognisable, her meaning clear, unambiguous.

‘The token, Mallory.’ She seemed to say. ‘Give me the token.’

=============================================

#am writing #am revising #narrative tone

Blog-i-sode Forty-Nine

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

Hunted

Hilariously, in retrospect, my first instinct was to freeze. Idiot. Like stopping moving now would convince whoever was on their way over here to stop investigating.

Who was I kidding? This was Blue Light. Had to be. Or one of his machine-minions.

Didn’t help that my years of schooling kicked in and my default panic protocol was:

Jumpjumpjumpjumpjump – waddayawaitingfortimeidiottimetogetoutofthetimeflow

Great. Well, if only this kicked in a bit faster when I’d really needed it, fifty years in the future, it might be more useful to me now.

Happily, getting angry with myself was the jolt I needed to start moving again.

My stuff was going to have to stay. No chance of obscuring the signs of habitation.

I, however, did have another exit option – and the slim hope that my route might not draw attention. I climbed up onto the side of the ‘rock fall’ and started searching feverishly for the catch that released the cover disguising the entrance to the crawl space. Sure, I probably ought to be able to go right to it but did I mention how much I disliked this passageway?

After some flurried reaching and wiggling, I found the catch and released it.

Now, could I corral the bird into the space with me? I could abandon her, would do if it came to it, but that felt like yet another betrayal and – wasn’t necessary to worry about, as it transpired. The crow was already lined up on a small ledge and flew/strutted into the space with no resistance. I had to believe this wasn’t the first time she’d been along this route.

The collared crow – Pirate – headed off happily, hopping into darkness. I knew (and presumably, so did she) that the crawl space wasn’t very long. Sure enough, lights came on shortly after she vanished from view, giving me a brief glimpse of the bird, wings extended, glide/jumping down into the corridor beyond. I balanced at the threshold long enough to turn, manoeuvring my body in legs first so that I could listen at the entrance for what was to come.

After an excruciating minute or so, something trundled into earshot. No footsteps, just the low noises of a well-maintained mechanism. Moving. Stopping. Moving again. The snick-snick that I recalled from when Blue Light’s machines took imagery of my wrist implant.

Then – the staticky crackle of an incoming remote transmission.

“Bramble, switch to audio report, please.”

Festering bog scum. It was Blue Light.

“Memory cells were activated 27m19s ago and remained active 1m58s. Currently inactive and showing signs of heat fatigue. Initiate test sequence to quantify damage?’

‘If it can run in the background. Otherwise, prioritise isolating the foreign element.’

‘Confirmed. Interference signature consistent with Terran medware. Configuration is unfamiliar. Purpose of tech unknown. Assignment unclear. Device ID code required.’

‘So, the device hasn’t been located?’

‘Confirmed.’

‘That’s – inconvenient. Wearable tech, so the wearer must have moved on. Can you track them? Are you picking up a signal from the device?’

‘No signal at present location. Sweeping the area.’

‘That may not get us very far. The rock is going to dampen everything outside your immediate position. I’ll send in a couple of sentry drones to do a visual scan of the tunnels.’

I discovered that I’d retracted my wrist involuntarily, hiding it behind my body. Like that would help. If only I were made of rock…

I considered retreating but decided that the noise would be detectable. I was just going to have to wait it out. And hope… for what? That the unit searching for me couldn’t check CO2 concentrations for signs of human respiration? Or wouldn’t think of using an infrared scan to test for nearby body heat signatures? (I’d read various things about original settler technologies in the Archives during some of my extensive downtime at the Place Without Names, though admittedly I hadn’t expected to be haunted by fear of experiencing them.)

In the corridor beyond my hiding place, it was unhelpfully quiet. No whirring, swooshes or beeps to tell me where the machine was searching. No commentary to guide me.

I hadn’t pulled the cover completely back into place when I hid and that was making me feel both potentially exposed and also – well, tempted to try to see what was going on.

Wiggling forward and to the side as quietly as possible, I was just about able to jam an eyeball into line of sight back along the corridor.

To my horror, the machine was looking exactly in my direction.

Strictly, it was just looking at the debris from a long-ago rockfall that closed off this access into the first colony’s main supply depot, but it knew I was here. I could feel it.

One of the machine’s flexi-extendable arms unfurled towards me. My muscles tensed as I waited for the big reveal. Maybe a device with indicators flashing to signal: game over.

The little grabby pincers at the end of the arm were empty, however. As I watched the pincers made what looked like a shooing motion and then retracted towards the machine’s comms interface in what could have approximated to putting a finger across the lips. Shhhhh.

Then, the machine executed a slow, deliberate 180 degree spin away from me and, looking pointedly (I felt) in the other direction, opened a staticky transmission channel.

‘Corridor location clear. Propose to join sentry patrol team in wider search?’

‘Noted, Bramble. Let me know when you’ve got something.’

‘Confirmed.’

The machine moved away from the mural, in the opposite direction from the rockfall.

I couldn’t make myself move while it was still in the nearest corridor section, but as soon as the lighting outside my hiding place clicked off, I scrambled backwards in an ungainly all-fours reverse crawl, moving as quickly as the awkward position allowed. It took me a couple of minutes to cover the distance but that felt excruciatingly slow now that I knew I was in some weird hide-and-seek race. When I – finally – extracted myself, dropping down into the corridor beyond the crawl space, Pirate, the collared crow, was nowhere to be seen.

***

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

Into the Tunnels

Until the moment I realised she’d gone, my one thought where the crow was concerned had been to hope that she wouldn’t make a noise and draw the attention of Blue Light’s machine.

The same thing I was hoping for myself, in other words.

Now that she was missing – missing or at any rate, not obviously here – I was torn. Could I spare any of my valuable running away time to try to track her down? And – did I need to? I didn’t see a reason for Blue Light to be interested in a collared crow. Not beyond the curiosity of finding one that seemed adapted to a mostly subterranean environment.

At the same time, this was hardly your typical Sierra dwelling corvid. She was an emerged-somehow-from-an-ancient-mural corvid, presumably the only one to have done so. And my sole tangible link to Emilia. Or, since the sibs hadn’t been back to see me and the Place Without Names wasn’t due to be founded for decades, to any other Time Tumbler. Any other people at all, in fact – with the unwelcome and discomforting exception of Blue Light.

Still undecided, I headed along the corridor in the direction of the entrance to the supply depot complex. For the first twenty paces or so, this was the only direction available. Then, I reached a corridor junction, where the path ahead took me to the depot admin centre, which these days doubled as my base, while a side branch offered access into the warehouse caverns and up to the upper levels, which held the landing pads and primary loading bays.

And – unless it had vanished as abruptly as it arrived – that unsettling mural depicting (why? how?) my memory of tree/Shalva from when they became entangled in the time rift.

So many reasons to head straight home, grab some essentials and put my knowledge of the cavern complex to the test, attempting to evade the sentries Blue Light had mentioned.

Except – just inside the mouth of the branch corridor, I saw a sliver of bright material.

I bent to examine it. It was a scrap from the wrapper of the protein bar I used to distract Pirate from her keen interest in my nose, when she first crossed into the current time-point. Was that really only an hour ago? I felt like I’d lived another lifetime since then. The idea of Blue Light and his minion machines here, actively tracking me squeezed out my capacity to think about or remember anything else. I’d always been on the run. They were always chasing me.

So, what might have sparked my curiosity on a different day just felt frustrating now. The scrap was my hint that Pirate hadn’t headed for the admin centre – why would she? It’s not even like she knew I lived there – but I was obliged, it seemed, to take the other tunnel.

That meant deviating from my preferred route in the frankly tenuous hope that I’d be able to navigate to wherever the collared crow had ended up. And there were so many possibilities…

I didn’t rate my chances but, would you believe it, some way down the corridor, there was another scrap of the wrapper. There was a third piece where the route divided again, this one sending me climbing towards the upper levels. A fourth piece led me away from the shuttle landing zone and into the loading bays – and I was somehow not surprised in the slightest when I reached the bay with the newly arrived mural to find Pirate standing on the ground in front of it, apparently staring intently at the image of Shalva-inside-the-tree.

‘Pirate!’ I said, stepping into the bay to walk over to her. As soon as I did, a pulsing red light started up, near the ceiling in one of the corners on the other side of the bay.

One of Blue Light’s machines was floating near the top of the room, its forward-facing lens swivelled towards me. Now that I knew it was there, I tuned into the quiet, high-pitched buzzing noise from the fans keeping it in the air. It wasn’t making any other sounds, but it seemed inevitable that the pulsing lights were sending a message to the other machines.

Or – should be. As I stared, paralysed, pondering my next move, the light sequence stopped, restarted, stopped again… and then the sentry machine flew off, out of the other side of the loading bay, out of sight, then out of earshot. I had to assume it was looking for reinforcements but right now it represented another – tiny? – reprieve.

If only I had any idea how to make constructive use of this sliver of opportunity. Literally nothing occurred to me. Except… that it was my moment for giving up. Resigning myself to being recaptured. Taken to Blue Light’s laboratory. Turned into a test subject.

I could hardly bear to think what terrible things he might do with whatever he learned about manipulating time. The thought filled me with terror – and with a powerful, gut-level longing for my childhood friends. I turned back to the mural and gazed at Shalva-in-the-tree.

There she was, my dear friend, inexplicably appeared in paint, both here-and-not-here, and looking very self-collected considering the mural showed what should be an unbearably gruesome scene… Shalva in the very moment of losing her l – no, not her life.

I said her name to myself again. A defiance, a reclamation. I’d rediscovered my confidence that Shalva was, had always remained, alive somewhen – the right question would always have been to ask where that somewhen might be.

What the time-rift took, on that day at the boundary to the Closed Zone, was Shalva’s freedom and, exiled here, I had no idea if she’d ever got her freedom back. It occurred to me in a rush that we had this in common. An experience of being trapped, of being beyond reach.

I made deep, soulful eye contact – and once again had the disconcerting feeling that the girl-in-the-tree-in-the-painting was looking right back at me. I imagined her stepping out of the tree – out of the wall – into the corridor – to join me in Undermountain. Imagined the two of us putting our resources together, figuring out how to evade Blue Light’s search party.

(Okay, fine, sure, what I meant was – the two of us, supported by Pirate the crow.)

What happened instead was, I suppose, just as implausible but utterly convinced me.

Mural-Shalva’s lips started to move. Well, they moved or I hallucinated them moving. In my head, her voice was instantly – delightfully –recognisable, her meaning clear, unambiguous.

‘The token, Mallory.’ She seemed to say. ‘Give me the token.’

#science fiction #time travel #body horror #am writing #am revising

War is Horrible // Love is Love

Spoilerish, let's assume...

This is one of two theatre productions I hadn't heard about and wouldn't ordinarily have gone to [the other being This Is Not About Me @ Soho Theatre]. I went in the spirit of "say yes, join in!" and because the - everything - that has been shifting for me means I'm freshly able to desire and appreciate Creative Expression as inherently Worth It.

It's a two-hander and because it's about a correspondence relationship, it has (ahem) an inherent challenge that the staging manages beautifully. You can probably get a good sense of that from the promo (assuming they leave it up on Insta? What's the form on these things? After a play has finished, I mean - does it just stay as a forever back catalogue of Great Work We Once Did? I surely hope so!)

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The poster is a clear riff on that famous photo of the sailor kissing the nurse in ?Time Square? and captures the mood of the play perfectly.

The set was budget chic, used inventively and confidently by the actors

Full disclosure - this is VERY much home terrain for me (a bittersweet love story? during wartime? filled with yearning? framed by a geopolitical context full of danger, sacrifice and threat? but where the tone says that I'm unlikely to have to *watch* atrocities on stage? YES!!)

I was pleased (and surprised) to discover that The Guardian liked it:

Dear Jack, Dear Louise review – wartime courtship by letter delivers intimate love story | Theatre | The Guardian

As I also did. As I also do. [Lil tense correction there in homage to TOBS's Tom Hayward, 'fighting for his (love)life' at a turning point moment of that lovely, lovely show...]

It was easier to like (for *me*) compared to This Is Not About Me, which played in a much more central - but still "off Broadway" - venue to what felt like a larger audience (could have been smaller room feels fuller syndrome?). It was very clever, inventive, varied, sporadically hilarious - and in terms of subject matter, felt darker* and more challenging.

[*That's strange, right? Or - ? The first couple is literally surviving a war, even if it's a long way away for one of them. The second couple is trying to figure out whether they are a 'thing' - and facing into legitimately traumatising personal experiences of MH issues (and, I think, abuse - though not between the characters on stage, which is one mercy...)]

I did like it - but maybe in a more self-conscious way, in the sense of *admiring* it? Loved the parts that looked explicitly at the writing and the implications of one of the characters 'being' the writer. My favourite scenes were the ones where they're sitting on a bed and projected onto the wall behind them is - subtext to their conversation or a super-sped-up version of the movie they were supposedly watching or - etc.

This, I believe, aligns with what this reviewer also liked about it:

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME review by thespyinthestalls at Soho

In the end I gave up trying to get tix to John Proctor is the Villain (coloured by the knowledge that if I'd come back to London a few days earlier there was a GOOD ticket available for me for the asking...)

I've decided - in the spirit of Don't Watch Actors You Loved In A Certain Role Playing A Different Role Where You Will Like Them Less - that I'm okay with this. It's a "meiyo banfa de banfa" (no other choice) but I do think that it's probably NOT the play for me. Thought it would be right up The Guardian's street and honestly, not entirely the case:

John Proctor Is the Villain review – Arthur Miller’s classic sparks a #MeToo moment | Theatre | The Guardian

Lovely Graham Norton loved it though and said so:

BTW I guess that in GN's post, the pic he included was the programme cover - and I freakin LOVE that in the pic the male teacher's face has been deliberately cut off, tho he is, as the Guardian notes, present. Also, the image centres the young female cast with the two boys behind.

Below it, I've put The Royal Court's own promo of the show (I fully get why they would continue to promote rave reviews - presumably The Guardian's isn't there! - but also, it's not that they need the tix sales!) But do you see what I immediately saw (ahem, at the second time of looking at it - never mind that I absolutely didn't see it first time). The teacher is at the centre of the pic, standing behind the table with the two boys - in the wider version of the shot, the girls are also there but - pretty much most of them aren't there in this one...

[Bonus shot is via Donal Finn - no shade to him in all this BTW - brave choice to want to play the character* though sure, it's The Royal Court. Kept it because I enjoyed hearing that the cast seem to like each other.]

*Just read a review-w-spoilers (trailed!) by Stalls to Stage (which BTW is one of the best things-reflecting-on-a-thing that I've read recently!) and she

This is the spoilery bit from her review:

I don’t know that this play would work so well if Mr Smith was any other type of teacher. And I don’t mean because they need the English lit classes to provide the bones of the story. I mean because whilst all teachers have the capability of abusing their powers, English teachers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of teenage girls...

Which is another thing this play tackles beautifully - the idea not just of a perfect victim, but also of a perfect culprit. It even plays on those past connections in the audience. I’m a grown woman who is, naturally as the vast majority of us are, distrustful of men. And yet, despite feeling something off from jump, I wanted to believe that Mr Smith genuinely did just really care about his job and his students. Would I have given that grace to any other sort of teacher? I don’t know, but I don’t think so...

Dónal Finn has an incredibly difficult job to do, pitching the tone of the character right to maximise the emotional hit of the twist. But he lands it bang on the money, not just for the twist to hit hard, but for the complexity of how your emotions towards him have to change from that moment on...

Link to the whole review follows:

John Proctor is the Villain - Royal Court Theatre: A magnificent bit of theatre at 28, that would have changed me at 17 — Stalls to Stage

Finally bcz I kept hearing calls for the OTHER Arcola show while I was in the bar waiting for MINE, I've included below the first review I found of it - an adaptation of Iphigenia (spoiler - they didn't like it).

I'm not in a position to judge but this is the second time I've been in a place with two studios and where a healthy portion of the waiting crowd turned out to be waiting to go to the OTHER one (waiting crowds not shown. Instead, pictured, low/no alc drinks plus book-companions).

Iphigenia review: A clumsy attempt to make Euripides relevant

PS I should also mention that when I went back to the Arcola's own Insta page, they had MANY four star reviews (and perhaps a couple of five star reviews too?). So this might v well not be representative...

#am writing #am revising #live theatre #creative arts #Instagram

Reflections on Blog-i-sode Forty-Eight

Had a stab of anticipatory sadness to realise I'm into the last ten of these. (Mixed, perhaps, with panic at the loss of this comfortable, welcoming 'pre-fabricated' displacement activity. Still, so much better than when the panic was that I wouldn't sustain even this activity...)

And - a DILEMMA! - because in addition to liking quite a lot of the action in this extract, it's also got Plot Points that I'll be the worse off for being without*... mebbe going to pick my way through and identify these in the hope that I'll remember to put them in 'somewhen' else?

*well, okay some of these plot points are a bit MAD and maybe I don't actually need a time-travelling collared crow? I can probably have Shalva connect more directly with M if they're both in the BZ anyway.

BUT - I really love the idea of M having set up a little den in the part of the tunnel where the mural appeared and talking to the people in the mural - who inevitably will eventually find a way to talk back.

Realised I have had two different ideas at different times about where this mural IS - both largely incidental / plot-driven (which might be why I don't feel strongly wedded to either) - so if I do use this, it can be wherever I feel like placing it, within reason, inside the tunnel complex.

First thought was that it would be in the exact same location for Mallory that Mallory's mural is in the earlier timeframe for Torstein. Nicely mirrored? I think I didn't do that in the draft that's in this blog material bcz I wanted PWN Mallory to find it so it had to be reasonably close to the PWN boundary and if it were too close to the supply depot side, that raises qus about why M didn't notice the entrance to an entire med facility right there. Sure, it's dark, but also - really?

Focusing on the first 1000 words of the blog for now -

Hot Staring Guy Mural [If the abbreviation is HSG, then I should probably *call* him HSG in the title - not that I'm committed to keeping the titles but - just in case...

‘Thing is, T, I’m asking myself whether someone working from an account in the Archives and nothing else could have reproduced th- ah, Shalva’s presence so perfectly?’ – I figured that since it was just me and some paintings in this conversation, I might as well use her actual name. – ‘Her likeness, yes. I can understand that being in the database, somewhere. But her spirit?’

Not sure about the piece in bold - it's a good cultural reinforcement BUT I'm pretty sure I've persuaded M to name the Unnamed when it comes to Shalva. Perhaps -

I noticed myself stumble before saying the name. I'd broken the taboo inside my head but never out loud before. Still, since it was just me and some paintings, what harm could come of saying it?

Better except - are you really free of a taboo if you still conform to it in all regular interactions? (Erm, surely that's a NOPE?). WIP for this one.

A stab of doubt. Perhaps I’d imagined the girl’s attitude, drawn on memory to imbue her posture with significance the artist hadn’t intended. Maybe the qualities I thought I saw – Shalva’s defiance, her irrepressibility, the bubbling life-joy – were empty echoes. Pprojections.

‘The eyes, though,’ I added. ‘Don’t think I imagined them moving. Winking. Right?’ (It was very – extremely – likely that I had imagined the mural’s eyes moving. I knew that...)

I was in my usual spot, on the floor of the corridor where, in c. fifty years’ time, there or thereabouts, I would be (/had been) abruptly disappeared from my adoptive native-present.

Gradually, I’d filled the corridor with things I’d pilfered from the supply depot, things that took my fancy. There was a tall lamp with a carved wooden stand and a fringed lampshade. A low, wide bookcase made from some wood/plastic composite that was sort of ugly-pretty but very functional. A keep-em-hot-or-cold picnic hamper and three flasks in the same material. Gloves, sweater, spare socks, hat for when it got chilly. Electric Fan for when it was too hot. But – I still sat on the ground, just like I did for that first visit, early in Matumaini, 171 CE, when after I’d finally accepted that the sibs weren’t going to make it back to see me. On a really plumptious, oversized cushion, yes, but – on the ground. That’s because it gave me the best eye-line for chatting to HSG. Positioning myself over on the same side of the corridor as the mural gave me a crick in my neck and sitting over here any higher up gave me the impression that HSG would be suffering neck issues of his own. (Yes, I know. He’s painted.)

I’d taken to calling HSG ‘T’. No good reason. Just looked like he was somebody whose name probably began with a T. I’d briefly trialled referring to addressed paint-Emilia as E but that didn’t stick. I couldn’t make it work. It was – the wrong kind of familiar for my sister.

This is super stupid because of course his name IS "T" / Torstein - but M currently has no way of knowing that. Nonetheless it really amuses me to imagine that he accidentally comes up with the correct name. Except - creepily, in the parts of the story where someone refers to Torstein as T, that person was the human that blends to make BL. AND it also amuses me that he can't sustain using initial-only for Emilia.

(Oh, no, wait, I think I’ve figured it out – the T thing. It’s the obvious, logical contraction. Hot Staring Guy T becomes Hot Guy T becomes Hot T. Of course.) Erm this is twee but I do love a wrong explanation...

So, there I was, seated in my usual spot on my comfortable, hard-wearing cushion and leaning on the tunnel wall opposite the mural with my back resting against a piece of custom-borrowed wainscotting in case the tunnel wall ran damp.

My mind was teasing at the question of how an inanimate object like a painted tree-girl could give the illusion of movement – everything I’d experienced after the age of sixteen was leading me to the answer some form of technology I didn’t grow up with but has clearly existed on Raynovia since forever – when my eyes drifted down from Hot T and fixed on... [probably something else and not the bird? I could substitute in any other noticeable change to the mural and M would impulsively go over and touch the wall, triggering the reaction I still need...]

the mural’s collared crow. The bird was depicted next to Emilia, so, further back in the mirror-corridor of the mural people, its head roughly level with my own when I was seated like this.

Perhaps for this reason, it appeared as though I’d caught the bird’s attention. Its head was cocked to one side and it stared quizzically straight ahead, thus, right at me. This was disconcerting and I wondered idly why it hadn’t made me more uncomfortable in the past.

When comprehension dawned, the realisation had me literally scrambling to my feet.

I hadn’t been uncomfortable because the bird hadn’t been looking at me like that.

What was happening? How and – crucially – why? A smarter person would have recalled their bio-past and avoided what happened next. Of course, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Of course, I was really intrigued and eaten by curiosity. Of course, I put out my stupid hand – yes, the one with the vertical mottled metallic scarring from the first time I did something like this, yes, on the arm sporting a silver bracelet with its edges melded into the skin around my wrist, from another time I blindly let instinct lead me. I touched my scarred palm gently against the painted body of the mural-bird and – An immediate burning pain jabbed down my hand from the tip of my middle finger to the base of my palm where it intersected with the silvered bracelet-thing and –

In the moment of contact, it was like something ignited. There was Literal grey-white smoke engulfed emanating from my wrist and, quite possibly a smell like could - could I smell human flesh burning? That part I might have imagined. because a All I could think thought about during the next panicky minutes was my own, vulnerable flesh being consumed behind the curtain of smoke and wondering how badly I’d damaged myself this time. and whether I could fix whatever I’d just done. One of the many things stashed on my corridor bookshelf was a pretty high-end first aid box. I fell to my knees (onto purloined tapestry-style carpet) and began feeling for the box with my non-smouldering hand. Luckily, my instinctive reaction was to recoil away from the wall and thankfully, whatever substance caused this, it didn’t bond skin to wall on contact. [Moved this down.]

One of the many things stashed on my corridor bookshelf was a pretty high-end first aid box. I fell to my knees (onto purloined tapestry-style carpet) and began feeling for the box with my non-smouldering hand. By the time I had the first-aid stuff, I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t need much of it. The perception of my flesh burning was proving to be, essentially, just that and nothing more. A perception. A very discomforting mind-trick played on me by my own submerged terror. I slathered the wrist/bracelet interface with antiseptic cream just the same, since doing so made me feel better, and tied a loose bandage over the spot. Only then, I felt ready to ask what in Vesper’s name just happened. A feeling that didn’t ease when I turned round into the corridor to find...

The revised version is c. 800 words but oh no it isn't - because I've chopped out the description of the bird and not yet replaced it... So this wordcount is light probably 50 words...?

Not sure I'm any closer to solving the conundrum but I do like the weird cosiness of this corridor arrangement. Not in a hurry to banish it.

#am writing #am revising

Blog-i-sode Forty-Eight

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

Hot Guy Mural

‘Thing is, T, I’m asking myself whether someone working from an account in the Archives and nothing else could have reproduced Shalva’s presence so perfectly?’ – I figured that since it was just me and some paintings in this conversation, I might as well use her actual name – ‘Her likeness, yes. I can understand that being in the database, somewhere. But her spirit?’

‘The eyes, though,’ I added. ‘Don’t think I imagined them moving. Winking. Right?’

(It was very – extremely – likely that I had imagined the mural’s eyes moving. I knew that...)

I was in my usual spot, on the floor of the corridor where, in fifty years’ time, there or thereabouts, I would be (/had been) abruptly disappeared from my adoptive native-present. Gradually, I’d filled the corridor with things I’d pilfered from the supply depot, things that took my fancy. There was a tall lamp with a carved wooden stand and a fringed lampshade. A low, wide bookcase made from some wood/plastic composite that was sort of ugly-pretty but very functional. A keep-em-hot-or-cold picnic hamper and three flasks in the same material. Gloves, sweater, spare socks, hat for when it got chilly. Electric fan for when it was too hot.

But – I still sat on the ground, just like I did for that first visit, early in Matumaini, 171 CE, when I’d finally accepted that the sibs weren’t going to make it back to see me. On a really plumptious, oversized cushion, yes, but – on the ground. That’s because it gave me the best eye-line for chatting to HSG. Positioning myself over on the same side of the corridor as the mural gave me a crick in my neck and sitting over here any higher up gave me the impression that HSG would be suffering neck issues of his own. (Yes, I know. He’s painted.)

I’d taken to calling HSG ‘T’. No good reason. Just looked like he was somebody whose name probably began with a T. I’d briefly trialled referring to paint-Emilia as E but that didn’t stick. I couldn’t make it work. It was – the wrong kind of familiar for my sister.

(Oh, no, wait, I think I’ve figured it out – the T thing. It’s the obvious, logical contraction. Hot Staring Guy T becomes Hot Guy T becomes Hot T. Of course.)

My mind was teasing at the question of how an inanimate object like a painted tree-girl could give the illusion of movement – everything I’d experienced after the age of sixteen was leading me to the answer some form of technology I didn’t grow up with but has clearly existed on Raynovia since forever – when my eyes drifted down from Hot T and fixed on the mural’s collared crow. The bird was depicted next to Emilia, so, further back in the mirror-corridor of the mural people, its head roughly level with my own when I was seated like this.

When comprehension dawned, the realisation had me literally scrambling to my feet.

I hadn’t been uncomfortable because the bird hadn’t been looking at me like that.

What was happening? How and – crucially – why?

A smarter person would have recalled their bio-past and avoided what happened next. Of course, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Of course, I was really intrigued and eaten by curiosity. Of course, I put out my stupid hand – yes, the one with the vertical mottled metallic scarring from the first time I did something like this, yes, on the arm sporting a silver bracelet with its edges melded into the skin around my wrist, from another time I blindly let instinct lead me.

I touched my scarred palm gently against the painted body of the mural-bird and –

An immediate burning pain jabbed down my hand from the tip of my middle finger to the base of my palm where it intersected with the silvered bracelet-thing and –

In the moment of contact, it was like something ignited.

There was literal grey-white smoke emanating from my wrist and, quite possibly, a smell like human flesh burning. That part I might have imagined because all I thought about during the next panicky minutes was my own, vulnerable flesh being consumed, wondering how badly I’d damaged myself this time and whether I could fix whatever I’d just done.

One of the many things stashed on my corridor bookshelf was a pretty high-end first aid box. I fell to my knees (onto purloined tapestry-style carpet) and began feeling for the box with my non-smouldering hand. Luckily, my instinctive reaction was to recoil away from the wall and thankfully, whatever substance caused this, it didn’t bond skin to wall on contact.

By the time I had the first-aid stuff, I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t need much of it. The perception of my flesh burning was proving to be, essentially, just that and nothing more. A perception. A very discomforting mind-trick played on me by my own submerged terror.

I slathered the wrist/bracelet interface with antiseptic cream just the same, since doing so made me feel better, and tied a loose bandage over the spot. Only then, I felt ready to ask what in Vesper’s name just happened. A feeling that didn’t ease when I turned round into the corridor to find I was nose-to-beak with a very much here-in-my-current-now collared crow.

***

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

Notes from Afar

‘AWK’, said my feathered visitor, clacking its beak together a breath away from my nose.

‘Eternal mother,’ I yelped, jumping backwards and knocking against the bookshelf with my bandaged wrist – where else?

I sat down with a bump onto the top of the unit, which luckily held my weight, but the movement caused the contents of the still-open first-aid box to skitter onto and across the floor. The crow took this as an invitation to eat the first-aid kit and began jumping around between the scattered pieces, peck-sifting for anything edible.

Sub-optimal, I felt. Unhygienic. To distract the bird, I grabbed a protein bar from my snack stash, tore it open at one end and tossed it to the other side of the corridor. Wonky from adrenaline, I overdid it. The bar bounced off the empty part of the mural where, I knew, a depiction of a collared crow used to be and then rolled onto the floor. The collared crow claimed the bar as its treasure and started dissecting the packaging with focused energy.

Something had changed, I noticed. Beyond the obvious it-was-here-not-there. This crow had a ribbon tied around one leg with a little pink square of paper attached inside it.

I felt like – If I could just hold off until its attention was truly elsewhere –

Yes. Once the crow had delivered a deathblow to the protein bar packaging and was intent on devouring its prize, I caught the trailing end of the ribbon, gave it a little tug, and then caught the square of paper as it came loose. It was in fact pink-and-white striped, now that I had it in my hands and it was folded into a square to protect something thin and round and coin-sized inside. I had a good idea what that would turn out to be but before I unfolded the paper to find out, I could see writing on the outside – a central message and a postscript.

The note at the centre was stomach-lurchingly familiar. It was the phrase DON’T HESITATE written in large, neat, printed capitals across the space where an addressee name might otherwise appear. These letters had been scribbled through, possibly by the same hand, possibly not. Too hard to tell.

The second note – the postscript? – was squeezed in around the edges of the paper and written in a long, continuous, inward-moving spiral, so that I would have to turn the page to read it. This was definitely a different hand, writing in a spiked, cursive style that resembled beats on a cardio-meter. My sister, I was pretty sure.

It read:

Mallory – this was delivered to us by S who asked us to pass it to you when the opp. arose. Suspect she knew there’d be one. Don’t know how. I couldn’t fit thru the fissure that opened but Pirate seemed willing to go. PS She likes peanut brittle. PPS Torstein says hi and that he hopes to catch you in the same time-point one day. We both do! PPPS I believe in you. Ex

My brain tried to have several different thoughts about this at the same time and, that being the case, failed to grab hold of one single, coherent response. I unwrapped the token-shaped stripey paper packaging and, sure enough, it contained a KeepSafe token.

Truly, the only surprise was that the token inside the package was cream-coloured. I’d assumed that the intention was to return my own, mint-green token, from some misguided sense that I might benefit from being reunited with it. If there was an award for the Time-Tumbler least likely to benefit from access to time-jump accessories, it would be mine and I’d probably just have knocked it off my bookshelf. ‘Oh, Shalva,’ I said, out loud to her token, lying innocently on the unfurled paper in my hand – fighting not to feel guilty about saying her name, faced with this proof, more-or-less, that she existed out there somewhere.

I stowed the token, from force of near-forgotten habit, in my old KeepSafe pocket and tidied up the first-aid box absent-mindedly, my thoughts fixated by the note from Emilia.

Least relevant – but looming largest for some reason – her inclusion of a greeting from Torstein was suspiciously couple-y. That was the obvious conclusion to draw but the idea frustrated and dismayed me. He didn’t seem like my sister’s type. (Whisper it, but I felt, irrationally, profoundly, like he’d be better suited for me.) Bizarre that his name genuinely did start with a T? Or was that just me making too much of a trivial-if-strange coincidence?

And – the fissure she mentioned? Was – was that me? The bird – Pirate – certainly got here somehow, unless I’d lost track completely and the bird had always been in this time-instance and I’d merely invented seeing it – her – in the mural. That didn’t ring right, though.

So, there was a fissure – a time-hole? – big enough for a crow but not big enough for a human. Didn’t sound like it worked much like the only form of time-travel I knew about but I had solid reason to be wary of the view that what I knew was all that could be known…

If I caused it, perhaps I could do it again. The idea of provoking another wrist-burn reaction was horrific but I might be able to endure it if it meant connecting with Emilia. If – if it gave me a way back into moving across time. Unproven whether I myself could travel through a fissure but if I could – Okay, calm down, Mal. Breathe. Getting ahead of myself – thus far, unproven whether I’d even created one. Unproven but easy enough to test…?

I winced. Stood up. Did a couple of activity-displacement stretches. Reached towards the part of the mural where Emily was standing – thus far, still with exactly the same look of horrified surprise on her face that she’d always shown me. Spotted the trailing end of my placebo-bandage and decided the last thing I needed was to introduce something that would ignite readily if exposed to some form of chemical reaction, heat or flame. I removed the bandage, coiled it up tightly and, unthinkingly, dropped it into the KeepSafe pocket next to my new token, instead of putting it back into the first-aid box to be cleaned for re-use later.

Reached towards the painted image of my sister for a second time – and froze. To my deep dismay, I caught sight of something in the corner of my eye.

Right down at the dim, distant, far end of the access tunnel, almost obscured by the lamp beside me and betrayed only by a flicker, a set of motion-activated emergency lights had just clicked on.

#science fiction #time travel #am writing #am revising

Saying "No - And..." // "Yes, But..."

(or some other such...)

Something's been happening... I - only really started noticing it when I was gifted two PERFECT - different - complementary - artful, story-experiences in PHM and TOBS. But *think* - it started with all the ART?

(Visiting, not making - tho I am tremendously fond of what can happen when we give ourselves permission to make BAD art - then slightly better, slightly better, better again, getting almost good now, etc.)

The art was a side-effect*, not a strategy but it's been the most amazing, joyful, & life-affirming of unintended consequences :)

*A way to pass time with a family member undergoing a programme of medical intervention... before it started, I thought this season was going to be all about hospitals and bodies, but in true our-family fashion, it's been all about doing all we can to avoid mentioning or acknowledging the body STUFF, suffering, possible impending death.

The extreme opposite of the strategy of this FAB-u-lous essay published by Hobart in January and that I happened across this month thanks to the re-promo generosity of an X mutual <3 <3

Hobart :: Songs in Case of Sudden Death by Casey Jo Graham Welmers

=====================================

Non-exhaustive selection of the exhibitions we've seen - each one of which has offered and added something and which in combination have, I believe, actually altered the current chemistry of my brain? The Neo-Impressionists... Nigerian art at Tate Modern... Anna Ancher in Dulwich... Hockney at Sotheby's and Barbara Hepworth at Christie's...

And THEN - Some *great* live theatre... things I was going to "as companion" that accidentally / incidentally blew me away - chief among these, Dance of Death at the Orange Tree, featuring Will Keen and Our Town somewhere random in Richmond with the new National Theatre of Wales under the wing & patronage of Michael Sheen.

As if THAT wasn't enough - all the marvellous fuss around Project Hail Mary and the *other* Mary, Mary Bennet - The Other Bennet Sister.

These are of course examples of creative endeavours that have succeeded. They exist. They got in front of audiences. They have been appreciated. In some cases, they have been adored. Taking the outcome as the message would be extremely dampening to hope.

Maybe that's what I've been doing for the past - oh, years...?

Don't know why this time has been different but somehow, I've been able to find my way into appreciate the PROCESS/ES of creativity.

[Perhaps it's the engagement in the background with Loosening the Ligaments - explicitly intended as a way to free up creative impulse.]

It's... a rush. [Yes, it's also, quite clearly, a crazy privilege to be able to say - oh, don't mind me, I'm just going to sit in the park reading Leonard and Hungry Paul, go to galleries, write my lil timejump fiction.]

The editing has been... joyful. Experiencing the art of others has been... tender, encouraging, exhilarating. Feelings I don't want to lose. Feelings that are clearly ethereal and temporary. I'm immersing myself as best I can, trying to fix the memory in anticipation of when I'll lose contact...

========================================

It's making me open and wanting to start saying YES to live theatre - for the first time, really, since I was a teen - and even then, I wasn't so much saying yes to the experience (often transporting, sometimes dull) as saying YES MA'AM to my scary-ss mother. [I chose fear, at least.]

I've resisted because - cost. Mum's circuit was: National Theatre, Almeida, Royal Court, Donmar - like the best long-established, highbrow destinations (and Sadler's Wells for dance...) These aren't necessarily even as expensive as West End shows, tho creeping up.

Which brings me to the second factor - safety. Mum and I have looked for VERY different things from theatre - her, catharsis, me, reassurance.

So, I've tended to gravitate to feel-good shows which are i) often more expensive and ii) not always all that well-written*, actually [who knew].

*VERY MUCH not always true. But the longer I go on, the more dross and slop and meh I encounter on the way to the wonders. [And I'm SURE this type of diminishing return feeling exists with no-matter-what - pretty sure I've seen a version of this en-wearying in my mum (who has been watching live theatre in London over literal decades) and perhaps that mature engagement means believing in the not-yet-glimpsed worthwhile on the other side of the "dead marches"...]

I've tended to brace myself to suffer thru mum's theatre picks-and NOT participate properly in the cathartic release. I was expecting this to have been my experience with DoD for sure and OT, maybe, somewhat.

But - wasn't. It worked for me, it somehow worked.

So. With all that said, I'm wanting to re-engage. AND - I'm still wary. Turns out there's a reason I was the kind of kid who read the last page if I became truly engaged in a story. I was nerve-shreddingly concerned for my new favourites - my new "friends" - and wanted to know they'd be okay. [Wonder how many journeys I spoiled for myself or abandoned because I found out something I didn't want to hear - sometimes because I would NEVER be okay with that ending but often because I hadn't "gone on the journey" and didn't have the info to understand it.]

With movies and plays - to an extent - you take the greater risk bcz you CAN'T do that. [Obv today, you can - there are so many ways to find out the plot of a thing before you head off to consume it. The harder art these days is avoiding finding out anything at all.] That's why - I think - I formed the habit of pre-emptive rejection. Not joining in. Just in case.

So, instead, I'm buying tix. And trying to target the buying at indy shows (loosely defined) and trying NOT to choose the things that I'd go to only/mainly because it feels like they would be soothing. [Back to the Future, Ave Q, I'm looking at you! Oh god, sudden visceral memory of that OTHER puppet thing A got me to go and see. Hand To God. Where someone said - puppets but also a horror movie. Traumatising. Ugh. Tho' the memory of it is funnier than the experience of seeing it TBF. ]

Don't regret, though, having had chance to see Harry Melling on stage.[my periodic reminder, when I looked up the name of this play, that he's a Troughton - like, of course he is. Seem to recall him being ver' good.]

On related note, I tried for tix for John Proctor is the Villain - and didn't get them and... I am... *relieved* (which, per my supervisor, is DATA)

I've said YES to - Dear Jack, Dear Louise at the Arcola. Come on, it's a WW2 romance - surely this is strongly normcore for me? (Yes, but...)

I've said a more tentative YES to FlyBy at the Southwark Playhouse. Come on - astronauts and music? Fragmented narrative? Lizzie Bennet from TOBS? (Yes, but... bullying? Loss? Will it be too sad? Too nasty?)

I said NO to Back to the Future - The Musical - because it felt like it would be TOO easy and TOO familiar (No - and - I'm a little scared you'll ruin the memory of the movie for me and - I'd rather have the 70 quid...)

No (so far) to the revival of Avenue Q:

I've said NO - so far - to Hadestown (of course, now I know that if I'd said YES, I'd have been able to tick off seeing Donal Finn on stage - tempting but still no, I think. It ought to be for me. It feels like it's - not.

I said - not yet - to the TV adaptation of Leonard and Hungry Paul in favour of reading the book first - and based on a few chapters, that has been a truly rewarding decision. I've been BARKING with laughter even though the backdrop is all rather heart-strings-sad.

Something's shifting in where I want to BE - headspace, purse-strings-wise, focus and intention wise. And shifting in terms of where I think I might be able to find joy, allowed to join in, CHOOSE to place myself.

And on that theme, rather randomly and last-minute - and bringing a few of those threads together - I said YES to

This Is Not About Me @ the upstairs space, Soho theatre

Found myself in the middle of the front row - on reflection, excellent accidental choice in a non-raked space... - and had a PANICKY few moments when the actor started handing things to people seated at the front. Not me, thank goodness! Ok only two things and to people at the edges. PHEW. Might say more about it bcz it was exploring mining one's own life as a writer (I accept I do that all the time, but in ways that are buried/tangential/accidental not directly autobiographical). Particular fave moments were when the characters addressed this - challenging things that were portrayed earlier, commenting on how things were (or were not) changed, fighting about who got to tell...

I did my usual thing of being alone in the crowd but - had my book - and no particular desire to make eye contact with anyone (in case I did or didn't recognise them, in case they noticed me noticing them - of course they would and of course they were all obviously industry professionals in some way and of course I most evidently wasn't).

It felt like an experiment - a different and not-worse, perhaps-better, experiment compared to going to an organ recital at a city church and having one of the (posh) volunteer ushers look straight through me.

Still not really "among my people" but - closer! closer! - and *enough*.

[That last photo was the intensity of the crowd when I arrived an hour early -now imagine that same space an hour later and RAMMED :) ]

Not the first time I've come across the following quote (presumed genuine - sounds plausible) - from Kurt Vonnegut but the first time I've read it while living a version of its truth. Making art - perhaps bad art, but as well as I know how thus far - as a way for the soul to grow <3 <3

#am writing #am revising #live theatre #london theatre

Reflections on Blog-i-sode Forty-Seven

So, having established that there's no current place in the revised WIP for the scene that follows, I'm instead simply going to edit it as a standalone text. [Still sorta love it, still want to find somewhere for it...]

AND it's a short piece - having established the blog-i-sode 'norm' as 3,000 ish words (a not-inadvertent nod to my MA writing workshops). Starting word count c. 1,100 words.

Ghostly, threaded in behind the trunk of the tree and mirroring the shape of the branches - it was possible to make out the outline of a young woman! ’s body, [moved up from para below] just as spectacular as the tree itself in her unreality.

I had to strain to see her. She had no colour of her own, just light sketched grey edges that left her almost invisible against the whitewash. Faded almost out of existence in the painting.

I shuddered. Was that what it felt like to be Un-named? Memory scrubbed from your timeline. Banished from conversation.

Here, she matched the tree’s dimensions, towering over me, but she could only be Shalva our lost friend. This I’m-certain-it-wasn’t-here-yesterday mural had found the very worst thing that I’d ever seen and projected a dissonantly upbeat version of it onto a wall where it had rational reason to be. No wonder I abandoned my walk and stood, transfixed.

This painted version of girl-in-the-tree was just as spectacular as the tree itself in her unreality. Her sketched-in presence was insubstantial, hinted at in silvery-grey lines.

Her body was the only part of the mural with no colour inside her lines.

Gradually I tuned into the image itself and now the lack of colour seemed the least horrifying thing about it. She seemed to be growing out of the tree - or the tree growing up through her.The girl’s Her tree-length limbs blended with the trunk of the tree, seeming to emerge from within it. Her arms were flung wide from her sides, mimicking the shape of the branches. Her wrists were upright, pointing towards the sky, and her palms were also facing upwards, fingers splayed, as if she had just thrown something into the air and was waiting to catch it.

It had to be Shalva? (Prohibited or not, I had to name her!) A rendering of the moment when she became tangled in the Rift. Details altered - vines swapped for a brush-tree and the scale wildly distorted - but the echoes felt unmistakeable.

The girl’s chin was high. Shalva. Shalva's chin. Say it.

Her gaze was raised towards the a dramatic cloudscape that billowed across the ceiling above her. – or her eyes might possibly be closed. It was hard to tell from where I was standing. Her pose exuded a vibrant, almost ecstatic, happiness, as if she was dancing. That's not how I remember her last moments. There was no dancing then. not fighting for life.

Suddenly I was immersed in flooded by memories I’d worked hard to erase. I squeezed my eyes shut, not that it really made much difference. I balled my hands into fists and pressed against my closed eyes as though I could shove the memories back out of my skull. When I moved my hands, the ghost-girl’s eyes were trained directly on me, skewering me with a painted gaze. Mural-Shalva was looking at me.

I was momentarily certain Shalva was about to shake herself out of the tree, out off the wall, to land here into the hangar bay where she would tease me for my unruly hair. and shocked expression. Or or demand asking me if I’d remembered to bring jump snacks this time.

In an effort to break the illusion, I moved several paces to the right. so the angle of my gaze shifted. Disconcertingly, The painted girl’s painted gaze followed me continued to hold my own, still looking as though she was about to speak. I moved left walked a similar distance in the other direction and her painted gaze seemed to maintain the connection. An astonishing, unsettling, effect.

I realised at once that the sudden appearance of the mural was almost certainly bad news. The most likely explanation for it was, of course, that Blue Light was here. Somewhere. Set this up. Was messing with me. He’d probably found an account of the incident at the boundary of the Closed Zone since he seemed to have full access to records I was once unaware of and subsequently came to understand as heavily guarded and restricted.

[moved up from para below] I’m not sure how long I was there. Long enough that the coffee I was sipping just before I stepped into this section of the hangar had lost the final vestiges of its heat.

But even knowing this and despite the scene the mural depicted, I couldn’t tear myself away from it. I was so – so hungry – for the friends of my youth, the companionship, the good-natured rivalry, the sense of a world of stable horizons and predictable rhythms. A sense that splintered apart in that time-instance. Without intending to do so, I found myself running my memories of that day once again, replaying the scene over and over, poking at every moment that led into the one I was looking at. Guess I was searching for clues about what we could have done differently. What I should do differently if I could find my way back to that moment. Looking for a re-set.

I’m not sure how long I was there. Long enough that the coffee I was sipping just before I stepped into this section of the hangar had lost the final vestiges of its heat.

I considered going back for a refill, but I strongly suspected that if I retreated now to the admin office I’d converted into my home base HQ, I wouldn’t come out again and, well, I had become very attached to the small number of routines that remained open to me. I didn’t want an impossible mural to keep me from my only daily contact with other humans. Even if they, too, were nothing but smears of colour cunningly fashioned to approximate to people.

So, Eventually, I came back to myself. No fresh insights. Nothing to be gained from standing here. I took a slug of cold coffee, packed the cup away, and carried on moved towards the next loading bay. As usual, once I was a few steps away from the dividing wall, a shift in the light behind me told me that the motion-responsive lighting had clicked off in the bay behind me.

I don’t usually pay much attention when that happens. It’s a constant effect everywhere in Undermountain where the lights still function. I whimsically think of it as though I’m being followed after a tiny time lag by a super-discreet entourage. Not that I’d ever had a – Or wanted – It’s just something I’ve amused myself by imagining.

But this time, I had a sudden heart-clutch of concern about leaving Shalva on her own in the dark, trapped in a tree painted onto a wall. Horrendous. So I looked back. The loading bays, in fact, don’t fall into absolute darkness when the artificial lights turn off. We’re quite close to the outer shell of the mountain here – that’s the obvious place to put a transit zone, right? – and grey light diffuses into the space from a number of crevice-openings high in the rock-walls above. I was standing in brighter light, straining to see into the shadows but as my eyes adjusted, I could clearly see Shalva, depicted as girl-in-the-tree-in-the-wall, and looking as serene and determined and borderline ecstatic as when I was standing directly in front of her.

I don’t know what else I could possibly have been expecting, but then, right as I was turning to walk away – I swear, tree-girl, mural-girl, Shalva our lost friend winked at me.

Not possible. I realise that. But I was already rattled.

I absolutely scuttled out of the loading bay area and into the corridor complex beyond it. This was by any reckoning an extremely inefficient route to HSG(P) and MTSS(AP) but it gave me a nice, long walk with the added benefit of saving me from crawling through the narrow part of the simulated rockfall.

On the occasions I’d been through, it seemed stable enough, but why risk it when I could stretch my legs and burn some awake-time by turning the other way and threading through the long chain of loading bays on the rock-side of the shuttle hangar and then dipping back into the tunnels and connecting to the other mural via a side corridor.

The revised version is more like 750 words and - you know what - in terms of an emotional beat, I really want to find somewhere for it.

[UGH]

How about painted onto the side of a large piece of junk? Arguably, finding it in the Broken Zone is (adjusting for the mad context) more plausible (lololol) than it turning up in the tunnels of Starah Miasto?

I'd have to lose the piece about the lights going out - which I regret because I think it's atmospheric and lovely - the grey light softly illuminating her - but it's not the emotional core (I think?) so - okay.

#am writing #am revising

Blog-i-sode Forty-Seven

[/cont]

ghostly, threaded in behind the trunk of the tree and mirroring the shape of the branches, it was possible to make out the outline of a young woman’s body, no colour, just light grey edges, almost invisible against the whitewash.

This painted version of girl-in-the-tree was just as spectacular as the tree itself in her unreality. Her sketched-in presence was insubstantial, hinted at in silvery-grey lines.

Her body was the only part of the mural with no colour inside her lines. The girl’s tree-length limbs blended with the trunk of the tree, seemed to emerge from within it. Her arms were flung wide from her sides, mimicking the shape of the branches. Her wrists were upright, pointing towards the sky, and her palms were also facing upwards, fingers splayed, as if she had just thrown something into the air and was waiting to catch it.

The girl’s chin was high. Her gaze was raised towards the clouds billowing above her – or her eyes might possibly be closed. It was hard to tell from where I was standing. Her pose exuded a vibrant, almost ecstatic, happiness, as if she was dancing not fighting for life.

Suddenly I was immersed in memories I’d worked hard to erase. I squeezed my eyes shut, not that it really made much difference. I balled my hands into fists and pressed against my closed eyes as though I could shove the memories back out of my skull.

When I moved my hands, the ghost-girl’s eyes were trained directly on me, skewering me with a painted gaze. I was momentarily certain she was about to shake herself out of the tree, out of the wall, into the hangar bay where she would start teasing me for my unruly hair and shocked expression. Or asking me if I’d remembered to bring jump snacks this time.

In an effort to break the illusion, I moved several paces to the right, so the angle of my gaze shifted. Disconcertingly, the painted girl’s painted gaze continued to hold my own, still looking as though she was about to speak. I walked a similar distance in the other direction and her painted gaze seemed to maintain the connection. An astonishing, unsettling, effect.

Without intending to do so, I found myself running my memories of that day once again, replaying the scene over and over, poking at every moment that led into the one I was looking at. Guess I was searching for clues about what we could have done differently. What I should do differently if I could find my way back to that moment. Looking for a re-set.

I’m not sure how long I was there. Long enough that the coffee I was sipping just before I stepped into this section of the hangar had lost the final vestiges of its heat.

So, I took a slug of cold coffee, packed the cup away, and carried on into the next loading bay. As usual, once I was a few steps away from the dividing wall, a shift in the light behind me told me that the motion-responsive lighting had clicked off in the bay behind me.

But this time, I had a sudden heart-clutch of concern about leaving Shalva our lost friend on her own in the dark, trapped in a tree painted onto a wall. Horrendous. So I looked back. The loading bays, in fact, don’t fall into absolute darkness when the artificial lights turn off. We’re quite close to the outer shell of the mountain here – that’s the obvious place to put a transit zone, right? – and grey light diffuses into the space from a number of crevice-openings high in the rock-walls above. I was standing in brighter light, straining to see into the shadows but as my eyes adjusted, there was girl-in-the-tree-in-the-wall, looking as serene and determined and borderline ecstatic as when I was standing directly in front of her.

I don’t know what else I could possibly have been expecting, but then, right as I was turning to walk away – I swear, tree-girl, mural-girl, Shalva our lost friend winked at me.

Not possible. I realise that. But I was already rattled.

#science fiction #time travel #body horror #am writing #am revising

On Adaptations, On Graft, On Tuning In

Lightly spoilery but I'm really trying NOT to, too much. (No doubt not enough for spoiler purists: Please take this as the warning - oh and yeah, of course, the landing image is also spoilery in that framing... sorry... guess you already know how this is likely to be, in that case.)

======================================

Getting drawn into the BTS material for Project Hail Mary and The Other Bennet Sister - and the current loop I'm navigating is around the changes that are needed (or - convenient - or... etc) in moving from one medium to another. But also - just the sheer joy of hearing from competent, motivated, bright people about the craft and graft involved.

Project Hail Mary first - picked this interview with Andy Weir because he's talking to his longterm editor at Penguin Random House (?) and so the focus is on the writing (as opposed to, typically, the science).

AW is famously attentive to the science details - there are other videos where he shows scientists the very large excel sheet of Science Stuff he's tracking as he shapes the initial problem and story arc. And I appreciate this about him vm, especially as I've stopped feeling that this means I would have to be THAT kind of writer. [Spoiler - am not scientist. Old brain tired. Cannot be THAT person. Can only be ME.]

I find him generous in giving credit to other people working in their own specialisms - and although I was mostly trying to find a clip of him defending the decision to put [xx] into the trailer, here, I especially liked that he prefers one of the movie solutions to his own - in terms of the rationale for why X now has to happen given that Y just did happen - and says that if he could go back and use their rationale instead, he wd.

Andy Weir on the PROJECT HAIL MARY movie adaptation | BOOK TO SCREEN - YouTube

Next - an in-depth talk about the process of adapting TOBS - was seriously impressed by SQ and so went off to find another interview with her after I'd listened to this one - Radio Times Writer's Room interview, following and was even MORE impressed with her after that!

This conversation touches on collaboration - a second pair of eyes - to shortcut the kind of problem-solving that otherwise requires that you put the writing in a drawer for a few months to be able to see it fresh.

And there's a really nice piece in there about priorities and choices - in the story transition at the end of ep 2, Mary can be described as having three problems and they are of differing magnitudes and urgency. Basically, although there was a poignant "third problem" - there was never a good place to put it in where it earned its "time-suck" from the larger issues. By contrast, in eps 6&7, the setting was preserved for the entire hour and they made that work by adding an extra plot beat in.

What The Austen interview with Screenwriter Sarah Quintrell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ofs_zngOYA

This is Sarah reflecting on her career - very thoughtful on the progressive process of becoming confident as writer and showrunner - and revealing, I think, of the combination of utter hard work, individual shrewdness, and also, the tactical importance of industry support. [Mentoring opps, the chance to participate in a competition, collaborating with other, more established writer on specific episodes, the nurturing of working relationships with seasoned show-runners...]

Sarah Quintrell on His Dark Materials and The Other Bennet Sister | Radio Times

And - although I haven't thought too much about Bridgerton S4 since These Other Shinies stole all my attention - I did really enjoy it (from a certain distance, as I mostly consume gogglebox-type commentaries).

And I'd heard that show Benedict / show story was less ICK than book Benedict / (it's been a long old road since the culture context of the original books - thankgodfully - but let's be fair, these stories were loved for their melodrama and frequent pulse-racing spicy bits, not for the crafting of their language, nor for any fidelity to the historical realities - they ARE I think very faithful to genre norms (?), and nor do they pretend to be a thoughtful examination of impulse control failures.

Anyway - thought this was a pretty fun, accessible take on this topic:

How Netflix Solved the Benedict Problem

#am writing #am revising #science fiction #regency romance

Reflections on Blog-i-sode Forty-Six

This is definitely supposed to be an edit blog (not a mooning over recent obsessions involving characters/objects named Mary).

And I'm still aiming to take something useful from this blog section - and the ones following - but it's been STRANGE to come from a portion of the text where I've basically directly imported all these edits into the actual, live version of the draft - to these pieces which don't fit AT ALL. Best I can offer some of them is - maybe in book two if there is one? But some of this imagery doesn't quite work at all* because I changed one truly vital detail from the early version (involving a tree and a girl and a time mashup and some quite intense - for me - body horror).

*Ha, in almost the very moment of typing this, I've worked out that I of course CAN use it - the imagery, not the setting, at least, not yet since M is hiding out in the Broken Zone not in the Starah Miasto caves. I just need to adjust how I describe the interaction between girl/tree - since the Impossible Cottage has all kinds of Tree stuff still going on :)

So what I'm doing instead [of editing the text] is - looking to see which ideas I might keep / adapt / recycle...

Voice note, 175 CE, Dormens 11

I was about to cross out the VN title - i.e. to reflect scrapping the entire concept - and then I remembered I actually still use it right at the beginning of the current version of the story. Only once (so far?) and I'm curious to see whether - maybe that's okay and it doesn't need reinforcing? It can always be a context piece that comes to the fore if M ever gets back to being the main character - not guaranteed I'm afraid!

Wasn’t planning to record anything else. Didn’t think anything else needed to be set down, you know, to be made discoverable beyond the perishable confines of my own remembering.

The first part of the next para I'd forgotten about but I sort of want to find somewhere for this sentiment - to have the TTs considering US and our lack of timepoint flexibility - and think WE'RE odd...

I feel so vulnerable, trundling around in this one, threadbare little timepoint. How did people ever find the courage to go on, without the safety net of being able to tuck themselves out of the timeline for a bit whenever a situation started to feel too threatening or even potentially unsurvivable?

Is M dumb enough to think this is going to be useful? Surely he must think of it as his enemy's weapon - I'm not sure this feels authentic.

I suppose I should take some comfort from the cloaking effect this bracelet device seems to have – I’m thinking here about how difficult the sibs found it to navigate back to me, even with the benefit of having actually been sharing the exact same time-point moments earlier.

The sentence in orange is a better representation of the situation IMO. I'd like to do a bit more work with this! [Weave it into the final act?]

Except – it’s not logical that the device cloaks me from the person controlling it. So I’m left with the creepy and unwelcome thought that it cuts me off from all my friends while exposing me to my enemy. Unless – perhaps I disrupted it when I force-jumped away from the receiver.

Perhaps. It’s a thin hope. I resent having to hang my peace-of-mind on something so flimsy. I feel rather more comfortable with the idea that Blue Light might not be able to reach me because I’m pastwards and he doesn’t time-travel. Pretty sure he can’t time-jump so that notion comes down to the proposition that he hasn’t engineered a machine to jump for him. Assuming Blue Light doesn’t have access to time-travel, then my main priority is to keep track of my adoptive present relative to the time-point where we last encountered each other. Even that’s more guesswork than I’d like but let’s say it lies future-ways roughly fifty years –Very Important Note to Self: if you’re still alive in 48 years or so, time to move, buddy.

Can't see exactly where I'd use this next part - but I like the little character snark. (Hmmm, generally the person doing the kind that couldn't be recommended IS Mallory so maybe I'm off-beam here?)

I’m also more than slightly intrigued to find out how Hravn knew this place existed. At the time, there was a bit of hand-waving about how they loved to explore the abandoned tunnels and – frankly, I had other things on my mind, so at the time, I let it go. Maybe I thought I’d pick up another time but as it turns out, haven’t had any more time with the sibs since they brought me here to hide, recover and await rescue but I’ve had lots of opportunity to wonder… Who sees a collapsed tunnel and instead of thinking, DANGER, AVOID!, says,

“Probably fake. Let’s check for a secret passageway concealed by and beyond that unstable pile of heavy geological material that might collapse around me at any moment. Oh look…”

I digress. Point is, delightfully little has happened since I crashed into this present now. Until a few days ago, when something did. Something involving the mural depicting my sister and that unknown hot guy. And also involving a new mural, which I came across on Dormens 04.

Keeping the Emilia/Tor mural is a decision already made; introducing the Shalva/tree mural is going to have to happen in a different way - not the first time I've completely re-shaped how it finds its way in. [Basically it was part of an MFA assignment and I worked it into part of Emilia's story that I ultimately canned - her spending (you're not going to believe this ;) ...) lots of time on her own in the Starah Miasto tunnels. So, now it's "unhomed" once again and maybe forever? Something about the writing I still like tho = and something about the link between Weird Things Happening To Break Time and Murals Appearing. I rather like that and remain kinda inclined to want to dial this up not down...

===========================================

[The rest of this post is more typically Wednesday-ish but the things I've wanted to say about art, creativity, and the rewards of making have been overflowing - and this centres a strange lil experience that was entirely about my OWN work - admittedly surrounded by and in conversation with beautiful creative achievements by others... So...]

Been in a weird (useful? glorious? long-may-it-continue-ish?) phase of saying YES to things - not quite intentionally and "results may vary".

Found myself in the City of London mid morning on a Monday - I was there to pick up a copy of The Other Bennet Sister with Ella Bruccolieri on the cover as Mary Bennet (dimly understanding that this would become precious to me as artefact as well as story-accessing medium). Wasn't expecting to need to be there bcz expecting to be able to buy the book in the West End. Had the - new to me - experience of having a Click-n-collect order *cancelled* because between placing it and the staff going to retrieve the book, someone else had already bought it!

So, stumbled into an opportunity to hear an organ recital at the church that stands in for the Spy Church (St Leonard's) in Slow Horses. Two pieces by Bach interposed by a longer piece by Charles-Marie Widor. Found myself first time in ?? - praying. [These days, I choose to preface the familiar rising-up, inward moment of transcendence with scattergun forms of address, for multiple possible receiving "ears".] Essentially, a prayer of recommitment to completing this story and bringing it into the world, be its audience ne'er so tiny - there are atm 2-5 people I care about reading it and I wish vm to write something *THEY* will enjoy <3 <3 Plus a lil wishlist of what it Doing Well might look like. You know. Just in *case* the divine ears WERE listening...

I've put this - and commented on it - somewhere else - but I want to keep reminding myself - the ability to *believe* that it's the art that matters (and not whatever it secures) can feel - fragile, ethereal, easily crushed - and therefore precious, worth protecting. Today's reminder:

#am writing #am revising

Blog-i-sode Forty-Six

Voice note, 175 CE, Dormens 11

Wasn’t planning to record anything else. Didn’t think anything else needed to be set down, you know, to be made discoverable beyond the perishable confines of my own remembering.

Sure, I personally still have questions, chief among them being: Does Blue Light know about this place and if so, does he know I’m here and, relatedly, how long do I have before the door flies open and I’m back to being hauled off for testing at… wherever his laboratories are? But this is too sickening for me to be able to think about for long. I feel so vulnerable, trundling around in this one, threadbare little timepoint. How did people ever find the courage to go on, without the safety net of being able to tuck themselves out of the timeline for a bit whenever a situation started to feel too threatening or even potentially unsurvivable?

Perhaps. It’s a thin hope. I resent having to hang my peace-of-mind on something so flimsy.

I feel rather more comfortable with the idea that Blue Light might not be able to reach me because I’m pastwards and he doesn’t time-travel. Pretty sure he can’t time-jump so that notion comes down to the proposition that he hasn’t engineered a machine to jump for him.

Assuming Blue Light doesn’t have access to time-travel, then my main priority is to keep track of my adoptive present relative to the time-point where we last encountered each other.

Even that’s more guesswork than I’d like but let’s say it lies future-ways roughly fifty years –

Very Important Note to Self: if you’re still alive in 48 years or so, time to move, buddy.

“Probably fake. Let’s check for a secret passageway concealed by and beyond that unstable pile of heavy geological material that might collapse around me at any moment. Oh look…”

***

Supply Depot

Starah Miasto

175 CE, Dormens 04

Hangar Bay Mural

My first thought was: It’s A Trap. What can I say? Being time-neutered has left me, well, not jumpy, clearly – it’s definitely left me non-jumpy, in the time-sense… Has left me prone to a degree of angst. Much as one part of me hankers for challenge and excitement, more of me finds comfort in my daily routines and is fiercely resentful of anything that intrudes on them. All which to explain I was en route for my daily catch-up with Hot, Staring Guy (Painted) and My Time-Shifted Sister (Also Painted) when I noticed the mural for the first time.

Hmmm, that makes it sound like it was always there, waiting to be found. Not so. I may be well into my time-hermit era, mumbling frantic updates into a voice-recorder that I accept will probably lie undiscovered and unheard but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost touch with my surroundings. Quite the reverse. I’ve taught myself the entire footprint of Starah Miasto – though I prefer, these days, simply to call it Undermountain. Accurate. Precise.

Where was? Oh yes. My environment. These days, I can even navigate the complex pretty competently in the dark. But most of the time, the emergency lighting is set to movement-responsive and I like it well enough so I tend to leave it on. Truth is, I actually welcome it as a form of early warning system, given that I still haven’t fully shaken the fear of being tracked down by Blue Light and – My point is, I know my way around and I know what to expect and what not to expect. And there wasn’t any kind of mural here last time I looked, which couldn’t have been more than around 18 hours ago.

This is what it boils down to:

Dormens 03 – no mural across the back of any of the loading bays. Situation normal.

Dormens 04, by contrast – suddenly, inexplicably, there it was. A gigantic band of colour was seared across a previously blank wall of one of the loading bays that were, I guess, exchange points between the supply depot complex and the first-settlers of Raynovia.

Settlers from the Before-colony.

Settlers who would have had no business painting this mural scene.

Because what the mural depicted was my personal worst-day-ever, extracted from the darkened, repressed depths of my sub-conscious and rendered as a large-scale artwork.

The painting – quite unmistakably – depicted the plateau of Raynovia’s Sector Pastoral, where I grew up. Some of the oldey-timey settlers might also have lived on the plateau, but believe me, they hadn’t seen the scene at the centre of the landscape. I had.

The mural centred around a spiky tree, the kind I hadn’t seen since I moved away from Hambleford, but used to see everywhere back then, dotted across the plateau grasslands. Back home, a real scrublands tree would rarely be any taller than person-sized, but this painted tree was extravagantly exaggerated, filling the space between floor and ceiling and there was a kind of hyper-reality to the depiction. Exaggerated. Contradictory. The style was deliberately non-naturalistic, but each thin, spiky leaf looked greener, sharper, more essentially itself than any of my memories. There was no forest smell, no soil smell, but my senses nonetheless insisted that the tree was really here, behind or inside the wall of the hangar bay, impossibly rooted and growing. Thriving where it could not, could never exist. Could have been landscape like this on Raynovia back before whatever happened to the previous settlers happened to them. Of course, conceded. If it were simply a landscape…But it wasn’t. Instead, ghostly, threaded in behind the trunk of the tree and mirroring the shape of the branches, it was possible to make out the outline of a young woman’s body, no colour, just light grey edges, almost invisible against the whitewash.

#science fiction #time travel #body horror #am writing #am revising

Nope, Still Not Over Any of This <3

Don't wanna be. Just want to live here. Won't leave. Can't make me.

My twitter feed has been bouncing between these for a while and FB and Instagram are catching up. Today's recommendations screen:

My current - possibly my enduringly - favourite piece of fan media from TOBS was posted (and I assume, created) by anthonyskathani on X:

sophie on X: "#THEOTHERBENNETSISTER: i’d marry you with paper rings https://t.co/BVFxlqTDf5" / X

Which took me to the original music video HERE (an education in itself as I had shamingly zero clue that it was a Taylor Swift song)...

Paper Rings - Taylor Swift (Music Video) - YouTube

Meanwhile these screengrabs - again from material posted on X - give a teeny glimpse of how joyful and hope-filled my social media feeds have been, well, really, since Project Hail Mary hit cinemas on, well, for me, on 19th March. [The longest, shortest, happiest social media month in personal living memory - admittedly, that memory is shonky.]

And for future need - when I've forgotten what it was like to live in such times and wish to find my way back towards a sense of it! - my timeline doing the thing it originally did with PHM and TOBS, except now with the addition of the - thankgodfully successful - Artemis 2 lunar mission:

Exhibit a) Artemis x PHM (obv crossover & one that's been referenced explicitly on both sides, to the joy of science nerds everywhere) Ooh and a cheeky extra tie-in to the Enterprise title music (don't hate that!)

Exhibit b) love pouring out for The Other Bennet Sister's Tom Hayward *and* for Artemis 2's commander, Reid Wiseman. Truly sad that only one of these men is non-fictional but rejoicing in the nominative determinism of his surname. A wise man, indeed. Apart from where he voluntarily plunged thru our atmosphere in a flambee'd capsule (??):

Exhibit c) Artemis 2 and TOBS both being breathtaking in quick succession :) Having invested too much time on this, I can identify that the still from TOBS ep 3 is where they're talking about poetry but not long after that genuinely heartbeat-disrupting moment where he rolls up his sleeves and she briefly loses her mind about it - plus that gorgeous lil theme plays, letting us know It's Real <3

Exhibit d) a rare, rare example of all three lining up directly under each other even tho it looks like the ref to Artemis 2 is snark. I've been actively trying to push my Algo towards positive, sunny stories so usually I'd be mentally blocking that one out - but here it suits my narrative so - it STAYS ;)

Exhibit e) IN SUMMARY, I/WE ARE NOT OVER THIS. Thank you for your attention re this matter.

Anyway, my point is, these lovely pieces of media - this weird mashup of fiction/non-fiction loves kept chasing each other across my screen - and I kept savouring every last example bcz I know the TL moves on...

PS on that exact note, here's a lil collage of my Instagram recs page the morning after the show finale broadcast on the Beeb:

(Top left and bottom right are both reels and main reason I ended up with four versions is that I really liked the tiny story they tell, serendipitously... Flipping to and fro between the two actors playing Mrs Bennet and Mary Bennet - tour de force performance from both of them and, strangely, I find Mrs B's monstrous presence hilarious and perfect - it doesn't make me want to stab her in the eye [I *think* maybe because I code it as an exaggeration that portrays how MARY feels she is towards her - and because we need this push to get Mary to stand up, in opposition, into her OWN version of an independent future]... also, in the bottom pane - /// your husband is coming / great forearm game [THANK you, yes, THIS is perfectly the female gaze :) ] / YEARNING / helpless jealousy at Ryder's dinner party ///)

#am writing #am revising #narrative #science fiction #space stuff #regency romance

Reflections on Blog-i-sode Forty-Five

Slightly strange life-reversal moment, in that I came back to this instalment of the blog only to realise I'd already completed the edit IRL.

That's because I got bored (tired? overwhelmed?) with the sheer length of this passage when I was doing the original "chunking" of blogs and carved it up without ceremony in some random midpoint - that, in itself, is "data", as my dear wee (6 ft something) supervisor used to say.

Promptly forgot I did that and - here we are. All good though. I still really like this scene and I think it's a much stronger piece having been weeded down - this second part is c. 850 words shorter, but that's almost entirely because I cut the 700 word end note in its entirety:

***

Voice note, 174 CE, Harvest 23

And – that brings us effectively up to date. Really very little has happened in the two years since I cliff-dived into what was probably my last ever time-jump before being pulled from the deep water of the Thunder Coast by my two local replacement jump-training buddies.

[Using orange highlighting to capture the bits I want to extract and recycle in somewhere else - may not need to bother to close the years gap i.e. between the age M was said to be when this started and the age he's said to be when it ends - a nine year difference? At the very least, though, it's useful for continuity to remind myself that I did originally think about this and two years was the balancing no...]

Still sitting at the beach, I told them the specifics they needed to remember, to be able to get that replacement KeepSafe out of the catacombs and back to Hanne and Jared. I hope that will happen. I hope it will help them with contacting Shalva our friend and supporting her to escape the time rift. If such a thing is possible. I only regret that I’ll probably never know.

Learning subsequent to writing this piece - I've said that I'm going to tell them so I don't esp need to then tell the doing of that. I guess at some point it will be relevant whether we got round to it or not, but for now I *think* the default assumption would be - that it happened?

Also - am I laying on the regret a bit thick at the end there? - this was a fun little snippet to write - because somehow it's fun when your character is suffering. I must be a psychopath. Highlighting ICON.

We rested at the beach in Vishoek Bay until I felt up to hiking back into the mountains. Not long – a day or so, maybe. My body was bruised and sore but no serious injuries and, honestly, since T and H didn’t dare try to fetch anything from their camp in 168CE, we couldn’t have stayed much longer without suffering from lack of food and shelter. I swear by the twin stars that if I’d know they were taking me right back into the part of the tunnels where Blue Light’s machine snatched me in 225CE, I’d have tried to think of something else.

Well this all has to go because I'm not taking him into the mountains... New plan - take him straight out to the Broken Zone instead and start layering him into the loops I've written there. That strange, creepy sense that someone is watching? Well, someone almost always IS, in that secretly surveillance-heavy future culture, but/and also Tay. And now, but/and also Broken Zone Broken Mallory - who isn't time-malleable any more and ordinarily could no longer cross loops. But here - nothing behaves like it should and if the rift chooses to come to HIM??

But I didn’t know, and my sense of direction didn’t kick in and it was only when we passed that amazing/weird mural of Hot, Staring Guy and My Time-Shifted Sister that I understood.

I remembered the tunnel beyond the mural as being blocked – and it still appeared to be, but that didn’t phase Hravn. It’s staged to look worse than it really is and there’s a way through, although helps if you’re not claustrophobic. Beyond – the tunnels extend into an ancient supply depot with enough provisions to support a population of thousands.

Helpful to remind myself the supply depot I enjoyed creating as ARNI's domain would very much still be there for this settlement re-boot. But also - he kinda needs to end up in some version of this. On Bikini island? After he's floated there on the impossible lift raft. MAYBE.

I might be lonely here on my own but I wasn’t going to starve.

This is why that is necessary - and because I want him to connect with Bramble - I *think* - and because it would be great to have him playing around with the tech without fully understanding it. There's a shoutout in here somewhere to the idea that he's writing footnotes into the archive - which I still love and would like to use in some way one day.

Eventually, once I was settled here, and bored enough to be ready to face the failures of my future-ways-past, I wrote it down, too. It has even made me feel better about being trapped here in the past, on my own. A lot better. Why, you ask? Nothing like recounting, blow by blow, a list of misguided ideas and terrible outcomes you’ve been involved with and at the very least partially responsible for to make a person feel better about having been swept off the board.

My track record is… Let’s see…

I created the circumstances that meant J and I couldn’t train in Hambleford and then goaded him into training inside the Closed Zone. Guess I’m not *fully* responsible for H and S joining in and I largely give myself a pass for the events that led to our encountering the time rift initially. However, my subsequent failed attempt to prevent that encounter from occurring, against TT guidance and expectation, certainly contributed to the destabilisation of the rift in the days that followed. When my sister sent me away, partly for my own safety, partly to stop me wreaking havoc, but also partly to put my rule-breaking and snooping to good use, I achieved nothing for years and then when I eventually acted, it was during a covert mission that was supposed to help J & H re-establish contact with S. Instead, I chased a shadow into the mountain, abandoning the part-reconstructed KeepSafe and only achieved being kidnapped and then time-jump-neutered by this cute but inconvenient neural implant.

Now I live in seclusion behind a semi-faked rockfall, stuck a quarter of a century before my own birth. Even if my TT community wanted to find me, they probably won’t be able to, because my neural inhibitor suppresses time-jump activity. For others, too. Not just my own.

It’s not even a terrible life. Bit lonely. I’ve taken up journalling again and from time to time, I visit the mural people for a chat. (Okay, you got me – I go *every day*.) It’s better than nothing. Somewhat better. A bit better. I have to fill in their side of the conversation, but…Honestly, the absolute worst part is not knowing what will-happen/ed to people I’ve loved.

All of this last part feels useful - but misplaced. Doesn't suit me (anymore) to have this here. I want to stay in the action - bringing the various strands closer together. And while all these ideas tell me perfectly how M is feeling about his misadventures, perhaps the best place for them is in the imagined recap section of a possible Bk Two?

TBC - but NOT right here right now... [What I do have to do, in this revised vision of Mallory's future in the past - is create him a lil Robinson Crusoe style den in the BZ - where and what - uncertain!]

#am writing #am revising

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